The Ravages of Storm (Book Review) by Amer Rizwan

The Ravages of Storm

By: Amer Rizwan[*]

George Tenet’s At the Eye of the Storm
Harper-Collins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York. 2007
Pages 549

‘At the Eye of the Storm’ is a firsthand account of the inner-working of CIA. Primarily, a biography, the book also gives a peep into the decision-making process in the White House and the emulous relationship that exists between the two most powerful agencies of the world i.e. FBI and CIA.

The book unfolds with the story of elevation of the writer to the premier slot of the American intelligence realm. Director FBI, Louis Freeh worn him in to the office. Interestingly, later near the twilight of his career the Jersey Shore, when he was in hot water on account to the famous or infamous ‘sixteen words’, it was none other than the Louis Freeh who told the author that it was high time for him to quit. He also guided him as to how to go about it.

The author is full of praise for his wife Stephanie and his son Michael. He is also all respect and admirations for his parents who were Greek immigrants to the US and worked really hard for making their both ends meet initially. However, thanks to their hard-work and meticulous concentration on their businesses, they scored resounding successes. He feels himself lucky to be the son of such proud parents who tried their luck in the US, thousands of miles away from their ancestral land. His description of the resourcelessness and the organizational weaknesses of the organization when he took over, and his resolution to get the things right denote a stereotype pattern. Every new boss has the same pious intentions at the outset but the range of success he or she scores is often limited, at least, for as long as the broom is newer. The singular characteristic of George Tenet’s account, however, is that he approximates the same to the Theory of Management when he shares with us some very sound principles and secrets of being a good and successful boss.

He also provides some glimpses of how the people in the American administration reacted to the colossal tragedy of 9/11. At eight thirty on the night of the 9/11, the President addressed the nation and enunciated what was later known as the Bush Doctrine. The crux of his argument was that the US was going to lead, and everybody else was going to follow. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”

“A day like 9/11, though, never really ends, except by the clock” How true are these words by the author as the world is still overshadowed by the ominous ramifications/implications of the events.

General Mahmud, the ISI Chief was having a meeting with Congressman Lindsay Graham and Representative Porter Goss when the first report of the planes hitting the World Trade Centre came. The writer reflected on the issue, and drawing inter alia the conclusion that the US had to make it clear to Pakistan and Afghanistan that the time of equivocation was over. He is clear on the fact of seeking Pakistan’s help in particular; that was a sine qua none; it is the country closest to Afghanistan, and the one with the most sway over it. Everyone in the administration was resolute that the time of talking with the Taliban had come and gone.

The failure of the author and the US to really convince Gen. Mahmood, the ISI Chief that the Taliban, far from being a strategic depth were in fact a threat to Pakistan itself. But in the wake of the colossal tragedy, and seeing the carnage of the attacks and the commitment of the bleeding ‘Leviathan’ to fight out the enemy to the end, the Head of the ISI was successfully brought about to the fact that Pakistan was to take a stern action against the Talibanised Afghanistan for harbouring Al Qaeda.

The author’s account of Gen. Mahmood Ahmad’s meeting with Richard Armitage is both interesting and revealing. He says that on September 13, Richard Armitage invited Maleeha Lodhi and Gen. Mahmood Ahmad………….over the State Department and dropped the hammer on them. Armitage told them that the time for fence-setting was over. There would be no more games. George Bush had said in his 9/11 address that he will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and terrorists that protected them. ‘Pakistan was either with us or against us.’ Specifically, Armitage demanded that Pakistan begin stopping Al-Qa’ida agents at its border, give the United States blanket over-flight and landing rights for all necessary military and intelligence operations, provide territorial access to American and allied intelligence agencies, and cut off all fuel shipments to the Taliban.

“Armitage is a bull of a man. Mahmood must have felt like he has been run over by a stampede by the time he left Rich’s office. I seriously doubt, however, that Rich actually threatened to ‘bomb Pakistan back to the stone age,’ as Gen. Mahmood repeatedly later told President Musharraf.”

Going to War in Afghanistan was a matter of compulsion, not that of choice. It was not a war of the Americans against Afghanistan but it was helping Afghans rid their own country of a foreign menace, al Qa’ida, and of the Taliban, who had allowed terrorists to hijack their country.

In the meanwhile in the author’s meetings with Mahmood, the former tried to persuade the latter if he could at least meet with Mullah Umar and make it crystal clear to him that the Taliban were to pay a terrible price if they continued their insistence on protecting Al-Qa’ida and Bin Ladin. Every call or message from the American Administration would harp on these and the related issues, but almost of them, would have Pakistan on the top of the list/agenda. As per the author, Gen. Mahmood was still trying to save the Taliban – but now he knew that if we did not get satisfaction, we were still coming after al-Qa’ida, no matter who objected or who tried to stand in the way. Gen. Mahmood did try to persuade the Mulla and sent a delegation of some Pakistani clerics to prevail upon him but to no avail. The deadlock only implied that the full might of the US military action was to be borne by the Taliban.
President Musharraf got the message clearly and within hours of Armitage’s ultimatum to Maleeha Lodhi and Gen. Mahmood, despite violent domestic opposition, Musharraf agreed to them. Pakistan’s volte-face had made it to be one of the most valuable allies of the US in the global war on terrorism. On October 8, as a final measure of showing his commitment to the US-led GWOT, Musharraf replaced Mahmood though the latter had been instrumental in Musharraf’s rise to power. Musharraf, like the high-ups in the US, would have concluded that in the new global reality, his Intelligence Chief was just too close to the enemy.
“I have always considered Musharraf’s reversal to be the most important post 9/11 strategic development after the takedown of the Afghan sanctuary itself”

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby are but a few of the gentlemen whom he usually finds himself at cross purposes with. Though he does not expressly use the term yet the coterie forms what is popularly known as the neocons.

The author takes pains in elaborating that the agency had already warned the administration of the impending danger, and also about scoring some successes vis-à-vis Al-Qaeda. The author argues that it was wrong that the agency couldn’t properly evaluate that the Al Qaeda has morphed into something dangerously solid and that it could really strike at the heart of the US.

His appointment to break the statement in the Middle East, and his efforts to work on the PLO, Israel and later Libya.

The author faced an enormous challenge at Wye Plantation Conference Centre at the Eastern Shore of Maryland held in mid-October 1998. Yasser Arafat and Bibi Netanyahu led their respective delegations to the Summit meeting. The Palestinian delegation was brought round concede some points courtesy the successful diplomacy of the US brokers. However, the Israelis put a strange conditionality i.e. to tie the release of Jonathan Pollard to the Israelis’ concession. The latter was convicted in 1986 on the count of passing top-secret material to Israelis while working as a Navy intelligence analyst. The author took a tough stand on the issue and even braved President Clinton who was otherwise amenable to Israeli demand by telling him that he would rather quit as DCI than accepting anything like the release of Pollard. At last the truth triumphed and the Israeli had to ink the agreement without compelling the Americans to release Pollard as a quid pro quo for doing the same.

His description of Yasser Arafat is simply immaculate. He says that he was among the last senior officials who saw Arafat alive at Ramallah in 2002. The author wonders if Yasser Arafat was a Moses or Bin Gurion who could lead his people to the Promised Land. After the tragic demise of Arafat, Tenet concludes that he was none.

Aimal Kasi was booby trapped and arrested in DG Khan. On January 25, 1993, Aimal Kasi, a lone Pakistani gunman armed with AK-47, walked up to the main entrance to CIA Headquarters and shot five people waiting to enter the compound. Later, he was lured to DG Khan to buy some Russian goods in Afghanistan and sell them at the premium price across the border in Pakistan. While he waited for the deal to go through, the CIA apprehended him. After his capture, Kasi told the investigators that he had conducted the shootout because he was upset by the US policy in the Middle East and Iraq. In a letter sent from his jail to a reporter, he said that his hope was to kill the Director CIA. (At that time Tom Woolsey or his predecessor Bob Gates might have been the targets)

The author prevailed upon the visiting Pakistani president to take action against Dr. A Q Khan and his network. He discusses his dealing with the issue of Umma Tamir-i-Nau and the retired scientists of Pakistani nuclear programme involved in the project. UTN had been established to carry out social projects in Afghanistan. Sultan Bashirudin Mahmood(former Director for Nuclear Power in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Agency), Chaudhry Abdul Majeed were some its founding members. The author had to reach Pakistan in the middle of the night. The author didn’t have to show any extra-ordinary diplomatic or persuasive skills to prompt the President to take A Q Khan to task and make a thorough inquiry into his nuclear inventory. President Musharraf, as per the author, was true to his words. Under his command, Pakistani agencies worked on the leads provided by the US and investigated the activities of the UTN high ups and eventually got confessions from them that led to the unearthing of new details. Bashirudin Mahmood confirmed all what we have heard about the August 2001 meeting with UBL, and even provided a hand-drawn rough bomb design that he had shared with Al-Qa’ida leaders. As per the author, their intelligence suggested that the UTN had a measure of support within Pakistani establishment and that it had a meeting with Al Qa’ida top leadership, including UBL and Al Zwaihiri in August 2001.

The exploitation by the journalist Bob Woodward the term ‘Slame Dunk’ used by the author over the issue of the WMD in Iraq. The Question of right leadership and that of bringing about the right type of democracy in Iraq. Ahmad Chalabi, a Westernized Iraqi, was a wrong choice to lead the interim Iraqi set up by any standard; it only aggravated the situation.

An excursion to Sun Valley Idaho and being haunted by the slame dunk episode.

The Confidence shown by President Bush in the author and in telling him that the administration still needed the services of the seasoned campaigner. “I really need you to stay”. And as per the author, he could not say ‘no’ to the President as the issues of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and GWOT were still unresolved.

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussain recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa” These sixteen words ultimately brought about the end of his career because initially the Administration didn’t accept the responsibility of incorporating them into the President’s speech. However, his view is that the aides of President Bush should have shared an equal responsibility for the lapse. “Perhaps, I was just the collateral damage”, he said. page. 481.

A very interesting aspect of this book is evaluating and judging the foreign dignitaries by the author. The actual yardstick is the cooperation with the US. President Musharraf, Late King Hussain of Jordon, the latter’s successor King Abdullah were the real heroes for they proved to be pawns in the US game or the GWOT. More than often he describes King Hussain to be enormously helpful in the Middle East Peace Process. He admires him for his humility and courtesy. However as a peace broker, he fails to evaluate the pulse of the region. Far from justifying his credentials of hailing from a country that espouses the cause of democracy and liberty, the author chooses to be associated with the forces of status quo and conservativism.

[*] Ph-D Scholar, Department of International Relations, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad. Pakistan.

ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE

THE NATION 08 August 2005.

By: AMER RIZWAN KHATTAK
amerrizwan@gmail.com

Thanks to communication revolution coupled with the elevation of some Anglophonic countries as the socio-economic giants, the use of English has increased immensely all over the world. Today, English is used and spoken in almost every nook and corner of the world. In most of the countries, it though not being the mother tongue of the majority, has been adopted as the lingua franca or as the national official language. It is no way a chance happening that the growth and dissemination of English has been concomitant with, or the result of, the growth of market economy and Western democracy. Business, international travel, the media and the globalization of the Anglo-American lifestyle are contributing to an ever increasing acceptance of English, particularly by the youth.. Against this backdrop, the use of English is on the rise even in Pakistan. Again with the barrier-free world in prospect in the form of W.T.O regime, there is an onslaught of M.N.Cs in Pakistan and elsewhere. Majority of these M.N.Cs are based and headquartered in the countries where the native English speaking persons are in overwhelming majority. Besides controlling global economy, these nations control the media as well, so transition in global affairs, inter alia, contribute towards furthering the cause of English around the globe. In the process, the use of English is on the ascendant curve in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Celtic was the first Indo-European language to be spoken in the British Isles. However, by and by, with the onslaughts from the southeast, and indeed, the native Britons were pushed further and further north and west into the more rugged and mountain area of Scotland in the south, Wales in the west, and Cornwall in the south-west. Romans first did that but could not leave indelible impact on the language of the Isles, because the Latin language, which was brought by them, was confined to the oligarchs. In fact, after the fall of Rome, and the subsequent loosening of its control on England, the Romans left a vacuum, which was left but quite after some times, by a wave of invaders from North-West Europe. These invaders were principally the Jutes and the Angles from what is part of Denmark today, and the Saxons from what is Northwest Germany and Holland, and they entered the East England. The English language of today is largely developed from the three similar Germanic dialects of these three invading tribes. In fact, it is from the Angles that the name England or Angleland derived. The period of old English is said to have existed between the years 450-1150 AD. Old English differed from modern English in spelling and pronunciation, but chiefly in grammar. The grammar of old English was exceedingly complex. The vocabulary of that time showed little influence from the Latin language, and differed from that of modern English.

The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century brought England and France together politically. As a result, French language replaced English as the language of administration, and, in fact, of the educated classes, both French and English. In spite of all this English did not stop to evolve. Ironically, it grew more rapidly in this period owing to quite a number of factors. The growing feeling of hostility towards the French people, the Englishness of the Norman French who had been in England for few centuries coupled with the ascendancy of middle and peasant classes brought about the decline of French Language. The trend also ensured a rise in importance of the language they spoke i.e. English. The English language underwent great change during that period. The grammar was simplified and most of its inflections were lost. This happened because at that time English was largely unwritten, and was used only by the ordinary people. Some ten thousand words were introduced into the language from French in order to supply the deficiencies of the English Language with regard to cultural and administrative matters. The invention of press increased literacy, and resulted in fixing of the English language which was resistant to change. There was also a development and increase in the vocabulary stock of the language as worldwide exploration began, and frontiers of scientific knowledge were pushed back.

The start of global spread of English began in the period between 1600 and 1750, as explorers, colonizers, traders and settlers went out from the British Isles to various parts of the world. The goddess of fortune was on the side of the British, because the power of existing colonial powers i.e. Portugal and Spain was fast dwindling, and the only close rival to the British i.e. France was contained, and in some cases evicted with clever maneuverings, for instance from that of a large tract of Central North America. Even after the American war of independence, in which Britain lost her American possessions, the U.S has to this date remained an English speaking country. In fact, all the immigrants to the U.S need to learn this language in order to get service. Similarly in 1600 East India Company sought trade concessions from the Moguls. By and by with the weakening of the House of Moguls, and virtual balkanization of the Mogul empire, the British got their hold stronger, eventually making almost the entire Indian sub-continent to be the part of British empire. In the 18th century mass migration to the continent of Australia began whereas Africa was started being discovered in the 19th century. Now, English is being spoken throughout the eastern and southern parts of Africa, and in large tracts of West Africa.

The current stage in the development of English concerns the emergence of a number of activities, movements and subjects that are carried out predominantly (though not exclusively) in English, across the world. One of the earliest examples was the international agreement to adopt English for air traffic control; another, which began with the establishment of the United Nations was the use of English in the numerous bodies providing international aid and administration. As the telecommunication revolution got underway, English became dominant in the international media, radio & T.V, computer & Internet, magazines and newspapers. The international pop music industry relies on English; so do space science and computing technology. The importance of this strand within the recent development of English has been not just the vast number of people who now read or want English for these activities, but the fact that using English has suddenly nothing to do with one’s nationality, or the historical facts of the spread of English speaking colonies. Peter Strevens aptly says in his article, “ English as an International Language” appeared in “Forum” in its October 1987 issue,

“The Peruvian air pilot, in a country relatively untouched by British or American expansionism, nevertheless, needs English for his job; the polish doctor, spending two years working for W.H.O in tropical countries, also needs English; pop music cults generate mania – using English language in the Soviet Union; as well as in Germany, Hong Kong or in the United States………….”

It is interesting to note that even the quadrilingual Switzerland could no longer remain insular in the face of this trend. It is so, because the Swiss-German dialect i.e. Alemmenic – which is spoken by 63.7% of the Swiss people -- is mostly used in informal way. Besides, the aversion of the young generation from learning French or Italian, the relegation of the minority ‘Romanish’ to a virtual extinction and the global dominance of English as the language of business and technology, English has displaced the use of the Swiss languages in many contact situations. For many people, English is increasingly becoming a ‘library language’. In the age of expansion of knowledge, it s essential that new ideas should be communicated as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and it is English through which this knowledge is propagated and spread. English makes such knowledge readily accessible to scholars in every part of the world.

Situation in Pakistan:
The earlier referred to onslaught of M.N.Cs has ‘anglicized’ the serving personnel almost everywhere including Pakistan. Advertisement campaigns, both in print and electronic media, are usually run in English. People living in cities are more attracted because they have access to these sources, and because they come across these tall signboards with catchy jargon more often. Monolingual signs in English at petrol stations are advertising their services in English because they can reach the local consumers as well as the visitors from abroad. Leisure activities and food and drink items pertaining to the American way of life are now widely advertised through the medium of basic English. Posters on bill-boards promote English brand names with short texts in English - cigarettes, soft drinks, watches, fashion items, sports goods, holiday packages. In most instances there is no need for more than a rudimentary knowledge of English required by the viewers. The use of English is prestigious and effective as the main message of these posters and advertisements is carried by the visual message and the brand name. Needless to say that this trend has influenced the urban ‘posh’ people the most. It is no denying the fact that the impact of this trend can be said to be all-pervasive yet these well-off urban people, or the so-called no-riche class, can afford to have access to these means of communications.

As per Govt. of Pakistan’s statistics, literacy rate in Pakistan is on ascendant curve i.e.25% - 27% - 31% - 37% - 39% - 46% - 53.5%. Accepting that to be the yardstick, there shall be a trend of general increase in the use of English as well, because courses in Pakistan invariably contain English as a subject. Moreover, new English medium syllabi, introduced now even in the rural-based private schools, can also be held responsible for popularizing English among the young folk.

Armed Forces in Pakistan enjoy high public image, and the same is considered to be the agent of modernization in Pakistan. The institutionalized form of army is getting strength and expansion both vertically as well as horizontally. It has also been observed, that in order to keep fresh blood being injected in the rank of the forces, more officers ranks have been given to less privileged rural areas as well. Against this backdrop, we may also recall that English is the official and communicational language of army. General people try to imitate their life style and terminology. The feudal lords in Pakistan, for that matter, are traditionally considered to be the drivers of the machinery of Government and politics in Pakistan, and in order to be able to be in a better maneuvering position vis a vis both the civil and military bureaucracy, they have started getting their juniors educated in American, Australian and British institutions. They are the relatively new users of English in Pakistan. Moreover, as the professional jargon and terminology is in English, so with the general increase in the working class people, particularly those of private sector i.e. banking, finance, I.T, medicine, the use of English is automatically on the rise everywhere.

It is no use escaping from the hard reality of the increasingly competitive ‘Brave New World’ i.e. achieving command over the basic skills of English language. Our traditional arguments, for our laggardness in this regard, are anachronistic in the changing realities. We can no longer claim it to be a foreign language, because it is an international lingua franca; we can no longer attribute the progress of the French, Germans or, for that matter, the Chinese to their linguistic insularity, because, willy nilly, these nations have let their lingua-cultural identities be diluted.

(http://www.sdpi.org/tdu/August8-14-05/education.htm)

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Education
What Has Become Of The Government's Plan To Set Up 105 Polytechnics?; Making Announcement Sis One Thing, Following Up On Them Quite Another... > Kaleem OmarThe News Rawalpindi/Islamabad, 08-08-2005-68

English As A Blogal Language > Amer Rizwan KhattakThe Nation Islamabad, 08-08-2005-82
Hr Scarcity In Research > Dr Faisal BariThe Nation Islamabad, 08-08-2005-90

Kashmiri Language Losing Its SheenThe Nation Islamabad, 08-08-2005-96
Efa Targets Unlikely To Be AchievedBusiness Recorder Islamabad, 08-09-2005-101
Student Seeks Governor's HelpDawn Karachi, 08-09-2005-29

Madaris To Ignore Govt Survey Performa; Ulema-Musharraf Meeting Likely By Weekend > Naveed AhmadThe News Rawalpindi/Islamabad, 08-09-2005-38

Book On Women's Rights LaunchedThe News Rawalpindi/Islamabad, 08-09-2005-39

Madaris Registration Begins In CapitalThe Nation Islamabad, 08-09-2005-67

Educational Reforms > Prof Safeer ShakaibThe Nation Islamabad, 08-09-2005-78

Foreign Student Of Seminary To Leave TodayDawn Karachi, 08-10-2005-17

Nbf Rewards Children's Flights Of Fancy > Jonaid IqbalDawn Karachi, 08-10-2005-22

223,990 Students In Nwfp Seminaries > Shafiq AhmadDawn Karachi, 08-10-2005-27

British Diplomats Visit MadaressahDawn Karachi, 08-10-2005-5

Foreign Interference In Educaiton System Deplored > Fazal SherThe Nation Islamabad, 08-10-2005-67

Is Our Education System Producing 'Robots'? > Sana AmjadThe Nation Islamabad, 08-10-2005-70

Paraha Likha Punjab! > Asif J MirThe Nation Islamabad, 08-10-2005-79

153 Scholls Closed In DaduDawn Karachi, 08-11-2005-31

A Treasure Trove Of Knowledge; The Public Library May Have Undergone A Transformation After The Arrival Of The Internet But Its Utility Will Not Diminish ...> Naseer AhmadDawn Karachi, 08-11-2005-34

Govt To Help Upgrade Seminaries, Says Dr WaseemThe News Rawalpindi/Islamabad, 08-12-2005-33

Teachers - They Are Not For Thrashing > Khalid AkhtarThe News Rawalpindi/Islamabad, 08-12-2005-34

Spelling Row Highlights German Resistance To Change > Philip BlenkinsopBusiness Recorder Islamabad, 08-13-2005-105

Expelling Foreign Students > Prof Mukhtar Ali Nqavi, Mumtaz Ahmad Dawn Karachi, 08-13-2005-11

Torture Of Students; Seminary Management On Judicial RemandDawn Karachi, 08-13-2005-9
The Importance Of Teaching Science > Rafia AliDawn Karachi, 08-14-2005-23

Criticism Against The HEC > Amer IqbalDawn Karachi, 08-14-2005-24

Bias Against O/A-Levels: A Rejoinder > Noman AhmedDawn Karachi, 08-14-2005-25

Functions Of Literacy; Literacy Centres Offer Hope And Uplift To Women In Kasur > Erica AhmedThe News Rawalpindi/Islamabad, 08-14-2005-73

Education For All In Fata > M Azim AfridiThe Nation Islamabad, 08-14-2005-83
242 Foreigners Studying At Four Lahore MadarisThe Nation Islamabad, 08-14-2005-93

Comments and suggestions would be welcome on
amerrizwan@gmail.com

From Great Game to Grand Bargain Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan

From Great Game to Grand Bargain Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan

By Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid

From Foreign Affairs , November/December 2008

Summary: The crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan is beyond the point where more troops will help. U.S. strategy must be to seek compromise with insurgents while addressing regional rivalries and insecurities
BARNETT R. RUBIN is Director of Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University and the author of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan and Blood on the Doorstep. AHMED RASHID is a Pakistani journalist and writer, a Fellow at the Paci?c Council on International Policy, and the author of Jihad, Taliban, and, most recently, Descent Into


The Great Game is no fun anymore. The term "Great Game" was used by nineteenth-century British imperialists to describe the British-Russian struggle for position on the chessboard of Afghanistan and Central Asia -- a contest with a few players, mostly limited to intelligence forays and short wars fought on horseback with rifles, and with those living on the chessboard largely bystanders or victims. More than a century later, the game continues. But now, the number of players has exploded, those living on the chessboard have become involved, and the intensity of the violence and the threats it produces affect the entire globe. The Great Game can no longer be treated as a sporting event for distant spectators. It is time to agree on some new rules.
Seven years after the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan commanders it supported pushed the leaderships of the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan, an insurgency that includes these and other groups is gaining ground on both the Afghan and the Pakistani sides of the border. Four years after Afghanistan's first-ever presidential election, the increasingly besieged government of Hamid Karzai is losing credibility at home and abroad. Al Qaeda has established a new safe haven in the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where it is defended by a new organization, the Taliban Movement of Pakistan. The government of Pakistan, beset by one political crisis after another and split between a traditionally autonomous military and assertive but fractious elected leaders, has been unable to retain control of its own territory and population. Its intelligence agency stands accused of supporting terrorism in Afghanistan, which in many ways has replaced Kashmir as the main arena of the still-unresolved struggle between Pakistan and India.
For years, critics of U.S. and NATO strategies have been warning that the region was headed in this direction. Many of the policies such critics have long proposed are now being widely embraced. The Bush administration and both presidential campaigns are proposing to send more troops to Afghanistan and to undertake other policies to sustain the military gains made there. These include accelerating training of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police; disbursing more money, more effectively for reconstruction and development and to support better governance; increasing pressure on and cooperation with Pakistan, and launching cross-border attacks without Pakistani agreement to eliminate cross-border safe havens for insurgents and to uproot al Qaeda; supporting democracy in Pakistan and bringing its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) under civilian political control; and implementing more effective policies to curb Afghanistan's drug industry, which produces opiates equal in export value to half of the rest of the Afghan economy.
Cross-border attacks into Pakistan may produce an "October surprise" or provide material for apologists hoping to salvage George W. Bush's legacy, but they will not provide security. Advancing reconstruction, development, good governance, and counternarcotics efforts and building effective police and justice systems in Afghanistan will require many years of relative peace and security. Neither neglecting these tasks, as the Bush administration did initially, nor rushing them on a timetable determined by political objectives, can succeed. Afghanistan requires far larger and more effective security forces, international or national, but support for U.S. and NATO deployments is plummeting in troop-contributing countries, in the wider region, and in Afghanistan itself. Afghanistan, the poorest country in the world but for a handful in Africa and with the weakest government in the world (except Somalia, which has no government), will never be able to sustain national security forces sufficient to confront current -- let alone escalating -- threats, yet permanent foreign subsidies for Afghanistan's security forces cannot be guaranteed and will have destabilizing consequences. Moreover, measures aimed at Afghanistan will not address the deteriorating situation in Pakistan or the escalation of international conflicts connected to the Afghan-Pakistani war. More aid to Pakistan -- military or civilian -- will not diminish the perception among Pakistan's national security elite that the country is surrounded by enemies determined to dismember it, especially as cross-border raids into areas long claimed by Afghanistan intensify that perception. Until that sense of siege is gone, it will be difficult to strengthen civilian institutions in Pakistan.
U.S. diplomacy has been paralyzed by the rhetoric of "the war on terror" -- a struggle against "evil," in which other actors are "with us or with the terrorists." Such rhetoric thwarts sound strategic thinking by assimilating opponents into a homogenous "terrorist" enemy. Only a political and diplomatic initiative that distinguishes political opponents of the United States -- including violent ones -- from global terrorists such as al Qaeda can reduce the threat faced by the Afghan and Pakistani states and secure the rest of the international community from the international terrorist groups based there. Such an initiative would have two elements. It would seek a political solution with as much of the Afghan and Pakistani insurgencies as possible, offering political inclusion, the integration of Pakistan's indirectly ruled Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) into the mainstream political and administrative institutions of Pakistan, and an end to hostile action by international troops in return for cooperation against al Qaeda. And it would include a major diplomatic and development initiative addressing the vast array of regional and global issues that have become intertwined with the crisis -- and that serve to stimulate, intensify, and prolong conflict in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Afghanistan has been at war for three decades -- a period longer than the one that started with World War I and ended with the Normandy landings on D-day in World War II -- and now that war is spreading to Pakistan and beyond. This war and the attendant terrorism could well continue and spread, even to other continents -- as on 9/11 -- or lead to the collapse of a nuclear-armed state. The regional crisis is of that magnitude, and yet so far there is no international framework to address it other than the underresourced and poorly coordinated operations in Afghanistan and some attacks in the FATA. The next U.S. administration should launch an effort, initially based on a contact group authorized by the UN Security Council, to put an end to the increasingly destructive dynamics of the Great Game in the region. The game has become too deadly and has attracted too many players; it now resembles less a chess match than the Afghan game of buzkashi, with Afghanistan playing the role of the goat carcass fought over by innumerable teams. Washington must seize the opportunity now to replace this Great Game with a new grand bargain for the region.
THE SECURITY GAP
The Afghan and Pakistani security forces lack the numbers, skills, equipment, and motivation to confront the growing insurgencies in the two countries or to uproot al Qaeda from its new base in the FATA, along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Proposals for improving the security situation focus on sending additional international forces, building larger national security forces in Afghanistan, and training and equipping Pakistan's security forces, which are organized for conflict with India, for domestic counterinsurgency. But none of these proposals is sufficient to meet the current, let alone future, threats.
Some additional troops in Afghanistan could protect local populations while the police and the administration develop. They also might enable U.S. and NATO forces to reduce or eliminate their reliance on the use of air strikes, which cause civilian casualties that recruit fighters and supporters to the insurgency. U.S. General Barry McCaffrey, among others, has therefore supported a "generational commitment" to Afghanistan, such as the United States made to Germany and South Korea. Unfortunately, no government in the region around Afghanistan supports a long-term U.S. or NATO presence there. Pakistan sees even the current deployment as strengthening an India-allied regime in Kabul; Iran is concerned that the United States will use Afghanistan as a base for launching "regime change" in Tehran; and China, India, and Russia all have reservations about a NATO base within their spheres of influence and believe they must balance the threats from al Qaeda and the Taliban against those posed by the United States and NATO. Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible.
Afghanistan needs larger and more effective security forces, but it also needs to be able to sustain those security forces. A decree signed by President Karzai in December 2002 would have capped the Afghan National Army at 70,000 troops (it had reached 66,000 by mid-2008). U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has since announced a plan to increase that number to 122,000, as well as add 82,000 police, for a total of 204,000 in the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). Such increases, however, would require additional international trainers and mentors -- which are, quite simply, not available in the foreseeable future -- and maintaining such a force would far exceed the means of such a destitute country. Current estimates of the annual cost are around $2.5 billion for the army and $1 billion for the police. Last year, the Afghan government collected about 7 percent of a licit GDP estimated at $9.6 billion in revenue -- about $670 million. Thus, even if Afghanistan's economy experienced uninterrupted real growth of 9 percent per year, and if revenue extraction nearly doubled, to 12 percent (both unrealistic forecasts), in ten years the total domestic revenue of the Afghan government would be about $2.5 billion a year. Projected pipelines and mines might add $500 million toward the end of this period. In short, the army and the police alone would cost significantly more than Afghanistan's total revenue.
Many have therefore proposed long-term international financing of the ANSF; after all, even $5 billion a year is much less than the cost of an international force deployment. But sustaining, as opposed to training or equipping, security forces through foreign grants would pose political problems. It would be impossible to build Afghan institutions on the basis of U.S. supplemental appropriations, which is how the training and equipping of the ANSF are mostly funded. Sustaining a national army or national police force requires multiyear planning, impossible without a recurrent appropriation -- which would mean integrating ANSF planning into that of the United States' and other NATO members' budgets, even if the funds were disbursed through a single trust fund. And an ANSF funded from those budgets would have to meet international or other national, rather than Afghan, legal requirements. Decisions on funding would be taken by the U.S. Congress and other foreign bodies, not the Afghan National Assembly. The ANSF would take actions that foreign taxpayers might be reluctant to fund. Such long-term international involvement is simply not tenable.
If Afghanistan cannot support its security forces at the currently proposed levels on its own, even under the most optimistic economic scenario, and long-term international support or a long-term international presence is not viable, there is only one way that the ANSF can approach sustainability: the conditions in the region must be changed so that Afghanistan no longer needs such large and expensive security forces. Changing those conditions, however, will require changing the behavior of actors not only inside but also outside of the country -- and that has led many observers to embrace putting pressure on, and even launching attacks into, Pakistan as another deus ex machina for the increasingly dire situation within Afghanistan.
BORDERLINE INSECURITY DISORDER
After the first phase of the war in Afghanistan ended with the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 (and as the United States prepared to invade Iraq), Washington's limited agenda in the region was to press the Pakistani military to go after al Qaeda; meanwhile, Washington largely ignored the broader insurgency, which remained marginal until 2005. This suited the Pakistani military's strategy, which was to assist the United States against al Qaeda but to retain the Afghan Taliban as a potential source of pressure on Afghanistan. But the summer of 2006 saw a major escalation of the insurgency, as Pakistan and the Taliban interpreted the United States' decision to transfer command of coalition forces to NATO (plus U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's announcement of a troop drawdown, which in fact never took place) as a sign of its intention to withdraw. They also saw non-U.S. troop contributors as more vulnerable to political pressure generated by casualties.
The Pakistani military does not control the insurgency, but it can affect its intensity. Putting pressure on Pakistan to curb the militants will likely remain ineffective, however, without a strategic realignment by the United States. The region is rife with conspiracy theories trying to find a rational explanation for the United States' apparently irrational strategic posture of supporting a "major non-NATO ally" that is doing more to undermine the U.S. position in Afghanistan than any other state. Many Afghans believe that Washington secretly supports the Taliban as a way to keep a war going to justify a troop presence that is actually aimed at securing the energy resources of Central Asia and countering China. Many in Pakistan believe that the United States has deceived Pakistan into conniving with Washington to bring about its own destruction: India and U.S.-supported Afghanistan will form a pincer around Pakistan to dismember the world's only Muslim nuclear power. And some Iranians speculate that in preparation for the coming of the Mahdi, God has blinded the Great Satan to its own interests so that it would eliminate both of Iran's Sunni-ruled regional rivals, Afghanistan and Iraq, thus unwittingly paving the way for the long-awaited Shiite restoration.
The true answer is much simpler: the Bush administration never reevaluated its strategic priorities in the region after September 11. Institutional inertia and ideology jointly assured that Pakistan would be treated as an ally, Iran as an enemy, and Iraq as the main threat, thereby granting Pakistan a monopoly on U.S. logistics and, to a significant extent, on the intelligence the United States has on Afghanistan. Eighty-four percent of the materiel for U.S. forces in Afghanistan goes through Pakistan, and the ISI remains nearly the sole source of intelligence about international terrorist acts prepared by al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan.
More fundamentally, the concept of "pressuring" Pakistan is flawed. No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal. The Pakistani security establishment believes that it faces both a U.S.-Indian-Afghan alliance and a separate Iranian-Russian alliance, each aimed at undermining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan and even dismembering the Pakistani state. Some (but not all) in the establishment see armed militants within Pakistan as a threat -- but they largely consider it one that is ultimately controllable, and in any case secondary to the threat posed by their nuclear-armed enemies.
Pakistan's military command, which makes and implements the country's national security policies, shares a commitment to a vision of Pakistan as the homeland for South Asian Muslims and therefore to the incorporation of Kashmir into Pakistan. It considers Afghanistan as within Pakistan's security perimeter. Add to this that Pakistan does not have border agreements with either India, into which Islamabad contests the incorporation of Kashmir, or Afghanistan, which has never explicitly recognized the Durand Line, which separates the two countries, as an interstate border.
That border is more than a line. The frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan was structured as part of the defenses of British India. On the Pakistani side of the Durand Line, the British and their Pakistani successors turned the difficulty of governing the tribes to their advantage by establishing what are now the FATA. Within the FATA, these tribes, not the government, are responsible for security. The area is kept underdeveloped and overarmed as a barrier against invaders. (That is also why any ground intervention there by the United States or NATO will fail.) Now, the Pakistani military has turned the FATA into a staging area for militants who can be used to conduct asymmetric warfare in both Afghanistan and Kashmir, since the region's special status provides for (decreasingly) plausible deniability. This use of the FATA has eroded state control, especially in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, which abuts the FATA. The Swat Valley, where Pakistani Taliban fighters have been battling the government for several years, links Afghanistan and the FATA to Kashmir. Pakistan's strategy for external security has thus undermined its internal security.
On September 19, 2001, when then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf announced to the nation his decision to support the U.S.-led intervention against the Taliban in Afghanistan, he stated that the overriding reason was to save Pakistan by preventing the United States from allying with India. In return, he wanted concessions to Pakistan on its security interests.
Subsequent events, however, have only exacerbated Pakistan's sense of insecurity. Musharraf asked for time to form a "moderate Taliban" government in Afghanistan but failed to produce one. When that failed, he asked that the United States prevent the Northern Alliance (part of the anti-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan), which had been supported by India, Iran, and Russia, from occupying Kabul; that appeal failed. Now, Pakistan claims that the Northern Alliance is working with India from inside Afghanistan's security services. Meanwhile, India has reestablished its consulates in Afghan cities, including some near the Pakistani border. India has genuine consular interests there (Hindu and Sikh populations, commercial travel, aid programs), but it may also in fact be using the consulates against Pakistan, as Islamabad claims. India has also, in cooperation with Iran, completed a highway linking Afghanistan's ring road (which connects its major cities) to Iranian ports on the Persian Gulf, potentially eliminating Afghanistan's dependence on Pakistan for access to the sea and marginalizing Pakistan's new Arabian Sea port of Gwadar, which was built with hundreds of millions of dollars of Chinese aid. And the new U.S.-Indian nuclear deal effectively recognizes New Delhi's legitimacy as a nuclear power while continuing to treat Islamabad, with its record of proliferation, as a pariah. In this context, pressuring or giving aid to Pakistan, without any effort to address the sources of its insecurity, cannot yield a sustainable positive outcome.
BIG HAT, NO CATTLE
Rethinking U.S. and global objectives in the region will require acknowledging two distinctions: first, between ultimate goals and reasons to fight a war; and, second, among the time frames for different objectives. Preventing al Qaeda from regrouping so that it can organize terrorist attacks is an immediate goal that can justify war, to the extent that such war is proportionate and effective. Strengthening the state and the economy of Afghanistan is a medium- to long-term objective that cannot justify war except insofar as Afghanistan's weakness provides a haven for security threats.
This medium- to long-term objective would require reducing the level of armed conflict, including by seeking a political settlement with current insurgents. In discussions about the terms of such a settlement, leaders linked to both the Taliban and other parts of the insurgency have asked, What are the goals for which the United States and the international community are waging war in Afghanistan? Do they want to guarantee that Afghanistan's territory will not be used to attack them, impose a particular government in Kabul, or use the conflict to establish permanent military bases? These interlocutors oppose many U.S. policies toward the Muslim world, but they acknowledge that the United States and others have a legitimate interest in preventing Afghan territory from being used to launch attacks against them. They claim to be willing to support an Afghan government that would guarantee that its territory would not be used to launch terrorist attacks in the future -- in return, they say, for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
The guarantees these interlocutors now envisage are far from those required, and Afghanistan will need international forces for security assistance even if the current war subsides. But such questions can provide a framework for discussion. To make such discussions credible, the United States must redefine its counterterrorist goals. It should seek to separate those Islamist movements with local or national objectives from those that, like al Qaeda, seek to attack the United States or its allies directly -- instead of lumping them all together. Two Taliban spokespeople separately told The New York Times that their movement had broken with al Qaeda since 9/11. (Others linked to the insurgency have told us the same thing.) Such statements cannot simply be taken at face value, but that does not mean that they should not be explored further. An agreement in principle to prohibit the use of Afghan (or Pakistani) territory for international terrorism, plus an agreement from the United States and NATO that such a guarantee could be sufficient to end their hostile military action, could constitute a framework for negotiation. Any agreement in which the Taliban or other insurgents disavowed al Qaeda would constitute a strategic defeat for al Qaeda.
Political negotiations are the responsibility of the Afghan government, but to make such negotiations possible, the United States would have to alter its detention policy. Senior officials of the Afghan government say that at least through 2004 they repeatedly received overtures from senior Taliban leaders but that they could never guarantee that these leaders would not be captured by U.S. forces and detained at Guantánamo Bay or the U.S. air base at Bagram, in Afghanistan. Talking with Taliban fighters or other insurgents does not mean replacing Afghanistan's constitution with the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, closing girls' schools, or accepting other retrograde social policies. Whatever weaknesses the Afghan government and security forces may have, Afghan society -- which has gone through two Loya Jirgas and two elections, possesses over five million cell phones, and has access to an explosion of new media -- is incomparably stronger than it was seven years ago, and the Taliban know it. These potential interlocutors are most concerned with the presence of foreign troops, and some have advocated strengthening the current ANSF as a way to facilitate those troops' departure. In November 2006, one of the Taliban's leading supporters in Pakistan, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, publicly stated in Peshawar that the Taliban could participate as a party in elections in Afghanistan, just as his party did in Pakistan (where it recently lost overwhelmingly), so long as they were not labeled as terrorists.
THE END OF THE GAME
There is no more a political solution in Afghanistan alone than there is a military solution in Afghanistan alone. Unless the decision-makers in Pakistan decide to make stabilizing the Afghan government a higher priority than countering the Indian threat, the insurgency conducted from bases in Pakistan will continue. Pakistan's strategic goals in Afghanistan place Pakistan at odds not just with Afghanistan and India, and with U.S. objectives in the region, but with the entire international community. Yet there is no multilateral framework for confronting this challenge, and the U.S.-Afghan bilateral framework has relied excessively on the military-supply relationship. NATO, whose troops in Afghanistan are daily losing their lives to Pakistan-based insurgents, has no Pakistan policy. The UN Security Council has hardly discussed Pakistan's role in Afghanistan, even though three of the permanent members (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have troops in Afghanistan, the other two are threatened by movements (in the North Caucasus and in Xinjiang) with links to the FATA, and China, Pakistan's largest investor, is poised to become the largest investor in Afghanistan as well, with a $3.5 billion stake in the Aynak copper mine, south of Kabul.
The alternative is not to place Pakistan in a revised "axis of evil." It is to pursue a high-level diplomatic initiative designed to build a genuine consensus on the goal of achieving Afghan stability by addressing the legitimate sources of Pakistan's insecurity while increasing the opposition to its disruptive actions. China, both an ally of Pakistan and potentially the largest investor in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, could play a particularly significant role, as could Saudi Arabia, a serious investor in and ally of Pakistan, former supporter of the Taliban, and custodian of the two holiest Islamic shrines.
A first step could be the establishment of a contact group on the region authorized by the UN Security Council. This contact group, including the five permanent members and perhaps others (NATO, Saudi Arabia), could promote dialogue between India and Pakistan about their respective interests in Afghanistan and about finding a solution to the Kashmir dispute; seek a long-term political vision for the future of the FATA from the Pakistani government, perhaps one involving integrating the FATA into Pakistan's provinces, as proposed by several Pakistani political parties; move Afghanistan and Pakistan toward discussions on the Durand Line and other frontier issues; involve Moscow in the region's stabilization so that Afghanistan does not become a test of wills between the United States and Russia, as Georgia has become; provide guarantees to Tehran that the U.S.-NATO commitment to Afghanistan is not a threat to Iran; and ensure that China's interests and role are brought to bear in international discussions on Afghanistan. Such a dialogue would have to be backed by the pledge of a multiyear international development aid package for regional economic integration, including aid to the most affected regions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, particularly the border regions. (At present, the United States is proposing to provide $750 million in aid to the FATA but without having any political framework to deliver the aid.)
A central purpose of the contact group would be to assure Pakistan that the international community is committed to its territorial integrity -- and to help resolve the Afghan and Kashmir border issues so as to better define Pakistan's territory. The international community would have to provide transparent reassurances and aid to Pakistan, pledge that no state is interested in its dismemberment, and guarantee open borders between Pakistan and both Afghanistan and India. The United States and the European Union would have to open up their markets to Pakistan's critical exports, especially textiles, and to Afghan products. And the United States would need to offer a road map to Pakistan to achieving the same kind of nuclear deal that was reached with India, once Pakistan has transparent and internationally monitored guarantees about the nonproliferation of its nuclear weapons technology.
Reassurances by the contact group that addressed Pakistan's security concerns might encourage Pakistan to promote, rather than hinder, an internationally and nationally acceptable political settlement in Afghanistan. Backing up the contact group's influence and clout must be the threat that any breaking of agreements or support for terrorism originating in the FATA would be taken to the UN Security Council. Pakistan, the largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, sees itself as a legitimate international power, rather than a spoiler; confronted with the potential loss of that status, it would compromise.
India would also need to become more transparent about its activities in Afghanistan, especially regarding the role of its intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing. Perhaps the ISI and the RAW could be persuaded to enter a dialogue to explore whether the covert war they have waged against each other for the past 60 years could spare the territory of Afghanistan. The contact group could help establish a permanent Indian-Pakistani body at the intelligence and military levels, where complaints could be lodged and discussed. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank could also help set up joint reconstruction programs in Afghanistan. A series of regional conferences on economic cooperation for the reconstruction of Afghanistan have already created a partial framework for such programs.
Then there is Iran. The Bush administration responded to Iranian cooperation in Afghanistan in 2001 by placing Tehran in the "axis of evil" and by promising to keep "all options on the table," which is understood as a code for not ruling out a military attack. Iran has reacted in part by aiding insurgents in Afghanistan to signal how much damage it could do in response. Some Iranian officials, however, continue to seek cooperation with the United States against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The next U.S. administration can and should open direct dialogue with Tehran around the two countries' common concerns in Afghanistan. An opening to Iran would show that the United States need not depend solely on Pakistan for access to Afghanistan. And in fact, Washington and Tehran had such a dialogue until around 2004. In May 2005, when the United States and Afghanistan signed a "declaration of strategic partnership," Iran signaled that it would not object as long as the partnership was not directed against Iran. Iran would have to be reassured by the contact group that Afghan territory would not be used as a staging area for activities meant to undermine Iran and that all U.S. covert activities taking place from there would be stopped.
Russia's main concern -- that the United States and NATO are seeking a permanent U.S.-NATO military presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia -- will also need to be assuaged. Russia should be assured that U.S. and NATO forces can help defend, rather than threaten, legitimate Russian interests in Central Asia, including through cooperation with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Russia and the Central Asian states should be informed of the results of legitimate interrogations of militants who came from the former Soviet space and were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
To overcome the zero-sum competition taking place between states, ethnic groups, and factions, the region needs to discover a source of mutual benefit derived from cooperation. China -- with its development of mineral resources and access roads in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the financial support it gave to build the port of Gwadar, and its expansion of the Karakoram Highway, which links China to northern Pakistan -- may be that source. China is also a major supplier of arms and nuclear equipment to Pakistan. China has a major interest in peace and development in the region because it desires a north-south energy and trade corridor so that its goods can travel from Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea ports of Pakistan and so that oil and gas pipelines can carry energy from the Persian Gulf and Iran to western China. In return for such a corridor, China could help deliver much-needed electricity and even water to both countries. Such a corridor would also help revive the economies of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
MORE THAN TROOPS
Both U.S. presidential candidates are committed to sending more troops to Afghanistan, but this would be insufficient to reverse the collapse of security there. A major diplomatic initiative involving all the regional stakeholders in problem-solving talks and setting out road maps for local stabilization efforts is more important. Such an initiative would serve to reaffirm that the West is indeed committed to the long-term rehabilitation of Afghanistan and the region. A contact group, meanwhile, would reassure Afghanistan's neighbors that the West is determined to address not just extremism in the region but also economic development, job creation, the drug trade, and border disputes.
Lowering the level of violence in the region and moving the global community toward genuine agreement on the long-term goals there would provide the space for Afghan leaders to create jobs and markets, provide better governance, do more to curb corruption and drug trafficking, and overcome their countries' widening ethnic divisions. Lowering regional tensions would allow the Afghan government to have a more meaningful dialogue with those insurgents who are willing to disavow al Qaeda and take part in the political process. The key to this would be the series of security measures the contact group should offer Pakistan, thereby encouraging the Pakistani army to press -- or at least allow -- Taliban and other insurgent leaders on their soil to talk to Kabul.
The goal of the next U.S. president must be to put aside the past, Washington's keenness for "victory" as the solution to all problems, and the United States' reluctance to involve competitors, opponents, or enemies in diplomacy. A successful initiative will require exploratory talks and an evolving road map. Today, such suggestions may seem audacious, naive, or impossible, but without such audacity there is little hope for Afghanistan, for Pakistan, or for the region as a whole.

Marking in haste By Shahid Anwar

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/education/archive/081019/education1.htm

Even the best individuals perform poorly in bad structures. The boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education in the Punjab have unwittingly done the same thing. In a bid to save some money, probably, they have introduced a faulty remuneration structure for marking papers.The fallout is reckless hasty marking with little sense of justice and fair play. It’s also making a mockery of the evaluation system, depriving the young students of their due awards while killing the hopes and aspirations of their parents.Before analysing the pros and cons of the payment structure, it is appropriate to describe briefly the boards’ system of central marking and the previous remuneration structure.The appointed examiners consisting of sub-examiners and head-examiners are called to the specified centres to mark papers of the students appearing in the matriculation and intermediate exams. The marking continues until the job is done.
Usually a centre runs for about 40 to 60 working days. It is called the central marking system. And it has been adopted to speed up the evaluation to enable an early tabulation and timely announcement of results. In this regard, the system has worked remarkably well and students and parents are saved from the inordinate waiting for results.The examiners were paid the standard daily allowance plus payment for paper marking. Having been given an assured amount as daily allowance, the examiners generally remained content with the marking of a prescribed number of papers (usually 20 to 25) per day. The system worked well as there was little incentive for crossing the prescribed limit for a meagre amount paid per paper. There were a few who sought more papers but they did it only through stealth. The overall working environment at marking centres was reasonable.But the boards abandoned the above remuneration system a couple of years ago and introduced a new one. It abolished the daily allowance and offered a lump sum amount per paper without any limits on the maximum number of papers one can evaluate per day. It means that hasty and speedy marking will be rewarded more than careful marking. Mark more, earn more ... became the driving passion.It serves the board as well. Getting more papers marked in a shorter span saves time and money. The unscrupulous examiners take advantage of this situation. Money matters the most. The boards want cheap labour and the examiners cheap money. But the very purpose of examination becomes the first causality. No just and fair evaluation can be expected in a system that promotes covetousness and haste and a demoted dignity of work and sense of fairness.Not surprisingly, it has opened the floodgates of reckless and carefree marking. A principal in a district college commenting on this phenomenon said: “It’s extremely shameful how the teachers are playing with the future of students.” The real culprit, however, is the faulty structure adopted by the boards. It is bound to unleash unjust measures.
There are several appalling stories regarding hasty marking and the corrupt exam mafia. For instance, a lecturer was told that a sub-examiner in English earned a cheque of around Rs2,75,000 from the Faisalabad Board for a single spell of central marking. The supersonic speed allows no room for appropriate time and attention that every paper deserves.In another case of carefree marking, according to an assistant professor privy to the details of the incident, an Urdu sub-examiner mistakenly marked his colleague’s Pakistan Studies paper, and similarly an English lecturer marked a Physics paper.Just imagine … this wild marking determines the future of thousands of students who appear in eight boards of the Punjab in an increasingly high-stake competition for admission to the professional colleges. The parents and students put in a lot of energy, time and also money on private tuition academies. What if they become victims of reckless evaluation at the end of the day?“There is plenty of discontent with more and more students applying for a recheck of their papers and in 50 per cent of the cases, the changes occur in marks,” shares a board official on conditions of anonymity. He also said that “Negligence is rampant. Many of the answers, at times, are found unmarked or unaccounted in the total.” Saying so, he cited a case of rechecking a paper in which the difference that came up was of 60 marks. The student actually got 76 but the examiner had wrongly written 16.What and where are the counterchecks? What if he had not applied for a recheck? Obviously, not all the students go for rechecking, many simply cannot afford the Rs670 fee per paper. It is also relevant to point out here that rechecking does not involve re-evaluation. There is no antidote for an examiner’s careless or injudicious marking.
The examples mentioned above are not rare occurrences. They are the tip of an iceberg. Any person with access to the boards’ official records can stumble on such astonishing facts through a simple scan.One needs to look for the following questions: ‘Who evaluated how many papers in a single day?’ and ‘Who got a cheque for what and of what amount?’Such an inquiry is highly desirable in order to find the nexus between money-minting teachers — always seeking exam duties and the board officials — never failing to oblige the same folk. Those familiar with the exam duty mafia are already well aware of such things.The plain but painful reality is that a combination of all pervasive silence, criminal neglect and self-serving greed is playing havoc with the future of our youth.So many students decide to change their subjects and go for another career depending on their examination results. For some sensitive souls, passing an exam is a matter of life and death. We often hear or read about some depressed young fellow committing suicide after failing to pass an exam. What if they never got a fair evaluation?The deterioration in quality of evaluation must be arrested here and now. The following suggestions may prove helpful:• High officials in education boards need to keep in mind that their topmost priority must be a fair, just and foolproof evaluation system.• It is very important to redesign the remuneration structure. Daily allowance should be restored and reasonably revised.• A lower and upper limit of papers that one examiner is supposed to evaluate in a day must be sensibly determined and observed strictly. Allowing anyone to mark as many papers as he wants to is damaging and should be recognised as such.• The mafia consisting of chronic exam duty hunters and their collaborators in the boards must be identified and busted.
• A fact-finding inquiry as mentioned earlier should be conducted to find those who marked hundreds of papers per day without any regard for their moral and professional duty.• The provincial government should step in to dismantle the structure of hasty marking that is denying our young students their fundamental right to be judged fairly. n

Pakistan Observer UN Reform:Challenges & Opportunities

Press Review/ UN STRUCTRAL REFORM AND PAKISTAN

Muhammad Asad: the road beyond Mecca (Formerly Leopold Weiss)

by Khaled Ahmed


Muhammad Asad (1900-1992) is known in Pakistan for writing his inspirational autobiography The Road to Mecca in 1954 that told he story about how a Jew converted to Islam and found peace in it. In the fifties, Islam had not yet turned hard and Asad’s story did not raise any hackles. But by the time he completed his English translation of the Quran, the yardsticks had changed and it was difficult to find any defenders of his interpretive method. Because he had been a friend of King Saud, the Saudi government continued to help him. When no one bought his Quran (because it did not meet the current scholarly ‘consensus’) the Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani bought 20,000 copies of it. Asad’s Quran had been sponsored by Muslim World League headed by Sheikh Muhammad Sarur, member of a leading family of Kuwait, but when the League distributed its copies to its scholar members, a furore of disagreement arose about its deviation from the ‘consensus’.A meeting in Lisbon: I met Muhammad Asad in 1987 through the courtesy of our ambassador to Portugal, Birjis Hasan Khan, in Lisbon, where Asad was living with his Bostonian wife, Pola Hamida. I asked him about General Zia’s enforcement of the shariah in Pakistan. He was clearly in disagreement over the orthodox ‘extrapolation’ from the Quran of half a witness for the woman in the law of evidence promulgated by Zia. He was appalled by the Zina Ordinance and thought that no Muslim in his right mind could equate rape with fornication, as done by the Muslim jurists. He clearly did not accept the taqleedi jurisprudence of Islam and insisted that the Quran should be understood as it was before it was overtaken by the laws and tenets of later ages. He was a purist who disliked the political accretions of later times and did not take easily to hadith. His was an austere vision, much like the Saudi version of Islam.He told me that when he converted to Islam he simply translated his name Leopold into Arabic. Leo became Asad, but what inspired him with awe was what happened after he was guided by his mentors to go and learn the Quran in Lahore after the Second World War. (He had been interned during the war in Dalhousie). He joined the Ahle Hadith seminary at Sheranwala Gate. He was struck by the fact that the locality was named after ‘lions’ that decorated the Gate under which the seminary was located. I asked him about Saint-John Philby (famous spy Kim Philby’s father), the other friend of Ibn Saud, who in many ways was a precursor of Asad himself: an expert in Arabic and a relentless explorer of the Arabian desert. His _expression of dislike was immediate. Philby’s knowledge of Arabic was such that he often contested the meaning of some words with the Arabs. Asad’s own grasp was tremendous, which enabled him to challenge some of the meanings accepted by Imam Bukhari in his collection of hadith. But Asad did not think that Philby was a believer, nor did he trust the loyalty he showed to Ibn Saud. Asad’s travels took him to all parts of the Islamic world before he settled down to his job in new-born Pakistan.At a Lahore seminary: At the Sheranwala Gate mosque, he learned the Quran from Maulana Ahmad Ali (d.1962), the greatest Ahle Hadith scholar of the city, with strong ties to the anti-British luminaries of Deoband, including Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi who, like Ahmad Ali’s father, had converted from Sikhism. Muhammad Asad also mentioned with extreme reverence the name of Maulana Abdul Qadir Kasuri (d.1942) whom he met frequently while he was in Lahore. Abdullah Malik, in his book on the family of Maulana Abdul Qadir Kasuri, explains the spiritual connection the Kasuris had with the Ahle Hadith, the ‘non-imitative’ school of thought closest to the Wahhabi version of Saudi Arabia. He also reports on the offer Ibn Saud had made to Maulana Abdul Qadir of a ministership or advisoryship in Hejaz, which the maulana had declined. The Kasuris became well-known lawyers in undivided India, based on the remarkable success of Maulana Abdul Qadir in the legal profession. His son, Mian Mahmood Ali Kasuri became an internationally known defender of human rights and was a member of the PPP government in 1971 before falling out with prime minister Bhutto. His son, Mian Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, a lawyer, was an MNA of the Muslim League before the parliament was dissolved in 1999.Allama Javed Ahmad Ghamidi’s journal Renaissance in its May 2002 issue has reproduced an article on Muhammad Asad from The Impact International which tells the story of this extraordinary man who served Islam in general and served Pakistan in particular in its early days. Leopold Weiss was born in a Polish town called Lwow (lion, again?) from where he escaped when 14 and joined Austrian army under a false name. He was recovered by his father and brought to Vienna where he finally went to the university to study art and philosophy. But his dabbling mind was attracted to journalism, which he wanted to pursue in Prague. He was trained in the Jewish lore and knew his Mishna and Talmud in the footsteps of his grandfather who had been a rabbi in Chernovic. A natural polyglot, Leopold could read and speak Hebrew and was acquainted with Aramaic too. Shifting to Berlin, Leopold entered the cinema for a time before landing a job as a journalist with a news agency. It was in Berlin in 1922 that he was invited by his maternal uncle to visit him in Jerusalem where he was in charge of a mental asylum.An eccentric beginning: While in Jerusalem he was able to land the job of a reporter for the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung. He travelled frequently to Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Istanbul and Lebanon, seeing how the Arab world lived. When he returned in 1924, his paper employed him on a regular basis and got him to write a book on his experiences in the Middle East. The book did not sell because it was not sufficiently romanticised and because it was anti-Zionist. Leopold simply did not accept that the ‘Jewish homeland’ was justified after driving the majority population of the Arabs from Palestine. The newspaper sent him back to the Middle East. On the way he stopped in Cairo to learn Arabic, in the process getting to know Sheikh Mustafa Maraghi, a renowned scholar of Islam who later arose to become the rector of Al-Azhar University. He embarked on his wanderings soon after that, going to Iraq and Iran, and finally to Afghanistan, where a Pushtun told him that he was already a Muslim because of his knowledge of Islam. After two years of wandering and writing for Frankfurter Zeitung, he returned to Berlin via Central Asia and Moscow.By this time he was feeling attracted to Islam because of its lack of dichotomy between the physical and spiritual worlds. He married Elsa in 1926 and embraced Islam together with her in the tutelage of an Indian Muslim in Berlin, renaming himself Muhammad Asad. He was contracted by a number of German Dutch papers before he left again for the Middle East. This time he stationed himself in Saudi Arabia, meeting King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud in 1927. At the age of 32, after Elsa died, he took an Arab wife and immersed himself in a library of early Islamic sources while also taking time out to ride through the length and breadth of the great Saudi desert, somewhat like Saint-John Philby. He travelled eastwards to Indonesia and India where he soon met Allama Iqbal who persuaded him in 1932 to ‘elucidate the intellectual premise of the future Islamic state’. While in India, he was trapped by the outbreak of the Second World War. The Raj government interned him in Dalhousie for the duration of the war. After 1947, Asad started working as head of the Department of Islamic Reconstruction in Lahore under the Punjab government, translating the hadith collection of Imam Bukhari and publishing his journal, Arafat.In the service of Pakistan: Irshad Haqqani wrote in Jang (6 April 2005) that Allama Muhammad Asad was a great Islamic scholar who was made director of Department of Islamic Reconstruction (1947-49) in Karachi to formulate laws about the new Pakistani society. But the archives of this department were no longer available. General Zia invited the great scholar in 1983 to show him the Islamic way together with Maulana Zafar Ansari and Dr Hamidullah, but when Asad disagreed with his idea of the shura he was displeased with him, which forced Asad to cut short his visit to Pakistan. However, back in 1952, he was chosen to represent Pakistan at the United Nations as minister plenipotentiary, but while in New York he soon developed differences with the Foreign Office back in Pakistan. When he applied to marry an American convert to Islam, Pola Hamida, permission was refused, compelling him to resign. Somehow he put Pakistan behind him forever, never writing the sequel to his famous The Road to Mecca which told the story of his life up to his stay in Saudi Arabia. His translation of the Quran was typically based on early sources and not on the tafseer literature which had proliferated in the medieval centuries. Although he had fled Western rationalism to become a Muslim, he could not avoid applying rationality to the understanding of the Scripture. He was influenced by the Egyptian Muslim reformers, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, whose rational presentation of Islam was later dubbed apologetics by the rising tide of taqleedi thinking. He wrote: ‘ The Quran cannot be understood if we read it merely in the light of later ideological developments, losing sight of its original purport and meaning’. Asad remained ever a restless soul, travelling and staying in different parts of the world, in all spending about 19 years in Morocco alone, before finally settling in Spain, where he died on 20 February 1992, and was buried in Granada, Andalusia. His book Islam at the crossroads (1934) advising Muslims to stay away from blind Westernisation was translated into many languages, and his This Law and other Essays (1987) explained his approach to the shariah and bemoaned the tendency of the Muslims to accept local accretions to the purity of Islamic law. If the early 20th century reformers thought that Islam would move towards rationality and modernity, they were proved wrong towards the end of the century. Intellectual activity, which could have shown the way forward, has been suppressed by a rising tide of violence. As he sat before me in Lisbon, he clearly understood that he had been rendered irrelevant by the march of events. Today, the extremism embraced by the ulema threatens to destabilise the Islamic state, and the moderate view of scholars like Allama Javed Ahmad Ghamidi is easily set aside by the more powerful but less learned religious leaders of Pakistan.

Night of The General

By Aysha

Javed Akram

• Once among the country's most influential individuals, General Rani is now just a faded page in the country's history books.

The woman was a phenomenon. Easily the most influential figure during Pakistan's second military regime, with the slightest gesture of her bejewelled hand she could guarantee employment, ensure promotions and bring about unwelcome transfers. Yet, interestingly, few even know her real name: Akleem Akhtar. General Rani she was, and remains to all but an intimate few.
There are enough reasons for the lady's ascension to local legend status. In her glory days she seemed omnipotent and was brazen about her exploits. And now, even while suffering from breast cancer that has led to metastasis in the liver and kidney, bedridden and in semi-seclusion, she remains spirited and outspoken.
Yet, doing a story on her was probably the most difficult assignment I have undertaken. For one thing, everyone I was certain was acquainted with her, was reluctant to even own up to the fact that they knew her. So, for starters, I made a call to her daughter, Aroosa Alam, the defence journalist for the Pakistan Observer and the news coordinator for the Middle East Broadcasting Company, and pop star Fakhre Alam's mother.
Aroosa nipped all efforts at contact with her mother in the bud, claiming that not only was General Rani far too unwell to entertain visitors, but also, her brothers were completely against their mother appearing in the press. "My mother has been hurt sufficiently by the media already; we don't want her private life exploited any further," stated a stern Aroosa.
A call to Naureen and Arshad Sami, Adnan Sami Khan's parents, proved equally unsuccessful. Although General Rani is Naureen's maternal aunt, she politely but firmly denied even knowing the lady. There was a similar response from Zil-e-Huma, whose mother Madame Nur Jehan's friendship with General Rani was legion. Huma completely denied any knowledge of the woman.
A journalist working for the Jang group, Maqsood Butt nearly had an apoplexy when I mentioned the story I was working on. While in the past Maqsood Butt had written extensively on this topic and is said to have close ties with the family, he has for several years, refrained from even bringing up her name in an article.
"I promised her that I would never talk about her or her family again," he stated nervously and refused to help me in any way.
Clearly, the woman I was seeking out was no ordinary woman. As I kept running into a blind alley and became increasingly despondent, General Rani's lawyers, S. M. Zafar and Ijaz Batalvi, Mustafa Khar, and a few journalists and government officials who wish to remain anonymous, appeared like beacons and lit my way.
A sneak visit was arranged to General Rani's house and thereupon begins this story.
The house General Rani resides in is rather small, with little more than a handkerchief-sized lawn in front, and the main door opening into a virtually non-existent hall that leads straight to her room. There was an air of neglect about the house; the garden was unkempt and the floor unswept. General Rani was lying in bed. My first impression was one of shock. Having visualised an elegant, elderly woman, I was instead confronted by a dark, overweight woman. Her hair had obviously suffered due to heavy doses of chemotherapy, and the loss of hair accentuated the pock-marks on her face. But though visibly ill, she was in good spirits and happy to entertain visitors - a commodity I suspect, is a rare treat nowadays.
General Rani hails from a village in Gujarat. Her father was a zamindar and the family was reportedly well-to-do. Those who knew her family describe their house as one of the bigger mansions in the area, with a number of servants running around to the residents' bidding.
From the outset, Akleem was an independent spirit. She was a tomboy, fond of outdoor sports and hunting. And though she did not even complete her matric, her sharp intelligence more than compensated for her lack of education.
At a tender age she was married to a police officer many times her senior. Though the marriage lasted for some time and she bore six children, General Rani was never happy. Her husband was a traditionalist and believed that a wife's primary duty was to serve her husband. A woman as strong and independent as she found this hard to digest, and squabbles were common between the two. The sham their marriage was eventually reduced to, collapsed one day - right on Murree's Mall Road.
One summer, when the family was vacationing in Murree, a burqa-clad Rani and her husband went for a stroll on the Mall. As was customary for him, he walked a step or two behind her so as to keep an eye on her. Suddenly there was a gust of wind - "a lovely breeze" says she, and quite spontaneously Rani lifted the naqab covering her face to allow the breeze to caress her cheeks.
Her husband immediately tapped her with his walking stick to reprimand her. Enraged and insulted, she threw caution to the wind and flung her naqab to the ground, and her abaya into a cracking fire. She then turned to face her husband with a defiant gleam in her eyes.
She explains her reaction in these words: "I just felt I had had enough. The anger and frustration had been building up inside me for many months, but that day, it just all came oozing out. I wanted to tear my husband's muffler into bits, scratch his face, pull his hair out, and do all sorts of damage to him. The only thing that stopped me were the people on the Mall."
Though this incident marked the end of her marriage, the official divorce process (if there was one) took place later. Most sources agree that Rani was only married once, but one of her closest friend states that there was a second marriage, much later in her life and of an extremely short duration. Whatever the truth of that marriage, the dramatic end of her first proved a turning point in her life and transformed Rani irrevocably. She began to thrive on her independence and her life philosophy evolved into a specific ambition. As she puts it, "I was determined to beat men at their own game. Since my husband was in the police, I had been observing men in positions of power throughout my married life and I had realised that all men in positions of power needed a vent and the vent they require the most is a bedmate provided through a reliable agency. The higher a man's position, the greater his demand."
In one interview, Rani stated: "I knew that dumb, pretty girls who come with no strings attached are a universal failing of men in power. After my marriage collapsed and I had to find the means to support myself and my children, I decided to become the provider of such girls to men in need."
In yet another conversation, she talked about the understanding she gained of the workings of the government by listening to her husband's complaints. "I realised that in this country everything worked on mutual favours and the profession that I had chosen for myself entitled me to these favours."
This outspokenness notwithstanding, Rani maintains she personally never allowed herself to be used or even thought of as any man's keep. She contends she maintained her dignity and saw herself as a sexless mother figure. She says she was always the woman behind the scenes, there to run the show and mop up the mess.
The gods were obviously smiling on her, because soon after she adopted this profession, the man who was soon to run the show took a shine to her. She describes her first meeting with Yahya Khan. "At that time Agha Jani was posted at Kharian and I was living in Gujarat. We met by chance at a party in Pindi club. Though I would often frequent such parties, I never joined in the drinking and dancing. Rather, I preferred sitting some distance away from the party and usually found a seat near the men's room, well aware of the fact that the more they drank the more visits they would have to make to the toilet and hence past me.
"Agha Jani was in full swing at this party. He was completely drunk, and was continually traipsing back and forth from the men's room. During one of these visits, he saw me and took a fancy to me. I remember asking about him and after we were formally introduced, I invited him to Gujarat."
Thereafter Yahya Khan began making frequent journeys from Kharian to Gujarat. Somewhere along the way she earned the title of General Rani and the name stuck. While speculation about the exact nature of her relationship with Yahya Khan rages - they were said to be friends, lovers, shared a sibling relationship or one of demand and supply at various times through the course of their relationship - the general consensus among Rani's more intimate circle is that they never had a physical relationship. Various explanations are put forth to explain this. "Yahya never desired her," says a friend. "She was a woman of principles and from day one, she made it clear to him what her limits were," states another.
Nonetheless, after he became the martial law adminstrator, Rani became a cornerstone in his life. Yahya's weaknesses were drink and women and Rani masterfully catered to both. Among the women she introduced him to were film actress Taranna - film actress Andleeb's mother - Madame Nur Jehan and Nael Kamal. She relates how Yahya's fascination with Nur Jehan began.
"One night Agha Jani came to visit me and was somewhat agitated. The moment he entered, he inquired if I had heard the song "cheeche da chala" from the film Dhee Rani. I smiled and stated that I had no time to listen to songs. So, he called the military secretary and ordered him to have a copy of the song delivered to my house at once. It was two o' clock in the morning and the MS had to specially have an audio shop opened up in order to obtain the album. But the command was obeyed and within an hour, Agha Jani was blissfully listening to the song.
"Observing him I smiled and stated that since he seemed to enjoy the song so immensely, I would bring the singer to his house on his birthday. This greatly pleased him and so the very next day, I took a flight to Lahore. In those days, a suite at the Intercontinental Hotel was permanently reserved for me and so from the airport, I went directly to the hotel. From there I called Nur Jehan and asked her to come and meet me. Till now, I had never been formally introduced to her; I just knew of her, as she knew of me. Well, Nur Jehan came, and we talked, and the next week she arrived in Islamabad to dance and sing for General Yahya Khan."
Madame Nur Jehan's relationship with General Yahya Khan subsequently came under great scrutiny. At first, Madame persistently denied that she was on friendly terms with the general, but when objectionable pictures of both of them were printed, she resorted to another defence and officially stated that General Rani, had time and, again tried to get her involved with the general. In response to this, Rani laughed and commented that Madame was hardly a suckling infant who could be coerced into doing what others wanted her to do. The Rani-Nur Jehan tussle was played up by the press, until eventually, some time before the latter's death, the two made up. Following is an extract from an interview General Rani gave after Madame's death.
Q: Why did you introduce Madame Nur Jehan to General Yahya Khan?
A: Some tax inspectors were bugging Madame Nur Jehan and the poor woman was in great distress. She asked me to help her out and I introduced her to Agha Jani.
Q: How would you define your relationship with Nur Jehan?
A: She was just like my sister and I often called her baji.
Q: How would you describe her character?
A: She was an exceptionally brave and confident woman, who brought up her children singlehandedly. The only flaw she had was her greed for money.
Q: It is said that Madame tried to drive a wedge between you and Yahya Khan?
A: I don't want to say anything on this issue. If Rani catered to Agha Jani's every whim, there is no question that she was royally compensated. During Yahya Khan's time, General Rani prospered way beyond her wildest expectations. There are endless reports of how she would use her 'special relationship' with Yahya to fill her coffers. She would ask for a plot of land or a house in return for a favour and those desperate for a job or promotion would readily fulfill her demands. During this time, politicians were also eager to win her approval and among the many who curried her favour were Mustafa Khar and Z. A. Bhutto.
General Rani describes her relationship with these two men: "Both Mustafa Khar and Z. A. Bhutto would come and sit at my house for hours on end, begging me to introduce them to the General. Mustafa Khar was particularly fond of listening to the poems I used to write. In fact if you compare Yahya Khan to these two, I would say that I was closer to Bhutto and Khar and arranged more parties for them than I did for Agha Jani."
It was a closeness that was not to endure. As soon as Bhutto came to power, General Rani was put under house arrest and her telephone connection was cancelled. Her crime in the words of an eminent lawyer was that, "she knew too much."
Thus began General Rani's downfall. Once the issue of house arrest was resolved (courtesy S. M. Zafar) and her subsequent jail terms ended (the most recent for drug-trafficking), General Rani never really reverted to her former glory. By now the money that had so freely flowed into her hands had also freely flowed out.
Financially wrecked, socially ostracised, dependent only on the kindness of a few whose affections for her have endured, General Rani lives largely in the past - in the memory of days of wine and roses.
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