Not sure if you’ve been following the news at my site www.gsrnews.com but there’s been some interesting news from the sub-continent/mid-east this week. The elected president of Pakistan made remarks that may reveal a change in his country’s nuclear doctrine, at the same time as a new map of his country has been doing the rounds and the ISI’s political wing has been disbanded. An NIE leak in Washington has confirmed reasons behind our limited successes in Afghanistan. MI6 has issued a global warning in regards to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan’s freedom to go back to what he does best: profiting from proliferation. NMD, as introduced in FOX HUNT, gets a mention too. Here’s some selected reading from part of my ongoing research for upcoming Lachlan Fox novels:
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Bush’s Legacy in India
By William R. Hawkins
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/24/2008
President George W. Bush will leave several foreign policy legacies. The one that has gotten the most attention is the change of regimes in Iraq, which after a rough patch at the end of his first term, has gotten back on track due to the troop surge directed by Gen. David Petraeus. But in the long run, President Bush may be remembered even more for the improvement of U.S.-Indian relations. If South Asia is defined as running from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Straits, then closer ties between Washington and New Delhi are not unrelated to American objectives in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, while also furthering larger interests across Asia.
When President Bush entered office, relations with India were at low ebb. In 1998, India and Pakistan conducted rival nuclear tests, bringing new U.S. sanctions against both countries. President Bill Clinton considered Pakistan, with its support for Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Kashmir, to be more dangerous than India, but felt compelled to be even-handed in the cause of non-proliferation. The same requirement to appear even-handed came into play again after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when the sanctions were lifted on both countries. There was a need to pull the Pakistani regime into the anti-terrorist campaign in Afghanistan. Pakistan had played a major role in creating the Taliban, who were giving sanctuary to al-Qaeda. The U.S. approach to Islamabad used carrots and sticks. In the latter category were improved relations with India, including a role for India in Afghan reconstruction and an occasional mention of a possible request for Indian troops.
The Bush administration was already warming to India for other strategic reasons prior to 9/11. In May 2001, the Indian government had issued a carefully worded endorsement of U.S. plans for a national missile defense (NMD) system after Washington’s termination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.
Though the NMD is called a limited system against rogue threats like that presented by North Korea, China has feared it could counter its small nuclear force as well and has loudly denounced the U.S. program. If America can blunt Beijing’s nuclear ambitions, India would also benefit, as China poses the greatest security threat to New Delhi. The threat India worries about from Pakistan is derived mainly from the aid Beijing has given Islamabad’s nuclear and missile programs. The Chinese alignment with Pakistan presents India with a risk of a two front war, countering India’s greater inherent strength against Pakistan. The Taliban conquest of most of Afghanistan was supported by Beijing as well as by Islamabad. The Taliban sent parts of two U.S. cruise missiles fired in 1998 at al-Qaeda camps to China for study. Chinese firms set up the Taliban’s telecommunications system prior to the U.S. invasion. Beijing continues to ship weapons through Pakistan that end up in the hands of Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents.
From Beijing’s perspective, aiding Pakistan keeps India focused to the west, allowing the Chinese more freedom of action in Southeast Asia, where it is the main source of support for the military dictatorship in Myanmar (Burma). Beijing has built naval bases along Burma’s coastline in the Bay of Bengal, better designed to service Chinese warships than the non-existent Myanmarese fleet.
In Tibet, Beijing has built all-weather military roads linking army bases, major airfields and ballistic missile sites. China is increasing its ability to launch strikes deep into India, by both aircraft and missiles, in the wake of growing unrest by the Tibetan people against Chinese oppression.
While the United States and India have a common enemy in radical Islam, whose terrorists were waging a campaign in the Indian province of Kashmir long before 9/11, the larger common threat is from China. Beijing’s rapid economic rise is giving the Communist regime the means to project its power across a wide arc. The 2008 annual report to Congress from the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China had as its key finding, “China’s expanding and improving military capabilities are changing East Asian military balances; improvements in China’s strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region.”
From the U.S. perspective, India is the only country on the Asian mainland that has the heft to counter China. From the Indian perspective, the U.S. is a vital source for technology to speed its economic development, and to improve its military capabilities. For example, India needs to match the ability of Chinese nuclear submarines to remain submerged while launching nuclear missiles, a senior Indian Navy planner recently told Defense News. New Delhi also needs to improve its general naval capabilities. Zachariah Mathews, a retired Indian Navy commodore, has identified three littoral regions — the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal — that India needs to dominate. India will have to obtain the technology and weapons systems from foreign sources to do so. For example, the Indian frigate Tabar, which sank a pirate ship off the African coast Nov. 19, is a Russian design built in St. Petersburg. It also incorporates components from several other countries including Britain, Denmark, Germany, Ukraine, and India itself.
Russia, particularly during the Soviet period, has been India’s primary source for military equipment. But since the collapse of the USSR, India has found this relationship less appealing. Russia is not the super power it once was, its equipment is second rate, and it is no longer an ally against China. Rather, Russia under Vladimir Putin has aligned Russia with China to counter American “hegemony.” India has turned to France, Germany, Israel, and Britain for arms, and is now looking for increased access to the American defense industry. Indian naval officers now speak in the Pentagon’s language of “net centric warfare.”
In the air, Lockheed Martin’s F-16 Fighting Falcon and Boeing’s F-18 Super Hornet have already emerged as the front-runners in the competition to sell 126 fighter jets to India worth $12 billion. Russia, Sweden and France are also in the hunt for one of the world’s richest export opportunities. Money, however, is not the only reason Washington wants an American firm to win the Indian bid. An arms deal will pull the military of the two countries together and foster interoperability.
The way for closer ties was opened with the ratification of the U.S.-India Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy. The implementing legislation was signed by President Bush on Oct. 8, a week after it was passed by both houses of Congress. The Senate vote was 86-13, with both Barack Obama and Joe Biden voting with the majority (along with John McCain and Hillary Clinton). The immediate benefit is that it boosts America’s chances in competition with Russia and France when bidding on the eight nuclear reactors India plans to import by 2012. The larger gains go beyond the nuclear pact itself. The diplomacy behind the agreement will expand a relationship that was started by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 when he signed a memorandum of understanding on high-tech sales to India. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said when the nuclear deal was signed that it was, “positive for United States national security interest because it will help us cement our strategic partnership with India, which is very important for our global interests.”
President-elect Obama needs to understand the value of what President Bush has left him. During his presidential campaign, Obama raised fears in India regarding a potential U.S. tilt towards Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute. Obama’s thinking seems to be that to win greater Pakistani cooperation against militants in its border provinces with Afghanistan; the U.S. should help Islamabad advance its militant demands on India. Such a policy would only embolden jihadists and reward radical elements in Pakistan’s army and intelligence services who are the political enemies of the country’s new democratic government. Afghanistan and Kashmir are not separate issues, but a common cause for the Islamic terrorist movement. Alienating India in order to give the militants a partial victory would be a strategic disaster for the United States. Instead, Washington, in concert with NATO and India, need to make clear to Islamabad that the legitimacy of its claim to sovereignty over its border areas depends on preventing its territory from being used for attacks against its neighbors.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari understands that the threat to the survival of his democratic government is internal, not external. Pakistan now wants to normalize relations with India, a country that poses no danger to Islamabad unless provoked. There is already an ongoing and productive peace process, which has included important back-channel negotiations over Kashmir. Rather than interfere with these discussions, Obama needs to keep focused on the larger strategic importance of closer ties with New Delhi. India is an emerging great power in Asia whose alignment with the United States is vital to the maintenance of a balance of power favorable to American security interests.
William R. Hawkins is Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the U.S. Business and Industrial Council in Washington, D.C.
FROM http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2F008B71-7F50-42C1-81A9-A7A563566E45
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November 23, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR | TRANSITIONS
A Wartime Presidency, on Two Fronts
By ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN
Washington
BARACK OBAMA will take office having campaigned that he would fight the war on terrorism by focusing on winning the war in Afghanistan and eliminating Al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s sanctuary in Pakistan. He recognizes that these two countries have become the center of Al Qaeda’s activities and of the violent Islamist extremism that challenges the real values of Islam. He also promised he would find the best way to withdraw from Iraq, and to create a new balance of security in the Persian Gulf.
He has less than two months to go from broad rhetoric to concrete day-to-day action. On Jan. 20, he will take over at a pivotal point in negotiating Iraq’s status of force agreement with the United States, in the middle of a winter military campaign in Afghanistan, and during a political, security and economic crisis in Pakistan. None of these issues will wait for America to deal with its financial problems. And no one involved believes that the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s northern territories can be fully won, or even transferred to Afghan and Pakistani hands, by even the end of President Obama’s first term. For at least the next two to three years, the war will intensify, and virtually all of the additional burden will be borne by the United States.
Leaks of a new National Intelligence Estimate have shown that we are now losing the war for several reasons: a lack of Afghan competence; a half-hearted Pakistani commitment to the fight; a shortage of American, NATO and International Security Assistance Force troops; too few aid workers; and nation-building programs that were designed for peacetime and are rife with inefficiency and fraud. This is why Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan, and other military leaders have called for 20,000 to 25,000 more troops and warned that even those reinforcements may not be adequate.
Even with a potential drawdown in Iraq, the military is being stretched ever thinner. The Army already extends the deployment of troops beyond their commitments, and it and the Marine Corps may well find it impossible to meet their goals for shortening deployment cycles. As things stand, it will almost certainly take until 2011 to bring enough military advisers into Afghanistan to train its army and police forces to the level where locals can replace international troops. And with increasing terrorist attacks on non-governmental groups, many aid workers are being forced to leave the country.
The Afghan and Pakistani economies have effectively collapsed, and Afghans face food shortages this winter. Monthly spending on operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan will likely rise to as much as $5 billion, from around $2 billion today, or we will face defeat.
Even if the United States fully withdraws from Iraq in 2011, as Mr. Obama and the Iraqi government say they would like, we will remain on something very like a war footing there throughout the next presidency. While the combat burden on our forces will decline, withdrawal will be as costly as fighting. It will take large amounts of luck (and patient American prodding) for the Iraqi government to move toward real political accommodation while avoiding new explosions of ethnic and sectarian violence.
Even with progress on those fronts, we will have to withdraw while still helping to win a war, contain internal violence, limit Iranian influence and counter its nuclear program, create effective Iraqi security forces, and help Iraq improve its governance. Not a full war perhaps, but at least a quarter war in terms of continuing strains on our military and budget.
Moreover, the best case for the Iraq war means coming to grips with the legacy of the worst secretary of defense in American history, Donald Rumsfeld. In spite of recent progress under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Mr. Rumsfeld’s inability to manage any key aspect of defense modernization has left the Obama administration a legacy of unfunded and expensive new trade-offs between replacing combat-worn equipment, repairing and rehabilitating huge amounts of weapons and equipment, and supplying our forces with new, improved equipment.
At best, President Obama will have to conduct the equivalent of one-and-a-quarter wars throughout his first term. At worst? The outside chance of war with Iran as well.
Anthony H. Cordesman is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
FROM http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23cordesman.html?bl&ex=1227589200&en=17a6020edb96eb41&ei=5087%0A
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London—MI6 has issued a global priority warning to all security services that Islamic terrorists are now closer to obtaining material to create a “dirty bomb” to launch against Western targets.
Osama bin Laden has long made this a priority and reinforced it with regular messages from his mountain redoubt in the north-west province of Pakistan. He has repeatedly said every “true Muslim must make it his duty to assist in all ways possible to find the next powerful weapon to destroy our enemies”.
After the election of the new Pakistani president, the controversial Asif Ali Zardari, who has served a nine-year jail term on corruption charges he has strongly denied, MI6 fear there will be little ability to provide strong leadership against the new wave of Islamic extremism that al-Qaeda has launched across the country.
Groups such as the newly formed Pakistan Taliban have proclaimed it is focussing on creating a “dirty bomb”.
MI6 agents based in Islamabad fear the mounting instability in Pakistan will make it easier for them to do so.
While Pakistan is the only Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal, it has in the past provided its expertise to Iran.
Pakistan’s Islam bomb was developed in the 1990s by the rogue scientist, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. He sold them to pariah states like North Korea and Libya. He was placed under house arrest by Pervez Musharraf.
But since Musharraf was forced to resign, restrictions on Khan’s detention have been virtually lifted–a decision that has alarmed Western diplomats in Pakistan.
While Musharraf readily agreed for the US to place stringent security around Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, there are serious concern that President Zardari will not be able to resist the rampant pressure al-Qaeda is mounting from its terrorist infrastructure base in Waziristan province in the north-west of the country.
A senior U.S. security official in Islamabad said: “Our concern is the sudden rise in intelligence which strongly indicates that al-Qaeda has renewed plans to gain access to nuclear material that could form a primitive nuclear device, one perhaps that a suicide truck bomber could use”.
In a “dirty bomb”, conventional explosives are surrounded with radioactive material.
The MI6 priority alert says such a device, while having a limited effect as a nuclear weapon, would create widespread panic.
An indication of how the threat has increased has been the number of terrorist-related websites which contain details of how to create a “dirty bomb”. As soon as the sites are discovered, they are eradicated by MI6’s experts. But within days they reappear elsewhere.
Gordon Thomas is the author of a new edition of Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service, The Mossad, by JR Books of London and available on Amazon Books.
(C) G-2 Bulletin, Washington D.C., USA, and Gordon Thomas.
FROM http://en.epochtimes.com/n2/world/al-qaeda-develop-dirty-bomb-7569.html
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November 23, 2008
MEMO FROM ISLAMABAD
Ringed by Foes, Pakistanis Fear the U.S., Too
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.
That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.
“One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan,” said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning, who insisted on anonymity as per diplomatic custom. “Some people feel the United States is colluding in this.”
That notion may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years. But as the incoming Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored.
This is a country where years of weak governance have left ample room for conspiracy theories of every kind. But like much such thinking anywhere, what is said frequently reveals the tender spots of a nation’s psyche. Educated Pakistanis sometimes say that they are paranoid, but add that they believe they have good reason.
Pakistan, a 61-year-old country marbled by ethnic fault lines, is a collection of just four provinces, which often seem to have little in common. Virtually every one of its borders, drawn almost arbitrarily in the last gasps of the British Empire, is disputed with its neighbors, not least Pakistan’s bitter and much larger rival, India.
These facts and the insecurities that flow from them inform many of Pakistan’s disagreements with the United States, including differences over the need to rein in militancy in the form of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The new democratically elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, has visited the United States twice since assuming power three months ago. He has been generous in his praise of the Bush administration. But that stance is criticized at home as fawning and wins him little popularity among a steadfastly anti-American public.
So how will the promise by President-elect Barack Obama for a new start between the United States and Pakistan be received here? How can it be begun?
One possibility could be some effort to ease Pakistani anxieties, even as the United States demands more from Pakistan. That will probably mean a regional approach to what, it is increasingly apparent, are regional problems. There, Pakistani and American interests may coincide.
American military commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, have started to argue forcefully that the solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, where the American war effort looks increasingly uncertain, must involve a wide array of neighbors.
Mr. Obama has said much the same. Several times in his campaign, he laid out the crux of his thinking. Reducing tensions between Pakistan and India would allow Pakistan to focus on the real threat — the Qaeda and Taliban militants who are tearing at the very fabric of the country.
“If Pakistan can look towards the east with confidence, it will be less likely to believe its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban,” Mr. Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last year.
But such an approach faces sizable obstacles, the biggest being the conflict over Kashmir. The Himalayan border area has been disputed since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and remains divided between them.
Pakistan’s army and intelligence agencies have long fought a proxy war with India by sponsoring militant groups to terrorize the Indian-administered part of the territory.
After the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan reined in those militants for a time, but this year the militants have renewed their incursions. Talks between the sides made some progress in recent years but have petered out.
Pakistanis warn that the United States should not appear too eager to mediate. First, they caution, India has always regarded Kashmir as a bilateral question. India, they note, also faces a general election early next year, an inappropriate moment to push such an explosive issue.
Second, some Pakistanis are concerned about the reliability of the United States as a fair mediator. “Given the United States’ record on the Palestinian issue, where the Palestinians had to move 10 times backwards and the Israelis moved the goal posts, the same could happen here,” said Zubair Khan, a former commerce minister who has watched Kashmir closely.
It was discouraging, Mr. Khan said, that the United States ignored the importance of the huge nonviolent protests by Muslims in Kashmir against Indian rule this summer. “Anywhere else, and they would have been hailed as an Orange Revolution,” he said, referring to the wave of protests that led to a change in the Ukrainian government in 2004.
Such distrust has been exacerbated by what Pakistanis see as the Bush administration’s tilt toward India.
Exhibit A for the Pakistanis is India’s nuclear deal with the United States, which allows India to engage in nuclear trade even though it never joined the global Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Pakistan, with its recent history of spreading nuclear technology, received no comparable bargain.
The nuclear deal was devised in Washington to position India as a strategic counterbalance to China. That is how it is seen in Pakistan, too, but with no enthusiasm.
“The United States has changed the whole nuclear order by this deal, and in doing so is containing China, the only friend Pakistan has in the region,” said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani Army general.
Further, Pakistan is upset about the advances India is making in Afghanistan, with no checks from the United States, Mr. Masood said.
India has recently made big investments in Afghanistan, where Pakistan has been competing for influence. These include a road to the Iranian border that will eventually give India access to the Iranian port of Chabahar, circumventing Pakistan.
India has offered training for Afghanistan’s military, given assistance for a new Parliament building in Kabul and has re-opened consulates along the border with Pakistan.
The consulates, the Pakistanis charge, are used by India as cover to lend support to a long-running separatist movement in Baluchistan Province. (Baluchistan was even made an independent state on the theoretical map, which accompanied an article by Ralph Peters titled “Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look,” originally published in Armed Forces Journal.)
Both India and Pakistan in fact have a long and destructive history of, gently or not, putting in the knife. Exhibit A for the Indians is the bombing in July of its embassy in Afghanistan, which American and Indian officials say can be traced to groups linked to Pakistan’s spy agency.
If the Obama administration is indeed to convince Pakistanis that militancy, not the Indian Army, presents the gravest threat, it will not be easy.
The commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, got a taste of the challenge this month, when he visited Islamabad and sat down with a group of about 70 members of Pakistan’s Parliament at the residence of the United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson. Their attitude showed an almost total incomprehension of the reasons for American behavior in the region after Sept. 11, 2001.
“A couple of the questions I got were, ‘Why did you Americans come to Afghanistan when it was so peaceful, before you got there?’ ” General McKiernan recalled during an appearance at the Atlantic Council in Washington last week.
“Another one,” he said, “was, ‘We understand that you’ve invited a thousand Indian soldiers to serve in Afghanistan by Christmas.’ ”
There was no truth to the claim, he told the Pakistanis. “We have a lot of work to do,” he told his audience in Washington.
Indeed, among ordinary Pakistanis, many still regard Al Qaeda more positively than the United States, polls find. Talk shows here often include arguments that the suicide bombings in Pakistan are payback for the Pakistani Army fighting an American war.
Some commentators suggest that the United States is actually financing the Taliban. The point is to tie down the Pakistani Army, they say, leaving the way open for the Americans to grab Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
Recently, in the officer’s mess in Bajaur, the northern tribal region where the Pakistani Army is tied down fighting the militants, one officer offered his own theory: Osama bin Laden did not exist, he told a visiting journalist.
Rather, he was a creation of the Americans, who needed an excuse to invade Afghanistan and encroach on Pakistan.
FROM http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/world/asia/23pstan.html?em
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Leader: Pakistan won’t be first in nuclear strike
24 Nov 2008
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistan’s president has assured rival India he would not be the first to use atomic weapons in any future conflict and proposed the idea of a nuclear-free South Asia.
Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, unlike India’s, does not contain a clause saying the country will not use its weapons first in conflict.
It was not clear if President Asif Ali Zardari’s comments, made Saturday during a video conference question-and-answer session organized by The Hindustan Times newspaper of India, represented a formal change in policy.
Asked by a student whether Pakistan was prepared to say it would not use a nuclear weapon first, Zardari said: “Most defiantly, I am against nuclear warfare altogether,” he said.
The moderator then asked the question again, pointing out to Zardari that his earlier answer was a “headline.” Zardari again replied, “Definitely.”
Zardari proposed the idea of a nuclear-free South Asia, saying he could persuade lawmakers to support such a plan, the reports said.
“I am sure I can get my parliament to agree with that, straight on. Can you say the same?” he asked those in attendance, which including government and business leaders.
He gave no more details on the idea, which Pakistan — six times smaller than India — has proposed before.
Predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan have fought three wars since they were created in the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947.
The stakes got much higher after both tested nuclear weapons in 1998.
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Pakistan dissolving military spy agency’s political wing
Reuters
Monday, November 24, 2008
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has disbanded the political wing of the military intelligence agency, the foreign minister said Sunday.
The cooperation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, directorate is regarded as vital to the West in fighting the threat of Al Qaeda globally and defeating the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
But critics call it a “state within a state.” Pakistan’s eight-month-old civilian government has regularly accused the ISI’s political wing of involvement in the overthrow of their governments. Neighboring Afghanistan and India view the ISI with great distrust.
The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, described the disbanding of the ISI’s political wing as a “positive development.”
“ISI is a precious national institution, and it wants to focus fully on counter-terrorism activities,” the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan quoted him as saying.
The report did not say when the decision was made.
The army has ruled Pakistan for more than half its history since 1947. Consequently, issues related to the military are closely watched in the region as well as by Western allies of the nuclear-armed nation.
The latest chapter of military rule ended with the defeat of parties loyal to Pervez Musharraf in elections in February and Musharraf’s resignation as president in August.
His successor, President Asif Ali Zardari, and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani signaled their intention to exert more control over the ISI in July but backtracked from an attempt to bring it under the ambit of the Interior Ministry.
Senior officials say that the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, who himself served as ISI head, has been supportive of Pakistan’s return to civilian-led democracy while insisting that the army look after its own affairs.
Since becoming army chief in November last year, Kayani has moved to take the army out of politics, including ordering all officers out of civilian posts and barring them from meeting politicians. He appointed a new ISI chief in September and replaced several senior officers.
The political wing was established by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first popularly elected prime minister, in the 1970s. Bhutto was toppled and hanged by the military in the late 1970s.
His daughter Benazir Bhutto had also accused ISI officials of conspiring to destabilize her two governments in the 1990s.
She was assassinated last December while campaigning for election, but her husband, Zardari, led her Pakistan People’s Party to victory.
Security analysts said the decision was good for the ISI.
“The involvement of ISI in politics has been a major controversy in Pakistan. This decision will help it in earning respect in the eyes of people of Pakistan, particularly at a time when it is facing the major challenge of terrorism,” said Talat Masood, an analyst and former army general.
The ISI is known to have wielded great influence on foreign and security policies, especially toward India and Afghanistan.
It played a role in distributing arms and money, covertly supplied by the United States and Saudi Arabia, to Islamist guerrilla groups fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Critics say the ISI was also instrumental in creating the Taliban movement in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Pakistan officially stopped backing the Taliban after becoming a U.S. ally in 2001, and the ISI has helped the United States eliminate hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters since then.
But the agency, or at least agents within it, are often accused of playing a double game and treating the Afghan Taliban and some militant groups as assets rather than enemies.
Some members of Pakistan’s security apparatus regard these militants groups as tools to gain leverage in Afghanistan and the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir in the long term, according to analysts.
The United States is believed to have privately urged the new government to rein in the ISI, particularly after a suicide attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul last July.
Washington demanded that Pakistan investigate Indian and Afghan accusations that the ISI was involved in the attack, which Pakistan denied.
FROM http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/24/asia/pakistan.php
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US planning to deploy more troops near Pakistan border
KABUL, Nov 23: A brigade of 3,500-4,000 extra US troops due in Afghanistan in January would be deployed in the east amid efforts to stop infiltration of militants from Pakistan, the US military said on Sunday.
The brigade has been approved as part of requested US troop reinforcements for Afghanistan’s fight against extremists, US military spokesman Col Greg Julian told reporters in Kabul.
“The first brigade that is coming will go into the (Nato-led) RC-East (Regional Command East) and they are going to move into areas that are currently not covered,” Col Julian said.
The area includes about a dozen provinces, many of which are on the border with Pakistan.
“We recognise that there are certain lines or avenues that the insurgents come through (from Pakistan) and we are focussing our efforts on those,” he said.
International and Afghan troops along with counterparts in Pakistan this month launched “Operation Lionheart” along the border. “This operation will help to deny the enemies of Afghanistan safe havens in Pakistan,” Brig-Gen Richard Blanchette, spokesman for a Nato-led force working alongside the US-led coalition and Afghan army, told the briefing.
Cooperation between Nato troops and the Pakistani army was the best it had ever been, said Brig-Gen Blanchette.
The cooperation was the result of tripartite meetings between Isaf, the Afghan military and Pakistani forces, he said. “This is not only a cooperation in the execution. This is also a cooperation that has happened in the planning,” he remarked.—Agencies
FROM http://www.dawn.com/2008/11/24/top1.htm
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It’s been a busy few weeks for me. The third Lachlan Fox novel, BLOOD OIL, came out late August. I’ve toured for it and I’m happy with the final product and the feedback from readers is so far, so good. Other than that, I started another novel late August, and finished it mid-September. It’s outside the Fox series and it has 15 year-old protagonists, so I guess it’s a teenage-audience book, but I like to think that all ages will read it as it’s an archetypal story of identity and survival told in a way I’ve never seen or heard. I wrote it un-contracted and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it.
Highlights from what I’ve been reading…
James Frey’s BRIGHT SHINY MORNING. He’s described it as a love letter to LA, only the kind of letter you’d write to a lover you’ve been with for ten years. It’s that and more. I caught up with Frey when he was in Melbourne and he mentioned that he’s very much carrying the torch of Norman Mailer which was nice to hear because that’s exactly how I think of Frey’s writing: he works in prose but he’s essentially, like Mailer, an essayist and chronicler of the self and the times around him. His best subject has been himself, much like Mailer, a man I never met Mailer and it’s a regret because I sense that he, the artist, the observer, was the most interesting part of his fictional creation. Mailer never really had the big novel that I’m sure he’d hoped for, certainly not as big as his precursor Hemingway. Much of his best work are now period pieces, which is not a bad thing in itself and they were important and current and immediate reads at the time I’m sure (AN AMERICAN DREAM, and WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM?). In this regard he was closer to Orwell, who was an essayist better than a prose writer and his books lacked any real future importance. Frey mentioned that in a discussion he had when dear old Mailer was still alive, that the man said to him and I may paraphrase: “You’re it now. It was Hemingway and then me and now it’s you.” I think that anxiety of influence crippled whatever real originality Mailer might have developed, as it did to Hemingway with his artistic competition to Tolstoy. Hemingway’s greatness was his short stories, which rival any other master of that form, Joyce, Chekhov, Babel, and he’s certainly the best short story writer we’ve seen since Joyce’s DUBLINERS (although my readers will know I have an affinity for Proulx and Winton as modern virtuosos of the sublime). Hemingway was the master of ellipses and his longer works, particularly THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, misses this virtue of aesthetic economy. William Faulkner praised this book as Hemingway’s best but then his taste was a little off some of the time. It’s at once a Christian parable and a work of sentimentality and it’s far too much for the novel to bear. To Frey’s credit he has none of that. I’d not say Frey’s strongest point of writing is his brevity for he details his prose as a painter might paint a canvas and apply stroke after stroke to built a picture that’s as rich as it is intriguing but what he achieved as a writer of literature is develop a parataxis that is at the forefront of achievement of 21C writers. I have no doubt that one day in the not too distant future, should Frey tackle an issue that strikes a chord with a time or generation, such as Mailer did with his VIETNAM etc, then he will receive the recognition that he deserves and strives for. He will be studied at universities, they will no doubt incorrectly read his work, but he will be appreciated as a poet observer beyond the limited view we have of Mailer, because he’s capable of better writing. Frey has written about his writing process that he approaches the page and task much like a method actor, to really get into the mindset that the given scene requires. I’ve tried that with some of my works but have found it to be too self-destructive and dangerous to everything around me. I do hope, and I trust, that Frey will get to write a canonical novel beyond the immediate that will last the ages and place him in his country’s best writers, to make them, as he says, insignificant. The danger, if he does not achieve this, as I believe that Hemingway realized he had not produced a novel to beat Tolstoy (THE SUN ALSO RISES came closest, but even it was beaten by Hemingway’s own short work, seen in much of the FIRST FORTY-NINE STORIES). In a letter to his publisher Charles Scribner, Hemingway wrote: “Am a man without any ambition, except to be champion of the world, I wouldn’t fight Dr. Tolstoy in a 20 round bout because I know he would knock my ears off. … If I can live to 60 I can beat him. (MAYBE).” Hemingway’s suicide at 61 had its reasons beyond anything hereditary and more than any sickness, like we saw only a few years ago in Dr Gonzo, another genius journalist-writer. Sadly, that door in the psyche is still an option for too many talented, ambitious artists, particularly and usually young men, which I might discuss in detail another day.
If we look at 20C American literature Nathaniel West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS rates right up there. Pynchon couldn’t touch him, only Faulkner holds the higher title. Of living writers, McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN ranks, as does DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Steinbeck was crippled by the shadow of Hemingway, as I believe Mailer was crippled to produce a work of sublime aesthetic achievement by Mailer himself, a Mailer constantly sparring with both himself and Hemingway. I mention these writers because of this: Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING, West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS, Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, and BLOOD MERIDIAN, UNDERWORLD, etc, go on through time to prove to us what literature can do, and these works go on harming and teaching and killing us with every read.
I don’t think that such a canonical work is beyond his reach of Frey and it’s certainly within the scope of his ambition. He has the ambition to be heavyweight champion of the literature world, to obliterate the others - if there are any remaining with similar ambitions - into obscurity, and I love him for it. The best I can hope to muster would be to muscle up and fight these guys, as Hemingway did against Stevens - which I’ve written about here before - and I like to think I’d be able to rank pretty high in those stakes. Sure, it’s been tempting to me as it is for so many young writers to write something of such worth and greatest that it will be remembered through all time as something of the finest aesthetic beauty, and maybe one day I’ll dedicate the time to do that but maybe I’ll just keep at my thing, whatever that is. At any rate, Frey’s proved with his third novel that he has reach beyond himself, and produced something that isn’t too restricted to time and place, which is a reach greater than Mailer could ever muster as he placed himself too near events time and time again. Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is Mailer’s ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF and BRIGHT SHINY MORNING could well be THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG. Mailer was his own best fiction complete with every nuance New Journalism brought along. Frey was there and now he’s broken the mould and stretched his wings. Mailer wrote in ADVERTISEMENTS: “…I pointed to the farthest fence and said within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner ad even old moldering Hemingway might have come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.” Hemingway characterized ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, in a letter to George Plimpton, “as a sort of ragtag assembly of his rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings shot through with occasional brilliance.” It’s easy to read Frey and say that he might share much with Mailer, much more than we may ever realize. Mailer as described by Richard Poirier: “…insists on living at the divide, living on the divide, between the world of recorded reality and the world of omens, spirits, and powers, only that his presence may blur the distinction. He seals and obliterates the gap that he finds, like a sacrificial warrior or, as he would probably prefer, like a Christ who brings not peace but a sword, not forgiveness for past sins but an example of the pains necessary to secure a future.”
Over the coming years I’m excited to watch just how far the reach of James Frey can go, and I look forward to him carrying the torch another leg of this great relay, to hit the ball out of the park and show the world what literature can still achieve.
What I’ve been writing…
My newest novel, titled ALONE.
I’ve read a heap of “Young Adult” fiction because I’ve just written my first, a little break in-between writing Fox novels. I read like 50 or so, from Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl (a couple of my childhood favs) to Robert Muchamore and Matthew Reilly. The older books still hold up, even Marsden’s TOMORROW Series reads well, so does OSC’s ENDERS GAME. I flinch at a lot of Blyton, as I’ve done with other period pieces of fiction that I’ve re-read as an adult like LORD OF THE FLIES and KING SOLOMON’S MINES, and while there’s still something to like in them they never live up to the memories of the first read when I was full of youthful ignorance and ready to be carried away. Contemporary YA fiction, with the exception of perhaps Jasper Fforde (if you’d call his stuff YA) is so utterly boring. It’s action and thrills but it’s hollow and doesn’t say much about anything. Golding’s first novel in LORD OF THE FLIES is relevant today but only if you are a teenage private school boy, likely an English one at that, who identifies with those weak characters; that’s all those characters were, private English school boys, and that’s all they ever will be, products of an author who had been through that system and continued a similar one by serving in the Navy and further residing in that system in teaching. I just now re-read Huck Finn, and yes, again I flinch at the language that we now know to be very non-PC, but Huck has so much more depth than any of Golding’s characters. Huck has irony, not seen in Ralph et al, and Golding’s “creations” are no more than humourless names with embarrassingly small views and ridiculously limited minds. There’s nothing universal about LORD OF THE FLIES, it certainly is not an allegory of moral depravity, it’s nothing more than a story of a few cardboard private school boys continuing their existence in a situation that a mature writer would have explored and mined for richness beyond the literal and expected, making names on a page resonate through the ages.
Now that books are marketed to kids like never before we need some bright shiny voices and stories available that are beyond the ordinary. We need the KIM and HUCK of today. So, I’ve created Jesse, in my first YA novel, ALONE. It’s McCarthy’s THE ROAD but set during the apocalyptic event rather than years after, with four teenagers at the centre as seen through Jesse’s eyes and without the overt writerly influences that hampers McCarthy’s effort. ALONE is a product of today and written for today’s readers and like THE ROAD, LIFE OF PI, THE BOOK THEIF, THE ALCHEMIST, ENDERS GAME, THE HOBBIT, THE LITTLE PRINCE, and SIDDHARTHA, I can see it will be read by adults as well as teenagers as well as advanced kids, and I hope they all identify with the archetypal qualities in the story. We follow four teenagers for three weeks and we see how they cope and survive in a city that has been attacked, and through it Jesse struggles with his identity and ego and self as much as his friends’. It holds no punches. It’s raw and it’s real and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it. Clearly I’m biased - but I’ve admitted on many occasions to not liking my previous work when I’m working on the next project - and this has not happened with ALONE. I’m writing FOX 4 and 5 back-to-back, as the storyline and through-arcs carry through them both and I figure it’s smart to mine this creative zone that I’m in while it lasts. But when I think back about those four lonely characters in ALONE, I still love them and I love their story and it was a great month of writing. I’ve never looked back and felt that way about anything I’ve ever written. Usually I’m glad the writing ordeal is over and the world I’d created and lived in for months on end is behind me.
What I’ve been watching…
A few DVD’s.
GONG BABY GONE. Enjoyed it about as much as the book. The twists still worked, even though I expected what was coming. Ben Affleck did a great job of directing. The only thing I had issues with was the small jump cuts in the scene where they were in the house of the mother - they worked fine, but it seemed out of place as a device and the first couple jarred until I was used to it. Still, it’s a little thing, like the little things I pointed out with Tony Gilroy’s first effort in MICHAEL CLAYTON. Make no mistake, both these guys can direct better than most, it’s just my super-critical eye because I expected so much. What pleased me the most with both their efforts is that they have such a minimal, old-school approach that is not reliant on any visual gimmickry.
STREET KINGS. I like David Ayer and I expected so much from this film and it didn’t deliver. TRAINING DAY was a deceptively good script and well acted and executed. In fact, I didn’t love it that much on the first run through but after reading the script and re-watching I got so much more from it, but perhaps that’s either me not being in the mood in the first instance to take it all in, or they filmmakers didn’t do a good enough job putting the script to screen. I suspect a bit of both. HARSH TIMES remains my favourite Ayer film and it’s small-budget genius. Chris Bale and Freddy Rodriguez were perfect; Bale’s character was utterly riveting and frightening and most importantly incredibly empathetic, which cemented Bale in my mind as one of the best actors around. Anyway, STREET KINGS could have been the story that I wanted to write, and when I’d read early news about it I was disappointed that I’d never get to write a similar novel that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while, the third of a cop trilogy. But, I will write that novel one day soon, about a cop who’s hard and tough as can be because of the two novels before it (both storylines of which came to me in separate dreams with the same cop characters – go figure), because STREET KINGS and its ridiculous cast did not deliver.
