Karzai Wins Afghan Warlords’ Support as Others Fear the Cost

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

KABUL, Afghanistan — When Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim was interim vice president and defense minister after the United States invasion in 2001, his tanks overlooked Kabul and he was widely seen as more powerful than the American-backed president, Hamid Karzai.

When Afghans finally got a chance to elect their president for the first time, in 2004, Mr. Karzai cast off Mr. Fahim, a Tajik warlord, winning the election as well as praise from Western governments that were worried Mr. Fahim might order his tanks into the streets and seize power.

Now, in the campaign for the Aug. 20 presidential election, Mr. Karzai has taken a different tack: Over the pleading of Western officials, he picked Mr. Fahim as first vice president on his ticket.

The reversal, critics say, is emblematic of the campaign by Mr. Karzai, who in angling to keep a hold on power has lined up half a dozen warlords who have guaranteed their political support in exchange for back-room deals.

While the precise nature of such deals is not known, Western officials, Afghan politicians and nongovernmental organizations contend that they include promises of protection from prosecution, the awarding of cabinet ministries and governorships, the creation of provinces to benefit one ethnic group, and the freeing of major drug traffickers.

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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Against Western wishes, Mr. Fahim, center, is running for first vice president on Mr. Karzai’s ticket in the Aug. 20 elections.

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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Mr. Karzai’s backers include Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, whose militia killed Hazara civilians in western Kabul in 1993.

This is not the first time that Afghans or their American patrons have cut deals with the warlords — whose widespread looting and killing of civilians in the 1990s helped spur the rise of the Taliban. After the Taliban were driven from power, the American government funneled millions of dollars and military support to the warlords.

But now many Afghans and foreign observers say the ties to warlords may win Mr. Karzai the election, but cost him and his country dearly, leaving him badly compromised and the central government greatly weakened.

“It was necessary from the U.S. point of view to have armed people on the ground” when the focus was toppling the Taliban, said Thomas Ruttig, a veteran United Nations diplomat and now a director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a nonprofit research group. “But if you are now bringing in warlords and other people who have an interest in leaving things unstable, you are undermining yourself.”

Today Mr. Karzai’s warlord backers include Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek commander whose men are accused of killing hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war in 2001 and who is now vying to regain wider control of northern Afghanistan; Hajji Muhammad Moheqiq and Karim Khalili, warlords from the Hazara Shiite minority ethnic group; and Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, whose militia killed hundreds of Hazara civilians in western Kabul in 1993.

Another warlord supporter, Gul Agha Sherzai, who has been implicated in drug-related corruption and is now governor of Nangarhar Province, could “possibly” become governor of Kandahar, “or maybe a minister,” said Mr. Karzai’s campaign manager, Hajji Din Muhammad.

“I’m sure that whoever the mujahedeen support will win the election,” Mr. Muhammad said, referring to the warlords.

Western officials are watching closely. “I expect an understanding of the fact that we need fewer warlords and more competent ministers,” said Kai Eide, leader of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. He said that Western governments were encouraged by reform-minded appointees to several ministries, including interior and finance, and that it had been made clear to Mr. Karzai that the trend must continue. But he declined to say if the president had addressed the warlords’ role after the election.

“If what we expect is not understood and not respected, then I think it will have consequences in terms of the enthusiasm of the international community,” Mr. Eide said. “We have to put the warlord period behind us.”

To many Afghans, serious damage has already been done. They say that the renewed association with warlords — including support by some warlords for one of Mr. Karzai’s challengers, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister — means that the powerful will not be held to account, particularly those accused of gross human rights abuses.

“It’s very easy to say, ‘I’ll bring reform and justice,’ ” said Dr. Sima Samar, chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and a cabinet minister in Mr. Karzai’s first interim government. “But where is the accountability? If you have these people around you, it shows you are not serious about justice.”

More recently, Mr. Karzai has defended his warlord political supporters as national heroes who fought the Russians and the Taliban. And Mr. Muhammad, his campaign manger, said: “Anyone who wants to implement a program in Afghanistan cannot implement it without the support of the mujahedeen. They still have lots of influence in their areas.”

When Mr. Karzai’s warlord strategy emerged this spring, it seemed he had all but secured his re-election. But many analysts now believe he may not gain the 50 percent of the vote he needs to win the election outright and could face a runoff.

The election may demonstrate whether the warlords’ influence has begun to wane. In 2004, when Mr. Karzai won with 55.4 percent of the vote, Mr. Moheqiq and General Dostum won a combined 21.6 percent.

Mr. Moheqiq and Mr. Khalili, who led militias during the civil war and the fight against the Taliban, are believed to have won a promise to carve new provinces from Hazara-dominated districts in Ghazni and Wardak Provinces, Western officials said.

That would bolster the national power of the Hazara leaders and could set off regional conflicts with Hazara rivals. Mr. Moheqiq also said Mr. Karzai promised him control of five ministries.

Mr. Muhammad said he knew nothing about such deals.

But for Western officials, it is the dealings with General Dostum, known for his brutality, that are the most worrisome.

The general, who denies any “intentional massacre” of Taliban prisoners in 2001, had been appointed a senior military adviser by Mr. Karzai. He left the country last year after assaulting a rival, but was declared free to return after announcing support for Mr. Karzai. American officials have sought to delay that return.

General Dostum’s deal with Mr. Karzai could lead to a power struggle in the north. But Mr. Abdullah has claimed recently that he has support from General Dostum, though officials from the general’s party deny that.

American officials were also angered by Mr. Karzai’s pardon in April of five men from Nangarhar Province convicted of smuggling 260 pounds of heroin in 2007. The men had been prosecuted by a special task force, with lawyers tutored by American and NATO counterparts.

The task force is a model for the justice system that Western officials want for Afghanistan, but the pardon sent a signal that even major drug traffickers with the right connections could escape. One pardoned convict is a nephew of Mr. Muhammad, who is also a former Kabul governor.

According to the decree signed by Mr. Karzai and obtained by The New York Times, the men were pardoned “out of respect” for their family members, who dominate politics in a broad section of eastern Afghanistan.

In an interview, Mr. Muhammad said he had never lobbied Mr. Karzai for the pardon.

Abdul Waheed Wafa, Sangar Rahimi and Carlotta Gall contributed reporting.

Clinton Pushes Kenyan Leaders to Follow Through on Promised Reforms

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 6, 2009

NAIROBI, Aug. 5 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton began a major trip to Africa on Wednesday by publicly urging Kenya, a strategic U.S. ally, to move faster to resolve tensions lingering from a disputed 2007 election that precipitated the country's worst crisis since it gained independence.

Clinton went further in a meeting with Kenyan leaders, urging them to fire the attorney general and the police chief, who have been accused of ignoring dozens of killings carried out by police death squads, according to a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. Clinton also raised the possibility of banning some Kenyan officials from traveling to the United States if the government does not move more quickly to prosecute those responsible for post-election ethnic violence that left 1,300 people dead. The organizers are widely suspected to include senior officials and cabinet ministers, many of whom have family members in the United States.

"We are going to use whatever tools we need to use to ensure that there is justice," the official said. "We raised the possibility of visa bans and implied there could be more."

Clinton's public remarks were more gentle but still reflected the Obama administration's concern that Kenya, which has lent crucial support to U.S. humanitarian, diplomatic and military operations in this volatile region, could slip back into political and ethnic violence that brought it close to collapse last year.

President Mwai Kibaki and former opposition leader Raila Odinga, now the prime minister, ended the crisis with a power-sharing deal and a commitment to political reforms that would include prosecution of those suspected of participating in the post-election violence. But Clinton made clear that their coalition government has not followed through.

"The absence of strong and democratic institutions has permitted ongoing corruption, impunity, politically motivated violence, human rights abuses, lack of respect for the rule of law," Clinton said at a news conference after meeting with Kibaki, Odinga and security officials.

'They're Trying to Hide'

Kenyans remain deeply frustrated with the coalition government, which they say is bloated with well-paid officials concerned more with their own survival than with the welfare of the country, swaths of which are in the midst of a hunger crisis.

In the latest example of trouble with the peace deal, the Kenyan government stepped back in recent days from a commitment to establish a special tribunal to try people accused in connection with the post-election violence. The government said it would rely on a "reformed judicial system" instead.

But in a country with a history of sweeping corruption cases, political killings and other official misdeeds under the rug, human rights groups and ordinary Kenyans cast the move as a blatant bid by senior officials to avoid punishment.

"They're selfish, and they're trying to hide," said Caleb Onduso, 25, who was among a crowd at a convention center here Wednesday hoping to hear Clinton speak. "They've forgotten us."

The U.S. Embassy also condemned the government's move in a statement on the eve of Clinton's visit, saying it was "not a credible approach in the eyes of Kenyans and the international community."

If the government fails to establish the special tribunal, U.S. officials say, they will support prosecution of the suspects by the International Criminal Court.

Clinton's trip comes just three weeks after President Obama visited Ghana and laid out his emerging policy toward Africa. Like Obama, whose father was Kenyan, Clinton is emphasizing good governance and touting a $20 billion U.S.-led program to provide poor countries in Africa and elsewhere with agricultural aid aimed at small farmers.

Clinton aides said the trips marked the first time a president and a secretary of state had visited Africa so early in a new administration. Clinton is set to log 21,200 miles on her 11-day, seven-country tour.

Economic Growth

She began her visit Wednesday morning at the annual forum on the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, a program started by President Bill Clinton that allows enhanced U.S. market access for African products. Clinton said she wanted to emphasize Africa's success stories and move beyond the "stale and outdated" image of the continent as a place awash in poverty, disease and conflict.

Sub-Saharan Africa had economic growth averaging more than 5 percent for the five years leading up to 2009, the first such expansion in 45 years. But the continent is now feeling the pinch of shriveling trade and remittances due to the global economic crisis.

At the AGOA Forum, Clinton emphasized plans for U.S. development assistance to focus more on spurring business and trade. Meanwhile, she said, African countries must focus on good governance and adherence to the rule of law, conditions she called "essential to creating positive, predictable investment climates."

In her meeting with Kibaki and Odinga, Clinton delivered a "frank statement" from Obama pressing for greater progress on political reforms such as a new constitution and an overhaul of the police, she told reporters.

Kibaki appeared to bristle at some of the U.S. demands, saying at the conference that his government had introduced electoral reforms and was in the midst of a constitutional review.

"These and other reforms are genuinely Kenyan," he said. "And Kenyans are driving them forward in earnest, for the good of all."

But Odinga, who had accused Kibaki of stealing the 2007 presidential election, acknowledged that there were problems and praised Clinton.

She has "demonstrated she's a true democrat, in agreeing to work with her opponent," he said, referring to Obama. "That's a lesson Africa needs to take seriously."

Editorial - Burma Must Come Clean

The evidence is now overwhelming of an alliance between Burma and North Korea. The vital question for Thailand is whether whatever ventures the two rogue states have started up pose a threat to our neighbourhood.

Political cartoon

In one sense, the answer is a clear "yes", since secrecy breeds suspicion. But as this newspaper showed in three major reports last Sunday, the Burma-North Korea alliance vastly increases the stakes of international diplomacy in our backyard and in the rest of Southeast Asia.

Any project involving nuclear weapons paints a new bull's-eye over the region, not to mention that Burma would be in gross and unforgivable violation of the Asean agreements it has signed.

First, the known facts.

Burma, with experts from North Korea, has undertaken huge earthworks in areas where foreigners and most Burmese are not allowed. Truck-sized tunnels have been burrowed into the ground and hills in the general region of the heavily secured new capital, Naypyidaw, in remote central Burma.

Commercial satellite photos show more than 600 tunnel complexes. Other photographs, taken on the ground and smuggled out of the country, show that some of the tunnels are fortified with blast-proof doors.

During construction of these tunnels, which was begun by 2003, Burma renewed official relations with North Korea, cut off in 1983 after state-sponsored terrorists from Pyongyang attempted to assassinate South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan in Rangoon with three deadly bombs.

Relations resumed in April, 2007. At the time, the chief concern of Burma's neighbours and the United Nations was that the twin rogue states would collude against human rights, chiefly with Burma purchasing weapons from North Korea.

The Burmese military continues to abuse citizens at the whim or acquiescence of the ruling junta. But the tunnel projects and increasingly warm relations between Burma and North Korea raise major questions that get to the very basis of Southeast Asian diplomacy, cooperation and peace.

Burma and its dictatorship have clearly violated major tenets of Asean. Indeed, as details of the tunnel projects emerged to the public, Burmese officials were attending the Asean Regional Forum in the southern Thai resort island of Phuket. The purpose of the ARF is specifically to encourage openness among all members in order to build trust.

Even the most peaceful and innocent nuclear project requires Burma - by Asean and by United Nations law - to fully reveal the work. It must be remembered that the junta has stated that it wants a small nuclear reactor, such as the one in Bangkok. Russia announced it would help to achieve that aim; then the subject was dropped from public discussion. But even that proposal must be fully public, and conducted through the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency.

There also has been speculation that the tunnels are part of a plan to mine uranium, and again Burma would be breaking international law not to discuss that.

On general principles of regional agreement, Burma must quickly disclose what it is up to with the tunnel complexes. The generals can prove that reports of nuclear cooperation with North Korea are wrong.
But by their silence they also can encourage even more distrust and suspicion about the intentions of their violent regime.

Bangkok Post, Aug 8

McChrystal Preparing New Afghan War Strategy

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is preparing a new strategy that calls for major changes in the way U.S. and other NATO troops there operate, a vast increase in the size of Afghan security forces and an intensified military effort to root out corruption among local government officials, according to several people familiar with the contents of an assessment report that outlines his approach to the war.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who took charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan last month, appears inclined to request an increase in American troops to implement the new strategy, which aims to use more unconventional methods to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, according to members of an advisory group he convened to work on the assessment. Such a request could receive a chilly reception at the White House, where some members of President Obama's national security team have expressed reluctance about authorizing any more deployments.

Senior military officials said McChrystal is waiting for a recommendation from a team of military planners in Kabul before reaching a final decision on a troop request. Several members of the advisory group, who spoke about the issue of force levels on the condition of anonymity, said that they think more U.S. troops are needed but that it was not clear how large an increase McChrystal would seek.

"There was a very broad consensus on the part of the assessment team that the effort is under-resourced and will require additional resources to get the job done," a senior military official in Kabul said.

A request for more U.S. troops in Afghanistan could pose a political challenge for Obama. Some leading congressional Democrats have voiced skepticism about sustaining current force levels, set to reach 68,000 by the fall. After approving an extra 21,000 troops in the spring, Obama himself questioned whether "piling on more and more troops" would lead to success, and his national security adviser, James L. Jones, told U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan last month that the administration wants to hold troop levels flat for now.

One senior administration official said some members of Obama's national security team want to see how McChrystal uses the 21,000 additional troops before any more deployments are authorized. "It'll be a tough sell," the official said.

Even so, McChrystal has been instructed by his superiors -- including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen -- to conduct a thorough assessment of the war effort and articulate his recommendations. While McChrystal has indicated to some of his advisers that he is leaning toward asking for more forces, he has also emphasized that his strategy will involve fundamental changes in the way those troops are used.

One of the key changes outlined in the latest drafts of the assessment report, which will be provided to Gates by mid-August, is a shift in the "operational culture" of U.S. and NATO forces. Commanders will be encouraged to increase contact with Afghans, even if it means living in less-secure outposts inside towns and spending more time on foot patrols instead of in vehicles.

"McChrystal understands that you don't stop IEDs [improvised explosive devices] by putting your soldiers in MRAPs," heavily armored trucks designed to withstand blasts, said Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington who served on the assessment team. "You stop them by convincing the population not to plant them in the first place, and that requires getting out of trucks and interacting with people."

The report calls for intelligence resources to be realigned to focus more on tribal and social dynamics so commanders can identify local power brokers and work with them. Until recently, the vast majority of U.S. and NATO intelligence assets had been oriented toward tracking insurgents.

The changes are aimed at fulfilling McChrystal's view that the primary mission of the international forces is not to conduct raids against Taliban strongholds but to protect civilians and help the Afghan government assume responsibility for maintaining security. "The focus has to be on the people," he said in a recent interview.

To accomplish that, McChrystal has indicated that he is considering moving troops out of remote mountain valleys where Taliban fighters have traditionally sought sanctuary and concentrating more forces around key population centers.

The assessment report also urges the United States and NATO to almost double the size of the Afghan security forces. It calls for expanding the Afghan army from 134,000 soldiers to about 240,000, and the police force from 92,000 personnel to about 160,000. Such an increase would require additional U.S. forces to conduct training and mentoring.

McChrystal and his top lieutenants have expressed concern about a lack of Afghan soldiers to patrol alongside foreign troops and to take responsibility for protecting pacified areas from Taliban infiltration. In Helmand province, where U.S. Marines are engaged in a major operation, fewer than 500 Afghan soldiers are available to work with almost 11,000 American service members.

Some U.S. and European officials involved in Afghanistan policy warn that the Afghan government does not have the means to pay for such a large army and police force, but McChrystal and his assessment team believe additional Afghan troops are essential to the country's stability. U.S. officials have said that they would like European nations to help cover the cost of training and sustaining additional Afghan forces.

The strategy advocates changes in what happens after Afghan soldiers graduate from boot camp. Instead of just placing small groups of U.S. trainers with Afghan units, the assessment calls for a top-to-bottom partnership between Afghan and NATO security forces that involves everyone from generals to privates working in tandem. "We've got to live together, we've got to train together, we've got to conduct operations together," one senior U.S. military official in Kabul said. "Everything we do has to be done together."

The assessment also calls for U.S. and NATO forces to be far more involved in fighting corruption and promoting effective governance, describing the risk to the overall mission from ineffective and venal government officials as being on par with the threat from top Taliban commanders. "These are co-equal ways we could lose the war," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served on the assessment team.

The team, which spent more than a dozen hours meeting with McChrystal over the past month, was made up of several prominent national security specialists from a variety of think thanks in Washington, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003948.html

East Timor: Security Sector Relapse?

Simon Roughneen | 31 Jul 2009

DILI, Timor-Leste -- Security sector reform (SSR) is a vital part of state-building, especially in Timor-Leste, a country that came close to civil war in 2006. Significantly, though, few Timorese political leaders interviewed about the issue wanted to speak about one of the highest priorities for the U.N. Mission in Timor-Leste: completing -- and, by extension, to some degree implementing -- a comprehensive security sector review.

Neither the review nor the overall role of the U.N. in SSR was raised in any of World Politics Review's meetings with politicians in Timor-Leste. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Dili-based foreign diplomat told WPR, "The Timorese will do SSR the Timorese way."

President Jose Ramos-Horta deflected the issue in a recent interview, focusing instead on the future of the army and police, in light of the imminent departure of resistance-era leaders due to retirement in the coming 2-3 years. Former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri told WPR that SSR proposals to date "are not really a reform," as what is proposed does not "have Timorese ownership."

All of the politicians interviewed spoke about the "resumption" of policing responsibilities by the Timorese police (PNTL) from the U.N. Mission. This is a vital part of SSR, given the police force's implosion in the 2006 violence. Moreover, the police has historically been subordinate to the army, known as the F-FDTL. That disparity was accentuated by the temporary Joint Command for national security set up after assassination attempts on President Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao in February 2008.

The domestic security situation improved in the months thereafter, but the police remained subordinate to the army, which still involves itself in internal security. According to eyewitnesses, U.N. police attempts to intervene in a public order incident in Maliana in June 2009, near the Indonesian border, resulted in F-FDTL guns being pointed at the multinational forces.

Some police, meanwhile, are involved in smuggling and extortion, and double up as members of the country's martial arts gangs and clandestine societies. Participants in the 2006 violence are mostly still employed on the force, without any accountability for their actions.

It is estimated that over 100,000 Timorese may be gang members, itself a difficult security challenge. James Scambary, of the Timor-Leste Armed Violence Assessment (TLAVA), a research project that looks at ways to implement community security initiatives, reminded WPR that "in 2006-7, over 1,300 U.N. police and later the [Australian-led] International Stabilisation Force could not prevent gang fighting," which was an expression of both non-political and political violence.

Draft security laws recently submitted to the Timorese parliament include a civil protection component, featuring a proposed Authority for Civil Protection "to coordinate the civil protection agents at national, district and suco level." This could have the effect of legitimizing or rewarding gangs and past perpetrators of violence with official status. If carried out in tandem with focused community security work, on the other hand, the measure could yield positive results.

It remains a point of discussion whether the influence of international peacekeepers has itself been entirely positive. Shona Hawkes of the NGO monitoring group La'o Hamutuk says that giving the multinational forces immunity from prosecution sets a negative example for local counterparts. There are almost weekly skirmishes between the Portuguese National Republican Guard (GNR) and Timorese security forces, with the most recent one allegedly involving a GNR assault on the prime minister's personal security.

But SSR, in Timor-Leste and elsewhere, means more than fixing the police and army. It
is a wide-ranging concept, often difficult to implement in practice. By most definitions, it means addressing all of the "hard" -- and a good chunk of the "soft" -- parts of state power.
In Timor-Leste, according to a recent paper (.pdf) published by the Center for International Cooperation, that means addressing "important justice and rule-of-law issues, including poor judicial capacity, a long legacy of impunity, a decrepit detention system, parliamentary and civil society oversight of security institutions."

Police reform is just a part of the process and will not work if the wide range of SSR needs are not dealt with. Timor-Leste, for instance, has a backlog of more than 4,000 legal cases, and there are multiple examples of impunity at the highest political levels.

Without the following priority list, by no means exhaustive, SSR will remain elusive in the country:

- Reform of the legal system and an end to impunity;
- Adequate economic growth and development that provides jobs and education for idle youth who proliferate in the gangs;
- Transparent implementation of the proposed Land Law, which aims to clarify land ownership issues that were muddied by cycles of displacement and contradictory legal systems inherited from various occupying powers.

To put the explosive land issue in context, perhaps 50 percent of Dili's houses were "illegally" occupied after 1999. As James Scambary told WPR, "Much of the fighting and displacement in 2006 was over disputed land," with over 100,000 Timorese driven from their homes at the time.

But perhaps the key to SSR is negotiating the political interests that have yet to be untangled, accommodated, or overcome. This is unsurprising, as SSR usually comes after conflict, when politics is either atrophied or compromised by links to armed factions, whether official or otherwise.

The U.N. views SSR as both a post-conflict and a conflict-prevention issue. But as the OECD-DAC handbook on Security System Reform and Governance says, it can be "difficult to find local ownership for SSR, especially where it is most needed, for example where security forces are part of the problem or where SSR may have the potential to change current power relationships."

The U.N. inquiry into the events of 2006 highlighted fragile state institutions, weak rule of law, minimal parliamentary oversight, and deficiencies in the army and the police as contributing factors to the violence. In Timor-Leste, the security sector is characterized by personal relationships, political and regional affiliations, and old-boy networks of comradeships and rivalries built up over decades of resistance to violent foreign occupation.

It seems that whatever the government does, security forces will have considerable autonomy. The draft security laws task the heads of the military and police with proposing each force's rules of engagement, with subsequent approval in both cases by the president and the council of ministers.

Former Prime Minister Alkatiri says SSR is "not only a technical issue, and we have to depoliticize the institutions." His Fretilin government failed to do so, contributing to the 2006 meltdown. Whether its successor, led by an icon of the resistance doubling as both prime minister and defense minister, has the will to address SSR remains to be seen.

Simon Roughneen is a journalist currently in southeast Asia. His chapter on Security Sector Reform in Sudan was published in "Beyond Settlement" (Associated University Press, 2008).

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articlePrint.aspx?ID=4147

Arrests of Sunni Leaders Rise in Baghdad

By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — The Baghdad police still do not enter the hard-line Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, which continues to suffer an insurgent attack every couple of days.

The Iraqi Army mans checkpoints here, but usually jointly with neighborhood volunteers from the Awakening movement, which is made up mostly of former Sunni insurgents who changed sides and helped reduce violence; it now fields as many as 900 paid fighters in Adhamiya.

But in little more than a week, the Iraqi Army’s 42nd Brigade has arrested seven Awakening leaders in Adhamiya, a neighborhood in north Baghdad. The second in command, Riyadh Abdul Hadi, was arrested on July 21, along with four of his followers, and last Sunday, the group’s security chief, Ghassan Muttar, and a local neighborhood leader, Abdul Khadir, were also arrested, three Awakening leaders in Adhamiya said.

The Iraqi government, which has been deeply suspicious of the Awakening movement for arming former insurgents, made no announcement of the Adhamiya arrests. They may well be another telltale sign of the dwindling influence the United States has over the Iraqi government now that American troops no longer dominate Baghdad.

In March and April, at least two dozen Awakening leaders were arrested, along with many more of their followers. The arrests apparently subsided in May, after strong expressions of concern from American officials. The recent arrests are the first known ones since American troops withdrew from cities and towns on June 30.

American military commanders at the highest levels have promised to track the arrests of Awakening leaders, and in some cases have intervened to win their release. American military officials declined to comment on the arrests. In the past, officials have stressed that arrests represented only a small portion of the 90,000 Awakening members throughout Iraq.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, has called Awakening members patriots and said that only those who have committed new crimes will be arrested. The Awakening leaders in Adhamiya are deeply skeptical. “We thought what we did for this area would win some place in the hearts of Iraqi officials, but it hasn’t,” one of the leaders said. “This place was a jungle before us.”

Many Adhamiya Awakening leaders have been attacked by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi organization with some foreign leadership. Last year a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest approached one of the local founders of the Awakening, then hugged him while detonating his vest. When other Awakening members arrived at the scene, another suicide bomber, this time in a car, drove into their midst and set off explosives, killing 13 more. Twenty-five of the Adhamiya fighters have been killed so far in insurgent attacks.

Two Awakening leaders were interviewed recently in a storefront that one of them used as a base; both spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they feared provoking the Iraqi Army into arresting them.

Their fighters stood guard outside and along the road; outsiders to Adhamiya still draw attention from residents.

“A month ago I was ready to quit,” one of the leaders said, complaining that since the Iraqi Army took over from the Americans, their pay has often been delayed, and Iraqi soldiers have often treated them contemptuously. He was persuaded by a community leader to be patient and remain in the group.

“We have sacrificed our blood here, so how can we quit?” the second leader said. He said he had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt just four months ago when a roadside bomb was detonated as he passed by.

The other leader said: “The Americans created the Awakening movement here. Before June 30th, when we had a problem, we could go to them and they would fix it. Now we don’t have anyone to talk to, we’re just hanging out in the streets.”

The leaders said that local Iraqi Army commanders held a meeting with Awakening members in Adhamiya early this week, attended by an American officer, to assure them they were not singling out the organization. The army commanders said they were just arresting individuals charged with new offenses, rather than crimes committed when Adhamiya was an insurgent stronghold. In those days, the local American base was called Fort Apache.

The commanders did not, however, reveal what those offenses were. “When the Americans were here, they would have told us the reasons and then everyone would calm down,” the second leader said. “Now they tell us nothing.”

Sheik Sabah al-Mashadani, the overall leader of the Adhamiya Awakening, said in an interview at his home that he was unconcerned, even at the arrest of his deputy. The judicial investigation will determine whether he is guilty, he said.

Under the Iraqi legal system, suspects are arrested and then a judge supervises an investigation before determining whether the charges were justified. That process often takes many months.

“We don’t want these arrests to make any unrest in the neighborhood,” the sheik said. “Since the Iraqi Army took over authority for us, we became part of the Iraqi security system, and like any other Iraqi employee, we are subject to our employer’s discipline.”

Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting.

Now It’s a Census That Could Rip Iraq Apart

By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — When Iraqis were drafting their Constitution in 2005, the parties could not agree on who would control Kirkuk, the prized oil capital of the north. They couldn’t even agree on who lived in Kirkuk, which is claimed by the region’s Kurds, but also by its Turkmen minority and Sunni Arabs. For that matter, they couldn’t even agree on where Kirkuk was — in Tamim, Erbil, or Sulaimaniya Province.

So the Iraqis punted, inserting Article 140, a clause that called for a national census, followed by a referendum on the status of Kirkuk, all to be held by the end of 2007. What followed were a succession of delays, against a backdrop of sectarian violence and warnings that Kirkuk could blow apart the Shiite-Kurdish alliance that has governed Iraq since the Americans invaded.

Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government, warned two years ago that if “Article 140 is not implemented, then there will be a real civil war.” He’s still waiting.

But so is the threat of civil war, which lurked quietly in the polling places this weekend as residents of Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated areas voted for their regional president and Parliament. Until the status of Kirkuk is clear, nobody really knows how much power those regional officials can wield within the national government, or even whether the Kurds will want to remain part of Iraq.

The problem with settling that is the Kirkuk referendum. There can’t be a referendum until Iraqis figure out who is eligible to vote in Kirkuk, which they can’t do until there’s a census. And any attempt to hold a census in this country may well end up, all by itself, provoking a civil war.

Even now, Sunnis don’t agree that they’re a minority of the nation, and that the Shiites are the majority, though it’s patently obvious. And in Kirkuk, everyone is in denial, one way or another.

Ethnically mixed and awash in oil, Kirkuk has always been something of a numbers game. There are 10 billion barrels of proven oil reserves — 6 percent of the world’s total and 40 percent of Iraq’s — all within commuting distance of downtown Kirkuk. Its fields, though half destroyed, still produce a million barrels of oil a day.

Both Turkmen and Kurds claim to be in the majority; the last reliable estimates, from a 1957 census, gave Turkmen a plurality in the city and Kurds a plurality in the surrounding district, with Arabs second in the countryside and third in the city. In the Saddam Hussein years, the Kurds declared Kirkuk part of their autonomous region of Kurdistan, but the dictator sent the army after the Kurdish guerrillas, known as pesh merga, and held onto the prize. He then set about Arabizing it, forcibly relocating families from the south while evicting Kurds and Turkmen alike.

After 2003, pesh merga troops quickly took control of Kirkuk as the Iraqi Army collapsed. Some local Arabs revolted, nurturing an insurgency that still festers. Others simply remained. Meanwhile, Turkmen appealed to powerful patrons in Turkey that they were undercounted and ignored by everyone, and Turkey came to their aid to make sure the Kurds didn’t get Kirkuk, which supplies much of Turkey’s oil. Only the presence of American troops has kept a lid on things; a brigade is still kept in Kirkuk.

And still there is no census. “The Iraqi government for the last three years, every year they say it will come this year,” says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament.

A date for a census is on the calendar — Oct. 24. But it is subject to ratification by Iraq’s cabinet, the Turkmen have announced that they will boycott it and Arabs in Kirkuk may well do the same.

One proposal for getting past this problem would be to hold a census everywhere but in Kirkuk. If that happened Kirkuk could end up, in effect, a disenfranchised province when the next general national elections are held in January.

Another suggestion is to hold a referendum on Kirkuk without a census, but that would invite a dispute about the validity of the results.

And then there’s the Lebanese solution, the one that so far seems likeliest: just do nothing. The last census in that sectarian hodge-podge of a country was in 1932; no one would dare hold one now, since the groups who would almost certainly lose representation — Maronite Catholics, Druze and Sunni Muslims — would simply go back to war rather than get counted out.

Already, the Kurdish regional government has been defying Baghdad and issuing contracts to develop its oil fields, including some in Kirkuk. The Iraqi government showed its displeasure by moving its 12th Division, some 9,500 troops, up to Kirkuk; there they have been provocatively patrolling into pesh merga-held areas and setting off a series of minor incidents recently.

“It’s very worrisome that these incidents continue to happen,” said Joost Hilterman, of the International Crisis Group. “Perhaps they will be contained, but the stakes are huge.”

For the moment, there are still plenty of American troops around to do the containing, but all American combat troops are due to pull out by next summer. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to broker an agreement, especially when no one is likely to really want it.

Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting.

U.S. Forces 'Have Plans' for N.Korea After Kim Jong-il

The U.S. "has plans" in the event of trouble in North Korea following the death of ailing leader Kim Jong-il, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Timothy Keating, claimed Wednesday. "I can tell you that we have plans with the United States Forces Korea and others in place if the president tells us to execute those plans, in the event of some uncertain succession in the North," Keating told reporters at the U.S. Defense Department.

But he added, "I don't think it is axiomatic that the departure of Kim Jong-il means a national security crisis. We would hope it wouldn't. But we are going to be prepared if it does mean that."

The admiral declined to go into detail. "We are prepared to execute a wide range of options in concert with allies in South Korea and in discussions through [the Department of] State, which would have the lead, with countries in the region and internationally if necessary."

He added Kim Jong-il "has clearly suffered some change of health. Is it the result of a stroke? Is that change the result of a stroke? Is there some larger issue at stake? I don't know... He's a different man today than he was a year ago, physically, in appearance."

This was the first time the commander of U.S. forces on Korean Peninsula in case of a sudden change in North Korea, made public remarks about a contingency plan for Kim's death.

On July 15, Michael Nacht, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Security Affairs, said the department is "developing a scenario for the future of North Korea."

Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, in a report in June said in the event of North Korean regime collapse, South Korean forces can implement tasks to maintain peace and reconstruct the North, but that the U.S. forces need to advance into North Korea if its nuclear materials, a serious threat to U.S. national security, pose a problem. In that case, the U.S. must send a clear message to China including promising to withdraw from the North Korean territory as soon as possible, he added.

englishnews@chosun.com / Jul. 24, 2009 09:33 KST

Increased U.S. Military Presence in Colombia Could Pose Problems With Neighbors

By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — A plan to increase the American military presence on at least three military bases in Colombia, Washington’s top ally in Latin America, is accentuating Colombia’s already tense relations with some of its neighbors.

Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which are members of a leftist political alliance that is led by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and backed by his nation’s oil revenues, have all criticized the plan, saying it would broaden the military reach of the United States in the Andes and the Caribbean at a time when they are still wary of American influence in the region.

Despite a slight improvement in Venezuela’s relations with the United States in recent months, Mr. Chávez has been especially vocal in lashing out at the plan. Speaking on state television here on Monday night, he put Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with Colombia under review, calling the plan a platform for “new aggression against us.”

Colombia’s foreign minister, Jaime Bermúdez, on Tuesday defended the negotiations, which are expected to produce an agreement in August, asking neighboring countries not to interfere in Colombia’s affairs. “We never expressed our opinion in what our neighbors do,” he said, pointing to Mr. Chávez’s attempts to strengthen ties with non-Western nations. “Not even when the Russian presence became known in Venezuelan waters, or with relations with China,” he added.

The United States has been negotiating the increase of military operations in Colombia in recent weeks, faced with Ecuador’s decision to end a decade-long agreement allowing E-3 AWACs and P-3 Orion surveillance planes to operate from the Manta Air Base on Ecuador’s Pacific Coast.

While American antidrug surveillance flights would sharply increase in Colombia, the world’s top producer of cocaine, the agreement would not allow American personnel to take part in combat operations in the country, which is mired in a four-decade war against guerrillas. A limit of 800 American military personnel and 600 American military contractors would also remain in place, officials involved in the talks said.

Still, depending on how the accord is put in place, American troop levels in Colombia could climb sharply. The United States currently has about 250 military personnel in the country, deployed largely in an advisory capacity to Colombia’s armed forces, William Brownfield, the United States ambassador to Colombia, said last week.

Colombia, which has already received more than $5 billion in military and antidrug aid from the United States this decade, has found itself isolated diplomatically as Mr. Chávez presses ahead with his efforts to expand Venezuela’s oil diplomacy while eroding American influence in the hemisphere.

Other countries chafe at Colombia for different reasons. Colombia’s diplomatic relations with Ecuador have soured since Colombian forces carried out a raid on a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebel camp on Ecuadoran territory last year. A festering boundary dispute with Nicaragua has also made for tensions between Colombia and Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, an ally of Mr. Chávez.

But with Venezuela itself, Colombia remains locked in a complex game of interdependence.

Its sales of manufactured and agricultural goods to Venezuela remain resilient despite Mr. Chávez’s occasional outbursts directed at his ideological opposite, Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe. And faced with disarray in its oil industry, Venezuela relies on imports of Colombian natural gas, narrowing the possibility of a severe deterioration in ties between the two countries despite their sharply different views of cooperation with the United States.

U.S. Overlooks Kyrgyzstan Rights Abuses

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — “You know what this is for,” Emilbek Kaptagaev recalled being told by the police officers who snatched him off the street. No other words, just blows to the head, then all went black. Mr. Kaptagaev, an opponent of Kyrgyzstan’s president, who is a vital American ally in the war in nearby Afghanistan, was found later in a field with a concussion, broken ribs and a face swollen into a mosaic of bruises.

Mr. Kaptagaev said that the beating last month was a warning to stop campaigning against the president, but that he would not. And so he received an anonymous call only a few days ago. “Have you forgotten?” the voice growled. “Want it to happen again?”

Mr. Kaptagaev’s story is not unusual in this poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia. Many opposition politicians and independent journalists have been arrested, prosecuted, attacked and even killed over the last year as the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has consolidated control in advance of elections on Thursday, which he is all but certain to win.

“This is how the authorities rule in Kyrgyzstan,” said Mr. Kaptagaev, 52. “They use criminal methods to keep power.”

The United States has remained largely silent in response to this wave of violence, apparently wary of jeopardizing the status of its sprawling air base, on the outskirts of this capital, which supports the mission in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Obama administration has sought to woo the Kyrgyz president since he said in February that he would close the Manas base.

In June, President Obama sent a letter to Mr. Bakiyev praising his role in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism. Mr. Bakiyev allowed the base to stay, after the United States agreed to pay higher rent and other minor changes.

The lack of criticism of Mr. Bakiyev underscores how the Obama administration has emphasized pragmatic concerns over human rights in dealings with autocratic leaders in Central Asia. Under pressure in Afghanistan, the administration has feared alienating nearby countries whose support is increasingly important.

How to react to crackdowns like Mr. Bakiyev’s is a longstanding challenge for American diplomacy, here and around the world. Some American officials stress that rebuking governments over human rights is often ineffective because they lash back, and tighten things further.

The administration is mindful that a neighboring former Soviet republic, Uzbekistan, closed an American military facility there after American officials condemned an attack by the security forces in 2005 that killed hundreds of people. The Obama administration is trying to repair that relationship.

In the Kyrgyz elections on Thursday, opposition parties have rallied around the candidacy of a former prime minister, Almazbek Atambaev, but he is given little chance. Mr. Atambaev’s campaign manager, Bakyt Beshimov, said the Kyrgyz president drew strength from the American reluctance to speak out.

“This regime clearly understand that for the United States, democracy is not a priority, freedom of speech is not a priority,” Mr. Beshimov said. “They want peace, stability, air bases and regional security connected with Afghanistan.”

The Obama administration’s attempt to improve ties with Central Asia was underscored by a visit to the region this month by a senior diplomat, William J. Burns.

In Kyrgyzstan, Mr. Burns said at a news conference that the United States hoped for “fair and credible elections,” but he did not mention the treatment of the opposition or journalists.

Interviewed about the political situation, another State Department official, George A. Krol, said reports of violence “greatly disturb the department.”

“The United States doesn’t shy away from raising these issues with the Kyrgyz authorities,” he said.

The Kyrgyz president, Mr. Bakiyev, took office in 2005 after the Tulip Revolution — the third in what was seen at the time as a series of so-called color revolutions that offered hope of more democratic governments in the former Soviet Union.

Today, widespread disillusionment has set in, as in Ukraine and Georgia, which also had such upheavals.

Kyrgyzstan, with five million people, continues to have a more open political system and more open media than its hard-line neighbors in Central Asia. It is not a police state, and in general, only those who overtly challenge the government are hounded by the security services.

Even so, human rights groups have been taken aback.

“President Bakiyev has become infamous for even greater levels of corruption, authoritarianism and ineffective economic policies than his predecessor,” Freedom House, a human rights group, said in a new report.

In an interview at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev dismissed such criticism. He said the security services were in no way persecuting the opposition.

He said he would be easily re-elected because the country was faring well despite the financial crisis, adding that opposition leaders were complaining that balloting would be falsified because they needed excuses for their lack of support.

“A strong opposition would not behave in that way,” Mr. Bakiyev said.

He said he was so confident that the elections would be honest that he had invited the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor them. In a report in May, the organization, which has 56 member states, described concerns in Kyrgyzstan about “a criminalization of the political process.”

Mr. Bakiyev, asked about repeated attacks on journalists, said he doubted that the attacks were related to their jobs. He said the government would never try to silence the media.

“The only authorities that would take that step are ones who are afraid — afraid of journalists, afraid of openness, afraid of something that they want to hide,” he said. “I, as president, and the government of Kyrgyzstan fear absolutely nothing. There is no motive, there is no reason to hunt down journalists.”

Still, the bloodshed continues. This month, a journalist named Almaz Tashiyev died after being beaten by police officers, prosecutors said.

Syrgak Abdyldaev says he barely escaped that fate. In March, Mr. Abdyldaev, 47, a well-known journalist who has scrutinized the president’s political activities, was lured to a meeting by an anonymous caller who promised confidential information, and was attacked.

He was stabbed 29 times in the thigh, apparently in an effort to cause him to bleed to death. He survived after passers-by came to his aid.

“They wanted to make an example of me,” Mr. Abdyldaev said. “They wanted me to die in front of everybody. And then nobody — not a journalist, not anybody with a brain in his head — would dare write anything in the press.”

While he was hospitalized, his newspaper, The Bishkek Reporter, dismissed him. He was told it was too risky to keep publishing his work.

Pakistan Objects to U.S. Plan for Afghan War

By ERIC SCHMITT and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is objecting to expanded American combat operations in neighboring Afghanistan, creating new fissures in the alliance with Washington at a critical juncture when thousands of new American forces are arriving in the region.

Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.

The Pakistani account made clear that even as the United States recommits troops and other resources to take on a growing Taliban threat, Pakistani officials still consider India their top priority and the Taliban militants a problem that can be negotiated. In the long term, the Taliban in Afghanistan may even remain potential allies for Pakistan, as they were in the past, once the United States leaves.

The Pakistani officials gave views starkly different from those of American officials regarding the threat presented by top Taliban commanders, some of whom the Americans say have long taken refuge on the Pakistani side of the border.

Recent Pakistani military operations against Taliban in the Swat Valley and parts of the tribal areas have done little to close the gap in perceptions.

Even as Obama administration officials praise the operations, they express frustration that Pakistan is failing to act against the full array of Islamic militants using the country as a base.

Instead, they say, Pakistani authorities have chosen to fight Pakistani Taliban who threaten their government, while ignoring Taliban and other militants fighting Americans in Afghanistan or terrorizing India.

Such tensions have mounted despite a steady rotation of American officials through the region. They were on display last weekend when, during a visit to India, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said those who had planned the Sept. 11 attacks were now sheltering in Pakistan. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued an immediate rebuttal.

Pakistan’s critical assessment was provided as the Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday night.

The country’s perspective was given in a nearly two-hour briefing on Friday for The New York Times by senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. They spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy. The main themes of the briefing were echoed in conversations with several military officers over the past few days.

One of the first briefing slides read, in part: “The surge in Afghanistan will further reinforce the perception of a foreign occupation of Afghanistan. It will result in more civilian casualties; further alienate local population. Thus more local resistance to foreign troops.”

A major concern is that the American offensive may push Taliban militants over the border into Baluchistan, a province that borders Waziristan in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Army is already fighting a longstanding insurgency of Baluch separatists in the province.

A Taliban spillover would require Pakistan to put more troops there, a Pakistani intelligence official said, troops the country does not have now. Diverting troops from the border with India is out of the question, the official said.

A spokesman for the American and NATO commands in Afghanistan, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, said in an e-mail message on Monday that there was no significant movement of insurgents out of Afghanistan, and no indication of foreign fighters moving into Afghanistan through Baluchistan or Iran, another concern of the Pakistanis.

Pakistani and American officials also cited some positive signs for the alliance. Increased sharing of information has sharpened the accuracy of strikes against militant hide-outs by Pakistani F-16 warplanes and drones operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. And Pakistani and American intelligence operatives are fighting together in dangerous missions to hunt down fighters from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas and in the North-West Frontier Province.

But the intelligence briefing clearly illuminated the differences between the two countries over how, in the American view, Pakistan was still picking proxies and choosing enemies among various Islamic militant groups in Pakistan.

The United States maintains that the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leads an inner circle of commanders who guide the war in southern Afghanistan from their base in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan.

American officials say this Taliban council, known as the Quetta shura, is sheltered by Pakistani authorities, who may yet want to employ the Taliban as future allies in Afghanistan.

In an interview last week, the new leader of American and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, paused when asked whether he was getting the cooperation he wanted from Pakistani forces in combating the Quetta shura. “What I would love is for the government of Pakistan to have the ability to completely eliminate the safe havens that the Afghan Taliban enjoy,” he said.

The Pakistani intelligence officials denied that Mullah Omar was even in Pakistan, insisting that he was in Afghanistan.

The United States asked Pakistan in recent years to round up 10 Taliban leaders in Quetta, the Pakistani officials said. Of those 10, 6 were killed by the Pakistanis, 2 were probably in Afghanistan, and the remaining 2 presented no threat to the Marines in Afghanistan, the officials said.

They also said no threat was posed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taliban leader who American military commanders say operates with Pakistani protection out of North Waziristan and equips and trains Taliban fighters for Afghanistan.

Last year, Washington presented evidence to Pakistani leaders that Mr. Haqqani, working with Inter-Services Intelligence, was responsible for the bombing last summer of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed 54 people.

Pakistani officials insisted that Mr. Haqqani spent most of his time in Afghanistan, suggesting that the American complaints about him being provided sanctuary were invalid.

Another militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is also a source of deep disagreement.

India and the United States have criticized Pakistan for allowing Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, to be freed from jail last month.

The Pakistani officials said Mr. Saeed deserved to be freed because the government had failed to convince the courts that he should be kept in custody. There would be no effort to imprison Mr. Saeed again, in part because he was just an ideologue who did not have an anti-Pakistan agenda, the officials said.

Some Fear N.Y. Fed Too Heavily Influenced by Wall Street Ideology

By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 20, 2009

NEW YORK -- The low-slung cubicles wrap around the ninth floor of a building three blocks from Wall Street, each manned by a young staffer staring at flashing numbers on a flat-screen computer monitor and working the phones to gather the latest chatter from financial markets around the world.

It could be any investment bank or hedge fund. Instead, it is the markets group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which has been on the front lines of the government's response to the financial crisis. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department officials make the major decisions, but the New York Fed executes them.

The information gathered there provides crucial insights into the financial world for top policymakers. But the bank is so close to Wall Street -- physically, culturally and intellectually -- that some economic experts worry that the New York Fed puts the interests of the financial industry ahead of those of ordinary Americans.

"The New York Fed sticks out as being not just very, very close to Wall Street, but to the most powerful people on Wall Street," said Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT. "I worry that they pay too much deference to the expertise and presumed wisdom of a sector that screwed up massively."

Even some former insiders at the Fed say the bank does not pay enough attention to the fundamental flaws in the country's financial system or to the risks associated with bailing out financial firms -- for instance, the chance that banks will be encouraged to take more unwise gambles. These experts worry that the New York Fed has adopted the mindset of a trading floor: well attuned to ripples in financial markets but not to long-term trends and dangers.

Last month, for instance, Wall Street bond traders wanted the central bank to ramp up its purchase of Treasury bonds, which would help the traders by driving up prices. But Fed officials in Washington and around the country concluded that such a move would be counterproductive in the longer run, in contrast to some New York Fed staffers, whose views more closely mirrored those on Wall Street.

New York Fed employees "play a very valuable role, day in, day out, with detailed contacts with the big financial firms," said William Poole, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis who is now at the Cato Institute. "What I think is missing is a longer-run perspective. They tend to be sort of short-term in their outlook, which is true of a lot of the financial firms. Traders have a horizon of a few hours or a few weeks, at most."

The New York Fed's home is a fortresslike building, with bars securing the windows on lower floors. Its main lobby resembles a Gothic cathedral: dim, quiet, with stone walls, as if to inspire a mix of fear and awe.

Like the other 11 regional Federal Reserve banks, the New York Fed is a curious mix of public and private, part of a system Congress created in 1913 to avoid concentrated power in Washington or New York alone. Its board of directors is composed of bankers, businesspeople and community leaders, who select the bank president with approval from Fed governors in Washington. Banks in New York, Connecticut and parts of New Jersey own shares in the New York Fed, though its profits are returned to the U.S. Treasury.

The man in charge is a soft-spoken economist named William C. Dudley, who took over as president in January, replacing Timothy F. Geithner when he became Treasury secretary.

With a proclivity for button-down Oxford shirts and rumpled suits, Dudley does not fit the mold of a Wall Street executive. He has won fans across the Federal Reserve System for a collaborative style, as well as a talent for explaining complicated problems in the financial world and drawing up solutions to them.

It is his résumé that alarms some critics, who see an example of a too-cozy relationship between financial firms and their lead regulator. One of several bank officials who have worked in the private sector, Dudley was at Goldman Sachs for two decades, including 10 years as chief economist, before joining the New York Fed in 2007.

The bank's board of directors, which selected Dudley, includes such corporate titans as Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase, and Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric's chief. Richard Fuld, then the chief executive of Lehman Brothers, resigned from the Fed just days before his firm went under. Stephen Friedman, who sat on Goldman's board, resigned as chairman of the New York Fed board earlier this year after controversy arose over his purchase of Goldman stock while at the Fed.

"I don't think they're consciously doing things to tilt the playing field to Goldman Sachs and the other major banks," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "But when you work at a place, you tend to internalize their views, and that is going to color your policies. It's not that they're being deliberately corrupt; it's that they come to incorporate the interests of major banks in their views."

Dudley argues that he has been willing to take on large banks repeatedly, especially with stress tests earlier this year that many viewed as onerous and which required some banks to raise more capital.

For their part, senior Fed officials in Washington say the experience Dudley and some of his colleagues have in the private sector has proved invaluable in helping them understand how markets are failing.

"He has been the right person at the right place at the right time," said Donald L. Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors.

On the ninth floor, the first employees show up at 4 a.m. and hit the phones to collect the latest on overnight trading in Asia and Europe.

The workers on the front lines are "trader analysts." Many of them are around age 30, with master's degrees in international affairs or public policy from schools such as Johns Hopkins and Columbia. Some stay at the bank for decades, rising through the ranks; others go to Wall Street firms within a few years (some of those converts have looked to return to the Fed lately as investment banks have shed jobs by the thousands).

The staff, though paid much less than Wall Street workers, is well compensated by government standards. The 289 bank officers earned an average of $204,000 in 2007 -- more than Cabinet secretaries.

"They're the eyes and ears of the Federal Reserve in financial markets, and they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they weren't sensitive to what's occurring in that world," Kohn said. Then it is up to the board and the Fed's policymaking committee "to take that information, weigh it along with all the other information we get and set policy."

This intimacy with the firms they regulate can give Fed officials crucial intelligence. At the height of the financial crisis in September, staffers learned from their market contacts that Wall Street's two largest investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, were in mortal danger because their trading partners were so quickly losing faith in them, according to an update on the day's market activity by the New York Fed staff obtained by The Washington Post. Four days later, the central bank brought the two firms under the Fed's protective umbrella by agreeing to make them "bank holding companies."

But in allowing Goldman and Morgan to convert themselves to bank holding companies that received access to greater federal aid, Fed officials exempted them from the usual requirements, potentially putting taxpayer money at risk. (Since then, the firms' fortunes have improved enough that the government has incurred no losses.)

In responding to the financial crisis, the New York Fed has designed many of its programs to try to take advantage of some of the same business practices that contributed to the crisis.

Last fall, Fed staffers in New York and Washington began developing ideas to address paralysis in the markets for credit card loans, auto loans and other forms of consumer debt.

In Washington, Fed staffers wanted the central bank to hire a small number of firms to purchase the securities backed by these loans, thus injecting fresh credit into the market. But New York Fed staffers thought it better to let any investor put up money, matched with a loan from the Fed, to buy the securities. They argued that this approach would restart private markets more effectively and could be deployed faster. The downside: The New York Fed's strategy could allow private investors to earn huge returns while the government limited their losses.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and other top Fed officials sided with New York.

The New York Fed, in scrambling to save the financial industry, has even taken a page out of the industry playbook, adopting a trick known as "special purpose vehicles." These entities, as used by Citigroup and other banks, contributed to the financial meltdown. But the Fed turned to similar entities when it bumped up against legal restrictions on its ability to buy risky assets. When the central bank decided to rescue Bear Stearns and, later, American International Group, New York Fed lawyers suggested creating separate limited liability corporations to buy the assets. The Fed then lent money to these new entities.

Dudley said the Fed has made such moves to support the overall economy, helping to keep a deep recession from getting much worse. When programs have helped individual firms, they have done so only to prevent catastrophic damage to the broader U.S. economy.

"Nobody here is trying to do anything but support the economy and support market functioning," he said in an interview. "We are worried about the stability of the system, not any individual institution."

The Afghan Triangle: Kashmir, India, Pakistan

Graham Usher

(Graham Usher is a writer and journalist based in Pakistan and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.)

The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons protesting in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri)

The Pakistani army’s operation in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan is the most sustained in five years of selective counterinsurgency against the local Taliban. The toll already is immense: 1.9 million internally displaced, including tens of thousands housed in tents on parched plains; 15,000 soldiers battling 5,000 guerrillas; and more than a thousand dead, mainly militants according to available counts but also soldiers and of course civilians.

The war has not been confined to Swat. In revenge for losses there, the Pakistan Taliban has unleashed a torrent of attacks in Peshawar, Lahore, Islamabad and other cities, killing scores. “You know it’s serious this time: the scale of the army’s campaign confirms it. You fear the war is at your door,” said Sajjad Ali from Mardan, a city adjacent to Swat.

The war is the fruit of a failed peace process, denounced by the United States as an “abdication” that had allowed the Taliban to within 60 miles of Islamabad. In February, the provincial government had proffered a localized form of Islamic law in Swat in return for the Taliban disarming and recognizing “the writ of the state.” The insurgents observed their commitments only in the breach, which included the slaughter of their opponents. In May the army “reinvaded” Swat.

Pakistanis historically have been hostile to campaigns against the Taliban, casting them as “America’s war.” But not this time: The army, the civilian government and most Pakistanis, including the largest opposition party, support the Swat offensive. “The atrocities of the Swat Taliban galvanized public opinion,” says Maleeha Lodhi, a former ambassador to the US. “It produced a coincidence of military resolve, political consensus and strong public support. And because the US was not seen as calling the shots in any pronounced way, this helped the government pursue a very aggressive policy.”

The public support manifests as a spontaneous, generous solidarity. In cities like Mardan, Peshawar and Swabi, people have literally opened their homes to the refugees. In vast tent cities near the banks of the Indus, volunteers deliver food, clothes, utensils and shelter. The relief work, involving all parts of Pakistani civil society, is led by the Islamic charities.

One such charity is Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). Last December the Pakistani government banned JuD and arrested its amir, Hafiz Saeed, following the JuD’s designation as a terrorist group by the United Nations. Saeed founded Lashkar-e-Tayaba (LeT), the Pakistani jihadi group that India alleges was behind the attack in Mumbai in November 2008. In Pakistan, it is widely assumed that JuD and LeT are one and the same organization. On June 2, the Lahore High Court ordered Saeed’s release on the grounds that the state had supplied “insufficient” evidence to warrant his detention. India responded by saying that the decision raised “serious doubts over Pakistan’s sincerity in acting with determination against terrorist groups and individuals operating from its territory.” India has since conditioned any return to peace negotiations with Pakistan on the latter taking action against LeT and other jihadi groups.

For the Obama administration—which has cast Taliban and al-Qaeda “sanctuaries” in Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan as the “single greatest threat” to America—the enigma is whether Pakistan’s military establishment is friend or foe in America’s war against Islamic militancy. “I’ve rarely seen in my years in Washington an issue so hotly disputed internally by experts and intelligence officials,” ceded Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s point man for “Af-Pak,” when asked that question in February.

The dispute in Washington about how to perceive the Pakistani army runs along two colliding tracks. Track one says the army is a friend. Even before Swat, the Pakistani army had lost 1,000 men to Taliban and al-Qaeda guerillas in the tribal areas. Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had “rendered” more than 600 al-Qaeda suspects into CIA hands, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. Currently the Pakistani army is fighting the Taliban not only in Swat but also the tribal areas of Bajaur, Orakzai, Mohmand, Khyber and South Waziristan.

Kashmiri children watching cricket near an excavation site in Budgam, near Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri)

Track two says the army-ISI combination is a foe. It allows Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his Shura council free run in Pakistan’s Balochistan province from where they direct the insurgency in Afghanistan. It shelters Afghan Taliban commanders like Jalaluddin and Sirjuddin Haqqani in North Waziristan. And it supplies money, arms and training to jihadi groups fighting the Indian army in Indian-occupied Kashmir, including the “banned” LeT.

The two tracks collide because both, in part, are true. The army is combating the Pakistan Taliban and its jihadi allies in Swat and elsewhere, seeing their spread as a danger to Pakistan’s integrity as a state. One hundred and twenty thousand soldiers have been mobilized to fight them. But 250,000 remain rooted on the eastern border facing the Indian army, and primed by organizational formation, weaponry, ideology and ethos to a vision that defines India, not the Taliban or al-Qaeda, as the “strategic enemy.” That vision must change if Pakistan is to defeat the enemy at home.

Jockeying for Kashmir

For the last 61 years the fight has been fought, mostly, in and for Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK): the territory Delhi and Islamabad have contested since the 1947 partition cleaved them into two states—and Kashmir into “Pakistani” and “Indian” parts. Sometimes (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) the war has been hot. More often it has been waged via Pakistani proxies against a standing Indian military. Since 1989, it has been channeled through a low-intensity, Pakistan-backed separatist-Islamist insurgency that has killed 50,000 people and incurred an Indian military occupation three times the size of America’s in Iraq and three times as lethal.

Of all the jihadi groups the ISI nurtured in IoK, the LeT was the deadliest, but there were others. Their collective purpose was to “bleed India” until Delhi surrendered IoK to Islamabad. Pre-9/11, the collaboration was overt. LeT and other jihadi groups recruited fighters throughout Pakistan, but particularly from southern Punjab. They launched hundreds of guerilla attacks on Indian soldiers and civilians and fought alongside the Pakistani army in the 1999 invasion of Kargil, the last time the two armies went head to head inside Indian Kashmir.

In December 2001, India charged LeT with attacking its parliament in Delhi, bringing the two countries to the brink of nuclear war. Under American pressure, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s then-military dictator, banned the LeT and other jihadi groups. Moves against the militants in 2002 seemed like bluffs at the time. In fact, they were the beginning of a slow change. Steered by Washington, Islamabad and Delhi went from nuclear brinkmanship to a truce across the armistice line in Kashmir. In 2004, Musharraf began a peace process or “composite dialogue” with India predicated on the oath “not to permit any territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner.” What had commenced as a feint by Pakistan’s military establishment was hardening into policy.

The ISI demobilized thousands of jihadi fighters in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Some of their camps were moved inland, including, ironically, to the Swat Valley. Six army divisions (about 80,000 to 100,000 men) were repositioned from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan, where the army was becoming embroiled in its first clashes with the Pakistan Taliban. Under the command of General Ashfaq Kayani (now army chief of staff), the ISI was reformed, with the more Indo-phobic and jihadi officers purged. Guerilla infiltration into IoK slowed to a trickle.

Some of the army’s senior officers believed that because both Pakistan and India had become nuclear powers, hot war was no longer an option. More importantly, many generals were convinced that the army would not be able to preserve its preeminent position in the Pakistani state or defend its enormous corporate interests in the economy without sustained growth which would require peace with India. Musharraf was the leading proponent of this new thinking. In 2004, he authorized Khurshid Kasuri, the civilian foreign minister at the time, to open “back-channel” negotiations with India on a possible settlement for Kashmir, one that would in essence give Islamabad an honorable exit from what had become an unwinnable war.

Over the next three years a deal took shape: Demilitarization would neutralize the two Kashmirs, open borders would unite them, and a form of self-government or autonomy would partly satisfy the Kashmiri aspiration to self-determination. The army agreed to the nucleus of this draft agreement with the proviso that the Kashmiris vote on it. “This was to allow the army to give up historic positions without appearing to,” said Hasan Rizvi Ashkari, a military historian.

The back channel ran aground in the storm that wrecked Musharraf after his illegal sacking of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in March 2007. Many fear that the attacks in Mumbai may have sunk prospects for a Kashmir agreement forever. But the progress of the discussions had suggested that the military was open to a resolution and had taken steps in that direction. “When the Kashmir camps were initially dispersed, the boys [fighters] were told that it was just a temporary measure because of 9/11,” a senior jihadi leader told the BBC in 2008. “Then the arrests and disappearances started. The boys realized fundamental changes were underway and quietly slipped away beyond the control of the Pakistani authorities.” This is what happened in the Swat Valley where jihadi cells joined forces and lent enormous firepower to local Islamist groups demanding shari‘a law. The pattern was repeated in the southern Punjab and Islamabad.

Police paramilitaries in downtown Srinagar during a city shutdown called by separatists. (Liz Harris)

Deprived of support from their old (state) godfathers, the “youngest and most radicalized members” were drawn to new groups, says historian Ahmed Rashid. They “joined up with al-Qaeda and the Pakistan and Afghan Taliban in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. They embraced the global jihad to fight US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later attacked the Pakistan government.” Rashid believes this al-Qaeda, Taliban and jihadi nexus is the motor driving much of the violence that has rocked Pakistan, Afghanistan and India in recent years, including Mumbai, the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, and the recent wave of attacks in Pakistani cities.

In other words, after 2004 many LeT and other jihadi cadres ceased focusing their militancy exclusively on India or Kashmir. They fragmented and morphed into multiple cells with ties to al-Qaeda and other Pakistani Sunni sectarian groups, sometimes acting in alliance, sometimes autonomously, but together having an outreach that included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Kashmir, Iraq, Europe and beyond. The ISI was loath to cut ties with groups over which it did maintain some sway, like the old LeT-JuD nexus. Nor was the ISI inclined to abandon entirely the proxy war strategy in IoK before a settlement had been reached. “If we did that, Kashmir would go cold and India would bury it forever,” said a senior army general in 2005.

IoK has warmed. In 2008 there were 41 militant infractions across the armistice line, double the 2007 total. The upward curve has continued in 2009, with several skirmishes between the two armies. For the first time since 2004, LeT cadres have publicly surfaced in the southern Punjab, proselytizing for jihad. Seminaries and schools are acting as recruiting centers, with the traffic in students moving in both directions between the Punjab and the tribal areas. Funerals in both provinces eulogize “martyrs” in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

None of this could happen without the knowledge of the ISI. Militant activity increased in the twilight between the end of Musharraf’s military rule and Pakistan’s new civilian government. Yet the new militancy seems to have little to do with the mass demonstrations for independence that shook IoK in the summer of 2008, or with insurgent violence there, which remains low. It has more to do with Afghanistan or, more precisely, with India in Afghanistan.

India’s Regional Dominance

Pakistan has been worried by India’s widening footprint in Afghanistan since the Bonn conference in November 2001, where Afghan factions came together to determine their country’s post-Taliban future. The Afghan Taliban was purged from any interim government headed by Hamid Karzai, and replaced by forces loyal to the Northern Alliance (NA). The NA had opposed the Taliban regime before 9/11 and fought with US troops to topple it. India, Iran and Russia were its main sponsors; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported the Taliban. Neither the Taliban nor Islamabad was invited to Bonn. “This was our original sin,” said Lakdar Brahimi, the UN’s envoy in Afghanistan, who chaired the conference.

India remains one of Karzai’s few champions. And Afghanistan is seen to be very much within Delhi’s sphere of regional influence. India has four consulates and has given the Afghan government $1.2 billion in aid: a huge investment for a country that is 99 percent Muslim and with which India shares no border. Delhi has built the new national parliament in Kabul, runs the Afghan electricity and satellite systems and has helped train its army and intelligence forces, the latter staffed by many ex-NA commanders.

India’s most ambitious Afghan project is a new highway, routed across the western border to the Iranian port of Chabahar, that circumvents landlocked Afghanistan’s need to use Pakistani ports to the Gulf; Islamabad deems these trade and energy corridors vital to its economic future. For the Pakistan army, the highway’s importance is clear: India seeks to consolidate an alliance with Iran in western Afghanistan to counter Pakistan’s influence in eastern Afghanistan. This is a continuation of the pre-9/11 war in a post-9/11 infrastructure, with India, Iran and the Karzai government on the one side, and Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban on the other. “The army feels under siege,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, a military analyst.

In 2004, the Bush administration tilted US South Asia policy toward Delhi, lured by the size of India’s markets and its potential role as a strategic “counterweight” to China, Pakistan’s closest regional ally. In 2008, the US signed an agreement that allows India to buy civilian atomic technology, including nuclear fuel, from American firms, even though Delhi is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty. Pakistan was granted no such privilege; on the contrary, it is denounced as a rogue for developing the bomb by stealth and for the proliferation activities of its former top nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan. Some in Congress want aid to Pakistan tied to US access to Khan for questioning.

For all the fabled “chemistry” between Bush and Musharraf, since 9/11 Washington has treated Islamabad as a gun for hire, providing certain weaponry and around $2 billion a year in exchange for securing supply lines for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and for fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. By cooperating in these ways, the army may have hoped that its interests would be taken into account in the post-invasion reconstruction. Yet unlike Iran or India—and despite the services or sacrifices rendered—Islamabad was given no say in the formation of the Afghan government or in its nascent military forces. This strengthened Pakistani perceptions that Musharraf and his army were mercenaries fighting “America’s war.” The Taliban, by contrast, were deemed Afghan or at least Pashtun nationalists resisting a foreign, colonial and anti-Muslim occupation.

These realities help explain the army’s selective counterinsurgency in the tribal areas. In Bajaur, Mahmond and to a lesser extent South Waziristan, the army has often been ruthless in campaigns against the Pakistan Taliban. This is partly revenge for the killing of Pakistani soldiers. But there is also the perception (and, the army insists, evidence) that “Pakistan’s enemies” are fomenting the militancy. A commander in Bajaur says many of those captured or killed by the army are Afghans, including Tajiks or Uzbeks, while the tribal areas are almost exclusively Pashtun. The inference is obvious. Some “insurgents” are “agents” working for Afghan intelligence and/or India.

In North Waziristan, on the other hand, the preferred policy is to negotiate ceasefires with tribal militants who openly provide fighters and arms to Afghan Taliban commanders like the Haqqanis. Unlike the Pakistan Taliban, these tribal militants do not attack the Pakistani army other than to avenge US drone attacks. “They’re our people; they’re not our enemies,” says an ISI officer.

A Pakistani analyst—who declined attribution—says these dual policies explain the enigma of the Pakistan army. It will act against those who threaten the state, such as the Taliban in Swat and al-Qaeda-linked militants elsewhere. But it will not act against those who, like the Afghan Taliban, seek only a haven from which to fight American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. In fact, “The ISI has retained its links to the Afghan Taliban because it wants to use them as a bargaining chip in Afghanistan,” says the analyst. “The Pakistan army wants to have a bigger say in whatever new regional dispensation America is planning. The view within the army and ISI is if the Afghan Taliban is abandoned, this would strengthen the Afghan government, as well as India in Afghanistan, at Pakistan’s expense.”

A Fork in the Road

Prior to his election, Barack Obama was clear on the link between peace in Kashmir and war in Afghanistan. “If Pakistan can look towards to the east with confidence, it will be less likely to believe its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007. Ensconced in the Oval Office, the president now dismisses Islamabad’s focus on Delhi as paranoia. “The obsession with India as a mortal threat to Pakistan is misguided [because] their biggest threat right now comes internally,” he said in April 2009.

The shift seals a “new” American policy toward Pakistan that marks more continuity than change with Bush’s second term. Under Obama, US drone attacks into the tribal areas—inaugurated by Bush—have continued and may be extended to other areas of Pakistan. Whatever good will Obama hoped to generate through increases in civilian aid has been wiped out by the increase in Pakistani deaths by American rockets.

The Pakistan aid bill before Congress, although promising a “deeper, broader, long-term engagement with the [Pakistani] people,” could be as conditional as anything tendered by Bush. Military aid is not to be tied only to fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda but may require Pakistan’s pledge not to support “any person or group that conducts violence, sabotage or other activities meant to instill fear or terror in India.” Some members of Congress want aid to Pakistan linked to moving troops from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan.

American policy towards Kashmir also reveals India’s widening influence in Washington. In an intensive lobbying effort, Delhi made clear to Obama that his envoy would be shunned if any link were made between Kashmir and Af-Pak. It worked. In a trip to Islamabad in April, Holbrooke refused to even say “Kashmir.” And while in Delhi, he was effusive about India’s “critical role” in the region without which “we cannot settle Afghanistan and many other world problems.” The implication was that Kashmir, clearly, is not among them.

This Indian-American axis presents Islamabad with a fork in the road. One way goes back. The ISI again could try to bleed India via surrogates in Afghanistan and Kashmir in the hope that its regional concerns will be addressed, above all a final status for Kashmir and recognition of its western border with Afghanistan. But such a strategy would likely fail; pursuing foreign policy objectives through guerilla violence rarely worked in the past. It simply creates conditions of friction that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and jihadi groups can exploit to keep 80 percent of Pakistan’s military manpower and hardware pinned down on India rather than on them or the tribal areas. Mumbai and the Taliban’s conquest of Swat are two examples of just how useful a diversion this can be.

The alternative is to go forward and insist that Kashmir, Afghanistan and Islamic militancy are regional problems requiring regional solutions. India is right to insist that Pakistan go after those nationals and groups implicated in Mumbai and other attacks in India with the same vigor as it is currently going after the Pakistan Taliban in Swat. But equally Delhi must recommence serious negotiations to resolve Kashmir and other outstanding water and land disputes with Islamabad.

On such bases Pakistan and India could come together to agree to terms for coexistence in a neutral and neutralized Afghanistan. For economic, energy and geopolitical reasons, both nations have an interest in their roads crossing in Kabul. But the road must start in Kashmir.