1- "Washington Doesn’t Help
Pakistani Democracy"
2- U.S. policy toward Islamabad exacerbates Pakistan’s widening civil-military
imbalance.
3- President Assad meets Putin in Moscow
4- US to sell Saudi Arabia four advanced warships
5- Are Saudi-Russian Relations Fraying?
6- French jihadists reveal what life is like in ISIS
7- Canada withdrawing fighter jets from Iraq, Syria, Trudeau tells Obama
8- US deploys ground-attack A-10 planes to Turkey
Detai of Topic 1 & 2 as are under
(1) Back in October 2013, I argued in an op-ed that President Obama should use a
isit by Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to bolster the Pakistani
government’s role relative to the military. The imbalance in civil-military
relations, I contended at the time, was indicative of an incomplete democracy. I
called on Washington to help strengthen civilian institutions such as Parliament
and the police. “In a true democracy,” I wrote, “no institution, no matter how
essential, should enjoy such unchecked power.”
Two years later, Sharif is back in Washington. Unfortunately, democracy in his
country not only remains incomplete, but has also grown increasingly imperiled.
In Pakistan, the idea of any semblance of a civil-military balance is a sham —
and U.S. policy, unfortunately, helps widen the divide.
In the summer of 2014, an anti-government movement led by opposition politician
Imran Khan, and likely sponsored by the security establishment, weakened Sharif
considerably. His portfolio was downsized dramatically, and his policy space
shrunk swiftly. The military swooped in to fill the vacuum. Ever since, Sharif
has ruled more like a governor than a premier — he sets the agenda on domestic
affairs, but defers to higher powers on foreign affairs. For a country with a
deep legacy of heavy military influence over statecraft, this is sadly nothing
new. The old normal has become the new normal.
Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in Pakistan’s India policy. Sharif’s
government came to power hoping to improve relations with New Delhi. Such
aspirations, however, have long since come crashing down. Pakistan’s civilian
leaders have seemingly been reduced to parroting anti-India narratives harbored
by a hardline military. This summer, Defense Minister Khawaja Asif declared that
India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was formed
“to wipe Pakistan off the map.” Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan
insisted that India wants to destabilize Pakistan and keep it “backward and
underdeveloped.” Even Finance Minister Ishaq Dar got in on the act; he suggested
that India was trying to sabotage the new China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Some may counter that Sharif offered a conciliatory speech in his recent address
to the United Nations General Assembly, when he proposed the demilitarization of
Kashmir. Such a proposal, however, was likely prompted by a desire on the part
of the Pakistani military to get the Kashmir issue on the front burner, and not
by a genuine desire for peace.
The widening civil-military imbalance was crystallized on Oct. 18, when
Pakistani officials divulged that Khan Janjua, a general who had conveniently
retired just a few days earlier, had been appointed as the new national security
adviser. He is accompanying Sharif on his trip to the United States.
This is not to dismiss Pakistan’s genuine democratic progress. Parliament
rallied behind Sharif during Imran Khan’s anti-government movement. Earlier this
year, it issued a resolution that emphatically rejected Saudi requests to
provide military support to Riyadh’s offensive against rebels in Yemen.
Additionally, Pakistan passed a landmark right to information law in 2013, which
provides the people access to public documents. Such assertions of civilian
authority followed a major democratic triumph of the previous Pakistan People’s
Party government; the 18th constitutional amendment, passed in 2010, weakened
the power of the presidency and enhanced the authority of provincial officials.
And yet these encouraging developments have done little to ease the military’s
tightening grip on power.
Several days before Sharif came to the United States, reports appeared in the
Pakistani media alleging that RAW was plotting to kill Sharif. In a previous
era, the conspiratorially minded might have assumed that this meant a military
coup would take place when Sharif left the country. By “revealing” this plot,
one might have argued, the military could have been serving up a useful pretext
for an intervention to save Pakistan from the latest predations of India.
In the present era, however, the Pakistani government is already operating in
lockstep with the military, negating the need for a takeover. The military has
another strong incentive not to seize power outright: Rawalpindi likely reckons
that it’s best not to be saddled with Pakistan’s staggering and arguably
unprecedented domestic challenges. These range from energy and education crises
to multiple public health epidemics.
Regardless, Sharif’s visit to Washington will do little to advance the cause of
democracy in Pakistan. The United States largely views Pakistan through the
narrow lens of security, and its chief interests in Pakistan are therefore
security in nature. This entails a need to heavily engage and frequently charm
Pakistani military officials, who rule the roost on security matters. Washington
pulls out all the stops during their visits to the United States, which tend to
be quite long and sometimes involve awarding them prestigious honors.
At the end of the day, when Washington needs to get something done to serve its
chief interests in Pakistan, one can assume it goes to the generals, not the
civilians. This is incredibly ironic and misguided — given that the generals
imperil U.S. interests in the region with their sponsorship of non-state
militants — but nonetheless a fact of life for U.S.-Pakistan relations.
This is why we shouldn’t expect many substantive outcomes from Obama’s meeting
with Sharif. The key agenda items — counterterrorism cooperation, nuclear
security, the Afghanistan peace process with the Taliban — are matters over
which the military, not the premier, hold sway and have the final say.
To that end, there is another Obama-Sharif meeting that is much more
consequential than the one happening this week — a summit between the U.S.
president and Pakistan’s military chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, which is scheduled
to take place next month (incidentally, Prime Minister Sharif’s visit was
immediately preceded by one from Lt. Gen. Rizwan Akhtar, who heads the
Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency).
This is not to say that Washington does not help advance — or at least attempt
to advance — the cause of democracy in Pakistan. The U.S. government disbursed
nearly $400 million in democracy and governance assistance for the country
between 2009 and 2014. Recent U.S. aid to Pakistan has included support for the
Pakistan Institute for Parliamentary Services, a research and training center
for the national legislature. A chief aim of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman (KLB) bill,
which authorized a total of $7.5 billion in development assistance between 2009
and 2014, was meant to strengthen a civilian administration emerging from nearly
a decade of military rule.
Though KLB expired last year, a few billion dollars still have yet to be spent.
In his meeting with Prime Minister Sharif, Obama would be wise to announce some
new initiatives using those remaining KLB monies.
Ultimately, however, this week’s visit, like most high-level official visits
involving the United States and Pakistan, will be about security. And that means
more engagement with — and a further bolstering of — the Pakistani military.
In so doing, U.S. policy, despite its best efforts to strengthen democracy,
invariably helps ensure that there will continue to be an essential institution
in Pakistan that enjoys unchecked power.
(2) " Ten Issues Obama Should Raise with Pakistan's PM Nawaz Sharif "
President Obama would be meeting with Pakistan's prime minister, Nawaz Sharif,
on Thursday just days after his staggering announcement to extend the U.S.
military presence in Afghanistan. The resurgence of the Taliban and some of
their disconcerting advancements have compelled the President to review a full
withdrawal from the hard country that the United States has failed to fully
conquer or control after fourteen years.
Four years ago, Bob Woodward told me in an interview that Obama believed the
"poison" (of terrorism) had actually moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Fareed
Zakaria insists that American efforts to manage Afghanistan will fizzle out
unless Pakistan completely abjures support for radical Islamic groups. Obama
will definitely discuss a host of outstanding issues with Sharif ranging from
fighting terrorism to the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
However, Pakistan, a nation that has received $20 billion American assistance
since 2001, is not very easy to ignore. Washington has in fact squandered
billions of dollars in Pakistan and one does not see the impact of this
extraordinary American investment anywhere. On the contrary, Pakistan continues
to betray democratic values and snub commitments that are essential to
democracy. On Thursday, Obama should raise the following ten issues with the
leader of the country whose ruling elite thrives on American taxpayers' money.
1-Support for Jihadists: Pakistan has repeatedly defied calls to take action
against the Lashkar-e Tayyiba (LeT), a Jihadist organization designated by the
State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The group killed
more than 150 people, including Americans, in a 2008 attack in Mumbai, India.
Hafiz Saeed, the organization's head who has a bounty of $10 million from the
U.S. government over his arrest, ironically, roams across Pakistan with total
impunity. He frequently makes fiery public speeches and appears on news channels
to promote his hateful ideology without the slightest fear of being arrested.
The signs of LeT's presence were recently found in the Afghan city of Kunduz
where one of its commanders was killed in what otherwise temporarily culminated
in the Taliban's best advancement since 2001. Obama should confront Pakistan's
policy of supposedly fighting the "bad Islamists" and tolerating and harboring
the "good Islamists".
2-U.S. Aid: Pakistan is one of the world's largest recipients of American
assistance. Yet, ordinary Pakistanis do not feel the trickle-down effect of the
American assistance. Most social indicators are abysmally bleak. Successive
governments have not sufficiently invested in education, curriculum reforms,
youth and women's empowerment. Pakistan's former ambassador to Washington Husain
Haqqani asks in his outstanding book Magnificent Delusions why Pakistan could
not develop like Japan, South Korea or Germany in spite of being a giant
recipient of American assistance. One clear reason is the lack of transparency
and accountability. According to the Congressional Research Service, "corruption
and lack of sufficient transparency is identified as a key obstacle to effective
implementation of U.S. aid programs in Pakistan, and has drawn significant
attention in Congress." With no accountability, American assistance will further
empower the corrupt civil and military elite and deepen Pakistan's woes.
3- Shakil Afridi: Pakistan continues to detain the doctor who helped in locating
Osama bin Laden. America's silence and Pakistan's persistent persecution of Dr.
Afridi cancel out the justification of the war on terror. The spying charges
against Dr. Afridi by the Pakistani government are ridiculous given the fact
that Pakistan had officially and publicly committed to the war against Al-Qaeda
and the Taliban. How can the government punish a man who assisted in hunting
down the world's most wanted terrorist when the country's military and civilian
leadership were doing precisely the same thing (although with a lesser degree of
commitment) and still getting hefty financial rewards from Washington for the
'spying' they were doing? The way the Americans ditched Dr. Afridi surely
discourages rest of the Pakistanis to report other dangerous terrorists,
including Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's successor, who is also perceived to be
hiding in Pakistan. By abandoning Dr. Afridi and imprisoning him, both the
United States and Pakistan have set a damaging precedence in fighting terrorism.
4-Blasphemy Law: Obama must urge Sharif to repeal, or at least reform, the
infamous blasphemy law, which is mostly used against religious minorities. The
law makes it legally okay to kill somebody who "disrespects" Islam or Prophet
Muhammad. According to the Dawn newspaper, 1,274 people have been charged of
blasphemy since 1986 and another 51 people accused of blasphemy, including the
governor of the Punjab province and a federal cabinet minister (who was also a
Christen), were killed on charges of blasphemy. Since efforts from the
progressive lawmakers to reform the Blasphemy Law failed in 2011 because of
strong resistance from the religious (and even not-so-religious) lobby, Sharif's
government has shown no interest in reforming the blasphemy law.
5- Disappearances in Balochistan: The U.S. Department of State and Members of
Congress have frequently expressed concern about thousands of cases of enforced
disappearance, torture and political assassination of political activists
belonging to the Baloch ethnic minority in the southwestern province of
Balochistan. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) has attributed these rights violations
to Pakistani security forces while one senior official from the Amnesty
International testified before Congress that Pakistan has used American weapons
to fight the secular Baloch instead of crushing the Taliban. Up till today,
security forces almost every day dump the tortured bullet-riddled dead bodies of
young Baloch.
6- The "Inhuman" Cybercrime Bill: Sharif's government is introducing a
controversial cyber security bill called the Prevention of Electronic Crimes
Bill 2015 that will drastically intrude people's privacy and also curtail
dissent. Sherry Rehman, Pakistan's former ambassador to the U.S. and a liberal
politician, has described the bill as 'inhuman' while HRW says it "will instead
institutionalize unacceptable violations of basic rights with a thin veneer of
legality."
7- War Against NGOs: Under Sharif's rule, national and international
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are facing renewed harassment. The
government is denying access to NGOs in conflict-zones like Balochistan where
human rights organizations blame the government of committing atrocities against
civilians. In Balochistan, the government forced Save the Children, a U.K.-based
humanitarian organization, to shut down its operations while the government's
new Policy for International NGOs further restricts the operations of these
humanitarian organizations. HRW says the new NGO rules are "repressive" because
they "threaten humanitarian, rights work."
8- Religious, Sectarian Minorities: In its Annual Report in 2015, the United
States Commission on International Religious Freedom, says "Pakistan represents
one of the worst situations in the world for religious freedom." Every year
hundreds of Shia Muslims are killed by extremist Sunni groups. Christen and
Hindus are forcibly converted into Islam, more than thousand non-Muslim girls
are married off to Muslim men or compelled to flee the country. The Ahmadiyya
Muslims face perpetual persecution and discrimination. Sharif, the only
politician to run the country for a third term, has made no policies to curb
violence and hatred against religious and sectarian minorities nor does it
appear on his list of things to do in the future.
10- Press/Internet Freedom: Lastly, President Obama should urge Sharif to take
Pakistan out of the darkness of censorship and infringement of journalistic
freedom. Pakistan should lift the two-year ban on Youtube in order to give young
Pakistanis an opportunity to benefit from enormous wealth of information
available on Youtube. Furthermore, Pakistan should reopen its doors for western
journalists, including the New York Times reporters Declan Walsh and Carlotta
Gall, who were kicked out of the country because of what I call as their
excellent journalistic work.
The avid Pakistan watcher Michael Kugelman at the Woodrow Wilson Center is
absolutely right in arguing, "Washington doesn't help Pakistani democracy".
President Obama can help in changing that perception by discussing issues
pertaining to Pakistan's democracy and convincing its "democratic leader" that
Pakistan's future does not rest with developing more nuclear weapons or
supporting radical Islamic groups. The country's future instead lies in robust
investment in education, liberalization of the society and extending all
democratic rights and freedoms to every woman and man living there.