With new threats, US Army must reinvent itself: Panetta

WASHINGTON: The US Army won’t be fighting conventional wars against columns of tanks in the future and will have to prepare for new threats from cheaper high-tech weaponry, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday.

With budget pressures bearing down on the Pentagon, Panetta challenged the “battle-hardened” generation of army officers who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade to come up with new ideas on how to counter a wide range of potential adversaries, including militant groups.

Referring to the first Gulf war in 1991, Panetta said “the reality is there aren’t a lot of countries out there building massive tank armies, it is unlikely that we will be re-fighting Desert Storm in the future.

“Instead, I see both state and non-state actors arming with high-tech weaponry that is easier both to buy and operate, weapons that frustrate our traditional advantage and freedom of movement,” he told an audience of mainly retired officers at the Association of the US Army.

Panetta described what US military planners and analysts call a new “hybrid threat” that combines conventional and irregular warfare, with the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon often cited as the most vivid example.

In that conflict, Hezbollah fighters used precision-guided weapons, such as anti-tank missiles, while moving in small units akin to a guerrilla force.

New models of shoulder-launched rockets and other weapons, including drones, have become easier to use, less expensive and more threatening to US military might, analysts say.

The US Army trained for decades to fight major land wars that envisaged numerous tank battalions but then switched course in Iraq and Afghanistan to embrace counter-insurgency doctrine.

Panetta, however, said the army would need to move beyond traditional strategy and help define its role in the future, with a smaller but agile force.

“Coming up with new ideas, with operating principles to defeat these kind of enemies is a challenge that I pose to this battle hardened generation of American soldiers,” he said.

The army has shouldered much of the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a rising suicide rate among its ranks has underscored the strain on the all-volunteer force.

Panetta noted that 2010 was the sixth year in a row that the suicide rate has increased for the US Army, which he called “a national tragedy.”

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/12/with-new-threats-us-army-must-reinvent-itself-panetta.html

Cabinet comes up with old formula to cope with power crisis

ISLAMABAD: The federal cabinet again approved on Wednesday a formula to resolve the energy crisis that has failed earlier — two weekly days off, business closure at sunset and staggering of industrial holidays — to overcome increasing electricity shortfall during peak hours.

And surprisingly, the decision was taken this time without the consent of the provinces and without even consulting them.

The chief ministers were not invited to the meeting although the decision cannot be implemented without their active cooperation.

In fact, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa publicly criticised the decision immediately after it was reported by the media.

And because the other stakeholders, the commerce and industries sector, had also not been taken on board, representatives of traders and industries expressed their displeasure and said the move would adversely affect businesses and industries.

Water and Power Minister Syed Naveed Qamar said the meeting presided over by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had decided that provinces would be consulted for implementation of the decision on energy conservation because they had to play a central role in enforcement of business closure after sunset.

He said some designated branches of banks would be allowed to operate on Saturdays to address practical business problems.

The cabinet did not take a decision on a proposal to increase electricity tariff by 12 per cent because of paucity of time, and decided to address financial aspects of the restructuring of circular debt and related matters in its next meeting.

The meeting decided to disconnect power supply to defaulting consumers 45 days after non-payment of bills even if these included ‘sensitive’ connections.

“The cabinet decided to disconnect electricity without discrimination to those who fail to pay their bills, whether he/she is the president, the prime minister, chief of army staff, the provincial governments or any other government institution,” Finance Minister Dr Hafeez Shaikh told journalists after the meeting.

He said all institutions were given a budget every year and it was their responsibility to pay their power bills with responsibility, he said, adding the government was serious and firm in implementing the decision indiscriminately because it had injected around Rs1 trillion in the power sector over the past three years and yet unpaid electricity bills stood at about Rs300 billion.

Mr Naveed Qamar said the cabinet had also decided to do away with the current tariff setting mechanism under which the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) fixed different tariffs for distribution companies of Wapda, resulting in tariff differential subsidy in hundreds of billions of rupees because of equalised and uniform tariff for the entire country.

He said from now onwards, a single tariff application would be filed before Nepra which would determine a uniform tariff.

Nepra will also be revamped and strengthened.

Dr Shaikh said the government decided to involve the private sector in billing, metering and collection of electricity bills to improve overall recovery because the public sector had failed to deliver.

The cabinet agreed to privatise the Islamabad and Faisalabad electric supply companies, which were the best distribution companies in the country, he added.

The ministers sidestepped questions why reform measures introduced almost a decade ago for transparent electricity costs were being reversed and whether it was an attempt to camouflage increasing system losses of distribution companies in Sindh, Balochistan and Fata.

An official, however, explained that the separate tariffs were premised on continuation of a set of reform measures, including privatisation of these entities which could not be done.

Dr Shaikh did not answer a question about quantifying the cost of bad governance and delayed decision-making, but an official said the Rs1 trillion the minister talked about having injected into the power sector could be attributed to these factors. The amount would have been enough to construct Diamer-Bhasha dam and Munda dam, generating a surplus electricity of about 8,000MW.

Mr Qamar said Pepco – looking after 14 distribution, generation and transmission companies of Wapda – would be abolished in a few days and corporate entities would be made fully independent through professional managements and a private sector board so that they did not look towards the federal government for bailouts.

The management contracts would be signed with new chief executive officers and chief financial officers with specific targets and performance rewards. He said the cabinet had decided to double security deposit for new connections and for reconnections after disconnection owing to default. Life-line consumers using 100 units a month will be exempt from the increase in deposit.

The minister for power said efforts would be made to ensure full recovery of outstanding dues within six months.

Simultaneously, special concessions on power tariffs to Azad Kashmir and Balochistan would be gradually eliminated in consultation with the respective governments. In Balochistan, all agricultural tube-wells would be brought on metres to quantify their consumption so that the government could provide a flat amount of subsidy, instead of applying un-metered flat rates.

He said billboards and neon-signs would not be provided electricity after sunset.

He said it had been proposed to close down wedding halls across the country after 10pm. About 30 million energy-saving bulbs have been procured with the assistance of the Asian Development Bank and their free distribution would be completed by June next year. Also, the ongoing power projects would be fast-tracked to be completed in 18 months, he said.

Mr Qamar said the measures would reduce the demand-supply gap to a manageable level.

Dr Shaikh said the cabinet had also decided to refund to power companies Rs10 billion the Federal Board of Revenue had collected as general sales tax on unpaid electricity bills.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/13/cabinet-comes-up-with-old-formula-to-cope-with-power-crisis.html

Unanimous NA move on power crisis

ISLAMABAD: After a six-day debate, the National Assembly unanimously decided on Monday to set up a special house committee to examine the causes of power shortages and recommend remedies even though the government said there were hardly any outages now after it tackled the recent crisis that provoked nationwide protests.

A motion adopted by the house on a proposal from the PML-N, to which the PPP agreed, authorised Speaker Fehmida Mirza to name the committee soon in a consensus that came despite bitter uproars over two unrelated matters and in a marked contrast to daily PML-N walkouts during the previous fives days of the debate and sit-in outside the presidency to protest against intense power cuts, or loadshedding, in the past week.

The day’s uproars were a controversial political role adopted by former Sindh home minister Zulfikar Ali Mirza over the affairs of Sindh province and allegations by the government-allied Muttahida Qaumi Movement of persecution of an estranged wife of a PML-N lawmaker and son of Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif.

The speaker, who chaired the proceedings for the first time after absence for the past few days due to an official visit to Malaysia, kept her usual poise in the face of some highly critical remarks of two MQM members against Dr Mirza, her husband, who got support for his challenge to the MQM over the affairs of Sindh despite last week’s return of the party to the PPP-led coalition.

After Water and Power Minister Naveed Qamar, who asked for an early cut-off date for the recommendations of the special committee while winding up the debate with an explanation of a turnaround in power generation within days to over 14,000MW from a suddenly dropped level of 7,000MW and the government’s future plans, the speaker asked all parties in the house to give her names of their nominees for the body so it could present its report at the start of the next session of the house due to begin on Nov 14.

“Today we can say there is none (of), or hardly any power outages anywhere in the country,” the minister remarked while explaining the government’s handling of the situation blamed on a combination of problems that he said had been tackled with improvement in river inflows to hydro-electric dams, a partial payment of arrears worth Rs11 billion to two private power companies to ensure oil supplies to them and restart of two nuclear plants, one of which had tripped and other closed for refuelling.

But he made it clear the present relief was temporary and said there was still need to enhance capacity because the demand would rise to between 17,000-19,000MW in summer.

“All our problems have not gone away,” he said while warning against complacency, and noted what he called “lack of governance” within the power distribution companies, which he would have to fend for themselves with reformed managements after the planned dissolution of the Pakistan Electric Power Company in the next 10 to 15 days.

Among projects for the future, he cited the Diamer-Bhasha dam on the river Indus, whose foundation stone is due to be laid on Oct 18, encouragement of privately-run wind power projects, some of which he said should start generation within 18 months before the present government runs out its five-year term in 2013, and coal-fired projects to be run initially with imported coal and later with coal extracted from the Thar area in Sindh.

The implementation of all these projects and the ideas that the new house committee might come up with, he said, would help the country not only to close the present gap between supply and demand but also go beyond to see national growth “in leaps and bounds”.

Earlier, the MQM marked its return to the house after the absence of some days it took for a reconciliation with the PPP by sparking the first uproar of the day when its member Asif Hasnain accused the PML-N’s provincial government in Punjab of punishing what he described as an estranged wife of PML-N lawmaker Mohammad Hamza Shahbaz Sharif by instituting criminal proceedings against her and influencing an anti-terrorism court.

MQM parliamentary leader and Minister for Overseas Pakistanis Farooq Sattar added fuel to the fire by taking up the issue even more vociferously, and inviting more PML-N shouts, despite an advice from PPP chief whip and Religious Affairs Minister Khurshid Ahmed Shah to avoid raising members’ personal matters, before the speaker adjourned the house for Maghreb prayers.

PML-N parliamentary leader Sardar Mehtab, who led the protests from his party, was once heard saying “we don’t want to hear this ‘bakwas’ (foolish talk)” as he asked the chair to switch off Mr Sattar’s mike, which was done more than once.

Tempers on both sides seemed to have cooled down when the house reassembled after the break for prayers, but more was to come at the fag end of the sitting after a PML-N member, Shirin Arshad, asked why the government was not taking action on some charges made by Dr Mirza with an oath of the holy Quran, only to provoke an angry outburst from MQM’s Waseem Akhtar, who said the former minister should be arrested under the Maintenance of Public Order ordinance for allegedly threatening law and order in Karachi.

And after a member of the government-allied Awami National Party, Bushra Gohar, used some words of praise for Dr Mirza by saying he had substantiated his charges with some proofs and another PML-N member, Ms Qudsia Arshad, said “I salute Zulfikar Mirza”, another retort came from MQM back-bencher, Sajid Ahmed, who said “all those who tried to liquidate the MQM themselves perished and the MQM is still there”.

From the PPP benches, only veteran party parliamentarian Zafar Ali Shah expressed support for Dr Mirza by advising members against making allegations against persons who cannot respond in the house.

No remarks from either side were expunged before the house was adjourned until 5pm on Tuesday.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/11/unanimous-na-move-on-power-crisis.html

ved) � h t � hb� rs, a Coptic priest said, while an AFP correspondent saw bodies with gunshot wounds at the hospital.

The grand imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed Tayyeb, the Sunni religious head, called for crisis talks between Muslim and Christian leaders “in a bid to contain the crisis”, state television said.

Some commentators warned of civil religious strife, but others said the clashes were fuelled not only by sectarian strife but also by anger towards the security services and the military council which succeeded Mubarak.

Government-backed provocation was also blamed.

Users of social networking sites such as Twitter said the initial clashes outside the state television building on the Nile were provoked by “thugs” at the scene, while the broadcaster was accused of fanning anti-Coptic sentiment.

On Monday, the authorities announced the hanging of a man sentenced to death for shooting six Copts last year.

Copts complain of systematic discrimination, but since Mubarak’s fall, tensions have also mounted between the military – initially hailed for not siding with Mubarak – and groups which spearheaded the revolt.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/11/egypt-probes-deadly-sectarian-clashes-first-victims-buried.html

WAR has raged between the Pakistani Army and Taliban forces for several years now, spilling over from the tribal areas and Swat into the plains and cities of Pakistan.

As a result, Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi have all borne the brunt of attacks on security targets, with Pakistan’s children being the most affected by the conflict.

Karachi-based psychologist Ishma Alvi explains the psychological effects of the war on terror and related violence on Karachi’s children. “There has been a marked increase in anxiety disorders, especially generalised anxiety disorder as well as agoraphobia, the fear of going to spaces where the sufferer might feel threatened, where there appears to be little escape and
where one might have a panic attack.”

She notes an increase in major depressive disorder, or clinical depression. “Not only have these disorders been appearing more frequently, they have been presenting in younger groups — teenagers to young adults.”

With 48 per cent of Pakistan’s population under the age of 18, and a small percentage of the budget allocated for education, chances are that extremism will continue to foment in the minds of young people faced with limited employment opportunities. According to Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, director of the Emmy-winning documentary Children of the Taliban, economic deprivation ensures that they will continue to turn to terrorism as a way of ensuring survival for their families.

Mindful of this ongoing threat, the Pakistan Army, during their 2009 operation in Swat, removed dozens of teenage boys who had been trained as suicide bombers from Taliban training camps. It enlisted Dr Feriha Peracha, a popular psychologist with a lucrative private practice in Lahore, to assess 12 of these boys. It was then proposed that she run a school aimed at rehabilitating them, and Dr Peracha agreed. Thirty-five children and teenagers were enrolled in this school, called Sabaoon, the Pushto word for the first ray of light in the morning.

The school was heavily guarded, and remotely located — security a top priority for such a delicate operation. The programme was administered by Dr Peracha’s organisation, the Unicef-funded Hum Pakistani Foundation. The programme included mainstream academic intervention and vocational training “for those who are unable to keep up with academics but continue with education at their own individual levels of achievement, starting with basic literacy”, says Dr Peracha.

Classroom education was supplemented with nature expeditions, art and drawing sessions and time to play sports, in order to give the boys a taste of the childhood that was snatched from them during the Taliban occupation of their villages and towns and their time in the training camps.

Religious academic and Swat University vice chancellor Dr Mohammed Farooq Khan visited the school once a week to teach the boys an Islam free from the distortions the Taliban had taught them. Undoing the damage inflicted upon the boys’ psyches — the five-point programme of indoctrination — was going to take months, if not years.

Rather than interrogating them or laying blame for their willingness to kill in the name of God, Dr Khan treated them as children who had undergone major psychological trauma, and attempted to educate and counsel them, helping them to understand how the Taliban had distorted their perceptions of religion and the West.

Sabaoon received media attention for its groundbreaking efforts and seemed to be off to a good start. Even the most severely indoctrinated children had begun to understand that the version of Islam previously taught to them was an ideology that encouraged death and destruction in their once peaceful valley. Then, one day in October 2009, the Taliban came to Dr Khan’s clinic and shot him in the head as he ate lunch with his assistant.

The murder has been linked to the ideological changes that Dr Khan had been attempting to institute in Swat University, which had become a hotbed of religious extremism during the days of the Taliban invasion of Swat, but his death had direct repercussions for Sabaoon and the boys in the school’s care.

“He was with me just two days before at the school,” says Dr Peracha, “and I had given some books to him about empathy training and requested him to use the parables and other narratives from the Quran to teach the same concept to the boys….”

Dr Peracha acknowledges the vacuum created by Dr Khan’s death, but it has not deterred her from her mission. She has hired another expert religious scholar as well as regular Islamic studies teachers to continue the work of Dr Khan, as she feels that the combination of religious education and psycho-social intervention is key to saving her charges from a path that no child should ever have to tread.

While danger continues to be a constant companion for Pakistan and its people, the key to surviving its psychological onslaught is to cultivate a place of safety within. Ishma Alvi urges parents to talk honestly to their children about the events and circumstances around them. She adds that parents must endeavour to keep calm in the moments of crisis that regularly erupt in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan’s restive cities. “That doesn’t mean they should fake calm, but that they should maintain calm despite fear.”

So many Pakistanis born in the age of the war on terror have died in these 10 years that it’s easy to imagine Pakistan as haunted by the children who never made it through the decade between Sept 11, 2001 and the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. But after the ones that have died, including the 160 children the UK-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism claims have been killed in US drone strikes since 2004, it’s the children who lived through and still live within the conflict areas that are the hardest-hit victims of the war and its violent blowback throughout Pakistan.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/11/the-youngest-casualties.html

Ideology and intolerance: By Irfan Husain

MOHAMMAD Ali Jinnah visualised the state of Pakistan as “a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent”.

Sadly, he did not specify precisely which sect of Muslims he had in mind. Although a Shia himself, he did not have a sectarian bone in his body.

Indeed, he was secular to the core, and this was the philosophy he bequeathed to the state he had created virtually single-handedly. This was a bequest we tore up even before he was laid to rest.

So as we witness the ongoing massacre of Hazara Shias in Balochistan, we need to take a hard look at the monsters Pakistan has spawned over the years. Management gurus teach us that before we can solve a problem, we must first analyse it to gain a full understanding of the underlying causes.

But given the deep state of denial we prefer to stay in, we shy away from making the logical connection between cause and effect. When elaborating on his ‘two-nation theory’, Mr Jinnah was of the view that Muslims could not live side by side with Hindus in a united India as we were a different nation in terms of values and cultural norms.

This notion led to the partition of India in 1947, and even though millions of Muslims did not — or could not — make their way to the new state, Pakistan was born in a cataclysm of blood and fire. Almost immediately, the hard-line vision of Islam, espoused by Maulana Maududi and his Jamaat-i-Islami, became the ideology of large numbers of right-wing intellectuals and clerics.

However, it wasn’t until Zia seized power in 1977 that this literal strand of Islam became the official ideology of the state.

Some of the hard-line Sunni groups like the Sipah-i-Sahaba came into being in Zia’s period, declaring Shias to be ‘wajib-ul qatal’, or deserving of death. Needless to say, these killers were permitted to thrive by Zia.

Step by step, the notion of separateness at the heart of Partition has fostered a feeling of ‘us against them’. Taken to its illogical extreme by hard-line ideologues and their brainwashed followers, this translates into the belief that those not following their particular school of Islamic thought become ‘wajib-ul qatal’.

Massacres and individual murders resulting from rabid intolerance bearing the spurious stamp of religious orthodoxy are too numerous to cite here. But the recent episodes of the cold-blooded slaughter of Hazara Shias in Balochistan should open the eyes of those wishing to negotiate with the terrorists responsible for these acts.

Another hard-line, anti-Shia group, the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, was quick to claim responsibility for these murders, and yet the state has done nothing to bring this organisation to book.

According to a Human Rights Watch press release, “In Balochistan, some Sunni extremist groups are widely viewed as allies of the Pakistani military, its intelligence agencies and the paramilitary Frontier Corps, which are responsible for security there.

Instead of perpetrating abuses in Balochistan against its political opponents, the military should be safeguarding the lives of members of vulnerable communities under attack from extremist groups”.

But it’s not just in Pakistan that Hazara Shias have been targeted: in Afghanistan, thousands have been killed by the Taliban.

Being a visible ethnic group, they are especially vulnerable to an increasingly vicious and violent Sunni majority. In a blog on this newspaper’s website, Murtaza Haider has cited a revealing doctoral thesis by Syed Ejaz Hussain. According to his research, 90 per cent of all those arrested for committing terrorist attacks in Pakistan between 1990 and 2009 were Sunni Deobandis.

And it’s not just Shias who are being targeted, or Christians, Hindus and Ahmedis: as we have seen time and again, suicide attacks against mosques and Sufi shrines have killed thousands of Sunnis as well. While there are a growing number of extremist groups, they are all united in their intolerance, and their contempt for democratic values and common decency.

Despite the evil these killers represent, there are growing voices in Pakistan demanding that the government negotiate with them. A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban was quoted recently as saying his group would talk to the government provided it broke off its relationship with the United States and imposed Sharia law in the country.

For a criminal gang to make such demands is preposterous; but for sane, educated Pakistanis to advocate talks with such people is even worse. Instead of insisting that we lock up these terrorists and try them, we are being asked to treat them as a political entity with valid demands.

If we are to ever defeat the hydra-headed monster we have created, our defence establishment will have to acknowledge its huge error in thinking that it could use these killers to further its agenda in Afghanistan and Kashmir. This has provided them with legitimacy, support and impunity. Unless the Pakistani state repudiates all links with extremism in all its forms, outfits like the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi will continue to murder at will within Pakistan, while the Lashkar-e-Taiba creates mayhem in our neighbourhood.

Quite apart from the collapse of the writ of the state caused by the depredations of these groups, and the innocent lives sacrificed at the altar of misplaced expediency, Pakistan has become a pariah in the international community. Increasingly, the use of terrorism as an instrument of policy is making us a scary country with a powerful death wish.

But while we struggle to cope with the rising tide of extremism, we need to step back and examine how and why we arrived at this abyss.

Clearly, it did not happen overnight. Looking back, we can see that the demand for separate electorates for Muslims in British India over 100 years ago was a major historical fork in the road. By conceding to this demand from a group of Muslim aristocrats as part of their divide-and-rule policy, the British tried to ensure that the two major religious communities would not unite against them.

However, we do not have the luxury of blaming our predicament on past imperial policies. The British are long gone, and the barbarians are poised to capture the state. We still have a choice, but if we don’t act quickly, we risk joining the ranks of failed states like Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/08/ideology-and-intolerance.html

Common enemy, not goal: By Shada Islam

LIKE the rest of the world, I’ve had the dubious pleasure of watching the long-running US-Pakistan soap opera/relationship plunge to new lows over recent weeks.

True, it made good headlines and certainly the cast of characters is interestingly colourful. Tough, gun-toting generals, shifty security officials, ruthless terrorists and — a new addition — a beautiful and classy woman, crowded on to an already very full stage, jostling for attention.

But frankly, like many observers, I could barely suppress my yawns. These repeated public squabbles, accusations and counter-accusations, finger-pointing, followed by angry sulks and much chest-beating and thumping are getting extremely tedious.

It’s time to innovate and get a bit more creative. At a time when even Bollywood is thinking outside the box, US and Pakistani foreign policy scriptwriters need to rethink the old-fashioned and outdated formula. The danger of following the well-worn genre is clear for both sides.

The US risks really losing face and patience with its once and future partner as Pakistani leaders run amok, suddenly morphing from friends into adversaries. Pakistan, meanwhile, is in danger of becoming known worldwide as a schizophrenic and
unpredictable partner, unable to make up its mind on whether it wants to be known as a progressive Muslim nation or one which provides succour to its ally’s worst enemies.

For the moment, both sides seem to be enjoying the drama and passion. Top US officials, including the now retired Adm Mike Mullen, certainly hit the headlines by describing the Haqqani network as a “veritable arm” of the ISI and responsible for the attack on the US embassy in Kabul.

The entire world has always had strong suspicions about the ISI-Haqqani ties — but nobody as yet has made the accusation in public. That of course enraged all of Pakistan with politicians of all sorts discovering a brief moment of brotherhood and solidarity as they ranted against the US.

There were passionate references to sovereignty and patriotism. Was it impressive? Did the rest of the world sit up and listen?

Not really. It was just more proof that politicians in the country can only unite to vent against a common enemy — the US in this case but often, of course, India.

The Pakistani military was once again painted as heroes — all references to their failure to ‘discover’ Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad and their various humbling run-ins with insurgents including at the Karachi naval base, erased from memory. As Gen Ashfaq Kayani and the ISI chief Shuja Pasha emerged smelling of roses — proving once again that the country’s politicians run to the military’s tune — Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar took to the American airwaves to complain about inappropriate behaviour from an ally.

And then of course, there were the usual references by Pakistan to the country’s only true ‘all-weather’ friend China and that other strong backer of democracy and human rights, Saudi Arabia. ‘Who needs America when we have China on our side’ goes the predictable Pakistani mantra. Although this time, Beijing’s embrace did not seem to be that warm — after all China has its own fears of Pakistan-based militants making their way into their country. And Saudi Arabia is too busy keeping its eye on the Arab Spring to pay attention to Pakistan.

Adding to the excitement, India and Afghanistan signed up for a ‘strategic partnership’ after President Hamid Karzai indulged in his traditional monthly tirade against Pakistan. He then went on to say Islamabad should have no worries since Pakistan and Afghanistan were “twin brothers”.

We did not have to wait long for the back-tracking to begin. Having put the cat among the pigeons, Adm Mullen reiterated the need to somehow maintain the alliance. “A flawed and strained engagement with Pakistan is better than disengagement,” he said. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said the US should build a “cooperative and trusting” relationship with Pakistan, where both countries pursue the goal to eliminate terrorism as their major effort. “What we’ve got to do is build a trusting relationship where we both understand that our major effort has to be to end terrorism, period,” he said, describing the US-Pakistan relationship as complicated but necessary.

But he pointed out that there’s no such thing as a good terrorist. Pakistan could not “pick and choose among terrorists. If you’re against terrorism, you’ve got to be against all terrorism”. It’s good advice but likely to go unheeded of course.

While the nation raged against the US, the rest of the world read and sympathised over the plight of thousands of people made homeless by the recent torrential rains in Sindh, the spread of dengue fever and of course rising anger in the country over power cuts.

As one newspaper report pointed out, “concerns over blackouts, inflation and unemployment are a far more pressing worry for many in the country of 180 million people than the risk of the militant bombings or sectarian attacks that periodically rock Pakistan’s cities”. As far as the country’s army, security and political establishment are concerned, it appears that relations with the US are a far stronger priority than making sure that Pakistan’s factories keep running, schools and hospitals can
function properly, taxes are paid and that proper action is taken to tackle repeated flooding caused by global warming.

The day that Pakistanis unite to work for progress, growth and development instead of burning the US flag, yes, the world will be impressed.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Brussels.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/08/common-enemy-not-goal.html