Dr Maleeha Lodhi

UNRESOLVED tensions in the Obama administration’s Afghan policy have again been highlighted by recent pronouncements by its top military officials. This has sent confusing signals about the US-led coalition’s next and decisive phase of engagement in Afghanistan rather than convey clarity in purpose and strategy.

In a spate of media interviews, General David H. Petraeus, the new commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, called for more time and patience for counterinsurgency efforts to make progress and indicated that the date by which American troops would start withdrawing – announced by President Barack Obama in December 2009 – would be conditions-based. He warned of “tough fighting” ahead and said he hadn’t come to Afghanistan to preside over a “graceful exit”.

These statements about the July 2011 withdrawal date suggested that he was seeking to extend the time and scope of the military option. This sparked questioning by the Western media about whether this stance was at odds with that of the President. The White House intervened to describe the date as “non-negotiable.”

What was the point of this media offensive and what was General Petraeus trying to achieve? Quite evidently he was trying to convince his increasingly war-weary nation, and equally skeptical allies, that the war was far from being lost. The attempt to rally crumbling public support was put in sharp relief by the latest poll numbers: almost seventy per cent of Americans believe that the war cannot be successfully concluded.

General Petraeus’s media remarks may have been aimed at preparing the ground to limit the pace and size of the troop drawdown and build the case for military engagement beyond July 2011. Significantly, he left open the option of advising the President to delay the planned pullout if conditions so warranted.

The NATO commander also claimed “pockets of progress” in parts of Afghanistan that showed that the surge was working and the tide turning against the Taleban. This too was an effort to demonstrate that a faltering war effort could still succeed despite many setbacks.

The mental map that Petraeus brings to his Afghan mission is defined by his experience in Iraq where he is credited with changing the course of the conflict. In one interview he asserted that the fighting in Afghanistan will get harder before it gets easier as it did in Iraq when the surge was launched in 2007.

These media remarks have heightened concerns among America’s NATO and other allies about where the new commander wants to take the coalition’s mission. Almost all these nations would like to see Washington act on its own acknowledgement that there is no military solution and therefore pursue a negotiated end to the war rather than more military escalation.

Nobody other than the US military believes that the surge – that has now put 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan – can be a game changer. While the Petraeus approach envisions a change in military realities to dictate a political strategy, almost all of America’s partners in the Afghan project, including Pakistan, would want to see efforts towards a negotiated peace calibrated with plans for military disengagement.

Uncertainties surrounding the US-led mission are also being compounded by the re-emergence of strains between Washington and Kabul on several issues. Most recently the Afghan President Hamid Karzai has sought to play into the debate over the withdrawal date by criticising it for reinvigorating the insurgency. These running spats do not induce confidence in the fate of the Afghan mission especially with crucial parliamentary elections due later this month in Afghanistan.— KT

These have evoked fears of a repeat of the fraudulent presidential poll of 2009.

Meanwhile much is being made by US officials of attaining this year’s target of 134,000 soldiers for the Afghan National Army three months ahead of schedule. But the capability of this force remains in great doubt. The high attrition rate – a quarter of the recruits and in some units fifty per cent desert – is only one among several serious problems (high illiteracy, low morale, inadequate Pashtun representation and alarming levels of drug use) that have hindered the Afghan army’s ability to undertake any significant military mission independently.

These difficulties and tensions reflect the continuing lack of alignment between the different elements and time lines of US strategy. Apart from the disconnect between a political timeline imposed by American public opinion and the military’s call for more time, other aspects of the US approach are also riddled by contradictions. This presents a picture of an Administration struggling to define an approaching endgame, which knows that continuing a nine-year long war is not politically feasible but has yet to forge an internal consensus on how to end the conflict.

Few American officials dispute the need for eventual talks with the Taliban to find a negotiated end to the war. But unresolved differences within the Administration about when and how to do this is hobbling moves to evolve a clear plan in which a political rather than a military strategy drives and shapes the coalition’s efforts in the coming months.

It may be that President Obama is allowing his military commanders a final opportunity to try to establish ‘battlefield dominance’ from where they can ‘dictate’ the negotiating terms for dialogue with the Taliban.

He does not want to be accused of abandoning the fight before the military surge runs its course. He may also want to wait until a formal review of his Afghan strategy due in December. By then the mid-term Congressional elections would be behind him. But little is likely to change on the ground in Afghanistan between now and then to alter the context for a decision that Obama has to face up to sooner or later.

If insurgencies are always ended politically by negotiations then vacillation on this count while pursuing tactical military goals makes for risky strategy. The costs of delay are especially high in the face of a shortening political timeframe and lengthening military odds. KT

Raja G Mujtaba

NEW YORK Times is no different than Fox TV or CNN. These are basically mouth pieces of Zionists hence miss no opportunity to malign Pakistan in any or every issue weather related or not or has any relevance to truth or not.

The recent floods in Pakistan are known to the whole world, its magnitude and devastation that it has caused and still no end is in sight. In this hour of need, every country and individuals around the world have mobilised their resources to help the people of Pakistan in any way that they can.

In a similar gesture, China a great neighbour of Pakistan who has always stood to the test of time has never lagged behind in helping Pakistan and its people to the extent that she possibly can. Likewise this time also China has sent huge quantities of aid and relief goods to Pakistan to help in overcoming this catastrophe that has made millions homeless and rendered their lands, crops, livestock and houses useless.

Besides this China has also helped Pakistan in constructing the Karakoram Highway that links China and Pakistan. These unprecedented rains have washed away many bridges on this road that need to be reconstructed or repaired before they take on the traffic load. Since this portion was constructed by China therefore it was logical for the Chinese to come forward and help in rebuilding of the roads and bridges. This does involve movement of the Chinese workers in the area that Selig Harrison has dubbed as stationing of 10,000 troops in Gilgit-Baltistan that has been played up by India and some other from their camp.

In this context, a column in the New York Times newspaper by American commentator Selig Harrison has raised quite a bit of media attention around a conspiracy theory that the government is giving Gilgit Baltistan to China, a claim publicly denied by the Foreign Office. As with most conspiracy theories of this magnitude, a little basic research demonstrates that Mr Harrison and his claim of Pakistan ceding territory to China are unfounded and totally baseless.

What Harrison has said is understandable but what is more bothersome is the attitude of our own media that without going into any details or trying to ascertain the facts they just rush to reproduce the stories to create sensations. Such irresponsible behaviour of the media must not go unchecked.

These very media houses are more than willing to repeat the wildest conspiracies without the least efforts in fact-checking. More troubling is that the Mr Harrison’s conspiracy seems to have been fed to him in part by Pakistani media. Certainly it must be serving their interests that needs to be investigated.

The first suspicion about Mr Harrison’s claim was that it was simply too outrageous to be believed without any authentic proof. Of course, Mr Harrison provides none in his column because none exists on ground.

Most troubling, as I said, is that Mr Harrison’s claim appears to be based at least in part on rumours by unnamed journalists. He says that his sources for this conspiracy theory are: …reports from a variety of foreign intelligence sources, Pakistani journalists and Pakistani human rights workers…

* What foreign intelligence sources is he talking about? While it would certainly be in keeping with journalistic practice to hold confidential the name of an informant, it is not unusual to at least report what agency the informant is associated with.

* Without playing into alternate conspiracy theories, it is well documented that intelligence agencies partake in disinformation campaigns designed to sow discord in targeted nations. Considering the location in question, is it not important to know which foreign intelligence agency is making these claims?

* It is quite troubling that some representatives of Pakistani media have been feeding such stories to foreign reporters.

* Considering Mr Harrison’s background (as will be explained below), it is worrisome that these Pakistani journalists went to Mr Harrison to promote their story.

* Certainly Mr Harrison will refuse to expose who these Pakistani journalists are, but at least he could name the papers or the agencies for which they work.

* There is reason to protect the identities of “whistle blowers” against official corruption for fear of their safety, there is little public good gained by allowing journalists to spread unsubstantiated rumours.

Now let’s look at Mr Harrison’s claims directly. Many of Mr Harrison’s claims are nothing more than hysterical conjecture.

See how Harrison builds sensation in his story, “Mystery surrounds the construction of 22 tunnels in secret locations where Pakistanis are barred. Tunnels would be necessary for a projected gas pipeline from Iran to China that would cross the Himalayas through Gilgit. But they could also be used for missile storage sites.” Here his mention that these could also be used for storage of missiles is simply a fiction writer’s dream. Also it would be appropriate to mention here that Gilgit-Baltistan is a tourist area of Pakistan where lots of both domestic and foreign tourists flock.

I could not help but think of the famous American claims about Iraq’s “aluminum tubes and mobile laboratories for weapons of mass destruction.” The idea that China, which shares a border with Pakistan, would need to store missiles under Gilgit-Baltistan makes no sense. Unfortunately for Mr Harrison’s conspiracy theory, though, building tunnels for a gas pipeline would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for an increased presence of Chinese workers in the region. It’s just not quite as scary.

Of course, this is not the first claim that Mr Harrison has made about the break up of Pakistan. The Pakistan Policy Blog noticed this trend of Mr Harrison’s back in 2008, noting that “Selig Harrison has made a career of predicting the imminent break-up of South Asian states”. In 2006, Mr Harrison reported for the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique that Baluchistan and Sindh were preparing to quit the nation.

While there is no denying that we have seen groups of separatists and ethnic strife in the country (what country has not experienced such moves in its history?), Mr Harrison’s reports consistently take on a tone of imminent national dissolution that is simply not supported by the facts. Four years after Mr Harrison’s prediction in the French media and no such calamity has occurred, of course. Yet Mr Harrison continues to predict the break-up of Pakistan. Perhaps he believes that if he simply wishes hard enough, it will come true?

Joshua Foust, a respected American journalist and intelligence consultant on South Asia, wrote a scathing profile of Mr Selig Harrison in 2008 in which he calls Mr Harrison’s writings on Pashtunistan, “silly, over-hyped nonsense” and says, “As it is, Harrison casts a very unconvincing shadow on the discourse over the Pashtunistan issue. It merits serious discussion—separatist movements always do. But placing them in their proper context, both historically and socially, is just as important as making a case you’ve been trying to make for years. As it is, Harrison seems to rely on mischaracterization, hyperbole, and “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (to borrow a phrase and avoid slinging charges of Orientalism)—hardly the stuff of a world-renowned regional expert. I hesitate to accuse Harrison of wearing ideological blinders, as I can’t really figure out what his ideology is, simultaneously blaming the West for subjugating the Pashtuns while granting them unlimited power to unite, declare independence, and bring down that very same West.

But that’s par for the course for most writing these days on Pashtuns, and even on Afghanistan. It just doesn’t add up. My question here, though, is the same as it was for Ann Marlowe: who the hell keeps paying him to write? I have to assume it is simply the ignorant, those more aware of his reputation than his recent scholarship, without the means to fact-check what he writes so long as it confirms their biases. That is a major loss to the field, that rigor. But, as with the curious longevity of Thomas Johnson (whom, ironically enough, Marlowe has called “brilliant”), it doesn’t seem to be that unoriginal, either.

Today, of course, Mr Harrison is not talking only about a separatist rebellion, but he has added a twist by claiming the government is “handing over de facto control of the strategic Gilgit-Baltistan region in the northwest corner of disputed Kashmir to China”.—Opinion-Maker

His evidence? Chinese PLA workers building roads and bridges.

Mr Harrison’s column, it is important to note, appears on the Opinion page of the New York Times. It does not even pretend to be an objective or investigative report, nor should it.

Mr Harrison makes clear his position when he writes, what is happening in the region matters to Washington for two reasons.

* Pakistan’s support for the Taliban,

* Islamabad’s collusion in facilitating China’s access to the Gulf makes clear that Pakistan is not a U.S. “ally.”

This is a position in direct conflict with the official positions of the US and Pakistan. It is not only Harrison’s opinion, but an attempt to change the direction of Pakistan-US relations. Something, it seems, he has been trying to do for years.

Hugh Corbet

AS American joblessness and recession remain grim, Barack Obama looks to exports for recovery.

The US president has called for a doubling of exports in the next five years. No doubt other leaders have similar hopes for their countries’ exports. Recovery from the global recession, however, depends on restoring the momentum of trade liberalisation, which first of all means completing the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations.

At the last G20 summit, held in Toronto, trade was the dog that didn’t bark. World leaders dwelled then, as in previous summits, on stimulus, debts and deficits. The G20 summit in Seoul this November could be more effective – promising to address the difficult issues that have held up negotiations in the World Trade Organisation for nine long years of fits and starts.

To break the impasse in the Doha Round negotiations, the United States must reconsider its position, said Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico, in a chairman’s statement issued after an international meeting of trade experts at Yale in May.

By offering to reduce agricultural subsidies further, the Obama administration could induce Brazil, China, India and other developing countries to improve their market-access offers, a major goal of US trade negotiators.

More specifically, the US could offer to reform its trade-distorting programmes for sugar, cotton and certain grains, to abandon its “zeroing” practice in calculating anti-dumping duties and to reduce its immigration barriers to “mode 4” business in the services sector enabling employees of foreign providers of services to enter the country temporarily.

From day one the Doha Round negotiations have been in trouble. Neither the US nor the European Union has made the substantial concessions on farm subsidies and tariffs expected of them after the Uruguay Round negotiations of 1986-94. They are still temporising over the liberalisation of agricultural protection and have been doing so for 40 years!

In the Uruguay Round negotiations and since, the Cairns Group of smaller agricultural-exporting countries – 19 nations ranging from Argentina and Canada to Thailand, lacking financial resources to subsidise farmers – have pressed for liberalisation of trade in farm commodities. The resistance has mainly come from the EU, but also from subsidised farm interests in the US, as well as smaller industrial countries.

At first the Cairns Group, led by Australia, held up progress in liberalising trade in industrial products until progress was evident on the agricultural front.

In the Doha Round negotiations its obduracy was overtaken by the WTO’s Group of Twenty developing countries led by Brazil. These countries have been more obdurate than the Cairns Group in fighting EU and US agricultural protectionism.

The Doha Round has not only suffered from lack of leadership in the EU, the US and smaller industrial countries. It has also suffered from the dissipation of political support for trade liberalisation.

Indeed, the negotiations have been driven by defensive interests in both industrial and developing counties. In the latter, defensive interests have included fear of “preference erosion” implicit in the reduction of tariffs, although World Bank studies have shown that only a few very small economies would be significantly affected.

If the US made worthwhile concessions on farm-support policies, which incidentally would get underway the liberalisation of agricultural trade, it could expect the developing countries to open their markets to farm produce. The potential growth of export markets for agricultural products is almost entirely in developing countries.

Secondly, the developing countries could also be expected to open their markets to services from the US and other industrial countries. Opening the economies of developing countries to the competition of firms engaged in mobilising financial resources would benefit them enormously.

Whether, thirdly, the developing countries would significantly improve access to their markets for industrial products might be something else. At present developing countries are not as fearful of US or EU imports as they are of Chinese imports, which they believe would flood markets, killing infant industries.

Prior to the Uruguay Round negotiations the multilateral trading system was dominated by industrial countries. Since then, with the entry into force of the WTO, which embraces the revised General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade and other Uruguay Round agreements, the system is now dominated numerically by developing countries, including economies “in transition” from being centrally planned.—AN

Today the “free riders” among them account for most of the WTO membership. These consist of the least-developed countries, “recently acceded members” such as China and the ACP countries – the small ex-colonies of the EU in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

With sluggish progress in the Doha Round, many negotiators have said, in private surveys of opinion, “a new approach” is required. Since World War II all nine rounds have been based on unconditional most-favoured-nation (MFN) treatment. The effect has been to slow the pace of negotiations to that acceptable to the least willing participants – to the slowest ships in the convoy.

Protectionist trends would increase and, in due course, the proliferation of preferential trade agreements would accelerate – meaning more discrimination, a subtler form of protectionism.

And in the longer run? Lorenz Schomerus, a former state secretary of the German ministry of economics, expresses the problem thus: “Multilateral institutions and rules cannot be left on a standby basis. They have to be used, supported and developed day by day. Failure to do so,” he adds, “will destroy the WTO system and its rules.”

It isn’t good enough for the G20 leaders to say, as they did in their Toronto communiqué, “we renew for a further three years, until the end of 2013, our commitment to refrain from using barriers, or imposing new barriers, to investment or trade in goods and services, imposing new export restrictions or implementing WTO-inconsistent measures to stimulate exports, and commit to rectify such measures as they rise.”

The leaders went on to say that in Seoul they would discuss reports on “the benefits of trade liberalisation.”

In the face of such studied complacency, it is not too soon for the smaller G20 powers to press others, especially the emerging-market economies, to rethink the WTO system and give priority to liberalising international trade. The “middle powers” have a strong stake in the multilateral trading system and cannot continue to rely on the economic superpowers – too big to see beyond their rivalry – to take the lead in promoting an open world economy.