The intractible conflict between India and Pakistan has been extremely expensive for both countries. And despite the glad tidings of renewed talks, there is a long way to go. For an outstanding series of short essays on the Jammu & Kashmir Conflict, diligent readers are advised to see Procrastination (Zakaria Ajmal; link to list of J&K posts at his site). Whilst Zack is a gifted writer and diligent thinker, his comments sections are the crown jewel of the site.

I said earlier that the conflict between India and Pakistan has been extremely costly. There are the deaths: over a million killed during the exchange of populations at partition, another million massacred during the secession of East Pakistan (Bangladesh; March 1971), 30,000 or so killed in three wars since partition, another 30,000 killed in Kashmiri violence, and nationalism-stimulated communal violence over the years.

Recently international observers were exasperated when the UN Security Council rejected any concrete ultimatum to the Sudan, largely under pressure from Pakistan's delegation (HC). The African Union is discussing alternatives at Nigeria's capital, Abuja (BBC; Passion of the Present). These are actually a resumption of talks that broke down in July after the rebels left the table.

The world press is full today of the news that Sudan has signed an agreement with the UN to repatriate refugees voluntarily-rather than forcing them back into unsafe villages -as has been charged by relief organizations... This agreement is a superficial step unless it truly (1) enables the international community more ability to protect the rights of refugees in the field, and (2) is combined with broader attention to security issues across Darfur-where many believe the Sudanese government is continuing its counter-insurgency and ethnic cleansing operations.

Is Pakistan's federally administered tribal area (FATA) turning into another Darfur?

"PAKISTAN: Growing concern over humanitarian situation in tribal area" (IRIN) reports on the ongoing fighting in the Wana District (Dawn) on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. The Global War on Terror has inflicted a terrible price on Pakistan's social fabric, and threatened the viability of the junker polity itself. For decades the junkers who actually ruled Pakistan-the military brass, the ulema, and the landlords-curried favor with Washington because they were staunchly anti-Communist; moreover, Muslim societies are generally highly resistant to Communism. It followed therefore that Pakistan would require US assistance because of agitation for land reform, and its eternal squabble with India; but it would require few political accommodations since Pakistan's polity had little option but to follow the American lead.

This meant that Pakistan, a semi-captive satellite, relied on confrontation of India to offset its inherently lack of genuine popular support with its subjects. A junker state is necessarily a praetorian one. Like the praetorian states of Latin America, it harbored pretensions of revolutionary nationalism-here, with an Islamic character-and its hard core secretly curried favor with terrorist outfits. In Pakistan, these secret revolutionaries were the ISI and radical clergy; had the Islamicists not targeted the USA, they would have been a junker's dream. Islamicist guerrillas usually tended to turn on secular revolutionaries; typically, they tend to go after "liberation theology" in Islam for much the same reason Ratzinger did in Roman Catholicism: because resort to secular methods of economic liberation lead to a secular society.

This contributed in large measure to the early western support for Sudan: as a former colony of British protectorate Egypt (ergo, a potential ally against Nasserist hegemony) and conservative Islamic state, it was seen as a bulwark against Communism. US aid to the new country was copious; later, when Pres. Nimeiri came to power there (1969). US-Sudanese relations were especially close [*]. In an earlier post I drew an analogy between the nomadic Ilkhanic rulers of medieval Iran, who favored the nomadic tribes over the settled peasants, and the modern rulers of Sudan; of course, neither the Ilkhans nor the modern Sudanese polity are literally nomadic; their heritage and their historical narrative is, though, and their developmental agenda is characteristic of the unsettled globalized development strategy; the peasants have to be displaced because they are in the way of the economically "rational" cash economy, the mechanized cash-based agriculture that serves the rootless urban overlords.

Is Pakistan the same way? It has a conservative Islamicist government, that has the misfortune of governing in another era from Nimeiri's. The praetorian Islamic state is now jeopardized by international anger at terrorism.

On 14 August '01, Pres. Musharraf banned both Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Mohammad (an anti-Shi'a and anti-Sunni group, respectively); later, on 12 January he banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), two organizations allegedly involved in the 13 December '01 attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. However, there is little doubt that supporting the US-Coalition invasion of Afghanistan was the bitterest cup of trembling that the praetorian state could have drunk. Ironically, the lack of military enthusiasm for the operation probably led directly to the nightmarish Wana fighting going on as I write: the ISI-cultivated Taliban and auxiliaries among Pakistani tribals made good an escape of al-Qaeda die-hards to the Northwest Frontier Province, leaving the US military and the Musharraf government with no option but to fight them on Pakistani soil.

One of the more detailed accounts of the Wana Clash and how it is leading to a massive problem of internal displacement, is to be found in The Wana Operation" Pakistan confronts Islamic Militants in Waziristan, by Rizwan Zeb.

The operations began in the second half of January, when authorities received reports that a number of Al Qaeda members could be hiding in the Klo Shah town. Exchanges of fire took place, though no foreign suspects were found, according to Pakistani Army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan. Soon, an ultimatum was given to the tribal jirga for handing over several individuals accused of sheltering Al Qaeda figures. During the jirga, it was decided that a tribal lashkar (paramilitary force) would be created to assist the security forces in arresting the wanted. The joint efforts of the Pakistani forces and the tribal leaders led to the surrender of more than twenty suspects.

While addressing a gathering of tribal elders on March 15, President Pervez Musharraf said that there were 600 terrorists present in the area... He guaranteed that these terrorists will not be handed over to any third country if they surrender. ..Reports suggest that apart from two wings of the frontier corps (FC), the Special service Group (SSG) is also active in the area;

So the three sides are:

1. the US-led Coalition, with the official organs of the Pakistani state, shelling
2. tribal opponents of direct rule, plus al-Qaeda and sympathetic fighters; the which abetted by elements of the ISI, Pakistani military intelligence, and domestic terror groups like those mentioned above;
3. members of local tribes: the Utmanzai and Ahmedzai Waziris

NYT, 20 July: The United States military, which has 17,000 troops across the border in Afghanistan, has provided satellite intelligence and aerial surveillance to assist Pakistani operations. Last month a Pakistani tribal leader was killed in what officials in Pakistan have said was a hellfire missile strike from an American unmanned drone. Both Pakistan and the United States have strenuously denied any participation of American troops on Pakistani territory.

United Nations and Afghan refugee officials have raised grave concerns with the Pakistani government about the refugee exodus, protesting that if there are military operations in such areas, that people at least be given adequate warning to collect their belongings and some choice as to where to go.

New arrivals interviewed in the town of Ghazni, south of the Afghan capital Kabul, said they were given 72 hours notice to leave their houses as the military moved to clear their area. Others said they fled in general panic as the fighting intensified around their villages and refugee camps as recently as four days ago.

[...]

Daniel Endres, acting head of that office in Afghanistan, said their ejection from Pakistan amounts to forcible repatriation. Some 200,000 Afghan refugees live in the remote border areas of Pakistan, in particularly poor and insecure conditions.

The Pakistani military has hardened its position against Afghan refugees living in the area in recent weeks, officials in Afghanistan said. Refugees have been given as little as two hours notice and their houses have been bulldozed, officials of the United Nations' refugee office said. Some have arrived with no belongings and are homeless once again, back in their native Afghanistan.

The Pakistani authorities have admitted to closing and bulldozing two refugee camps, Zarinoor 1 and Zarinoor 2, in South Waziristan. A Pakistani official in Kabul said that the government had decided to dismantle all camps within five kilometers of the border "as part of a clean-up of the area, so militant-saboteurs would have no place for asylum."

"Inevitably that caused hardship to families," he said. "It's unfortunate, but it had to be done as part of the overall campaign against terrorism," the official said.

Pakistani security forces launched an offensive last year against local tribesmen allegedly supporting Al-Qaeda militants hiding in the tribal belt of Wana, headquarters of the South Waziristan agency of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). According to a fact-finding mission by the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), the area has been badly affected as a result of ongoing military operations in the area, including the use of light and heavy artillery. Search operations, raids on houses, road blocks and economic sanctions over the past three months have resulted in heavy financial losses for residents in the area, according to the rights activists.

Pakistani Intelligence kills Amjad Farooqi

September 28, 2004

Al-Jazeera mentions that he was linked to Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami and Jaish-e-Muhammad. There is also an allegation that he was "the right hand man" of Abu Faraj Farj (ABC; Frontline-India), who was allegedly the replacement for Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in the al-Qaeda network. I remain curious as to how much impact the higher-profile captures have on any al-Qaeda-imbedded network.