Where have Washington’s Pakistan Experts Gone?

Something is missing in Washington, and I’m not referring to bipartisanship. I’m talking about Pakistan expertise.

Last year, Shuja Nawaz, head of The Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, lamented the exodus of Pakistan experts from Washington policy-making jobs. Yet this only represents the tip of the iceberg.
Scan the speaker rosters of the city’s think-tank symposia, study the bylines of policy briefs and commentaries, and scrutinise the talking heads on DC talk shows.

What do you see? The same set of names, drawn from Washington’s small group of esteemed Pakistan-watchers.

Numbering about two dozen, they include diplomats (Teresita Schaffer), scholars (Stephen Cohen, Christine Fair), and those who have engaged both public service and academia (Daniel Markey, Lisa Curtis, Marvin Weinbaum). In more recent years, this fraternity has also taken in transplanted Pakistanis (such as Nawaz).
Yet beyond this venerable group, there is little else. In a city that constantly refers to the immense strategic significance of Pakistan, this deficit of expertise is striking — yet also unsurprising.

Americans, after all, are notoriously uninformed about foreign affairs — and even about a nation that their government insists is so important (my countrymen have been known to confuse Pakistanis with Palestinians).

Also, US public opinion toward Pakistan is strongly negative — a February 2012 Gallup poll found that only 15 per cent of Americans regard Pakistan positively (in the last 10-plus years, only once has this figure exceeded 30 per cent). Such a climate does not exactly encourage Americans to gravitate toward Pakistan.

Even those who wish to become students of Pakistan face obstacles. This is because US higher education doesn’t emphasise Pakistan like it does other nations and regions. A range of universities — the University of Washington, University of California at Berkeley, and SAIS/Johns Hopkins, to name just a few — boast programs specifically dedicated to the study of China. Yet Pakistan Studies programs are rare.
By no means does this signify a paucity of Pakistan-oriented scholarship in the United States — consider, just for starters, Anita Weiss’s work on gender, Sarah Halvorson’s on geography, and Ayesha Jalal’s on history — yet it does suggest that America’s higher education system refuses to place a high premium on Pakistan.

Little wonder many recent graduates flock to careers as China hands or Middle East specialists — yet few vow to become part of the next generation of Pakistan experts. My own experience is illustrative; during the early months of the Iraq War, I decided to pursue a master’s degree in Middle East studies. I entered the South Asia field only later on, through a combination of luck and happenstance (and I’m glad I did).

Wait, you may say: What about that cottage industry of Pakistan experts that has sprouted in Washington in recent years? “Only in DC can you be a Pakistan expert without ever visiting the region,” grumbled Washington-based journalist Huma Imtiaz last year. “Yet your average Pakistan expert, fresh out of college or mid-career, claims to possess a deep understanding of how Pakistan’s politics, military, and society work.”
Alas, this is not a cottage industry of Pakistan specialists — it is one of Af-Pak experts. In Washington, Pakistan is inextricably tied to Afghanistan and to the war that the US is embroiled in there. Little wonder two of the most popular (and best) information portals consulted by Washington Pakistan-watchers — the AfPak Channel and Colin Cookman’s Pakistan/Afghanistan/Terrorism News brief — focus on Afghanistan as much as (if not more than) Pakistan.

Predictably, those representing this new wave of “Pakistan experts” are mostly security specialists fixated on the Afghanistan War; few nurture an abiding interest in Pakistan’s public health woes, its burgeoning IT sector, or Lollywood; they are more concerned about the threat posed to US forces in Afghanistan by militant sanctuaries in North Waziristan, and about Islamabad’s role in the Afghan endgame.

With Washington’s Pakistan-followers effectively proxies for Afghanistan War- watchers, what will happen in 2014, when US combat forces have left Afghanistan? Will a reduced US military footprint in Afghanistan spell an end to Pakistan-heavy policy papers, panels and punditry in Washington? Will there still be ample experts on hand to contemplate Pakistan’s natural resource shortages, economic malaise, and education crisis — long-term challenges having little to do with Afghanistan?

Here is where the narrative grows less gloomy. Washington boasts a promising organisation, the Young Professionals Working Group on Pakistan, which comprises aspiring analysts of the country. Some of the capital’s most insightful Pakistan analysis in recent years has come from new and younger faces — Shamila Chaudhary, Moeed Yusuf, Joshua White, Stephen Tankel.

Further afield, a cultural engagement program, Caravanserai, has barnstormed across America, hosting performances and film screenings by Pakistani artists — and hoping to pique schoolchildren’s interest in Pakistan.

Bipartisanship may be a lost cause in Washington. Yet there is still hope for strengthening and expanding the city’s ranks of Pakistan experts.

Michael Kugelman is the program associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He can be reached at michael.kugelman@wilsoncenter.org and on Twitter @michaelkugelman

Pak Prime Minister Gilani Down But Not Out – Yet!

PM after SC Verdict (Credit: worldbulletin.net)

ISLAMABAD, April 26— Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Thursday convicted Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani of contempt for defying its orders to reopen an old corruption case against the president, but the justices spared Gilani any prison time.

The sentence was symbolic, lasting only until judges left the courtroom. But Gilani’s political future remains clouded with the possibility that he could still be removed from office.

For months the political crisis had distracted from U.S. efforts to restore full diplomatic ties with Pakistan, which were badly strained after American warplanes inadvertently bombed two border outposts last November, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.

The continuation of Gilani and his party in power, at least for now, provides a measure of stability that experts say should help speed the resumption of a cooperative, if uneasy, relationship between the two counterterrorism allies. Pakistan’s Parliament has already indirectly granted the chief U.S. request: that the nation reopen its border to NATO convoys, including thousands of oil tankers, that supply troops in Afghanistan.

Gilani could have been sentenced to up to six months in prison, but his ruling Pakistan People’s Party was hardly pleased with the outcome. “This is a dark day in the history of the country,” Firdous Ashiq Awan, a former information minister, told journalists outside the court.

Analysts were divided over whether the conviction meant the prime minister would have to give up his seat in Parliament, and thus his higher office. They said that could happen in a matter of weeks or months, depending on the outcome of legal wrangling.

Political score-settling here often includes new leaders bringing questionable criminal cases against members of parties who have fallen from power. Gilani’s conviction stemmed from his adamant refusal to pursue money-laundering and kickback cases brought by Swiss authorities against President Asif Ali Zardari.

Gilani has maintained that the constitution grants Zardari immunity from prosecution, and Zardari has denied the allegations, which date to the 1990s.

Although Gilani has served longer than any prime minister in the nation’s 64-year history, he also bears the stain of being the only prime minister found guilty of contempt; two others were charged but not convicted.

After his courtroom punishment, which lasted about 30 seconds, Gilani chaired a special cabinet meeting where he seemed sanguine about the entire matter. “Politics has lots of ups and downs,” he said, according to one cabinet member in the room and various media reports.

A career in politics means unavoidable tumult, the embattled premier noted, offering an Urdu proverb: “Working with coal will make your hands black, too.”

Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, who himself faced contempt of court charges as prime minister in 1997, called on Gilani to quit.

“He should step down without causing further crisis,” Sharif said on the cable channel Geo News. He also called for new elections.

Correspondent Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.

After the Death the Doctor

Grieving relative of Bhoja crash (Credit: news.kuwaitimes.net)

ISLAMABAD, April 23: The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on Monday began an inspection of all passenger planes operated by private airlines after a near-miss in Karachi that came just two days after a fatal crash in Islamabad.

The checks were ordered on Sunday after a Shaheen Air flight with 178 people on board narrowly avoided disaster when its left rear tyre burst after its landing gear broke as it touched down at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi.

On Friday, a Bhoja Air Boeing 737 came down in fields near Islamabad as it tried to land, killing all 127 people on board – Islamabad’s second major crash in less than two years.

“The CAA launched a comprehensive inspection of airplanes being flown by private airlines, from today,” CAA spokesman Pervez George told AFP.

The CAA has already received a plane from Bhoja Air for so-called “shakedown” checks by engineers, George said.

He refused to give any timeline for completion of the process, saying “it is difficult to say how much time the inspectors will take to examine each plane and all its systems”.

“We have asked all the private airlines to reschedule their domestic and international flights during the inspection so the passengers do not have to suffer,” he added.

Inspection work will begin with Bhoja Air planes before moving on to Shaheen Air International and Airblue.

George said planes from the national flag carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) had shakedown checks a few months ago and would not be subject to the special inspection.

Another Shaheen flight with more than 100 passengers bound for the Iranian city of Mashhad was prevented from taking off at Lahore on Sunday after a fuel overflow during refuelling, George said.

In July 2010 an Airbus jet operated by Airblue crashed into the hills overlooking Islamabad while coming in to land after a flight from Karachi, killing 152 people in the worst air disaster ever on Pakistani soil.

What Choices for Hindu Girls in Pakistan?

Rinkel Kumari or Faryal Shah? (Credit: Pravasitoday)

On April 18, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry ruled that the three Hindu women who had been converted to Islam, Rinkel Kumari, Dr Lata Kumari and Aasha Kumari, should decide if they want to return to their parents or stay with their new husbands. All three stated that they had willingly converted to Islam and wanted to live with their husbands.

However, there are still concerns about the climate of intimidation in which these cases were carried out and both Rinkel and Dr Lata had previously made contradictory statements in court about their conversions. Often in such cases the Hindu parents and lawmakers receive death threats and therefore raises the question if these decisions by the three women were made under duress.

Imagine your name is Bharti. You are a 15-year-old Hindu girl who lives in a small apartment in Lyari. Your father is a driver and social worker who raises money for others while struggling to pay your family’s medical bills. You have three older brothers, who are busy with their own jobs and families. Your future seems bleak.

Imagine you then meet Abid. He is the son of a police constable and promises to marry you. He promises you many things – but on the condition that you convert to Islam. You agree and run away with him. His family teaches you the Kalima and gives you a niqab to wear. After a few days, they take you to a maulvi. While the nikah form is being filled, you already know what you have to say. You tell the maulvi that you are 18-years-old and your name is now Ayesha.

Imagine that a few months pass. You are still living with Abid and his family. Your father lost the court case after a medical report was produced that stated that you are 18. You couldn’t look your mother in the eye when she came to court. You haven’t once been able to visit your home since you ran away. Your in-laws still haven’t given you a cell phone but sometimes you are able to borrow a phone and briefly talk to your brothers. When you speak to them, you can’t help but cry.

Be it the mean streets of Lyari or the dusty villages of interior Sindh, stories such as these are becoming increasingly common in Pakistan. In the last four months alone there have been at least 47 reported cases of alleged forced conversions of young girls from minority communities. But none of these cases have quite captured the fascination of the public as that of Rinkel Kumari.

Nineteen-year-old Rinkel disappeared from her home in Mirpur Mathelo, a village in the Ghotki district of Sindh, on February 24. The answer to what happened to her varies significantly, depending on whom you speak to. According to her father Nand Lal, a government schoolteacher, Rinkel woke up somewhere between four and five in the morning to go to the bathroom when she was drugged and kidnapped by armed men. She regained consciousness at around nine in the morning to find herself in Barchundi Sharif in Daharaki – a stronghold of PPP MNA Mian Abdul Haq, also known as Mian Mitho, who is the spiritual leader of the shrine where conversions regularly take place. Just hours after her arrival in Barchundi Sharif, Rinkel was forcibly converted to Islam, married off to one of the kidnappers, Naveed Shah, and subsequently renamed Faryal.

Mian Mohammed Aslam, the son of Mian Mitho, provides a different version of events. He stated on an evening news show that Rinkel showed up with Naveed Shah at his doorstep, expressing her wish to convert to Islam and get married. Aslam added that he contacted Rinkel’s parents to let them know his daughter was with him and even invited them to come visit her before she converted, but they never showed up.

And to add to the confusion, there is a third account of events according to which Rinkel was indeed in love with Naveed and went to meet him on the morning of February 24, but did not know that he would be waiting with other men, ready to kidnap her.

In response to the latter accounts, Rinkel’s family has stated that they did not want to meet their daughter at Mian Mohammad Aslam’s residence because they were concerned that they would not be able to talk freely in the presence of the MNA’s son. And her parents have denied suggestions that Rinkel knew Naveed, stating that since there is no phone in their house and Rinkel does not own a cellphone, there was no way for them to have contacted each other.

But be it Rinkel, Bharti or any other girl, the problem at the heart of all these cases is that nobody knows what actually happened to the victims. Some of the girls, including Rinkel, have made somewhat contradictory statements, initially saying that they willingly converted to Islam and later crying that they want to return to their parents. And in all known cases, the accused have fiercely guarded the girls from meeting their families. This raises several questions: Were the girls’ statements made under duress? Should non-Muslim parents be allowed to meet their now Muslim daughters? Does tempting a young girl with false promises count as coercion? Are these forced conversions and marriages essentially cases of rape and sexual harassment committed in the guise of Islam?

Advocate Iqbal Haider believes the answer to all these questions is an unequivocal yes, and he does not hide his disgust towards Mian Mitho and others involved in such conversions: “Mian Mitho is exploiting his status as an MNA and has been indulging in the most objectionable activities.” PPP MNA Mian Mitho

Haider has fought many cases of forced conversions and described the kind of problems that commonly arise in such cases. “No police officer would dare defy the orders of an MNA. The police is not independent,” stated Haider, adding, “I recently saw it in court when two police officers led the girl into the courtroom and her alleged husband was glued to her.”

The police was apparently unconcerned that the man was yet to be proven as the husband and that he was imposing his presence on the girl. It was only when Haider shouted at the police that they separated the two. The families are often not allowed anywhere near their daughters and Rinkel’s parents and their supporters have received public death threats from Mian Mitho and his abettors.

It was against this climate of intimidation that the court decided to move Rinkel and Dr Lata, a 29-year-old who also converted and got married in February, to Islamabad. Haider will not be representing any of the cases in the Supreme Court but he believes it was the right decision to move the girls to more neutral territory. “Keep the girls in Islamabad in a protected area but you can’t keep them there forever. I hope the court holds judicial inquiries into each and every case.”

Haider emphasised the importance of cross-examining all the witnesses since the girls’ statements are often made under duress. And he also pointed out the importance of having a liberal judge since, in his words, “There are bigots everywhere.”

Rinkel and Lata had their court hearing in Islamabad on March 26. Rinkel was barely able to speak and it took her two minutes to answer whether she studied science or arts in school. Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudry instructed everybody to leave the court so that he could talk to the girls privately. The girls were then allowed to briefly meet their parents before being sent to Darul-Aman for two weeks, according to the court’s orders.

In a phone conversation the day after the ruling, Rinkel’s father, Nand Lal, revealed that in the few minutes the family spent with Rinkel, she cried non-stop and said that she wanted to return home with them. She also told them that Mian Mitho’s men had threatened her to not make a statement in favour of her family. While her father hopes that Darul-Aman will provide a safe environment for his daughter, the family does fear that Mian Mitho’s men will be able to reach her there as well. If Rinkel is happily married, as Mian Mitho and his followers like to claim, then why do they feel the need to resort to these intimidatory tactics?

PPP MNA Nafisa Shah, who has publicly condemned the forced conversions, believes this environment of intimidation is the main source of the problem. “Coercion does not just mean using brute force,” she said, “We have an extremely claustrophobic environment in which there is space for only one religion.” And it is this claustrophobic environment that limits opportunities for minority communities in the country and makes the offer to convert and get married all the more alluring to young, vulnerable women. Nafisa Shah also pointed out that Hindus are rarely involved in serious crimes in Pakistan, but because they don’t have arms, they become all the more vulnerable to outside threats.

Nafisa Shah did not want to specifically talk about Mian Mitho, but she made it clear that these forced conversions go against the ideology of the PPP and points out that people like Shahbaz Bhatti and Salmaan Taseer lost their lives as a result of speaking up against prejudicial laws. Shah emphasised that the space for dialogue and multi-faith expression is shrinking and attributes Talibanisation as the source of this problem. She also added that conversions are not an issue, but the fact that in Pakistan it is a one-way street of only minorities converting to Islam that causes concern.

According to Bharti’s nikahnama she is 18-years-old.

Abdul Hai, assistant coordinator at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, agrees that there is nothing wrong with converting, even if it is for the sole purpose of getting married. “The real problem is where is the girl going?” he adds “Maulvis will say in court that the girl’s parents are kafirs and that she can no longer meet them. How can you forcibly cut the girl off from her parents?”

Senior journalist and human rights activist, Akhtar Baloch reiterates the points made by both Shah and Hai: “You cannot stop adults from converting or getting married. But why is it only the Hindus who are converting to Islam? And that too girls? Why don’t we have men converting to Islam or Muslims converting to other religions?”

Baloch is also concerned that the cases being highlighted in the media are of those who are financially more secure and he fears that there are countless more cases that go ignored.

One such case is that of Bharti. On December 2011, Narain Das found his daughter was missing from home and filed an FIR at the Baghdadi thana only to soon discover that his daughter had run off with Abid, the son of Anwar Kalia who is a constable at Preedy police station.

This is not the first time one of Das’s children ran off to convert to Islam. Around 12 years ago, Das’s employers, car dealers, lured his oldest son Lakshman, who was at the time barely a teenager, to convert to Islam. The men, who Das drove cars for, would send the young boy to fetch alcohol and when Das scolded him, they suggested that he convert so that he would no longer have to live by his parent’s rules. Das and his wife would try to visit Lakshman but each time he would run away. When Das finally got a hold of his son, Lakshman said that he ran away because he was told that if he met his non-Muslim parents they would all become wajib-ul-qatl. Das had enough knowledge of Islam to know this was untrue but as a cautionary measure got a fatwa from a neighbourhood maulvi. When Lakshman was nearly 18, Das proposed to his son’s converters that they should get his son married and help him get started in life. The next day, Das was called to take his son back home.

“I bet nobody in all of Pakistan has done what I did next to my son,” said Das. He went on to relate how he got his son a job with a Muslim butcher and when a Hindu girl fell in love with his son, he told her parents that she would have to convert to Islam since his son is a Muslim.

“I have a Muslim son. I have Muslim grandchildren. And I am the Hindu dada of those children,” Narain said, stating that he has no issue with his daughter converting to Islam. What offends him is that his daughter was lured to run away and that Kalia’s family is preventing them from contacting each other.

Also, Das has NADRA documents stating that Bharti is 15 but the police got a medical report alleging that she is 18, over which Das lost the court case.

Das was visibly furious when I met him. “If these NADRA documents hold no meaning, then close down all their offices in the country. And how can Bharti suddenly be older than her brother Sunny? Next they’ll come and say she’s older than her parents.”

The family has received death threats for pursuing this case and Das added, “The biggest mistake I made was hiring Amarnath Motumal as my lawyer. Not because Amarnath is a bad person, but because he is a Hindu and the other side clearly threatened him.”

Motumal, who is also the vice-chairman of HRCP, confirmed that Bharti is indeed only 15 but the case is now unfortunately closed and he hopes public outcry might lead to a new, fairer trial.

Das revealed how Anwar Kalia had the police on his side. The DIG Sindh ruled that Bharti should be taken to a women’s thana and that Anwar Kalia’s family would not be allowed to visit her there. However, these orders were ignored and Kalia’s family would go take meals to Bharti everyday. He also describes Bharti’s alleged husband (Das and his family do not recognise the marriage since Bharti was under coercion) as a good-for-nothing drunkard and drug addict. Her brothers tell me I can ask anyone in the neighbourhood about Abid’s reputation.

Occasionally her brothers were able to speak to her on the phone and they said she would always cry and say she made a mistake. In trying to get in touch with Bharti, I spoke to Abid’s uncle who firmly advised me to move on and not bother them, saying “Bharti is happily married so there is no point in talking to her.”

He admitted that they medically proved her age but did not want to disclose the name of the hospital or doctor they went to. And the maulvi who presided over the nikah ceremony, Mohammed Abbasi, was of little help as well. When asked how he confirmed Bharti, or rather Ayesha’s age, when she had no form of identification on her, he said, “She said so. And you can tell by looking if someone is 15 or 18.”

He also shamelessly told me how Narain Das spoke to him on the phone for an hour, begging for help, but he did nothing. “I have given my statement to the police and the girl married willingly.” It also does not concern him that the witnesses were only from the boy’s side even though in Islam, witnesses from the bride’s side are required.

“If they didn’t accept me as a witness because I’m Hindu, then why didn’t they take my Muslim son as a witness?” Das asks. “And why is it that Dr Lata who is 29 is taken to a women’s shelter, but my 15-year-old daughter is sent away with the accused? Why should I be dealt a different judgement because I am poor?”

Had Rinkel’s family not been able to find the right contacts, had Mian Mitho not been involved, had the Pakistan Hindu Council not decided to take up the issue, her case too perhaps would have been left ignored.

New cases of forced abductions are emerging every month. But Nafisa Shah is sceptical about giving exact figures because nobody is able to find out for certain if the girl in question converted willingly or not. How can one know when soon after the conversion, the girls are married off and cut off from the public? Even in the rare case in which a girl speaks up, there is fear of persecution. According to Seema Rana, a member of the Hindu community who is doing research on these conversions, a girl from Lyari was asked to take an oath on the Quran in court. She refused, saying that she cannot take the oath since she is a Hindu and was forcibly converted. The girl was returned to her parents, but her family feared the accused might take revenge and immediately got her married. Even though the girl is willing to talk about her experiences, her family is too afraid to give her name to the media.

Without access to the girls themselves, we can only imagine what truly happened to them.

The Lost Girls

These young girls – long forgotten by all but their families – were allegedly kidnapped from their homes and forced to convert to Islam.

In December 2009, 13-year-old Radha Ram’s parents reported that she was kidnapped from their home in Rahim Yar Khan. She was kept in a madrassa and Abdul Jabbar, the leader of the madrassa, prevented the Hindu family members from meeting her since she was now Muslim.

Four men kidnapped 13-year-old Mashu from Jhaluree, a village near Mirpur Khas, on December 22, 2005. They then allegedly forced her to convert to Islam and renamed her Mariam. Pir Ayub Jan Sarhandi was involved in her conversion and soon after her abduction and conversion, she was married to one of the kidnappers.

Anita Kumar, a 22-year-old Hindu woman with two young children, was kidnapped from her house in Moro, Sindh in April 2011. In the process her two children, aged four and two, were beaten up and locked up alone in the house. The Supreme Court allowed her marriage to a Muslim man, even though she was still married to her first husband, Suresh Kumar. She has since then been renamed Aneela Fatima Pervez.

Gajri, a 15-year-old Hindu girl, was kidnapped by a neighbour from her home in Katchi Mandi in the Rahim Yar Khan district on December 21, 2009. She was later discovered in a madrassa, but by then she had already been converted to Islam and married to her neighbour, Mohammed Salim. Her parents later received an affidavit, in which the daughter stated that she had converted to Islam willingly but they were not sent a copy of the marriage certificate. The parents are not allowed to visit their daughter since they are non-Muslims.

On October 18, 2005, a Hindu driver, Sanno Amra, came home from work to find that his three daughters Reena, Usha and Rima had disappeared from their house in Punjab Colony, Karachi. The oldest sister was 21 and the youngest was 17 – legally still a minor. When Amra pursued the case he started receiving death threats and eventually found affidavits in the mail, which stated that his daughters had willingly converted to Islam. The parents were only allowed to briefly visit the daughters, and that too in the presence of maulvis and police officers.

This article was originally published in the April 2012 issue of Newsline under the headline “Unholy Vows.”

Probe Launched on Links between Pak Jail Break and Afghanistan Attacks

Bannu jail break (Credit: tribune.com)

PESHAWAR, April 16: Authorities on Monday removed four senior officials over a jail break in the restive northwest and launched a probe into whether it had any link to multiple attacks in Afghanistan.

The provincial government said a “total failure” of intelligence was to blame for the break-out, in which dozens of inmates including Taliban militants and death row prisoners fled a prison after armed militants attacked before dawn on Sunday.

More than 150 heavily-armed militants stormed the jail outside the town of Bannu, near the lawless tribal region where Taliban and al Qaeda linked militants have carved out their stronghold.

“It was a total failure of intelligence agencies,” Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told a news conference.

The militants came in dozens of vehicles, continued to operate for more than two hours and went back undetected, he said.

“We have removed the deputy superintendent of Bannu Jail, the city commissioner and two other senior police officers,” he said, adding that a five-member committee had been set up to investigate the matter.

The provincial government has also taken note that the jail break in Pakistan coincided with multiple attacks by Taliban insurgents across the border in Afghanistan on Sunday.

Some 36 insurgents were killed nationwide as Afghan forces regained control of Kabul on Monday 18-hour after the Taliban assault, which left 11 members of the security forces and four civilians dead.

Hussain said “the committee will try to find out whether the jail break in Pakistan, claimed by local Taliban, had any link to coordinated attacks in Afghanistan.” Senior Bannu police official Iftikhar Khan earlier told AFP that a total of 384 inmates had escaped the jail, of whom 53 returned voluntarily while 11 others were arrested.

Most of those who escaped were militants, including 34 prisoners on death row.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack which he said was launched to free some of their key members.

The attack began around 1:00 am (2000 GMT Saturday) and continued for two hours, with militants in cars and pick-up trucks shooting and throwing grenades to force their way into the prison, which held 944 prisoners.

A former member of the air force sentenced to death for an attack on former president Pervez Musharraf was among the escaped militants, according to officials.

Adnan Rasheed was convicted after a bomb planted under a bridge in Rawalpindi near Islamabad in December 2003 exploded moments after Musharraf’s motorcade passed. His appeal is pending before the Supreme Court.

 

Glacial Surge Buried Soldiers at Siachen – Expert

Siachen Glacier (Credit: nation.com.pk)

Neither it was the cloudburst nor the avalanche but the “glacier surge” that buried the men stationed at Siachen, Arshad H Abbasi, an expert on water and climate changes, told The News.

“Glacier surge is phenomena caused either by rise in temperature or some tectonic movement, where a glacier advances substantially, moving at velocities up to 100 times faster than normal,” he said.

Keeping in view the record of tremors occurring in the last one month, Abbasi insists that rise in temperature caused “the increase of melt-water at the base of a glacier that untimely reduced the frictional restrictions to glacial ice flow and transfer of large volumes of ice on Pakistan’s Army Camp.”

“The rising temperature is directly proportional with huge number of military presence in area. That is fundamental cause of melting glacier at an unprecedented rate,” he argued. “The actual retreat is not only evident by the snout of the glacier, but the real concern is the reduction of the glacier’s mass balance, which is the difference between accumulation and ablation (melting and sublimation).”

Having received the latest images of the glacier, Abbasi says it shows “visible cracks in the midst of glacier and above all the number of glacial lakes that have formed.”

‘Voodoo Science’ practitioners are justified in saying that Indian Army is playing pivotal role in global warming, causing the fast melting of Siachen Glacier.

Those claiming Siachen is melting due to global warming are advised to look into the report titled ‘Advancing Glaciers and Positive Mass Anomaly in the Karakoram Himalaya’ published by NASA. The report says of the glaciers in Karakoram, more than 65 percent are growing. They term abnormality as “Karakoram anomaly”. Therefore, it’s just a myth that Siachen is melting because of global warming, as it’s case of direct human interference, climate change.

During Track-II dialogues, Abbasi said, he had again been raising the question of the audit of Siachen Glacier to know the reduction of its volume, which was always declined by the Indian government. The climate change is by far the biggest threat ever encountered by humankind.

“It is time that the global leadership and community work with Pakistani and Indian leaders to save Himalayan glaciers by solving the longstanding Siachen dispute. This conflict is adding to environmental degradation, sea level rise and changing climate pattern but it is also depriving the poor of both countries of close to one billion dollars every year that these countries spend to maintain troops there,” he said.

SC Verdict Leaves Hindu Girls Conversion Issue Unresolved

Hindu Protestors in Karachi (Credit: tribune.com.pk)

ISLAMABAD, April 18: The chief justice was in a hurry for once. In just the second hearing on Wednesday of a case related to the conversion of three Hindu women, a Supreme Court bench, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, wrapped up the case and announced its judgment.

The three young women present in the court were told to express their ‘true’ feelings about what they wanted to do and Sindh police were ordered to be their ‘protectors’ — ensure their safety and their happiness.

Police were asked to submit reports every fortnight about the wellbeing of the women.

The women did not utter a word during the proceedings. Later they were sent off to the registrar’s office to pour their hearts out.

In between, they were kept apart from their parents; they were taken to the registrar’s office from a different route so that no one would run into them.

The women recorded their statements before the registrar and decided to go with their husbands.

The judgment, however, did not go down well with the hapless parents. For the rest of the afternoon, the human tragedy that is the Hindu minority in Pakistan was played out on the steps of the Supreme Court building and outside as the families spoke to media and protested the verdict. Wednesday did not bring them the justice for which they had travelled from Sindh to Islamabad.

The women who appeared before the court under the watchful eyes of Sindh police were Rinkal Kumari, 19, (now known as Faryal Bibi) of Mirpur Mathelo, Dr Lata Kumari, 30, (Hafsa) of Jacobabad, and Aasha Devi, 19, (Haleema Bibi) of Jacobabad, who earlier was missing but surfaced voluntarily.

“We gave these girls sufficient time to think about their future and we will not force them. They are grown-up and are allowed to go wherever they want to go,” the chief justice observed. He said they were sui juris (one who has reached maturity and is no longer dependent) and, therefore, fully in a position to decide about the future.

“We feel they (the women) stayed in a pressure-free atmosphere at the Panah Shelter Home in Karachi where neither of the parties was allowed to meet them,” the court observed.

The order, however, generated instant commotion inside the courtroom, prompting the chief justice to ask the counsel for different parties to urge their clients to maintain discipline.

Frantic developments were seen soon after the announcement of the verdict. Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, patron of the Pakistan Hindu Council (PHC), called an emergent meeting to discuss implications of the verdict.

The PHC also filed a petition highlighting abduction of Hindu girls who were then forced to change their religion and married off to Muslim men. The court will take up the case after two weeks.

The disappointed parents of these women and members of the Hindu community, including parliamentarians from the ruling PPP, staged a sit-in outside the Supreme Court for some time and called for giving custody of the women to their parents.

“This is complete injustice in the name of Islam,” shouted Mohen, father of Aasha, outside the courtroom. He asked why the court did not take into consideration a demand by police for payment of Rs1.8 million for recovering the girl — a demand which was raised to Rs3.5 million and then to Rs5 million. “From where we will fetch this kind of money.”

He said the Hindu community was being forced to leave Pakistan.

The mothers of the three women kept weeping and wailing outside the Supreme Court and alleged that the court had never allowed the girls to meet their parents.

Ramesh Lal, a PPP MNA from Larkana, said minorities had lost all hopes in the country’s judiciary and today justice had been buried forever. “Why the judiciary, which never tires of taking suo motu notices against the president and the prime minister, is not taking notice about police demanding money from the victim families to recover the girls,” he asked.

Noor Naz Agha, the counsel for Rinkal, however, welcomed the verdict and said the court had rightly accepted that being adult, the girls had a right to live their lives according to their choice.

But she held the absence of legislation responsible for the rising number of complaints about forced conversions and marriages.

Mian Aslam, son of MNA Faqir Abdul Haq alias Mian Mitho, who was accused of abducting Rinkal, rejected the allegations, wondering “if we kidnapped her then why she was produced before the magistrate to record her will and later handed over to police”.

He brushed aside an impression that the girls were converted to Islam forcibly.

Indo-Pak Civilians Renew Calls to Demilitarize Siachen Glacier

Entrance to Siachen Glacier (Credit: news.kuwaitimes.net)

ISLAMABAD, April 11 — Pakistan and India’s military standoff in the frozen high mountains of Kashmir is not only costing soldiers’ lives, experts say — it is also wreaking havoc on the environment.

A huge avalanche on Saturday devastated Pakistan’s Gayani army camp on the fringes of the Siachen Glacier, where Pakistani and Indian soldiers brave bitter conditions to eyeball each other in a long-running territorial dispute.

Environmental experts say the heavy military presence is speeding up the melting of the glacier, one of the world’s largest outside the polar regions, and leaching poisonous materials into the Indus river system.

Faisal Nadeem Gorchani of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad said the glacier had shrunk by 10 kilometres (six miles) in the last 35 years. “More than half of the glacier reduction comes from the military presence,” he said.

Pakistani hydrologist and Siachen specialist Arshad Abbasi gave an even more alarming assessment of the glacier’s decline, and said that non-militarised areas had not suffered so badly. “More than 30 percent of the glacier has melted since 1984, while most of the Karakoram glaciers on the Pakistani side expanded,” he said.

Troop movements, training exercises and building infrastructure all accelerate melting, Gorchani said. Waste from the military camps is also a major problem, harming the local environment and threatening to pollute the water systems that millions of people across the subcontinent depend upon.

“Indian army officials have described the Siachen as ‘the world’s biggest and highest garbage dump’,” US expert Neal Kemkar said in an article for the Stanford Environmental Law Journal.

The report quoted estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature saying that on the Indian side alone, more than 900 kilos (2,000 pounds) of human waste was dropped into crevasses every day.

Kemkar said that 40 percent of the military waste was plastics and metal, and as there are no natural biodegrading agents present, “metals and plastics simply merge with the glacier as permanent pollutants, leaching toxins like cobalt, cadmium, and chromium into the ice.”

“This waste eventually reaches the Indus River, affecting drinking and irrigation water that millions of people downstream from the Siachen, both Indian and Pakistani, depend upon,” the report said.

Kemkar also warned the conflict had affected wildlife, with the habitat of animals such as the endangered snow leopard, the brown bear and the ibex — a type of wild goat — all threatened.

There is virtually no chance of any of the 138 people buried by Saturday’s avalanche being found alive, so they will likely be added to the list of those claimed by Siachen, dubbed “the world’s highest battleground”, with outposts more than 6,000 metres high.

An estimated 8,000 troops have died in the glacier’s freezing wastes since conflict over the area flared in 1984. Colonel Sher Khan, a retired Pakistani officer and mountain expert, says that not a single shot has been fired in anger in at least eight years and combat deaths in Siachen have numbered only in the dozens.

The rest have succumbed to frostbite, altitude sickness, heart failure and inadequate cold weather equipment — as well as avalanches and landslides.

Military experts quoted in local media say a Pakistani soldier dies around every three or four days in Siachen, and the latest disaster has led to louder calls for a negotiated end to the standoff, particularly given the huge expense of maintaining troops at such a high altitude.

The cost of the operation is kept under wraps but Pakistani daily newspaper The News reported that Pakistan spends $60 million a year on Siachen and India more than $200 million. In two countries where millions live below the poverty line this is a lot of money to defend an frozen, uninhabitable patch of mountain, but after nearly 30 years of stalemate, no-one is expecting a swift end to the dispute.

“It’s a matter of ego. Nobody is ready to take that step, even if they want it, because elections are coming,” said retired colonel Khan.

The soldiers facing each other across the icy, inhospitable mountain wastes have one thing in common, at least.

“India and Pakistan are not fighting each other in Siachen, they are both fighting the glacier, and nature takes its revenge by killing soldiers,” said Abbasi.

Zardari Yatra Eggs on Indo-Pak Peace Process

Pak President Zardari Meets Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (Credit: ft.com)

One of the more unheralded achievements of the PPP government has been the way it has repaired relations from the nadir of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, when war seemed a very realistic possibility. Rather than try to be overly ambitious, the government has cautiously taken small steps towards lasting peace, with trade and regular high-level meetings inching the process forward.

President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip to the shrine of Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer, which allowed him to hold talks with Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, was yet another indicator that the two countries are moving firmly towards setting up a lasting peace between them. By all accounts the talks were cordial and Dr Singh accepted Zardari’s offer of a return visit to Pakistan. This was also the first time a Pakistani head of state had visited India since Musharraf in 2005, marking another landmark in the slow return to normalcy.

The two countries are fortunate that they both have leaders who are committed to the peace process but that does not mean that danger is not lurking around every corner. The army could easily scuttle whatever progress has been made by working around the elected government and embarking on yet another military adventure along the lines of the Kargil conflict.

In India, too, the hawks (of which significant sections of the media is a part) remains resolutely anti-Pakistan. Issues like Hafiz Saeed, who had a bounty placed on him by the US for actionable information leading to his conviction, are still unsolved. The two have so far decided to at least go ahead with lowering trade barriers with Pakistan set to grant India Most-Favoured Nation status by the end of the year. However, the rigid visa regime between the two, which makes it next to impossible for the citizens of either to visit, must be relaxed as well.

Also, as the recent landslide tragedy at Siachen has showed, both countries need to realise that perhaps the time has come to demilitarise the glacier.

Far more lives on either side have been lost to the ravages of weather than to actual combat and the cost of maintaining troops for both countries on the world’s highest battlefield should be enough to necessitate a final push for a bilateral drawdown.

 

Turf Wars Heat up on Pak-Afghan Border

Jalozai Camp in Mardan (Credit: rescue.org)

JALOZAI, April 8 – Banmaroo stands in the dust, tears rolling down her cheeks as she recalls how her husband was killed in Pakistan’s latest battle zone on the Afghan border. “He was just a labourer. Firing started. I don’t know who killed him, but I was handed his body in the afternoon. It was in such a rough condition, just pieces,” she said, wiping her face with her green veil.

Too frightened to cope alone and worried that her children would also become caught up in fighting between the army and local warlord Mangal Bagh, she fled. “We felt danger everywhere. If the situation becomes good and our area gets freedom, we’ll go back. We need peace,” she said.

Travelling from her home in Khyber, Banmaroo and her six children arrived at Jalozai, Pakistan’s largest refugee camp, three weeks ago. She is among more than 250,000 people, mostly women and children, Save the Children says have fled the violence since January.

Khyber lies just outside Peshawar in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt, on the Afghan border, still considered the world’s premier Al-Qaeda hub despite the killing of Osama bin Laden and the impact of US drone strikes. But the war in Bara, where Banmaroo and her children remember a once-idyllic life, is far murkier than a simple fight between the state and Islamist militants who want to impose sharia law and purge communities of infidels.

Troops have struggled since 2009 to defeat Bagh, a former bus conductor who founded Lashkar-e-Islam, a militia better known for kidnapping and extortion than religion. Now soldiers are stepping up the fight, keen to quell Bara to protect nearby Peshawar, the sprawling city where an increase in bomb and rocket attacks has been linked to the fighting in Khyber.

As a result, thousands of refugees stream into Jalozai everyday. Young men queue up to register in droves, standing or squatting under the burning sun. Security guards armed with sticks swipe queue-jumpers. “Five thousand people are expected to register today. Three days back it was 2,900,” UNHCR field officer Changaiz Mataul Hussain told AFP.

It’s a scene that Jalozai knows only too well. For 26 years, it was home to Afghans fleeing Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule. Then in 2007, six years after the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban and when life in Afghanistan appeared to be improving, Pakistan closed the camp. Afghans were either voluntarily repatriated or told to find new homes.

But when the Pakistani Taliban rose up against the government in late 2007, Pakistan’s own creeping conflict forced Jalozai to re-open. With a capacity of 140,000, according to Hussain, nowhere else offered temporary shelter to so many Pakistanis displaced by conflict.

In 2008, the refugees came from the tribal district of Bajaur, then from neighbouring Mohmand and in 2009 there was a huge influx from the Swat valley, where the army managed to put down a Taliban insurgency. Today, the majority of the 109,515 in the camp are from Bara. They speak of their horror at gun battles, air strikes and mortar rounds destroying houses, but few go into details, fearful of spies.

Life in Jalozai is hard. Residents say there is no electricity, particularly galling at night. Children complain of eating rice day after day. The newest arrivals are ensconced some distance from the ordered blocks of tents protected by fences of plastic sheeting, on a stretch of desolate land where children scramble across the stone-strewn landscape.

It is only in the relative privacy of a tent that Khayalzar, a wild-haired man squatting on his haunches, is prepared to be more candid. “If you’re against Mangal Bagh, you’ll be slaughtered, so everyone is afraid. One of my neighbours was selling hashish. Mangal Bagh people threatened him many times, but he kept on doing it,” he said.

“Then one day, they came, put him inside a vehicle and drove off. On the second day, a headless body was dumped outside the village. Five or six days later, we found the head.” But it is not just the army fighting Lashkar-e-Islam. The militia is also embroiled in deadly turf wars with rivals, including the Pakistani Taliban.

Two suicide attacks outside Lashkar mosques killed 27 people last month in the Tirah valley, a hashish-growing area well outside government control, where Bagh’s turf war with the Taliban is concentrated.

“It’s very complex,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a tribal affairs expert. “There is no real goal. The main factor now is to be in control.” But the outcome of the army offensive is also unclear. It is not a sweeping operation as in Swat and despite numerous claims to have cleared other parts of the tribal belt, fighting continues and violence remains a problem.

“Mangal Bagh and the government are two faces of the same coin. We’ve suffered from both sides,” snaps Salma, sitting on the side of a dusty track, a crumpled burqa obscuring her face and body. “Mangal Bagh targets us on the ground and government jets target us from the air,” she says. “Only God can bring peace.”