Source:
AP/YahooTo understand the scale of the challenge facing him as President Obama's envoy to promote U.S. interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke might consider the story of Amjad Islam. Islam, a schoolteacher in Matta, Pakistan, refused to comply when local Taliban leaders demanded that he hike up his trousers to expose his ankles in the manner of the Prophet Muhammad. The teacher knew Muslim teachings and had earned jihadist stripes fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Their edict was wrong, Islam told the Taliban enforcers; no such thing had been demanded even by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the '90s. The scuffle that resulted left Islam's body hanging in the town square. To drive home their warning to the locals, the militants also shot the teacher's father.
In introducing Holbrooke's mission to promote counterterrorism cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama on Thursday warned that "there is no answer in Afghanistan that does not confront the al-Qaeda and Taliban bases along the border
." But Amjad Islam was not killed in some frontier village abutting Afghanistan; his body hung 80 miles (129 km) from Pakistan's capital in the Swat Valley, which until 2007 had been a popular tourist destination dubbed the "Switzerland of Asia." Today about 75% of the valley is under the control of a particularly virulent branch of the Pakistani Taliban, which has destroyed schools and terrorized the population. If the authorities in Pakistan have been unable to tackle a homegrown insurgency just hours from its seat of power, prospects for their cracking down on Taliban and al-Qaeda forces along the border are grim. (See pictures of Pakistan's volatile North-West Frontier Province.)
Whereas Pakistan was once seen as the key to fixing Afghanistan, these days it's starting to look like an even more serious security crisis in itself. According to a report released by the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, a terrorism monitoring organization, last year 8,000 lives in Pakistan were lost to suicide attacks, terrorist bombings, Predator drone attacks and military operations against militants - some 600 less than the lives lost in Afghanistan, a country at war. And the government in Islamabad appears unable to respond effectively.
Pakistan's government, in fact, is in a precarious position, with the military having set clear limits on how far it will subject itself to civilian authority and a restive public buffeted by militancy and economic woes. A Gallup International poll conducted in Pakistan last fall showed President Asif Ali Zardari enjoying only a 19% approval rating, two percentage points higher than that of his predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, just before the general stepped down. And that was the situation before the government was forced to apply for a $7.6 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to avoid defaulting on its debt - a loan that stipulates an end to subsidies and an increase in taxes, which could further diminish the government's popularity. For now, the IMF loan has helped stabilize the economy, but the Pakistani rupee has been devalued by almost 20 points in the past year.
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090126/wl_time/08599187390200
It is time to balkanize Pakistan and get rid of this "international migraine" as Madeline Albright put it.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
