Pakistan’s new leaders are doing the easy stuff first. Judges fired by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, including former chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, will probably get their jobs back soon. Curbs on the media are being lifted. Earlier this week the Supreme Court cleared the way for slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to run for parliament in June. That, in turn, could put the Pakistan People’s Party co-chairman in line for the job of prime minister.
All this honeymoon excitement is partly about getting back at Musharraf, whose influence is dwindling almost daily following February’s election defeat.
A possibly more significant development was Monday’s decision by provincial authorities to free a senior pro-Taliban mullah, Sufi Muhammad.
The move was a first, untasted fruit of Islamabad’s new policy of wooing rather than fighting hardline Islamists. The government says it believes dialogue and development is the best way to pacify tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, notably Waziristan, where top al-Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden are believed to be based, sheltered by indigenous fundamentalists.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, making a get-to-know-you visit on Monday, gave the new policy a cautious welcome.
“We need a far greater degree of precision and detail when we are talking about reconciliation — reconciliation with whom, reconciliation in aid of what?” he said.
Deals that created safe spaces and freedom of operation for terrorist groups, such as that struck by Musharraf in Waziristan last year, would not work, Miliband suggested.
Deals that involved militants renouncing violence, as Sufi Muhammad reportedly has done, might be more attractive.
Not unusually, Britain is saying quietly and in a roundabout way what the US would prefer to state far more forcefully.
In developing its new softly-softly counter-terrorism policy, Islamabad is simultaneously de-emphasizing military “solutions” and calling on US forces to show much more restraint, particularly in their use of Predator drone attacks in western Pakistan. It wants what it calls a “strategic pause.”
It is supported by influential figures in Congress and the US state department who fear that, with Musharraf sidelined, renewed invasive operations could fatally undermine Pakistan’s fragile democracy. But ranged against them are Pentagon, CIA and White House officials who say the growing threat emanating from Pakistani territory, especially from al-Qaeda, is so imminently serious that immediate, forceful action is required.
Michael Hayden, the CIA director, made his view ominously plain last month. The security situation along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he said, “presents clear and present danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan and to the West in general and to the US in particular.”
That is the verbal equivalent of pressing the button marked “Detonate.”
Media reports from Washington this week say US commanders in Afghanistan, anticipating a Taliban spring offensive, are pushing for greater freedom to wage war inside Pakistan. Unidentified US intelligence officials told the New York Times that Pakistani networks had taken on an increasingly important role as allies of al-Qaeda in plotting attacks in Afghanistan and helping foreign operatives plan attacks on targets in western countries such as Britain.
The US military’s plans reportedly include limited cross-border artillery bombardments, aerial missile attacks, and/or ground incursions by CIA paramilitary squads or US army special operations forces. Only fears about the resulting anti-US and anti-Western backlash in Pakistan — and its impact on its fragile coalition government — appear to be staying Washington’s hand.
They may not hold off much longer, as the Afghan war escalates, al-Qaeda regenerates and a legacy-minded US president retreats toward the exit, still trophy-hunting for bin Laden and with all guns blazing. For the grudge-settlers and political point-scorers of Islamabad, the hard stuff is about to start.
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS