Pakistan

Wednesday - Shari'a-for-peace


The government of Pakistan signed an agreement on Monday with Taliban rebels to trade "Shari'a-for-peace." The arrangement comes after Pakistani authorities essentially lost control of the once-idyllic Swat Valley - the "Switzerland of Pakistan" - in the Northwest frontier province.

Under pressure from Washington, Pakistan dispatched 12,000 troops in what turned out to be a failed campaign to pacify a region terrorized by 3,000 Taliban fighters. The Islamists had destroyed hundreds of schools (where girls were being educated or boys were learning secular subjects); intimidated foreign teachers, beheaded policemen and murdered journalists. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled the province.

There are disturbing, though unsubstantiated, reports that India may be supporting the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan - another example, if true, of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" aphorism.

Most of Swat, roughly 100 miles from Islamabad, is in Taliban hands. Authorities also hold little sway in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan. In short, while Pakistan is a nuclear power and has a seat in the UN, it is arguable whether it is a genuinely sovereign state.

The Shari'a-for-peace accord was reached between authorities and Taliban "moderates" led by Sufi Mohamed. What impact the deal will have on his more radical son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, remains to be seen.

In theory, the deal bolsters "moderate" Taliban and removes Shari'a law as the battle cry of the extremists. The theocratic rules to go into effect, authorities insist, will be a gentler, kinder version of Shari'a, compared to the Afghanistan strain.

The most positive spin on the deal is that it will end lawlessness and replace an unresponsive civil court system. Outlawing television, public entertainment and shaving would be a small price to pay.

President Asif Ali Zardari, whose wife Benazir Bhutto was probably assassinated by Taliban types in December 2007, has approved the Shari'a-for-peace deal. So, reportedly, did the Awami National Party, a secular Pashtun grouping. The Pashtun ethnic group comprises 15 percent of Pakistan's population, and 42% (a plurality) of Afghanistan's. The Taliban is predominantly Pashtun.

BUT MANY Pakistani modernizing elites are distressed. "This deal shows that the Pakistan military has in fact been defeated by the militants; that we are now incapable of retaining control of vast tracts of our own territory," commented a News of Pakistan editorial.

The decision to trade Sharia-for-peace appears to reflect a bad trend in the Muslim (and Arab) world whereby radicals stick to their guns, and moderates capitulate. Even if the Taliban could be satiated with "just" Afghanistan and Pakistan, these vast lands would become - even more than they already are - safe havens and launching pads for terrorism against "the infidels."

Indeed, reports claim that Osama bin Laden is currently not in some cave but in the village of Parachinar, near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, in an area that's seen Sunni-Shi'ite strife.

US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, who is just completing a tour of the region, called the Swat deal proof that India, the United States and Pakistan "all have a common threat now."

If only that were true. If only matters were that clear-cut.

The US is doing its best to keep up appearances. Anne W. Patterson, America's ambassador to Pakistan (who sometimes appears in public wearing a head covering), oversees the delivery of millions of dollars in US aid. At the same time, the US military (starting in the last months of the Bush administration) is employing unmanned aircraft to strike at terrorist targets inside the country, with the tacit approval of Pakistani authorities.

WHEN Pakistan's top general. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani - the man who controls Islamabad's nuclear arsenal and presumably still makes the final call in the shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Agency - arrives in Washington next week to meet Obama administration officials, there will be much to talk about: the release from house arrest of A.Q. Khan, and the serious proliferation risk he continues to be; the Shari'a-for-peace deal; and Pakistan's culpability in the Mumbai attacks.

Between Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, the power vacuum in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and the need to preserve relative stability in Iraq, the administration will, no doubt, want to prioritize its Middle East agenda accordingly.

Those Gaza killed and wounded: An update

Tuesday -- The first casualty of war: Truth


Which is the greater factor in getting consumers of news to believe that "1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians" were killed during Operation Cast Lead? Intrinsic anti-Israel bias - or a high degree of gullibility to manipulative international media coverage?

Put another way, do you have to be anti-Israel to believe Palestinian lies, or is Palestinian mendacity so well-constructed, so plausible, and so well disseminated by collaborative media outlets like Al Jazeera that even well-meaning people can't help but believe the worst of Israel?

These questions are prompted by some significant reporting in Monday's Jerusalem Post ("Int'l community was duped by Hamas's false civilian death toll figures, IDF claims").

Even well-regarded Palestinian pressure groups have been claiming that Israel killed 895 civilians in the Gaza fighting. Operating on the basis of such "data," coupled with a poisoned wellspring of antipathy against the Jewish state, Mahmoud Abbas has been making the case for indicting Israeli cabinet ministers and military officers for international war crimes.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners allege that two-thirds of the Arab fatalities were civilian. The IDF insists that no more than a third of the dead were civilians - and not a one was targeted intentionally. So instead of "1,300 killed, most of them civilians," we now have reason to believe, based on the IDF's methodical analysis of 1,200 of the Palestinian fatalities thus far identified by name, that 580 were combatants and 300 non-combatants.

Of these 300, two were female suicide bombers, and some others were related to terrorists such as Nizar Rayyan, a top Hamas gunman who insisted that his family join him in the hereafter.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth," said US senator Hiram Warren Johnson.

Take, for instance, Arab eyewitness accounts of the number killed at the Jabalya UN School on January 6 - some 40 dead, maybe 15 of them women and children. The IDF says the actual figure is 12 killed, nine of them Hamas operatives.

With time, perhaps, the names and true identities of each and every one of the Gaza dead - including the 320 as yet unclassified - will be determined.

One point is indisputable: Despite the best efforts of both sides, the IDF wound up killing more Palestinians unintentionally than the Palestinians killed Israeli civilians on purpose. This is known as "disproportionality."

Israeli officials, given bitter experiences such as Jenin in 2002, when a grossly false narrative of massacre and massed killing was disseminated by Palestinian officials, should have long since internalized the imperative to try to ascertain the number and nature of Palestinian dead in real time.

But while the figure "1,300 Palestinians killed, most/many of them civilians" is now embedded in the public consciousness, it is emphatically not too late to try to set the record straight.

Atrocity stories are nothing new. The British have been charged with using them to create popular outrage during the Boer War. The allies used them against Germany during World War I - which, incidentally, allowed the real Nazi atrocities during WWII to be dismissed long into the Holocaust.

Nowadays, it matters what masses of uninformed or ill-informed people far removed from the Arab-Israel conflict think. Dry statistics released so belatedly will win Israel no PR credit in a world of 24/7 satellite news channels and real-time blogging. Nevertheless, the fact that an Israeli narrative is finally out there is significant. Perhaps responsible news outlets will want to reexamine some of their original reporting, along with the assumption that "most" of the dead were non-combatants.

Palestinian propaganda is insidious because those being manipulated are oblivious to what is happening. Chaotic images of casualties being hurried to hospitals, gut-wrenching funerals and swaths of shattered buildings create an overarching "reality." Against this, Israel's pleadings that the Palestinians are culpable for the destruction, and that the above images lack context, scarcely resonate.

Despite six decades of intransigence and a virtual copyright on airline hijackings and suicide bombings, the Palestinians have created a popular "brand" for themselves by parlaying their self-inflicted victimization into a battering ram against Israel.

Disseminators of news should have learned better than to take Palestinian death-toll claims at face value, least of all when sourced directly or indirectly from the Hamas-run government of Gaza.

Ooops, turns out they are working on a Bomb

Monday - Intelligence has its limits


"The problem with technical intelligence," East German spymaster Markus Wolf once said, "is that it is essentially information without evaluation. Technical intelligence can only record what has happened so far - not what might happen in the future."

Perhaps that is why the director of US National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last Thursday that "Iran is clearly developing all the components of a deliverable nuclear weapons program," but "whether they take it all the way to nuclear weapons depends a great deal on their internal decisions."

Blair is the American government's highest-ranking intelligence official. He released the Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence after being in office just two weeks.

The struggle against Islamist terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan absorb the bulk of US intelligence resources, he revealed.

No one - perhaps not even the Iranians themselves - knows with absolute certainty whether they will stop just short of a test detonation once they have worked out all the pieces of the nuclear bomb-making puzzle. The mullahs may want to wait for a second-strike capability. But by the time Iranian decision makers grapple with that, it will already be too late.

When Israelis think about intelligence it is of the concrete, tactical variety that, for instance, helps the IAF target Kassam launching squads. Over the weekend, the Americans used their tactical intelligence to target an Islamist base along the Pakistan-Afghan border using drone aircraft.

The threat assessment, in contrast, while presumably informed by hard intelligence, is largely subjective evaluation. In this respect, it reminds us of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate ("Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities") which told policymakers "with high confidence" that Teheran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Last week, President Barack Obama acknowledged that Iran was pursuing "a nuclear weapon." So did CIA Director Leon Panetta: "There is no question that they are seeking that capability."

THE BIGGEST danger facing the US, according to last week's assessment, is not Iran, or North Korea or Islamist terrorism, but the world economic crisis.

The prospect of cross-border instability increases when the rising expectations of the masses are dashed by sputtering economies and runaway unemployment. Regimes that feel threatened at home become problems abroad. "The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to US strategic interests," said Blair.

The assessment also focused on nuclear proliferation, narcotics trafficking, global warming, pandemics, North Korea - even cyber-terror.

US intelligence believes that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, though still dangerous, is largely hunkered down, sidelined and finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with adherents worldwide. In addition, many Sunni Muslims, in Iraq for instance, are fed up with the indiscriminate al-Qaida-inspired violence. "We have seen notable progress in Muslim opinion turning against terrorist groups such as al-Qaida," Blair said.

At the same time, however, groups nominally loyal to al-Qaida are gaining ground in East Africa and Yemen.

Blair acknowledged that the Islamists are ascendant in Afghanistan, and a dangerous threat in Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have thrived in an atmosphere of government corruption, insidious drug-related criminality, and a failure to develop the rule of law and rebuild the economy.

INTELLIGENCE HAS its limits. It always did. US intelligence could not predict - with certainty - until after December 7, 1941 that Pearl Harbor would be attacked; nor, until after December 25, 1991, that the Soviet Union would implode; nor, until two years after the US-led invasion, that Iraq did not have deployable WMDs.

Today's 20th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan is another reminder that evaluative intelligence, especially, has its limits. Could anyone then have certified that the mujahadin who had ousted the Soviets would turn their fanaticism against the West?

Though the US president has access to the kind of intelligence that goes well beyond what is publicly released in the Annual Threat Assessment, at the end of the day his job is about leadership and decision-making. Barack Obama has declared time and again that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. To make good on that commitment, and in the absence of absolute certainty, he will have to make some tough decisions.

Jewish leaders meet the pope in Rome

Shabbat shalom to all
elliot


Friday -- Benedict's plea

On January 25, 1904 Theodor Herzl obtained an audience with Pope Pius X to seek Vatican support for the Zionist enterprise. The pontiff held out his hand, but Herzl did not kiss it - though he felt uncomfortable not doing so.

The father of modern Zionism outlined his plans. The pope's response was disappointing: "We cannot give approval to this movement… We can never sanction it… The Jews have not recognized our Lord; therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people."

The Church has come a long way in its attitude. The principal milestone was the 1965 Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate which repudiated the precept of collective Jewish guilt for the death of the Christian messiah.

In 1986, John Paul II became the first modern pope to visit a synagogue, where he called Jews "our beloved elder brothers." And in 1994, the Vatican - casting aside the age-old belief that the Church had replaced the Jews as the "true Israel" - established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

In parallel with these signs of progress, there has been some backsliding. In the late 1980s, John Paul II met twice with Kurt Waldheim after the Austrian president's Nazi connections emerged. The Church moved glacially to relocate a group of Carmelite nuns who had set up a convent at Auschwitz. The pope sullied his papacy with a nauseating, 20-minute meeting with Yasser Arafat on September 16, 1982 - long before the PLO chief feigned his renunciation of terrorism. The pontiff went on to meet Arafat 10 more times.

BENEDICT XVI has had a troubling record. In 2005, the pope condemned a litany of terrorist atrocities while conspicuously avoiding mention of the 57 Israelis killed that year during the second intifada.

In 2007, Benedict moved to canonize Pope Pius XII ("Hitler's pope"). Last year, he reintroduced the Tridentine Mass, which Nostra Aetate had rendered archaic: The Latin original contained a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of "the perfidious Jews." Benedict's revised version lets Catholic conservatives pray that God "remove the veil" from the hearts of Jews and end their "blindness."

During Operation Cast Lead, a senior Vatican cardinal, Renato Martino, referred to Hamas-ruled Gaza as one "big concentration camp."

But it was the lifting last month of the 1988 excommunication of four arch-conservative bishops associated with the Society of Saint Pius X that brought Catholic-Jewish relations to a nadir. Jews do not much care about theological issues within the Church unless they impact on us directly. But one of those readmitted bishops, Richard Williamson, is an unregenerate Holocaust-denier.

Someone in the Vatican hierarchy did Benedict a great disservice in not forewarning him about Williamson. Only after criticism crested, and the (Protestant) German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Benedict to make "very clear" his rejection of Holocaust-denial, did the German-born pope take action. (To his credit, Benedict has refused to receive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.)

As a matter of Jewish dignity, The Jerusalem Post called for a moratorium on public contacts between the organized Jewish community and the Vatican - which is now saying Williamson must accept Nostra Aetate to be granted full communion, and has told him to publicly recant his Holocaust denial. To no avail.

ON THURSDAY, leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations met with Pope Benedict in Rome. The audience had been scheduled before the Williamson controversy broke. Canceling it would have exacerbated tensions and embarrassed the pope - which is not the Jewish way. These communal leaders sensed the Vatican wanted to set matters straight. It appears they were right.

The pope told them: "Any denial or minimization of [the Holocaust] is intolerable… This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures."

He then repeated, verbatim, the prayer Pope John Paul offered when he visited the Western Wall in 2000 and asked the Jews to forgive the Christians who had persecuted them over the centuries. Benedict ended: "I now make his prayer my own."

We welcome this reiteration of the late pope's entreaty. Still, as the Holy Father may know, in Jewish tradition, absolution requires not just the confession of a sin, but its cessation.