In September of 2010, Pastor Terry Jones, an obscurantist preacher from Florida, caught the attention of senior US political, diplomatic and military leadership when he threatened to burn a copy of the Holy Quran. Ultimately, Mr Jones desisted from this inflammatory folly after achieving several days of sustained fame and after receiving various entreaties by US President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others. Mr Jones promised to not revisit the subject in the future.

In early January 2011, he announced that he would hold an “International Judge the Koran [sic] Day”. This round of theatrics drew no press attention. On March 20, 2011 Mr Jones served as the judge in this ‘trial’ in which a copy of the Holy Quran was burnt. Despite the small turnout, Jones declared the event a success.

The bizarre mock trial and execution of Islam’s most revered book went unnoticed in the American and international media until April 1, when angry mobs in the usually peaceful northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif stormed a UN compound and slaughtered at least eight people. The violence quickly spread to Kandahar, Jalalabad and Kabul.

While Mr Jones was deliberately provocative, this butchery of innocent Afghans and international UN workers is mind-boggling. How is it possible that the actions of a reviled, fringe lunatic in central Florida could result in the deaths of so many people — including Afghan Muslims?

The Holy Quran crisis underscores a clash of juridical cultures. In the United States, though Jones’ actions are repugnant, they are legal. The pastor enjoys the same freedom of speech and freedom of religion that all Americans enjoy, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, etc. His right to offend is the other side of the coin that protects our religious freedoms. Tolerating hatemongering shenanigans is the price we pay for our freedoms.

While some Muslims may find this tolerance abhorrent, many Americans recoil at laws in Muslim countries, which are intolerant. Blasphemy laws in many such countries can carry a death sentence; are often employed for motives that are anything but religious; and are usually used against non-Muslims. In January, a zealot assassinated Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, because he suggested reforming Pakistan’s blasphemy law. While Pastor Jones is an obscure and reviled figure in the United States, Taseer’s killer, Mumtaz Qadri, became nationally acclaimed as a hero and was even festooned with flowers and gifts.

Clashing legal and civil values alone cannot explain the bloody violence that has erupted across Afghanistan this weekend. Sensible people understand differences in legal regimes across states and do not easily mobilise into murderous mobs. Sensible people understand that killing innocent people is not condoned in any religion.

Nor does the act of desecrating the Holy Quran itself satisfactorily exculpate Sunni militants who have attacked and razed dozens of Shia mosques and Sufi shrines in Pakistan in recent years alone. This has not sparked outrage.

If senseless Holy Quran burning was so universally viewed as a legitimate precipitant of massacres of innocents, why has violence not erupted elsewhere? If frustration with international occupation and episodic but gruesome human rights violations of US and international troops had explanatory power, we should see this in Iraq.

Mr Jones’ act has been resoundly condemned by President Obama, among others.

How do we explain the savage butchery of utterly innocent people who are dedicated to helping Afghans? Here the finger must turn to Afghan politics: President Hamid Karzai.

Rather than explaining to his population that Jones is a fringe crank whose actions are reviled by most Americans, Karzai has made this his most recent anti-American cause célèbre, denouncing the Americans who have paid deeply in lives and treasure to support his corrupt and unaccountable government.

The April 1 conflagration likely would not have happened had it not been for President Karzai himself, who drew attention to the little known event on March 24 when he issued a press release in which he called the immolation of the Holy Quran “a crime against a religion and entire Muslim umma [community]”. He further called for the US and UN to “bring to justice the perpetrators of this crime”.

Karzai’s demands for Jones to be brought to justice are bizarre. Karzai knows that Mr Jones committed no crime in the United States and Afghanistan has no jurisdiction over him. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, have denied Jones entry into their country.

It is easy to conclude that Karzai chose this path of deadly controversy to demonstrate his strategic independence from the United States, which pays his bills while his supporters loot his country’s coffers. According to the recently downsized US defence budget, American taxpayers will still pay about $300 million per day for the military effort in Afghanistan alone. For all operations in the country, the United States will spend about $17 billion in Fiscal Year 2011 alone. This is in addition to the thousands of international deaths and many more Afghan deaths.

Washington must ask if it can justify squandering such life and treasure on Karzai when he time and time again undermines his and America’s interests. How can America continue to support a man who is willing to stoke the flames of violence in his own country for his own, deeply personal political gains? This is as inexplicable as the senseless violence in Mazar-i-Sharif and the bigotry of Mr Jones.

(A longer version of this piece was originally published by Foreign Policy’s Af-Pak channel.)

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9^th, 2011.

Washington has a simple account of Raymond Davis: He was an employee of the US consulate in Lahore who shot two men in self-defence. Since he has ‘diplomatic immunity’, he should be released under the Vienna Convention immediately.

We now know from media reports that Davis “carried out scouting and other reconnaissance missions as a security officer for Central Intelligence Agency case officers and technical experts.”

That Mr Davis was a contractor for the CIA is immaterial to the issue of immunity. Countries — including Pakistan — routinely use their embassies and consulates for intelligence collection and operations and persons involved in this operate with relative safety under ‘official cover’. While few Americans have heard of Raymond Davis, he is a national obsession in Pakistan’s print and television media. Pakistanis have called for his hanging in public rallies, which have been organised by militant groups like the Jamaatud Dawa.

Revelations that US media withheld information about Davis at the behest of the Obama administration have only fanned the conspiratorial flames that Pakistan’s varied intelligence agencies and Islamist groups alike can stoke among Pakistan’s wary public.

From Pakistan, the ‘facts’ are far less clear, with the Pakistani press focusing upon other issues.

First, Raymond Davis is not the true name of the man in question. A Pakistani barrister, Iqbal Jafree, has suggested that Davis came to Pakistan using a fake name. If this is the case, he has argued, another legal case may also be registered against him. Second, Pakistani coverage maintains that Davis’s possession and use of a firearm was illegal under Pakistani laws. Third, the Pakistani media suggest that Davis got out of his vehicle and shot his victims in the back. Fourth, Pakistan’s media have widely reported that a camera was recovered from Davis upon his arrest, which, reportedly, contained photos of sensitive installations. Pakistani media outlets have made these photos available to the public. Pakistanis accept the authenticity of the footage, and its worrisome implications, as a matter of fact. Fifth, and most importantly, much of Pakistan’s media outright rejects the US’s central claim that Mr Davis has diplomatic immunity. This latter claim is flawed, even if it is widely believed. One thoughtful Pakistani commentator, Raza Rumi, writing on these very pages, has tried to take issue with it. Finally, if the media spectacle were not provocative enough, the suicide of the widow of one of the slain, Mohammad Faheem, has further inflamed Pakistani sentiments about the case and strengthened the nation’s resolve to try Davis as a cold-blooded murderer.

The Raymond Davis issue is iconic of the challenges of US-Pakistani relations. Pakistani rage over Davis is layered upon simmering anger over the inaccurately maligned US drone programme. President Zardari’s party has had internal rifts over how best to deal with the imbroglio. Given Zardari’s weak government, the PML-N has exploited the situation and complicated any possible resolution of the issue. From outside, it seems as if the government has simply outsourced the resolution of the awkward situation to Pakistan’s activist courts, despite the fact that this is strictly a Foreign Office issue.

Given the legal clarity of the matter, a bothersome question persists: What elements of the Pakistani government are stoking these dangerous, populist sentiments and to what end?

In the end, this incident is likely to turn into a showdown between the ISI and the CIA. The two outfits have tended to work well together in the past. However, they have burgeoning disagreements over the ISI’s support of the Afghan Taliban and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaatud Dawa.

Is this affair a clarion signal that Islamabad does not want to continue the strategic relationship that Washington peddles with naïve optimism?

The answer to this query is critical. The new US Congress is trying to slash budget outlays everywhere, including those of the US Department of Defence and USAID, among others. Congresspersons are increasingly frustrated with what they see as Pakistani indifference or even ingratitude towards US assistance amidst the most serious economic hardship for Americans since the Great Depression. The amount of humanitarian assistance to Pakistan exceeds the entire sum of humanitarian assistance to all other countries combined.

Zardari’s government may have punted on this issue to save its hide. What will happen to the government if the moneys from Kerry-Lugar-Berman — which the government has already programmed — are axed by a furious US Congress, which does not abide by the diktat of the US president and whose members are less persuaded of the need to sustain this turbulent relationship when Pakistan’s interests appear to diverge starkly from those of the United States?

In the end, there may be some marginal benefit to be obtained from this absurd drama of diplomatic duplicity, if it does not precipitate a complete bilateral breakdown.

To resolve this impasse and free Davis, the US government will have to present evidence about the nature of the position of Raymond Davis in Pakistan’s courts. This will likely reveal just as much information about Islamabad’s complicity in these complex arrangements as it does about Davis and the US mission in Pakistan.

In doing so, the Davis disaster may be a long overdue occasion to cast much-needed transparency on the activities of the US government in Pakistan and the nature of its ties to various Pakistani agencies, which may have connivance in this tragic incident.

This will be good for Americans and Pakistanis alike, as they struggle to understand the extent of the codependence of their two nations and how best to manage it.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 24^th, 2011.

A version of this article first appeared on Foreign Policy’s Af-Pak Channel on February 18th, 2011.

The roads and ports, and other infrastructure that the Chinese are building in Pakistan principally benefit China. Pakistanis are an afterthought. The Chinese obtain contracts on favourable and profitable investment terms, use their own employees, and contribute little to the local economy, ultimately to build projects which facilitate the movement and sale of cheap (but also dangerous and poorly crafted) Chinese goods and products into and through Pakistan.

It is a sad fact that China uses Pakistan for its foreign policy aims as well. It provides Pakistan nuclear assistance and large amounts of military assistance to purchase sub-par military platforms in hopes of sustaining Pakistan’s anti-status quo policy towards India. By encouraging Pakistani adventurism towards India, Beijing hopes that India’s massive defence modernisation and status of forces remain focused upon Pakistan, not China. China wants to sustain the animosity between India and Pakistan, but it certainly does not want an actual conflict to ensue as it would then be forced to show its hand again — by not supporting Pakistan in such a conflict.

What about Saudi Arabia? The increasingly broke US citizens provided more assistance to Pakistan’s flood victims than Pakistan’s Islamic, oil-tycoon brethren in Saudi Arabia. While the US government has not figured out how to give aid in a way that minimises corruption and maximises benefit, Pakistanis should note that at least America tries to do so in contrast to Saudi Arabia, which simply abdicates.

Saudi Arabia does fund madrassas, albeit of a highly sectarian variety. Yet, Pakistan does not need more madrassas. In fact, the educational market shows that Pakistani interest in madrassa education is stagnant, while interest in private schooling is expanding. Unfortunately, those madrassas and Islamic institutions that Saudi Arabia does support have contributed to a bloody sectarian divide in Pakistan that has killed far more innocent Pakistanis than the inaccurately reviled US drone programme.

In short, Saudi Arabia, too, uses Pakistan to isolate Shia Iran and to promote the dominance of Wahhabism over other Sunni maslaks and over all Shia maslaks. Pakistan has paid a bloody price for Saudi Arabia’s assistance.

There is no such thing as ‘friends’ in international relations. Any country will help Pakistan if it expects that doing so will advance its interests, not necessarily those of Pakistan and its citizenry. Pakistan will never be free from the dictates of donors until it raises its own revenue from its own domestic resources.

There is another important reason why all Pakistanis should pay local and federal taxes according to their means: It is the bond that ties the governed to the government. When the state extracts taxes from its citizenry, the citizens demand services in return. When the government fails to perform at either local or federal levels, the citizens have the opportunity to vote the miscreants out of office. The incoming elected officials learn, over the course of several electoral cycles, to be responsive to the voters. Within constitutional democracies, payment of taxes is the most important mechanism by which citizens exert control over their government.

If Pakistanis genuinely want to toss off the yoke of financial servitude and gain a genuine stake in their government, they should stop howling at the US government. Instead, the street power mobilised to support a flawed law and a murderer should be redirected to policy issues that are critical to the state’s survival. And rest assured, financial sovereignty is one such issue.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2011.

Pakistanis are outraged by US Ambassador Cameron Munter’s recent reported assertion that the US government is entitled to influence Pakistan’s internal affairs in exchange for US assistance. The US is Pakistan’s largest source of economic support, either directly or through international financial institutions. These funds enable the government of Pakistan — if not the state — to survive.

Pakistanis naturally resent this situation because they have no leverage in its relationship with Washington and, thus, are beholden to Washington’s diktat. They are right: This funding renders Pakistan answerable to the US taxpayer rather than to Pakistanis. But this anger towards Washington is misplaced. Pakistanis should ask why it is that their state — including its massive, nuclear-armed military — requires outside assistance on the scale it does when Pakistan, in fact, has considerable national wealth.

Pakistan is not a Somalia. Why is it that neighbouring India can pay its way, having transformed itself from an aid-receiving to an aid-granting state, while Pakistan must grovel at the table of the IMF and other multilateral and bilateral donors? Indeed, it is India’s financial success that has drawn global capitals to its doorstep, seeking to sell to India’s state and central governments weapon systems, surveillance technology, power plants, and other needed infrastructure and commodities demanded by the growing country and its minions. It is India’s growing economic heft that gives it leverage in the strategic partnerships it forges — including those with the US and Israel.

There is no reason why Pakistan cannot step out of the shadow of its servitude and into the light of sovereignty. After all, Pakistanis are hard-working and proud patriots.

What does it mean for a state to be sovereign? Apart from exercising monopoly of force and writ of law, more or less homogenously over the state territory, one of the most important elements of state sovereignty is the ability to pay its own bills. While Pakistan is making strides in the former, it has made no progress in the latter.

To free it of international meddling, Pakistan’s political leaders need only to subject themselves and their patronage networks to an agricultural and industrial tax, a move which Pakistan’s leadership has steadfastly avoided throughout the state’s entire history. Of course, it must improve income tax compliance too.

Given this refusal to expand its tax net, the state relies upon an admixture of international assistance and punitive and regressive domestic sales and income taxes to pay its bills. Sales taxes are especially regressive because they affect the poor far more than the wealthy. Government servants — whose income tax is deducted from their wages — and other honest income tax payers pay their way, while the wealthy agriculturalists and business elite abscond. Bangladesh has a better tax compliance record than Pakistan.

The sad truth is that Pakistan’s elite — many of whom sit and have sat and will sit in parliament — have chosen to subjugate their country for their own personal accumulation and preservation of wealth. This should be the focus of public outrage: Not Washington’s expectation that its massive investment in Pakistan yield some return for the interests of its taxpayers.

Some may counter that China and Saudi Arabia help Pakistan without such expectations. These cherished myths are rubbish.

What has China done for Pakistan? It did not help Pakistan in any of its wars with India in 1965, 1971 or the Kargil crisis of 1999, when it took the same line as the US and even India. It did little to help Pakistan in the 2001-2002 crisis with India and it even voted in the United Nations Security Council to declare Jamaat-ud-Dawa a terrorist organisation in 2009, in the wake of the Mumbai terror outrage.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2011.

Despite deepening security threats from the Taliban, India remains committed to Afghanistan. India worries that an ultimate settlement in Afghanistan will bring the Taliban back to power and this will likely be discussed in Delhi during President Obama’s state visit next week. India should be pleased that the Obama administration’s assessment of the ‘Pakistan challenge’ mirrors that of India more than that of the pro-Musharraf Bush administration. But Obama has much to prove to the Indians. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to China first. Both Obama and Clinton made statements attesting to China’s primacy in America’s Asia strategy. This peeved India after years of incessant wooing by the Bush administration, which urged Washington to alter its entire non-proliferation regime to accommodate the controversial Indo-US civilian nuclear deal. India watches with concern as Washington provides military assistance to Pakistan while the Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ul-Dawa remains unconstrained and the Afghan Taliban retain state support. India is irked that Washington provides access to weapon systems that are more appropriate to target India than Pakistani insurgents.

In the wake of the recently concluded US-Pakistan strategic dialogue, more defence wares will be on their way to Pakistan. India’s defence minister, AK Antony, summarised India’s concerns in September 2010: “We feel that even though the US is giving arms to Pakistan to fight terrorism, our practical experience is (that)…they are diverting a portion against India.” Obama’s (largely misconstrued) announcement that US troops will begin drawing down military forces from Afghanistan in a conditions-based fashion in July 2011 has been read as “sever and saunter” among Afghanistan’s neighbours. The administration’s assurances that Washington will remain committed to Afghanistan have not dampened regional actors’ contingency planning.

India is no exception. India is a free rider under the US/Nato security umbrella in Afghanistan and worries about sustaining its initiatives in Afghanistan when this umbrella disappears. Indian personnel have been under steady attack in Afghanistan. After the 2008 attack on India’s embassy in Kabul, the Indian Express ran a poignant editorial that captured this dilemma: “New Delhi cannot continue to expand its economic and diplomatic activity in Afghanistan, while avoiding a commensurate increase in its military presence there. For too long, New Delhi has deferred to Pakistani and American sensitivities about raising India’s strategic profile in Afghanistan.”

Some Indian analysts have articulated an explicitly military option. Dr Subhash Kapila argued that since the US exit is a question of when not if, India must begin preparing extensive contingency planning for the ‘day after’ the US exit from Afghanistan. He is joined by others such as Shushant T Singh who argue that “a significant Indian military presence in Afghanistan will alter the geo-strategic landscape in the extended neighbourhood, by expanding India’s power projection in Central Asia.” Others contend that India should push to train Afghan National Security Forces over the objections of the US, Nato, and Pakistan. Other analysts argue that the benefits of Indian presence in Afghanistan are outweighed by the cost. They say that India should do so when the US and other coalition partners reduce their kinetic operations and retract their military footprints, beginning July 2011.

The stakes for India are higher than some may appreciate. India’s efforts to shape the outcome in Afghanistan will be important evidence that India has what it takes to be a power of any consequence outside of South Asia, much less globally. If India cannot effectively shape the course of events in its own ‘immediate neighbourhood,’ how can it lay claim to its great power aspirations at home or abroad?

This is a condensed version of an article that first appeared on Foreign Policy’s Af-Pak Channel on October 27, 2010

Published in The Express Tribune, November 2^nd, 2010.

India’s profile in Afghanistan has been a looming concern for New Delhi, Washington, Brussels and, of course, Islamabad with all wondering what the optimal role for India in Afghanistan’s reconstruction is, in light of the security competition between India and Pakistan. Some want to expand India’s presence in Afghanistan through Indian training of Afghan civilian and military personnel, development projects and economic ties. Others caution against such involvement. Others yet see Indian and Pakistani competition in Afghanistan as a new “Great Game” and argue that Afghanistan can be pacified through a regional solution that settles the Kashmir dispute.

India’s interests in Afghanistan are not only Pakistan-specific but also tied to India’s desire to be seen as an extra-regional power moving toward great power status. While India’s presence in Afghanistan has Pakistan-specific utility, India’s interests in Afghanistan can be seen as merely one element within India’s desire to be able to project its interests well beyond South Asia.

India has three principal aims in Afghanistan. First, it faced security threats from the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the 1990s which provided training opportunities and safe havens for several Pakistani groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, which operate in India. India insists that Afghanistan should not again become a terrorist safe haven.

Second, India wants to retain Afghanistan as a friendly state from which it can monitor Pakistan and, where possible, cultivate assets to influence activities in Pakistan. Naturally, Pakistan seeks to deny India such opportunities.

Third, developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan have a negative effect on India’s domestic social fabric. Hindu nationalists and their militant counterparts live in a violent symbiosis with Islamist militant groups operating in and around India. Islamist terrorism in the region provides grist for the mill of Hindu nationalism and its violent offshoots.

Contrary to some Pakistani views, India’s ties to Afghanistan are not new. In 1950, Afghanistan and India signed a “Friendship Treaty.” Prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, New Delhi formalised agreements with various pro-Soviet regimes in Kabul. During the anti-Soviet jihad, India expanded its development activities in Afghanistan.

After the Taliban consolidated their hold on Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, India struggled to maintain its presence. It aimed to undermine the Taliban by supporting the Northern Alliance in tandem with other regional actors.

Working with Iran, Russia and Tajikistan, India provided important resources to the Northern Alliance, the only meaningful challenge to the Taliban in Afghanistan. According to journalist Rahul Bedi, India also ran a 25-bed hospital at Farkhor (Ayni), Tajikistan, for more than a year and supplied the Northern Alliance with high altitude warfare equipment worth around $8 million. India also based several ‘defence advisers’ in Tajikistan to advise the Northern Alliance in their operations against the Taliban.

Since 2001, India has relied upon development projects and other forms of humanitarian assistance. To facilitate these projects and to collect intelligence (as all embassies do), India now has consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, in addition to its embassy in Kabul. There are also a number of smaller-scale activities throughout Afghanistan. According to the US, British, and Afghan officials that I interviewed over the last several years, India’s activities are not isolated to the north, where it has had traditional ties, but also include efforts in the southern provinces and in the northeast, abutting the Pakistani border.

This is a condensed version of an article that was first appeared on Foreign Policy’s Af-Pak Channel on October 26, 2010

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2010.