You have to be a Pakistani to feel this

 

Shahid Hashmi

September 06, 2008

There was despair everywhere.

“We seem to be fighting the war against terror alone, and paying the price,” said a cricket official. Captain Shoaib Malik agreed. “We are facing a cricket poverty.” Their feelings summed up the mood in Pakistan after the Champions Trophy was postponed over fears of safety and security.

You have to be a Pakistani to feel this loss. It has left Pakistan cricket and millions of fans deprived of an event when it was needed badly. Had it taken place it would have paved the way for more international cricket in Pakistan. As of now, Pakistan has become a ‘no go’ zone for non-Asian teams for another year, maybe more.

Cricket’s superpower India and the game’s governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC) fought valiantly to keep the game’s second most prestigious competition after the World Cup in Pakistan till the last moment. The ICC even risked an ‘Asia and non-Asia’ divide in its pursuit to keep the event in Pakistan.
Sadly, the ICC president David Morgan acted more like an England and Wales Cricket Board chairman than a top man of the international governing body, for he too was worried about the safety of players in a country which is wrongly labelled ‘troubled’. Once South Africa shocked the cricketing fraternity by pulling out, the writing was very much on the wall. The move reeked of double standards, for the Proteas had so successfully toured Pakistan just 10 months ago.

But the low point came from Down Under. Australian cricketers and their overzealous media had made up their minds much before. Yet they, knowing fully well of their deserved reputation for pulling out of tours to Pakistan, did not want to be the first to do so this time. And instead, that distinction went to South Africa. It is not clear whether in seriousness or jest, but an Australian newspaper claimed that the Tamil Tigers had assured them they would not target the event if it was relocated to Sri Lanka, the alternate venue.
Pakistan’s point, and a valid one at that, was they had hosted the six-nation Asia Cup as recently as in June-July. That went off peacefully and  the foreign security hawks found it difficult to get the players’ opinion on security arrangements because they were mostly out of their hotels!

For the record, Indian players are always more at risk in Pakistan. There were threats issued against them but they have come to Pakistan thrice in the last four years. Aren’t they human beings, too? It was the duty of international cricketers — it wasn’t as if they are risking their lives by playing in Iraq — to support Pakistan and play for a cause, under tried and tested security arrangements. It was silly of them to express doubts over the security plans Pakistan had promised.

Imran Khan summed it up well. “It is a great tragedy,” said Imran, a politician and despite being a critic of the current government, did not back the postponement. “Not having a mega event will not only hurt Pakistan financially, but also interest-wise and development-wise. Pakistan badly needed cricket.”  Wasim Akram also felt for the fans. “For so long,  the non-Asian nations are depriving us of cricket. Australians have double standards. Had there been big appearance money like in the IPL, they would surely have come. Everyone saw that they did not raise a voice when bombs went off in Jaipur. Like every Pakistani, I am disgusted.”
Cricket is the only entertainment in Pakistan. It also unites an otherwise wayward nation. Sadly, that chance at forging a peace, however temporary, was taken away. Even the most optimistic of fans doubt that it will happen next year because it is impossible to win the war against terror so soon. Also, conceptions are unlikely to change overnight.

The writer is an eminent Pakistani  journalist, based in Karachi.

Friend to foe: Pak forces falter under jihadi fire

Islamabad may be the national capital of Pakistan, but the country’s real centre of power - the General Headquarters (GHQ) - is just half an hour’s drive away, in the garrison town of Rawalpindi. This is a completely khaki town, with neatly polished staff cars zipping up and down its wide roads, heavily armed guards standing like statues at the gates of British-era military buildings and smartly dressed officers and men going about their work in a hurried and nervous manner.

With its heavy razor-wire fences and tall and muscular armymen on patrol, it should be the safest town in the "most dangerous place in the world".

But it’s not. As the war with the Taliban and al-Qaida on the country’s north-west fringes moves to the heart of the nation, it’s the immaculate streets of Pindi that have been awash with blood and enveloped by fear, and the GHQ - obsessed with the ‘real enemy’ on the eastern front for the past 60 years - looks shaken and confused by the ferocity of attacks from the enemy who lurks within.

Last week, as Lt Gen Mushtaq Baig, chief of army medical services, was blown to bits by a teenaged suicide bomber in the heart of the Rawalpindi cantonment, Pakistan’s worst fears were confirmed once again: the militants were determined to attack the core of the Pakistani army.

And the Army is not ready for this deadly game with the people it has patronised, nurtured and guided in the past. Though it has been involved in a high-voltage battle of nerves with militants in the NWFP, it has gained little ground against them.

The militants are elusive and deeply motivated, and there have even been incidents of some army units willingly surrendering to the heavily armed militia rather than fight them.

The reason for this debacle is quite simple. Trained to fight conventional war with the Indian army in the mountains of Kashmir, the plains of Punjab and the desert of Rajasthan, the Pakistani army struggles and fumbles as it takes on battle-hardened guerrillas in the treacherous terrain of the Pashtun belt.

There’s another reason: Since 1947, generations of Pakistani army have been trained, motivated and indoctrinated to fight India. Just like in jingoistic Bollywood flicks, the word enemy always had only one meaning in the barracks of the Pakistani army. Explaining the Pakistani establishment’s perception of India in a recent interview, Ayesha Siddiqa, author of Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy , said: "India is an enemy, it is about to eat us up. We have to challenge it."

It’s probably this mindset that explains the ‘misuse’ of more than $5 billion given by the US to the Pakistani military to fight the Al-Qaida and Taliban in its restive border areas with Afghanistan. In a report published last year, US military officials said they believed that much of the American money had been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India.

The American accusation led to a war of words between Islamabad and Washington, with the Pakistanis accusing the Americans of ingratitude and the Americans in turn charging them with not doing enough to counter the Al-Qaida "which was expanding its influence from the remote border regions into the more populated parts of Pakistan".

"The Pakistanis are damn good fighters," says a retired Indian Army officer who saw action on the western front in 1971. "But unlike us, counter-insurgency is not their strength. It’s a different ballgame altogether. They have to shift their focus from India if they want to defeat the militants in the mountains."

This is precisely what the Americans have been telling Islamabad. In recent weeks as the country voted in the general elections and President Pervez Musharraf stood defeated and isolated, some top US officials - CIA director Michael Hayden, deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen - flew down to Islamabad, offering to train Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in anti-guerrilla operations and trying to persuade army chief Gen

Ashfaq Kayani to switch from training in conventional warfare to counter-insurgency operations. The general reportedly agreed with the Americans’ viewpoint.

But even if Gen Kayani manages to shift the focus of his army’s training, it’s not going to be easy to win this battle, for an entirely different reason. Because of the heavy dose of religion during training and the army’s symbiotic relationship with religious extremists in the past, the soldier on the front is not convinced he is fighting the right battle. Trained to fight the ‘big enemy’, the soldiers are getting a bit confused as they take on the people who once fought alongside them.

"Even before the Taliban, we engaged with non-state actors and militants," says Siddiqa. "Who fought the war in 1947-48? We got those tribal warriors from Waziristan primarily to fight. In 1965 again, we used jihadis." In addition, the army also used religious extremists to defeat its political opponents. Now they are in a Catch-22 situation. Though Pakistan joined the US war on terror after the threat of being "bombed back to the Stone Age", its army is not ready - militarily and mentally - to fight the enemy’s enemy which has turned its guns on its former patron.

shobhan.saxena@timesgroup.com

Army to raise 2 mountain units to counter Pak, China

High time that India responded to the dangers being posed by China on its Himalayan Borders. An army unit in itself will not be sufficient unless it is backed with the right infrastructure and the political will to tell China to mind their business. Lately, India's responses to Chinese incursions in North-Western and North-Eastern fronts have been silence to a timid cry at Beijing (which the Chinese deftly chose to ignore). Along with this plan hopefully India has other plans in store.....Vj


Army to raise 2 mountain units to counter Pak, China

NEW DELHI: The Army has launched preparations to raise two new mountain divisions, with around 15,000 soldiers each, which will be tailor-made for swift offensive operations in the mountains of north and North-East India.

The groundwork on the 'organizational structure' and 'equipment profile' of the two new proposed mountain divisions is already under way after the cabinet committee on security recently approved this plan, said sources.

The two new mountain divisions, to be raised at a cost of around Rs 650-700 crore each, will have 'integral tactical air mobility assets' in the shape of medium to heavy-lift helicopters.

They are also likely to be equipped with the new ultralight howitzers which the Army plans to induct in the near future. As first reported by TOI , the Army is hunting for 140 ultralight howitzers at a cost of around Rs 2,900 crore in the overall Rs 12,000-crore artillery modernization plan.

The approval for the new mountain divisions comes at a time when the Indian security establishment is warily watching the massive upgrade of Chinese military infrastructure along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) in all the three sectors — western (Ladakh), middle (Uttarakhand, Himachal) and eastern (Sikkim, Arunachal).

China has established a robust network of road, rail and air links between its mainland and Tibet over the last few years, which makes it possible for it to rush a couple of army divisions near the border with India within a matter of days. The need to have additional specialised offensive mountain formations has been felt even on the front with Pakistan despite the fact that the 14 Corps, with around 50,000 troops, now guards the Ladakh region after the 1999 Kargil conflict.

"There was a move to establish an offensive corps in the mountains after Kargil. But the 14 Corps has limited offensive capabilities, roughly equivalent to that of any other corps in the mountains," said an officer.

The 1.13-million strong Army does have 10 mountain formations in a total of around 35 divisions. But in terms of being organized and equipped for "dispersed operations" in mountains, with adequate "fire-support elements", only six of them (Silchar, Dibrugrah, Bombdila, Rangia, Gangtok and Kalimpong) can be said to be true mountain formations. "The mountain divisions in J&K are more like standard infantry divisions," said another officer.

While the two new mountain divisions will be fully in place only by the middle of the next decade, the government has now finally kickstarted infrastructure development plans along the Indo-Chinese border. These plans include a 608-km road network project along LAC, which will have 27 road links along J&K, Himachal, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal, as well as the overall 7,603-km Special Accelerated Road Development Programme for the entire North-East.

rajat.pandit@timesgroup.com

Compensation and Performance measures: Pak used anti-terror aid against India

What happens when you do not compensation is not backed by performance measures


WASHINGTON: More than five billion dollars in US aid to Pakistan has often never reached the military units it was intended for to fight Al-Qaida and the Taliban, and was instead diverted to other programmes, the New York Times reported on Monday.

Much of the money meant to reimburse frontline Pakistani units was channelled to weapons systems aimed at India and to pay inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs, unnamed US government and military officials told the daily.

Pakistanis critical of President Pervez Musharraf said he used the reimbursements to prop up his government, and one European diplomat said the United States should have been more careful with its money.

"I wonder if the Americans have been taken for a ride," said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Money intended to repay Pakistan for maintaining 100,000 troops in the restive tribal areas apparently does not reach the troops who need it, officials said.

"It is not making its way, for certain, we know, to the broader part of the armed forces which is carrying out the brunt of the operations on the border" with Afghanistan, a senior US military official told the Times.

Despite the vast funds flowing to Pakistan, a US official visiting the border recounted finding members of the country's frontier corps "standing there in the snow in sandals."

Several soldiers were wearing World War I-era pith helmets and had battered Kalashnikov rifles with only 10 rounds of ammunition each, the official said.

The two countries have never forged clear strategic goals as to how the US military aid should be spent or how Pakistan could show it was meeting Washington's expectations, according to US and Pakistani officials.

US aid to Pakistan has come under scrutiny recently in the United States given the strength of Al-Qaida and Taliban cells in Pakistan's north-western tribal areas as well as the failure to secure the capture of Osama bin Laden.

Musharraf has also been forced by US pressure to ease back on repressive measures, lift emergency rule, shed his military uniform and move the country toward greater democracy.

The United States provides the five billion in aid to reimburse Pakistan for carrying out military operations against terrorist threats. A separate US program delivers 300 million every year to pay for equipment and training for the Pakistan military.

The US Congress on Thursday slapped restrictions on the 300 million in traditional military aid, 50 million of which will be withheld until Pakistan shows it is restoring democratic rights.

US funds are vital for Pakistan's military, with American aid accounting for about a quarter of the military's entire budget, the paper said.

Pakistani officials interviewed by the New York Times denied their government had overcharged the United States for the "war-on-terror" military aid it gets.

But US officials cited helicopter maintenance as an example of the funding programme's failure.

While Pakistan received 55 million dollars for helicopter maintenance for an eight-month period in 2007, the officials said they found out that only 25 million had been received by the Pakistani army for helicopter maintenance for the whole of 2007.

Allegations that generous military aid to Pakistan has been squandered represent another setback for President George Bush's administration, which has viewed Pakistan as an important ally in the "war on terror."