Jammu & Kashmir - flashback to 1948

October 5th 1948:

Pakistan most certainly will not give Kashmir up in the face of Indian threats.  To many Pakistani officers it seems probable that the war in Kashmir is at present essential to the existence of the Indian Union.   They see it as the one common factor uniting all the different forces, which, if left to themselves, would pull the State to pieces.  Without a "popular war" the Nehru Administration would have to settle the conflicting claims of its own members, satisfy the Sikhs, reconcile labour and capital, deal with the Communists and take drastic and unpopular measures to stop the drift of the national economy towards complete chaos.  Hyderabad was a card which was good as long as it was held; now that it has been played there remains only Kashmir and the stakes on that card have been made so heavy in both men, money and prestige, that it cannot remain unplayed much longer.  Recent speeches by Union Ministers do tend the suggest the obtrusion [sic? intrusion] of the U.N.O. into the relations between India and her State of Kashmir has been a tedious restraint on the Union's ability to manage her own affairs efficiently.  Patel going so far as to remark on October 1st, that "if the Security Council releases us from that embarrassment we shall perform that operation also (i.e., Kashmir) with the least amount of danger." A singularly vacuous remark if ever there was one! Either Mr. Patel was using Hyderabad as a yard-stick to measure the Indian Army's martial prowess, or else he was completely ignorant of the military implications and the political consequences of a Union advance upto the Pakistan border.

This is from Adrian Reed (Junior Staff Member, Lahore Deputy High Commission posted to Rawalpindi) to Olver  (?Stephen Olver, Pakistan Foreign Service in Karachi).

(# 70 in "Towards a Ceasefire in Kashmir, British Official Reports from South Asia, 18 September - 31 December 1948", Editor: Lionel Carter).

Ramachandra Guha on Pakistan

Slate.com has an interview with historian Ramachandra Guha, on the occasion of India's seventieth independence day.

Among the many piles of rubbish spread out by Guha there, sprinkled perhaps with one or two gems of insight, one particular garbage heap to note is where Guha says:

Second is that partition made Pakistan, unlike India, a frontline state in the Cold War. History and geography have dealt Pakistan a bad deal because it became a frontline state in the Cold War. It had to choose sides against the Soviets, which from the 1950s led to the rise of the military in Pakistan, which undermined the democratic possibilities.

The first, and sometimes it seems like the last, native-born American who saw Pakistan for what it was and is, was Margaret Bourke-White.   (There are plenty of first-generation immigrants who understand Pakistan in all its grotesque horror.)  To her everlasting credit, she saw what Pakistan was and would be, right at its birth.  Seventy years of history and a lifetime as a historian haven't given Ramachandra Guha half as much insight. This passage from her is worth repeating (via here).  Pakistan didn't have to be a frontline state in the Cold War. It was a deliberate choice, right from the point of its founding. 



The Messiah and The Promised Land

Margaret Bourke-White was a correspondent and photographer for LIFE magazine during the WW II years. In September 1947, White went to Pakistan. She met Jinnah and wrote about what she found and heard in her book Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India,Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. The following are the excerpts:

Life as a dhimmi - 17

During April-May, 18 Christian women kidnapped and converted to Islam in Pakistan.

The gloomy report for Pakistani Christians stated that charge sheets were not brought against the abductors in any one of the case after the abductors presented the Christian abductees’ certificates of conversion to Islam.
....
In none of the cases, the parents or family members of the Christian abductees were ever allowed to meet their daughters, they were just informed that their daughters have married Muslim men after converting to Islam.
....
The NGO stated in its report that there has been a sharp rise in cases of abduction of Christian girls, and their forced conversions and forced marriages with Muslim men after a Fatwa issued by Islamic clerics on electronic media. The report detailed the fatwa declared “Islam permits Muslim man to keep non-Muslim women as mistresses and perform sex with them without marriage while he is married to Muslim woman.”

In contrast to the Christian marriage Act under which the Christian marriage stands in effect even after conversion to Islam, there are claims that after conversion to Islam, the previous marriage becomes invalid and the kidnappers misuse this fatwa while the police fervently drops charges of kidnapping filed by the Christian families. On the other hand, Hindu girls are being kidnapped and forcefully given in marriage to Muslims in Sindh.

C. Christine Fair on the Lashkar-e-Taiba

Georgetown Prof. C. Christine Fair has an outline of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in India Today.  She also has a stark warning:

While Indians are likely correct to anticipate that the next attack on India may well come from the LeT; I encourage Indians to also remember the Jaish-e-Mohammad which launched the attack on India's parliament in December 2000. JeM had been dormant for years in part because their cadres had defected to the Pakistani Taliban. In recent years, the Pakistan army and ISI have resuscitated JeM in hopes of luring some of the previous cadres back into the fold with the lure of killing Indians. JeM, it should be recalled, conducted its first attack-a suicide bombing in 2000-in Kashmir. JeM, unlike LeT, has long had ties to al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, once the world leaders in murderous brutality, and JeM's operatives have been working with the Pakistani Taliban whose attacks have been nearly as savage as that of IS. Indians would be wise to keep on eye on JeM in addition to LeT. The Pakistan army and the ISI needs both of these groups if its twin goals of pacifying Pakistan and setting India on fire are to be advanced.

Tarek Fateh talks: Islamic State, Islam, India & Pakistan

Very rarely are harsh truths delivered in such good humor.

His "Pakistan was formed because Tagore won the Nobel Prize and Iqbal was pissed off" almost felled me from my chair.

Tarek Fatah: Why Balochistan needs the attention of the USA

Tarek Fatah: Why Balochistan needs the attention of the USA
Speech at a discussion on The Hill in Washington DC on the conflict on Balochistan hosted by congressman Chris Smith on July 22, 2015.

Water use: top 10 countries in 2010

From an IMF publication (PDF):
The 'Agricultural Land Area' heading is wrong, it is the total land area of the country.  Noteworthy are that Pakistan is the most water-intensive (water used per unit of GDP) country, and that India's per capita water use is so much higher than China's. 

The Chinese rip-off of Pakistan?

Much is being made of the promised Chinese investment of $46 billion in Pakistan.

The plans envisage adding 10,400 megawatts of electricity at a cost of $15.5 billion by 2018. 

The China power deals with Pakistan are at $1.5 billion or so per 1000 MW of installed power.

In contrast, in Bangladesh,

"Reliance Power and BPDB today signed a MoU to develop four units of power plants to produce 3,000 MW of electricity with a cost of $3 billion," the company said in a statement. .....Adani Power will set up two coal-fired plants with a total capacity of 1,600 MW that will cost more than $1.5 billion.

The Indian companies are doing it in Bangladesh at $1 billion per 1000 MW.

This is consistent with Tata Power in Vietnam:

Long Phu 3 plant is also expected to cost roughly $2 billion, with a capacity of 2,000 MW.

Back to Pakistan:

The 1,320 megawatts coal-fired power plant, known as Port Qasim Power Project, near Karachi will be jointly carried out by Chinese Power Construction Corp with 51% and Qatar’s Al Mirqab Capital with 49% stakes in the project with a total cost of $2.1 billion.

The above is about $1.6 billion per 1000 MW, and this is without overhead one might think is contributing to the costs in other projects (e.g., setting up coal mining in Thar, or setting up railway capacity to transport coal from the port city Karachi to the interior of Punjab).

Same article, here's the Thar project, where mines will be set up to use coal relatively recently discovered in Thar:

The mining will cost $950 million while $1.1 billion will be required for power generation for the 660 megawatts coal-fired power project, he said.

$1.1B for 660MW works out to about $1.6B per 1000 MW.

It would seem to me that friendship with China is costing Pakistan 50% above the market rate for power plants. The friendship has to be indeed taller than mountains and deeper than seas for it to survive market forces.

I hesitate to call it the Chinese rip-off of Pakistan only because the Pakistanis have successfully extracted billions out of the US of A without giving anything substantial in return; and it may be in their nature to try to do the same with the Chinese.

PS: the cost in the US for a new coal power plant ranges from $3B to $6.6B per 1000 MW but I would expect costs in Pakistan to be more in line with Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Prof. C. Christine Fair is incensed that a book she authored was found in bin Laden's library.

The research project that culminated in the 2006 publication of Fortifying Pakistan began in 2004, when I was a new researcher at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). My boss, Paul Stares, (now at the Council on Foreign Relations) hired me to initiate a South Asia research program. This project was not an easy sell. Most of Washington had long decided that Pakistan was our most allegiant ally in the war on terrorism. That attitude endured until the Obama administration came into office.

Simply put: It was blasphemous to suggest, in 2004, that then-president Musharraf was playing a both sides with Washington. The Bush administration could not countenance such a possibility, or even consider the plausibility of it, given that its attention and resources were focused on Iraq.

 ____

Historians will judge the American Pakistan policy with confusion and contempt. They will logically ask why the Americans continued to treat Pakistan as a partner when it undermined so many salient American interests in the region. They will ask why the American tax payer continued to aid and arm Pakistan, even though it was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and NATO allies in Afghanistan and the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghan allies, in and out of uniform. They will ask why the US government was unable or unwilling to see that Pakistan was not a problematic ally, but rather, a hostile state that cynically manipulated and exploited an impotent and incompetent America.

For years, I hoped that American policy makers would begin appreciating these facts, and change course, rather than wait for our sons and daughters to write this scathing history long after such revelations ceased to matter.

With the US military presence in Afghanistan winding town, there is still time to hold Pakistan to account and begin treating it like the hostile state it is, rather than as the challenging ally so many policy makers delude themselves into believing. This will require courage and leadership across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, such qualities seem chronically lacking in the contemporary American landscape.

Curiouser and curiouser

Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) released a statement in which they claim credit for the murder of several Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.

Asim Umar, the Indian-born head of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks that killed several secular writers and intellectuals in Bangladesh and Pakistan, including Avijit Roy who was hacked to death on a Dhaka street in February.

“Like the companions of the Prophet who defended him with their lives,” Umar said in a statement that was released online over the weekend, “the mujahideen of al-Qaeda have despatched to hell many who blasphemed against God, and insulted the Prophet.”

In addition to Roy, Umar named slain Bangladeshi intellectual Ahmad Rajib Haidar and Rajshahi University scholar AKM Shaiful Islam as victims of al-Qaeda hit squads. His statement also claimed the killing of Karachi University Islamic Studies scholar Shakeel Auj, assassinated last year while on his way to a meeting with Iranian diplomats. Auj had been condemned by Islamist clerics in Karachi for is purportedly blasphemous views.

The statement also mentioned an Urdu blogger Aneeka Naz as a victim. Naz, an academic, was reported killed in a 2012 car traffic accident, in which her husband was injured. Naz is not known to have held contentious political views.

“From Waziristan to Charlie Hebdo, this war is one,” Umar said, “whether it is waged upon us with drones or with Charlie Hebdo’s pen, with the International Monetary Fund or World Bank’s policies, or with the satanic conspiracy of Kerry-Lugar bill, which sought to humiliate the believers, or whether it is waged with the hate-filled words of Narendra Modi, which call for Muslims to be burned live.”

What on earth is the Kerry-Lugar bill doing in this list of grievances?  The people who were most staunchly against the bill and felt "humiliated" by it was the Pakistani Army.  Why would al Qaeda care about it in the least?

As SSridhar wrote on BRF:

The reference to Kerry-Lugar bill by AQIS and claiming it to have 'humiliated the Believers' is a dead giveaway that AQIS and the Pakistani Army have coalesced.

Despite stiff competition from ISIS in Iraq, Pakistan remains the epicenter of global terrorism.

Indians in denial

(via S.)   It is Indians that are in denial, about the fundamental nature of the Pakistani state.

However, there is need to discuss who is in a state of denial, Pakistan or India. We all know what the Pakistani state is all about, so if we still have not understood what they are up to, and why they won’t acknowledge the role of Abu Jundal (or Zabiuddin Ansari) in directing the 26/11 terrorists, we are in a state of denial.

The prime purpose of the Pakistani state is to oversee India’s failure as a state. Which is why when we brandish Abu Jundal’s dossiers, they smirk. They will toss it into a dustbin and ask us “what evidence?” When we sent them the dossier on Hafiz Saeed, the Pakistani foreign secretary in February 2010 called it mere “literature.”

We should never be in denial of this reality till Pakistan itself, through an internal process of rediscovering their relatedness to us, shed their anti-Indian identity.

PS: The article linked above is by R. Jagannathan.  Tavleen Singh has more on the issue.

Life as a Dhimmi - 12

Here:

About a dozen people have been mildly injured and three have been booked under blasphemy laws for staging a rally against forced conversions of Hindu girls in Hyderabad, Sindh today.

How to be a (South Asian) Strategic Analyst

MajorlyProfound explains.

Life as a dhimmi - 11

http://criticalppp.com/archives/73624

This has been going on, in pre- British India, in British India, and now in Pakistan.

A Lesson

Posted by Atri on BRF
क्षमा, दया , ताप , त्याग , मनोबल सबका लिया सहारा
पर नर व्याघ सुयोधन तुमसे कहो कहाँ कब हारा?
क्षमाशील हो रिपु समक्ष तुम हुए विनीत जितना ही
दुष्ट कौरवों ने तुमको कायर समझा उतना ही

अत्याचार सहन करने का कुफल यही होता है
पौरुष का आतंक मनुज कोमल होकर खोता है
क्षमा शोभती उस भुजंग को जिसके पास गरल है
उसका क्या जो दंतहीन विषरहित विनीत सरल है
तीन दिवस तक पंथ मांगते रघुपति सिन्धु किनारे
बैठे पढते रहे छंद अनुनय के प्यारे प्यारे
उत्तर में जब एक नाद भी उठा नहीं सागर से
उठी अधीर धधक पौरुष की आग राम के शर से

सिन्धु देह धर त्राहि-त्राहि करता आ गिरा शरण में
चरण पूज दासता ग्र्र्हन की बंधा मूढ़ बंधन में
सच पूछो तो शर में ही बस्ती है दीप्ति विनय की
संधिवचन संपूज्य उसीका जिसमे शक्ति विजय की

सहनशीलता, क्षमा, दया को तभी पूजता जग है
बल का दर्प चमकता उसके पीछे जब जगमग है
-रामधरी सिंह दिनकर


Mercy, resolve, tact, tolerance you've tried everything and some
But o my king of men when did Suyodhan succumb?
The more forgiving you were In your humane compassion
The more these rogue Kauravas pegged you as cowardly ashen

This is the consequence Of tolerating atrocities
The awe of machismo is lost When one's gentle n kindly
Forgiveness is becoming of The serpent that's got venom
None cares for the toothless, Poisonless, kind, gentle one
For three days Lord Raam kept Asking the ocean for a passage
Sitting there he petitioned Using the sweetest words to engage
When in response there was Not a whisper from the sea
A raging fire of endeavor Rose from Raam's body

The ocean took human-form 'N supplicated to Raam
Touched his feet, was subservient A slave he had become
Truth be told, it's in the quiver That lies the gleam of modesty
Only his peace-talk is reputable Who is capable of victory

Tolerance, forgiveness and clemency Are respected by the world
Only when the glow of strength From behind it is unfurled

Stephen Colbert finally gets it about Pakistan

Perhaps a decade late, but finally Stephen Colbert gets it about Pakistan:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

What did he understand? Well, in case you can't watch the video for some reason (e.g., you're on an iPad with no Adobe Flash), it begins with this:

Hitchens on Pakistan

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning “Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.

Javed Akhtar and Two-Nation Theory

A delightful interview of Javed Akhtar: (it is in English, btw.)

Second of two on Pakistan

Dhruva Jaishankar in The Indian Express:

Finally, there are those elements that Washington continues to give credence to, or at least leave unquestioned: Pakistan’s insecurities are legitimately propelled by fears of encirclement, India’s growing resource base, its nuclear weapons programme, and its reported “Cold Start” doctrine, thus adequately justify Pakistan’s inordinate military spending, greater investments in its nuclear and missile programmes, and support for terror groups targeting India and Afghanistan. That lasting peace between India and Pakistan and the settlement of the Kashmir dispute to Pakistan’s satisfaction will almost entirely eliminate its insecurities. That the army remains the only secular institution in Pakistan that “works” and is therefore deserving of support. And that Pakistan’s top military and intelligence officials bear little or no responsibility for the actions of their subordinates and affiliates, a claim even less credible given revelations from the ongoing trial of Tahawwur Rana and the testimony of David Coleman Headley. The erroneous conclusion drawn by the Obama administration from such questionable assumptions is that demonstrations of Indian magnanimity will allow Pakistan’s misguided, but not necessarily malevolent, security forces to reallocate resources towards improving the country’s security and economy. 

Responding to Pakistan’s narrative requires an important cognitive leap, one that most in Washington are still reluctant to take: Pakistan’s purported obsessions and insecurities are self-inflicted, created and consistently advanced to serve important private interests, almost always to the detriment of the country and its people. This applies equally to all the challenges commonly associated with Pakistan, be it the military’s political preponderance, the proliferation of nuclear technology and materials, the cultivation and use of terrorist proxies against both adversaries and nominal allies, the growing radicalisation of the body politic, and periodic India-Pakistan crises. There is also little clarity regarding Pakistani pleas for a long-term strategic relationship, which it professes to desire as a symbol of legitimacy, but also works to undermine through its transactional demands and poorly concealed enthusiasm for a hasty US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

First of two on Pakistan

Sushant Shareen writes in Tehelka: (excerpt, but read the whole thing)

PAKISTAN IS not so much a victim of terrorism as it is a victim of the stupendous success of the indoctrination programme that has replaced the innate pragmatism of the people. Islamism doubles up as nationalism and validates substantially, if not entirely, the concept of Islamofascism. It is this phenomenon that leads a newspaper owner, who is an ideal candidate for a lunatic asylum but in today’s Pakistan is a leading flagbearer of the ‘ideology of Pakistan’, to demand a nuclear strike on India because after a nuclear exchange Pakistan will be able to progress like Japan did after Hiroshima! It is this thinking that leads a top general under Pervez Musharraf, and a man who at one point was touted as a possible successor to Musharraf, to advocate firing “a nuclear warning shot in the Bay of Bengal, across India, demonstrating our circular range capacity” in order to send the message that “you don’t mess with a nuclear power and get away with it”. It is this thinking that makes a former information minister declare that “Pakistan has made nuclear weapons not to keep them in the cupboard but to use them against its enemies”. It is this mindset that makes the so-called ‘civil society’ — news anchors, lawyers, activists — defend the action of the assassin of Punjab governor, Salman Taseer. And it is precisely this mindset that prevents the Pakistan army (its ranks filled with the oxymoronic ‘moderate Taliban’) from ending its double-game in the war on terror. 

Today, it is not the nukes that protect Pakistan but Pakistan that protects its nukes. 

This then is the terrible reality of Pakistan. Unfortunately, just as the Pakistanis are in denial, so too are the Indians, or at least the Indian establishment, about the ground reality in Pakistan. India’s Pakistan policy (if at all there is such a thing) is predicated on interactions with what is a fringe group of liberal, moderate, modern, and sensible Pakistanis who are excellent advocates of their country but whose words don’t count for anything in terms of setting their country’s policy or direction. This is a class that doesn’t number more than a couple of thousand.