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It’s just not cricket

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

This is a postscript of sorts to Bill Verrall’s two posts last week ‘The Great Game…again’ parts one and two.

Television news on Saturday 28 August 2010 carried the surprising and shocking news that the Pakistan cricket team was engaged in match fixing. The only surprise in this matter was that the media purported to be surprised. Cricket is not a game of the masses in Pakistan. It is a game of the urban middle classes and as such it cannot help but be as corrupt and venal as is the government of Pakistan which also springs from these classes. While this bit of sporting trivia would not normally be of interest to readers of Policy Progress this news item is elucidating in providing an understanding of the problems America has had in pursuing its military and diplomatic objectives in Afghanistan.

I have previously explained how the US gave birth to radical Islam using the Pakistan Intelligence Services (ISI) and how it could not control the either ISI or the Islamic fundamentalist organizations it created. The problem, however, does not rest there as the level of corruption in Pakistan is such that it undermines the credibility of the very government that America needs most, in its fight against both the Taliban and al Queda.

A major factor in facilitating the rise of Islamic extremism in Pakistan has been the corruption of the ruling classes and government. Just as in the 19th and 20th century when poverty was seen as the ideal breeding ground for communism so to in the latter part of the 20th and into the 21st century poverty has been the natural spawning ground for Islamic extremism in Pakistan The corruption endemic in Pakistan’s ruling elites has ensured that the problems associated with poverty have never been addressed as the elite gradually became more and more isolated from the vast majority of Pakistan’s population

Corruption seems to have been a theme of Pakistan’s Government from its very earliest days. Even Jinnah, its legendary founding father, is alleged to have attempted to embroil the US state department in underhand dealings regarding the possible purchase of his own house as the site for the new US embassy. Minor though this one example may be it shows how even Jinnah who is revered as “Father of the Nation” was not above using his position in such a manner.

Over the last few decades Pakistan’s government has been shared between the Sharifs, the Bhuttos and the Military. Both of these families have sought to enrich themselves during their stints in power. Government has not been an opportunity to serve the nation, or to implement important national policies, rather government has been the occasion to enrich oneself and one supporters and to take revenge upon one’s opponents.

Pakistan’s most well known civilian politicians are the Bhutto family. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto founded the PPP (Pakistan Peoples Party) in 1966. His daughter, Benazir Bhutto took over the party after his execution in April 1979 and in an amazing example of feudal patronage, in December 2007, she nominated her son as her successor but with the proviso that her husband would rule in his place till her son came of age to take up the leadership himself. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, is the current prime minister of Pakistan. The extent to which Benazir Bhutto and her husband have used their political positions to enrich themselves at the expense of their opponents and the poverty stricken masses is the stuff of legend.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was elected to power in 1970 on a radical reform platform which promised to curtail the power of Pakistan’s elite. An estimated 22 families were reported to control 70% of industry, 80% of banking and 90% of Insurance. The Economic Reform Order of 1972 nationalized the insurance and banking industries and also nationalized about seventy industrial complexes. However, the aim of the nationalization was not one of redistributing wealth to the nation or to the poor. Wealth was redistributed, but it was redistributed into the hands of Bhutto and his supporters. Rival politicians such as the Sharif family were particularly targeted in these ‘nationalizations’ and the Sharifs lost their steel foundry to the government. Such actions meant that when Bhutto and his supporters were removed from power those who had ‘lost out’ under that government used their period of influence to make up for lost time and amass as much money as possible in the shortest possible time.

Bhutto was removed from power in 1977 by the army under general Zia-ul-Haq. When Zia was assassinated in an Aircraft explosion in 1988 Pakistan temporarily reverted to a period of civilian rule with power alternating between the Bhutto family and the Sharif family. This was again a period of unrivalled corruption.

During this period Benazir Bhutto was in power on two occasions. By the end of her second period in power her marriage to Asif Ali Zardari had resulted in such massive personal corruption that foreign governments began to take legal actions against the Bhutto/Zardari partnership. Zardari, then Benazir Bhutto’s husband, but today Prime Minister in his own right, is alleged to have been paid 10 million dollars in return for awarding the sole rights to import gold into Pakistan to a bullion dealer in Dubai. In 1995 Zardari and a colleague are alleged to have orchestrated a deal with Dassault Aviation of France for $4 billion dollars worth of jet fighters upon the payment of US$200 million to Zardari and his colleague. In another instance of fraud a Swiss company is ironically alleged to have paid millions of dollars into Zardari’s off-shore accounts after being awarded a contract to prevent customs fraud in Pakistan.

It was widely acknowledged in Pakistan the Bhutto and Zardari had amassed a personal fortune in excess of 1.5 billion dollars. Eventually her intransigence and refusal to rein-in her husband led the president to seek army support and Leghari, the president, removed her from office and called for new elections.

Surprise surprise! The new elections returned to power Nawaz Sharif supported by his brother Shahbaz. It was Nawaz Sharif who appointed Pervez Musharraf to the position of Army chief of staff. Later in 1999 Musharraf overthrew Sharif and installed himself as the new ruler of Pakistan. Musharraf held this position till 2008 when, after a major political miscalculation concerning the sacking of the Pakistan Supreme Court chief justice, Musharraf was replaced as ruler by none other than Asif Ali Zardari.

While this pattern of corruption is widespread in many nations its importance to American foreign policy cannot be underestimated. Pakistan is the nation America sought to use to initially support the mujahideen freedom fighters, including the Taliban, so that they could be used against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Pakistan is the only nation that America can use in a geographic and political sense to help it in its current war in Afghanistan. However, Pakistan’s corruption coupled with the USA’s earlier policy of encouraging the radicalization of Islam and the formation of extremist groups has now resulted in a vast mass of poverty stricken illiterate, malnourished and unemployed Pakistanis who have proved to be excellent recruits for the new Islamic jihadist groups.

These combinations of Pakistani corruption and American interference have led to a situation where the Pakistan government is no longer in control of significant portions of its own countryside. The Taliban and other Islamic groups rule huge swaths of the countryside. The recent attacks by the Pakistan army in the Swat valley have been forced on the Pakistani government as it desperately tries to regain its own countryside from its own disenchanted subjects.

To what extent the current army attacks will succeed in destroying the Islamic extremists is very uncertain. Most analysts are currently betting that Barak Obama’s only hope of obtaining a pliant Pakistan is by negotiating with the Extremists and trying to force a division between those who the US government might find acceptable and those who they will not.

Given that the Taliban who where considered the most hateful, anti-democratic, vengeful and despicable group only a few years ago are now being considered as possible partners in this war, this is an excellent indication of the weak ground on which Barak Obama is trying to build the military foundations of his ongoing battles in Afghanistan.

It’s just not cricket.

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Bill Verrall graduated from Canterbury with a Master in History and Political Science in 1972. He then pursued a career in Education. His last 20 years were as Principal of Fiordland College in Te Anau. He resigned in 2008. He currently spends his time attempting to outthink trout on the waters of Fiordland, reading, and working as a summer ranger for the Department of Conservation.

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The Great Game…again [part two]

Friday, August 27th, 2010

In Part 1 Bill Verrall looked at the rise of extremist groups in Pakistan and the fact that most were funded and equipped by the USA with the support of Pakistan. Today he looks at the internal politics of the USA which lay behind the foreign policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s which lead to the complete dominance of Neo-Conservative policy in US foreign relations. This domination resulted in the creation of groups such as the Taliban.

In many respects these ‘freedom fighters’, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and a myriad of other groups, were the illegitimate children of a group of very conservative American leaders who had struggled during the Ford and Carter presidencies to establish a truly conservative American world view. Given that their world view was not the prevalent view of that time this group became known as “Team B”. Team B included some very powerful people but more importantly as time progressed, through its proselytizing, it was able to involve others and eventually this lead directly to the dominant “neo conservative” (neo-con) philosophy of the 20th century.

At its inception the group included University of Chicago professor and RAND corporation theorist Albert Wohlstetter, Harvard Professor of Czarist history Richard Pipes, Lt General Daniel Graham, Dr Thomas Wolfe of RAND, General John Vogt, Ambassador Fay Kohler, Paul Nitz, Ambassador Seymour Weiss, Maj General Jasper Welsh of the USAF, and Paul Wolfowitz. Their common belief was that the Soviet Union was hugely powerful and growing in power at such a rate as to be able to physically threaten the USA. In line with that fundamental belief the group despised the concept of Détente and sought to destroy it, and with it, the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties. The group did not believe that a nuclear war was unwinnable and sought to reignite the strategic arms race. It also sought to weaken Russia in any way possible and at any cost. It is a testament to the perseverance and power of this group that nearly all of its goals were achieved.

Initially Team B’s most powerful acolyte came to be Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski used his position as National Security Advisor to undermine Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and to turn the initially moderate foreign policy of President Jimmy Carter into a virulently anti-Russian policy. When Ronald Regan assumed the presidency in 1981 the beliefs of Team B began their rapid rise in ascendancy, to point where through the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century these policies became de rigueur across all political spectrums in the USA.

Interesting though the story of the rise and rise of Team B and the Neo Cons is, it is the effect of this policy shift and its direct causal relationship with today’s terrorist groups that is immediately relevant to this discussion.

Under Brzezinski, Team B worked to isolate the USSR in every way possible way. Their greatest success was in preventing Russia from negotiating a peaceful solution to the Afghan crisis of 1979-80. By preventing a diplomatic solution to the crisis they were able to instill such a degree of panic in the Soviet Politburo that eventually the Soviet leadership ordered Soviet troops to invade Afghanistan. Prior to the invasion the Soviet’s own intelligence agencies had reported that such a war would be unwinnable and would be an economic, military and political disaster for the Soviet Union. Brzezinski publicly acknowledged the role the USA played in drawing the Russians into Afghanistan. Brzezinski is quoted as saying “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would”. He is also quoted as telling President Carter “Now we can give the USSR its Vietnam war”.

His motivation was the knowledge that once the Soviets became embroiled in Afghanistan then America would then be able to support the Islamic opposition and ensure that the Soviets suffered a military defeat without America being overtly involved.

As a tactic it was brilliant. The Soviet invasion was a disaster. As Brzezinski had foreseen, when he referred to making Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam, the Soviets became beleaguered in a country ideally suited to guerrilla warfare.

There will always be debate as to the extent America “led” Russia (The USSR) into Afghanistan. What there is no doubt about is the jubilation in the American camp as it foresaw Russia walking into what they dubbed “their Vietnam”. America immediately set about funding the Islamic groups that sprung up to fight the Russian Bear. Whilst the Taliban has come to be the most well known of these groups it was not alone. A host of groups were formed during the 80s and 90s and despite amalgamations, splits, mergers and disintegrations most of these group still exist in some form today.

Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami are but two such groups. Today they are have a greater degree of independence from the Pakistan army and Pakistan government then they did at the time of their inception.

For many years now there has been real doubt that the Army or the intelligence services could regain control of these groups. The most recent attack on an ISI post in Lahore clearly shows the extent to which the client-patron relationship no longer exists. The USA cannot ignore these groups. They have the ability to destroy US armed intervention in Afghanistan just as they did the Soviet intervention. The USA is therefore attempting to split the groups into two factions, one of which will support it in its war in Afghanistan. (It is interesting to note that one of the possible allied groups is a major portion of the Taliban which only a decade ago was recognised as the scourge of freedom, democracy, modernity and women’s rights.) At the same time as the USA pursues its policy of divide and rule, the Pakistan government and army are forced into a struggle they had long sought to avoid, namely a struggle to reassert their authority over the extremist groups they had previously either actively supported or complicity encouraged.

Thus the the current fighting (pre flood) in the Swat Valley, Waziristan and Baluchistan is a far from simple affair. Just which groups of Islamist are being attacked is not publicly recognised. How other groups are responding to this is not known. The extent to which any army victory is merely window dressing as either the insurgents retreat and regroup in good order, or as they retreat at the request of the ISI or army so that the current flow of US money and arms can continue, it is currently very difficult to ascertain.

The only thing certain is that Brzezinski’s and the Neo Cons’ policy of radicalizing Islamic groups in the 1980s and 1990s has certainly come home to roost.

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Bill Verrall graduated from Canterbury with a Master in History and Political Science in 1972. He then pursued a career in Education. His last 20 years were as Principal of Fiordland College in Te Anau. He resigned in 2008. He currently spends his time attempting to outthink trout on the waters of Fiordland, reading, and working as a summer ranger for the Department of Conservation.

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The Great Game…again

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Part 1 of 2. Bill Verrall looks at the history of two of the radical groups that have been blamed for some of the recent bombings and violence in Pakistan.  He shows that the history of these groups reveals a complex web of international intrigue and that the enemies of these groups were once their strongest supporters. He asks to what extent these groups can now be pacified so the USA can implement its new foreign policy in Afghanistan.

In recent times Pakistani insurgents have attacked the Hotel Marriott in Islamabad, the Indian capital Mumbai, the Sri Lankan cricket team and more recently a police training academy in Lahore, Pakistan. It is unclear exactly which group, or groups, is responsible for these attacks. Although arrests may be made and prosecutions bought to bare it is highly unlikely that the people behind these attacks will ever be held responsible because of the symbiotic relationship these groups have with the Pakistan government.

Two groups that are considered to be leading contenders for a number of these bombings are Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami.

The history of both of these organizations is enlightening. Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami was founded in the early 1980s along with a raft of other extremist groups. The instigation for this sudden upsurge of extremism was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. At that time all these groups were loosely referred to as mujahideen freedom fighters. They were funded and supported by the USA through a compliant Pakistan government. Behind this funding of an obviously violent and religiously motivated extremist group lay America’s greater fear, namely that of a resurgent USSR, with a supposed policy of world domination. During this period of time the USA considered the USSR to be a major threat to its own plans and its own freedom. The deliberate propagation of these extremist groups therefore made complete sense to a government which saw them as the ideal weapons with which to fight the USSR and to wear it down in a war of attrition which the US was confident the USSR could not win. The USA also saw that this was a war in which they would not have to participate directly and which they only had to support with money and arms. To the USA the USSR decision to invade Afghanistan was an opportunity simply too good to resist.

America set about funding, equipping and training resistance groups that would fight the invading Soviets. The vast majority of these groups had a strong Islamic basis. The American leadership saw the growth of radical Islam as the idea proxy vehicle through which they could weaken the USSR. They were in this respect absolutely correct.  For reasons of public acceptability the Islamic groups were termed ‘Mujahideen freedom fighters’ and along with many of the very conservative, traditional, ethnic and tribal leadership groups they fought the soviets to a virtual standstill.  This aspect of American foreign policy was extremely successful.  Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) was but one of a number of groups spawned at this time as a result of America’s unwavering concern about the Soviets supposed strength and plans for world domination.  American funds and intelligence from the Pakistan military and intelligence services were the foundations upon which these groups grew. Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami was thus spawned by the neoconservative policies of the 1970s and 80s. It was funded and armed so that it would undertake terrorist type activities against the Soviet Union. It was encouraged in its fundamentalist ideology because it was this ideology that its creators saw as being necessary to encourage poor, uneducated, provincial Pashtuns to fling themselves into a war against the second greatest military and industrial power on earth.

Lashkar-e-Taiba has an equally interesting history. Lashkar-e-Taiba is the child of the Pakistani Intelligence services. The LeT is the military wing of the Inter-Services Intelligence ISI.  It was formed by the ISI in order to precipitate a war in Kashmir.  Kashmir is a frontier province between India and Pakistan. Its short history is troubled by rivalry between these two powers. An initial conflict at the time of partition resulted in Kashmir also being partitioned with India receiving the lion’s share.

In 1999 the Pakistan army used its protégés the Lashkar-e-Taiba to launch a surprise attack in Kashmir. Kashmir is so remote and inhospitable that in a longstanding agreement both India and Pakistan withdrew their troops during the extreme depths of winter. Thus the Pakistan irregulars had spectacular early successes against no opposition and occupied a significant section of Indian Kashmir. However, India responded by sending its crack regiments supported by artillery and airpower back into the region and Pakistan’s forces were forced to retreat. Lashkar-e-Taiba has remained an off-shoot of the ISI to this day.  Lashkar-e-Taiba is the group many analysts believe to be responsible for the attack in Mumbai on Nov 26 2008 and the attacks in 2009 against the Sri Lankan cricket team.

Although Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami are but two of a large number of such groups, they typify the degree to which these organizations were fostered by large “patron” states. They also typify the fact that the USA and Pakistan have to a large degree lost control of their earlier puppets and are now engaged in counterinsurgency incursions and open warfare against their once pliant clients. Pakistan remains the key to a successful outcome for Barak Obama’s foreign Policy in Afghanistan. The current situation in The Swat valley, Waziristan and more particularly Baluchistan and the general boarder area shows the extent to which past actions by both the American and Pakistani governments have ironically created the greatest difficulties these two states currently face in achieving their goals.

Tomorrow - Part 2 looks at the internal politics of the USA which resulted in the creation of groups such as the Taliban.

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Bill Verrall graduated from Canterbury with a Master in History and Political Science in 1972. He then pursued a career in Education. His last 20 years were as Principal of Fiordland College in Te Anau. He resigned in 2008. He currently spends his time attempting to outthink trout on the waters of Fiordland, reading, and working as a summer ranger for the Department of Conservation.

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