Afghanistan: A response to Musharraf — I

The writer (Ejaz Haider)was a Ford Scholar at the Programme in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security at UIUC (1997) and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Foreign Policy Studies Programme


Former General-President Pervez Musharraf’s article “What should be done in Afghanistan” (December 14) in this newspaper presents a selective narrative. He gives a historical background to position his thoughts on what can be done now and opens the story in 1979, “with the invasion of the country by the Soviet Union”. But the story goes further back in time and has, as its central themes, the non-acceptance by Afghanistan of the Durand Line, claiming the irredenta west of Attock, and its closeness to India.

It is important to note this because Pakistan’s response to developments after former Afghan president Daud Khan’s coup and later, after the Saur Revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion, was informed by these concerns.

Daud wrested power from King Zahir Shah in July 1973, declared Afghanistan a republic and embarked on a reforms programme. He tried to put down religious elements, brought Afghanistan closer to the Soviet Union, started a massive military modernisation programme and began actively supporting Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan.

Back in 1961, when Daud was prime minister, he had tried to pursue an aggressive policy of supporting Greater Pakhtunistan. The crisis had led Pakistan to close the border with Afghanistan. In 1962, Daud sent a military probe into the Bajaur Agency of Pakistan which was routed. The crisis ended in March 1963, when Daud was asked by Zahir Shah to step down.

Much before the Soviets crossed the Amu Darya, leaders of the jihad had arrived in Peshawar to avoid capture after Daud’s takeover. Those dissidents, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmed Shah Masoud, Abdul Rab Rasool Sayyaf et al, were put on the Frontier Corp’s (FC) aquittance roll by then inspector-general of the FC Brig Naseerullah Babar. Babar also presented a paper to Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government on how to use anti-Daud sentiment to Pakistan’s advantage. It was nothing more than some money and Lee Enfield rifles but gave a foretaste of what was to come.

Fast forward: In an historical irony, Daud fell when he came round to having better relations with Pakistan, Iran and the US, trying to get out of the Soviet influence. The Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had entrenched itself and the fillip came with the killing of its Parchami ideologue, Mir Akbar Khyber. His funeral got the PDPA to take to the streets and it blamed Daud for the killing and refused to believe the official version that Khyber was killed by Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami. Daud moved in against the PDPA but by then it was too late. On April 28, 1978, a day after the PDPA-led coup had begun, he was killed along with his family members.

The PDPA regime also faced the rising tide of popular unrest which the Soviets thought was being exploited by the US. In walked the Soviets. That’s the point at which Musharraf’s narrative begins. But the reasons for what Pakistan did, and why it did it, went further back and were related both to Afghanistan and India — the perceived threats and responses and, today, the consequences of that policy.

The US was witnessing a debate between US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; Vance didn’t think the Soviets were in Afghanistan for any reason bigger than stabilising the PDPA government; Brzezinski argued it was part of a thrust towards the Gulf waters and the Arabian Sea. The latter won and the US mounted the massive effort that ended later with President Ronald Reagan’s rollback policy.

Islamabad found the situation conducive to multiple strategic objectives: exploiting Afghan insurgency to stave off the Pakhtunistan problem; getting military aid to strengthen itself against India; cash inflows to sustain the economy; moving fast-track on its nuclear programme while America looked the other way; getting Kabul at some point to accept the Durand Line; and, if and when the Soviets withdrew, to have a friendly government in Kabul.

Until the Soviets were in Afghanistan, the US-Pakistan interests converged. When they left, some interests diverged. The first break came in 1989, when President George Bush indicated to Islamabad that he would not be able to certify next year that Pakistan was clean on the nuclear front. In 1990, the Pressler Amendment kicked in. Pakistan had specifically asked for Pressler to circumvent the more circuitous Glenn-Symington Amendment. But when Pressler was applied, Islamabad said it had been short-changed.

This is the thrust of Musharraf’s piece: the US left us high and dry. The fact is, the rules of the game related to realpolitik. Pakistan knew it and played the same game. And in Afghanistan, it got more and more involved for its own perceived strategic reasons. The worst part of the strategy, dominated by the army-ISI combine, was the attempt to play kingmaker in that country.

Another dimension was added to the Afghan policy when Indian-held Kashmir suddenly exploded in December 1989. That connection is too well-known to bear repeating. The point is that it is disingenuous to say that Pakistan was left holding the baby.

Internal developments were no less troubling with General Ziaul Haq’s Islamisation drive. Over time, the Islamist proxies that Islamabad was relying on began finding a corresponding streak within Pakistani society. The policy that wanted to reject Afghanistan’s irredentism by getting Kabul to accept the Durand Line ended up creating an Islamist bloc on both sides with deep linkages and rejection of the idea of national boundaries.

The penetration became complete with the Taliban policy, pursued from 1994 onwards, to open up the southern route to Turkmenistan. Again, Pakistan signalled to other players that it was the dominant actor. Musharraf argues that the world should have recognised the Taliban regime because that would have given the world leverage over the Taliban and “we could have saved the Bamiyan Buddha statues and even untangled the Osama bin Laden dispute”.

My question is: we had recognised the Taliban, were supporting them to the hilt and it was in our interest to get them to fall in line; why did we fail to either save the Buddha statues or “untangle the Bin Laden dispute”? Not just that, we couldn’t even get the Taliban to accept the Durand Line! And what Mullah Omar did to Prince Turki al Feisal is already a recorded incident.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 31st, 2010.

Link to source: http://tribune.com.pk/story/97035/afghanistan-a-response-to-musharraf--i/

Behsud protest in Toronto 2 .MOD

Construction of road from Qara Bagh to Jaghori under way

Written by By U.S. Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Julie Brummund Ghazni Provincial Reconstruction Team Tuesday, 21 December 2010 16:22


GHAZNI PROVINCE, Afghanistan - The Ghazni Provincial Reconstruction Team traveled to Qara Bagh District Dec. 17 to inspect the status of the ongoing road project between Qara Bagh city and Sanga Masha in Jaghuri District.

The road project, contracted with RWA Construction Company, covers 28 kilometers and connects the capitals of these two districts. This road project is a major priority for the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the PRT, according to U.S. Navy Cmdr John Doolittle of St. Petersburg, Fla., PRT commander.

“We are working closely with GIRoA to ensure this road project is completed before the end of the next construction season,” he added.

The RWA Construction Company has committed to completing the road by June 2011.

The road will provide access from the Jaghori capital to Highway 1, part of GIRoA’s objective to connect each district center with the highway that rings the country.

Link to Source: http://cjtf101.com/en/press-releases-mainmenu-326/3861-construction-of-road-from-qara-bagh-to-jaghori-under-way-.html

Young Hazara Scholar answers questions

Steps afoot for promotion of scouting

Updated at 1830 PST Wednesday, December 29, 2010

 

 

QUETTA: Balochistan Minister for Quality Education Jan Ali Changezi has said steps were being taken to promote scouting in the province.

According to a statement issued on Wednesday, he lauded role of Balochistan Scouts in helping flood-hit people in the province.

He said schools were nursery of scouting and sports.

He also appreciated Balochistan Scouts for their role in maintenance of peace during Muharram-ul-Haram.

He said no region could get goals of progress and prosperity without equipping its new generation with standard education.

He urged students to pay their fully attention to education and learning.

Link to source: http://www.thenews.com.pk/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=8281

Afghan student finds niche, purpose at Berea

 

By Linda B. Blackford at 12:00am on Dec 29, 2010 — lblackford@herald-leader.com
 Modified at 1:39am on Dec 29, 2010

Fellow student government representative Elizabeth Vega calls Shuja "an exceptional person. It's not just his intellect; there's a quiet strength he displays in his interactions with people."Buy Photo

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BEREA — When Ahmad Shuja left Afghanistan at the age of 6, the country was disintegrating from the end of a civil conflict and the rise of the Taliban.
Seventeen years later, Afghanistan is still in chaos, but Shuja, 23, is Berea College's student body president, one semester away from graduation. His life has changed dramatically, but he still doesn't think he can go home.
"I don't know what the answer is," Shuja said recently. "It's so complicated now."
Particularly for him.
Shuja is a Hazara, a Shiite minority group in largely Sunni Afghanistan. Because of so few opportunities in their native country, where they lived in Kabul and other areas, Shuja's family settled with many other Hazaras in the city of Quetta, in western Pakistan. Shuja hasn't seen his parents and three siblings in four years, but neither his native country nor his adopted Pakistan look particularly stable or inviting for a recent college graduate.

And Shuja — whose determination to get an education brought him from Quetta to Berea College — has big plans that include graduate school, possibly in international diplomacy, at Harvard, Tufts or Princeton.

Then he might look toward his native land.

"It depends on what happens in Afghanistan," he said in his flawless English, which he speaks in a completely American accent. "If things improve there somewhat, I could see myself trying to prop that hopeless country up."

'The mother chicken'

It's been a long journey from war-torn Afghanistan to the sunny office of Berea's student government.

Shuja attended schools in Quetta run by non-governmental organizations with other Hazara children. His father owned a truck, which he drove for hire, moving people and things around Pakistan. That gave the family enough money to send Ahmad to special English and computer schools in the afternoon.

As he grew older, he started looking into scholarship opportunities for college.

"I wanted to study somewhere a degree meant something, as universities in Afghanistan had no future prospects," Shuja said.

He looked at Great Britain and Australia but, by then, Afghanistan was again a war zone, and Shuja spent time translating for several American journalists, which turned his sights toward the United States.

Marcus Stern, an investigative reporter for Pro Publica, was one of those journalists. He met Shuja in Quetta shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, when his translator was unable to understand the dialect of several Hazara women Stern was trying to interview. Shuja was walking by, stepped up and started talking.

"He was this kid in a clean white shirt on a bike, and he spoke perfect English with an American accent," Stern recalled. "I was amazed because he was so good at translating. But it was sad because he was saying he'd be finishing school and would not have any options for education beyond that."

In one of his Internet searches, Shuja found the name of Berea College, one of the last colleges in the United States to offer a tuition-free education to low-income students. Berea also has a significant community of international students.

Stern gave him the money for the plane ride to New York City. Shuja said his first experience in the United States was being held in immigration for four hours while officials checked out his Afghan identification.

"I was really afraid they were going to send me back," he said. "But they let me go. I came out of the airport, and there was New York, and there was me."

From New York, Shuja traveled to see Stern at his home in Georgia. It was in Georgia, Shuja said, he got to see the real America.

On the one hand, he couldn't believe the "organizational efficiency of people doing their jobs without taking bribes. I was not used to that."

On the other, he went to a Wal-Mart and couldn't believe the sight of people buying so much stuff.

But in Berea, he became a political science major, entering student government in his freshman year and serving as an officer until he was elected president.

His friend and co-officer, Elizabeth Vega, calls Shuja serene and introspective and says he will often study a situation before making a decision.

"He's interested in why people do the things they do from a cultural standpoint," she said. "He's an exceptional person. It's not just his intellect; there's a quiet strength he displays in his interactions with people. He's very, very diplomatic."

He has worked on such issues as making Berea more sustainable, getting more students involved in student government, strengthening the student resident program, and that perennial favorite, improving the food service.

Vega says that while Shuja is passionate about issues, "he never flies off the handle." And while she thinks he misses his family deeply, "he kind of recognizes that being here could also help his family and his community. He navigates that because he sees the greater good."

(Vega says many people remark on Shuja's extraordinary American English and says she's only ever heard him make one mistake: He was introducing her at a faculty meeting, talking about her maternal nature. "He was trying to say, 'she's our mother hen,' but he said 'she's our mother chicken,' " Vega recalled. "It was so funny, now people call me The Mother Chicken.")

Shuja also speaks Urdu and Farsi, along with some Pashto and Arabic.

'A sense of purpose'

Shuja spent a summer interning at Fox News in New York and had another summer internship at the Afghan Embassy in Washington, D.C.

"He's gotten the most of those experiences," said his adviser, John Heyrman, a political science professor. "He came already with a sense of purpose you usually don't see in freshmen, and he's made the most of his education."

He sees what could have been when he hears about his family members still back in Afghanistan. One cousin suffers terribly from diabetes, which in most countries is a treatable disease. Another cousin tried to work illegally in Iran and is now trying to make his way to Australia for work, where he will probably end up in detention.

"Refugee life was, of course, a blessing," Shuja said.

He doesn't have the answers for Afghanistan except to say: "Don't withdraw and allow elements against civilization and humanity to come back into power."

But someday, whether as journalist, diplomat or maybe even politician, he hopes to be part of the solution.

So do his fans.

"He's so perfectly suited between these two worlds (the U.S. and Afghanistan), to serve at this crossroads during this difficult time," Stern said. "When we begin withdrawing our troops, it would be really good to see him playing some role there."

As his friend Vega says: "I'm looking forward to seeing what he does in the future because he's a real leader."

Link to Source: http://www.kentucky.com/2010/12/29/1581617/afghan-student-finds-niche-purpose.html#more

One man's struggle to find a safe place to live

 

Steven Glass

December 29, 2010

It is obvious, when I first meet Reza*, that his life has been difficult. You can see it in his eyes, in his furrowed brow, in the lines deeply etched in his face. He is not yet 40, but he appears perhaps two decades older. Still, he holds himself erect and smiles as he shakes my hand when I meet him in the interview rooms at the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre in Western Australia's far north.
The rooms are small and bare, but they are airconditioned, so they provide welcome relief from the oppressive 42-degree heat outside, where the sun is unrelenting.
Both Reza's smile and the sense of respite are short-lived, as we get down to the business of preparing his application for an Australian protection visa. Reza is a Hazara, a member of a small and distinct ethnic and religious minority in Afghanistan, who many in that country accuse of being "foreigners" and "infidels". They have been persecuted for generations. Reza tells me about his family's farm, a modest patch of ground. He tells me of the nomadic Pashtun people, the Kuchi, who enter the village every few years and graze their cattle on his farm, leaving the family penniless. Sometimes they burn down houses in the village. I hear about the threats and extortion inflicted by the Taliban. His eyes mist up as he tells me of the courage of his brother who, a few years ago, refused to pay bribes to the Taliban. His brother was not seen for the next three weeks; his corpse simply appeared one day near the local bazaar.

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Tears flow as Reza recounts the death of his father after a Taliban rocket attack on his family home.
There is nothing left for him in Afghanistan. His home is destroyed, half his family murdered, and the local Taliban leadership continues to seek revenge against his family for his brother's defiance. Reza flees his village, taking his wife and children with him. But there is nowhere to go.
The family smuggle themselves across the border into western Pakistan, where he joins hundreds of thousands of fellow Hazaras living illegally in Quetta. There, they are at the mercy of the Pakistan Federal Immigration Agency, which sends many back to Afghanistan.
And in the past couple of years they have come under increasing attack from the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Balochistan Liberation Army, Sepa-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and others - an array of Islamic militants who have all sorts of religious and political agendas, but who share a passionate hatred of Hazaras and a belief that it is God's will they be expelled from Pakistan or exterminated. Countless hundreds of Hazaras have been massacred in recent months in suicide attacks carried out by these groups in Hazara-dominated markets and places of worship.
Reza, needing to escape once again, can find nowhere to go. There is no queue in Quetta. There are no refugee camps, there is no UNHCR, there is virtually no effective government. There is just poverty and violence. Desperate to save his family, and having run out of options, Reza sells his remaining possessions and submits to a people smuggler.
He tells his family to keep their heads down, to leave the house as little as possible until he can arrange for them to join him in Australia. But he almost doesn't make it here. The fishing boat the people-smuggler has arranged in Indonesia breaks down. It drifts for a week, and the 30 asylum seekers on board have no food. It then develops a leak. Just as Reza and his fellow passengers give up hope of survival, the boat is spotted by the Australian navy and taken to Christmas Island.
Reza never raises his voice as he recounts all of this to me in the interview room at Curtin. "Thank you," he says, "for listening to my story." No one has listened to him before.
I don't know if Reza, or the other Hazaras I recently assisted with visa applications in Curtin, will be permitted to stay. But I do know they are not exploiting our refugee policy. All their lives, they have been victims of exploitation. Nor are they unfairly taking places from other needy people. There is no queue in Quetta.
Steven Glass is a partner of Gilbert + Tobin Lawyers. *Reza is a pseudonym

Source Link: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/one-mans-struggle-to-find-a-safe-place-to-live-20101228-1998o.html