PRESIDENT George W. Bush and his officials used to applaud Pakistan’s role in the war on terror, but they also thought it necessary to prod the government in Islamabad to “do more” to fight extremists.

During one of his frequent recent visits to the subcontinent, David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, chose to express his government’s solidarity with India by asking the Government of Pakistan to “move faster” to apprehend and punish the militant organisations whom Indian officials have accused of complicity in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on Nov 26, 2008.

The Bush administration’s urging to “do more” meant that Pakistan should deploy additional, well-trained and better-equipped troops to stop the militants based in the Fata area from crossing into Afghanistan, and replace those of its officers who might be ambivalent about their assigned mission of eradicating the militants. Pakistan responded to these urgings by saying that it was already doing all it could, but that it would do even more if the United States provided the requisite means.

Pakistan banned some of the militant organisations such as Sipah-i-Sahaba and Lashkar-i-Taiba several years ago. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it has banned Jamaatud Dawa (which comprised some of the former Lashkar activists) and arrested and detained several hundred of its members. Pakistani investigators are interrogating the more prominent among them with the intention of prosecuting them if incriminating evidence against them is found. Indian spokesmen want the suspects they have named and their associates “brought to justice” here and now. Likewise the British foreign secretary asks Pakistan to “move fast” in dealing with the militants.

What would “moving fast” mean? Needless to say, the suspects being questioned will deny any role in terrorist activities even if they are confronted with the ‘information’ that Indian officials have supplied. The interrogators may procure confessions by torturing the suspects. They will then have to find judges willing to convict the accused on the basis of evidence that is normally inadmissible. The accused can then be hanged.

This procedure and outcome may satisfy Mr Miliband and Mr Mukherjee. But in another situation six months from now these gentlemen, and many others, may see fit to berate Pakistan as a country where human rights are violated, suspects are tortured, the judiciary is perceived as corrupt, and there is no rule of law.

Fortunately, this is not how this case will go. The accused will have competent attorneys to represent them. They will challenge the authenticity of the evidence against their clients and will probably have it thrown out. In the unlikely event that the accused are convicted, they are sure to file appeals all the way to the Supreme Court. It will be years before the cases are finally settled. One cannot rule out the possibility that the accused will eventually be acquitted.

There is another side to the coin we have been inspecting. Militants killed 170 or so persons in Mumbai. That was a most abominable act of savagery. But it was not anything out of this world. Militants engineer bomb blasts that kill a number of people in Pakistan every other day. India has been talking tough and down to Pakistan as if it were the terrorists’ only place of residence. India has its own homegrown terrorists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who operate both on its own territory and abroad.

Indian officials have tried to give the impression that the Mumbai incident had been Pakistan’s doing, because the culprits had been living there. This reasoning is not valid. Pakistan is a country of nearly 170 million people. It is wrong to expect that if 10 of them, sitting under a tree in one of its several hundred thousand villages, are planning to make trouble for India, this fact should be known to its government. Intelligence agents keep an eye on individuals whom they have reason to suspect. There is no way they can keep track of each and every person who may be unobtrusively sympathetic to this or that extremist organisation. That would amount to placing all of its 170 million people under surveillance.

It may be true that inadequacies of education and income have something to do with the emergence of extremism and militancy. Pakistan has not only used force to subdue the militants in its tribal areas, it has also thrown money at their communities. But they are still “alive and kicking”. Their war against the state and society of Pakistan goes on unabated.

President Obama intends to help Pakistan carry on its present campaign against militants and terrorists. It seems that he wants greater emphasis to be placed on developmental activities to reduce the incidence of deprivation in the country’s poverty-stricken tribal regions where the militants currently abound. We will have to wait and see if this approach works better than the ones followed to date.

It should be understood that extremism is also an intellectual persuasion, a frame of mind, to which some of the well-educated and well-to-do persons can be receptive. Force or money may silence them for a time but it will not convert them to “enlightened moderation”.

President Obama has placed Pakistan and Afghanistan on the top of his foreign policy agenda, because these are the places where the Al Qaeda and Taliban, presumed to pose a grave threat to America’s security, are mainly located. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that he will change his mind as further considerations are admitted and allowed to bear on his thinking. He may begin to ask what the consequences of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan would be. The answer may well be that in that event the Taliban will once again rule that country. That will not necessarily produce a repeat of 9/11. If the Al Qaeda and Taliban want to send a bunch of suicide bombers to America, they can do so from their present locations in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, that is, even while they are not ruling either of these countries.

Afghanistan has neighbours (Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and China) and non-Pakhtun populations in its own northern areas, all of whom are opposed to the Taliban. President Obama may conclude that the task of containing the Taliban can be left to these powers without detriment to America’s security or other vital interests.

The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics. (Curtsey Daily Dawn)

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

Nurallah strode into our workshop shaking with rage. His mood shattered ours. "This is no government," he stormed. "The police are like animals."

The story gushed out of him: There'd been a fender-bender in the Kandahar bazaar, a taxi and a bicycle among wooden-wheeled vegetable carts. Wrenching around to avoid the knot, another cart touched one of the green open-backed trucks the police drive. In seconds, the officers were dragging the man to the chalky dust, beating him -- blow after blow to the head, neck, hips, kidneys. Shopkeepers in the nearby stalls began shouting, "What do you want to do, kill him?" The police slung the man into the back of their truck and roared away.

"So he made a mistake," concluded Nurallah, one of the 13 Afghan men and women who make up my cooperative. "We don't have a traffic court? They had to beat him?"

In the seven years I've lived in this stronghold of the Afghan south -- the erstwhile capital of the Taliban and the focus of their renewed assault on the country -- most of my conversations with locals about what's going wrong have centered on corruption and abuse of power. "More than roads, more than schools or wells or electricity, we need good governance," said Nurallah during yet another discussion a couple of weeks ago.

He had put his finger on the heart of the problem. We and our friends in Kandahar are thunderstruck at recent suggestions that the solution to the hair-raising situation in this country must include a political settlement with "relevant parties" -- read, the Taliban. Negotiating with them wouldn't solve Afghanistan's problems; it would only exacerbate them. Ask any Afghan what's really needed, what would render the Taliban irrelevant, and they'll tell you: improving the behavior of the officials whom the United States and its allies ushered into power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

I write this by flickering light, a fat candle at my right elbow and a kerosene lamp on my left. We get only three or four hours of electricity every couple of days, often from 1 to 5 a.m. Still, the bill has to be paid. To do that, you must wait in a total of eight lines in two different buildings. You almost never get through the whole process without hearing an uncouth bark as your turn comes up: "This desk is closing; come back tomorrow." Due to the electricity shortage, the power department won't open new accounts. Officially. But for $600 -- 15 times the normal fee and a fortune to Afghans -- you can get a meter installed anyway.

A friend recently visited the jail in Urozgan Province, north of Kandahar, where he found 54 prisoners. All but six were untried and uncharged and had been languishing there for months or years. A Kandahar public prosecutor told him how a defendant had once offered him the key to a Lexus if he would just refrain from interfering in a case the man had fixed.

Across the street from my cooperative there used to be a medical clinic. When it moved to a new facility, gunmen in police uniforms set up a checkpoint outside the empty building. Our inquiries revealed that they were the private guards of a senior government official. Their purpose? To serve as a graphic warning to the building's owners not to interfere in what would follow. A few days later, some friends of the official's moved in. The owners had no say in the matter, no recourse. This government official is one of the men the United States helped put in power in 2001 and whom the international community has maintained and supported, no questions asked, ever since.

This is why the Taliban are making headway in Afghanistan -- not because anyone loves them, even here in their former heartland, or longs for a return to their punishing rule. I arrived in Kandahar in December 2001, just days after Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was chased out. After a moment of holding its breath, the city erupted in joy. Kites danced on the air for the first time in six years. Buyers flocked to stalls selling music cassettes. I listened to opium dealers discuss which of them would donate the roof of his house for use as a neighborhood school. I, a barefaced American woman, encountered no hostility at all. Curiosity, plenty. But no hostility. Enthusiasm for the nascent government of Hamid Karzai and its international backers was absolutely universal.

Since then, the hopes expressed by every Afghan I have encountered -- to be ruled by a responsive and respectful government run by educated people -- have been dashed. Now, Afghans are suffering so acutely that they hardly feel the difference between Taliban depredations and those of their own government. "We're like a man trying to stand on two watermelons," one of the women in my cooperative complains. "The Taliban shake us down at night, and the government shakes us down in the daytime."
I hear from Westerners that corruption is intrinsic to Afghan culture, that we should not hold Afghans up to our standards. I hear that Afghanistan is a tribal place, that it has never been, and can't be, governed.

Afghans remember the reign in the 1960s and '70s of King Zahir Shah and his cousin Daoud Khan, when Afghan cities were among the most developed and cosmopolitan in the Muslim world, when Peace Corps volunteers conducted vaccination campaigns on foot through a welcoming countryside, and when, my friends here tell me, a lone, unarmed policeman could detain a criminal suspect in a far-flung village without obstruction. Kandaharis -- even those who lost a brother or father in the 1980s war against Soviet occupation -- praise the communist-backed government of former president Najibullah. "His officials weren't building marble-clad mansions with the money they extorted," says Fayzullah, another member of my cooperative.

One day I asked three of my colleagues -- villagers with almost no formal education -- what jobs they would choose if we were the municipal government of Kandahar. They spoke right up. "I would want to be in charge of public hygiene," said Karim. "The garbage piling up on our streets is a disgusting health hazard." Abd al-Ahad wanted to be the registrar of public deeds, "so the big people can't just take land and pass it out to their cronies." Nurallah wanted to be the equivalent of the FDA: the man responsible for weights and measures and the quality of merchandise in the bazaar.

After the Soviet invasion, which cost a million Afghan lives over the course of the 1980s, followed by five years of gut-wrenching civil war and another six of rule by the Taliban, who twisted religious injunctions into instruments of social control, Afghans looked to the United States -- a nation famous for its rule of law -- to help them build a responsive, accountable government.

Instead, we gave power back to corrupt gunslingers who had been repudiated years before. If they helped us chase al-Qaeda, we didn't look too hard at their governing style. Often we helped them monopolize the new opportunities for gain. A friend of mine, one of the beneficiaries, was astounded at the blank check. "What are we warlords doing still in power?" police precinct captain Mahmad Anwar asked me in 2002. "I vowed on the Holy Koran that I would fight the Taliban in order to bring an educated, competent government to Afghanistan. And now people like me are running the place?" I had to laugh at his candor.

Into the context of the white-hot frustration that has been building since then, insert the Taliban. Since 2001, they have been armed, financed, trained and coordinated in Pakistan, whose military intelligence agency -- the ISI -- first helped create them in 1994.

What I've witnessed in Kandahar since late 2002 has amounted to an invasion by proxy, with the Pakistani military once again using the Taliban to gain a foothold in Afghanistan. The only reason this invasion has made progress is the appalling behavior of Afghan officials. Why would anyone defend officials who pillage them? If the Taliban gouge out the eyes of people they accuse of colluding with the Afghan government, as they did recently in Kandahar, while the government treats those same citizens like rubbish, why should anyone take the risk that allegiance to Kabul entails?

More and more Kandaharis are not. More and more are severing contact with the Karzai regime and all it stands for, rejecting even development assistance. When Taliban thugs come to their mosques demanding money or food, they pay up. Many actively collaborate, as a means of protest.

The solution to this problem is not to bring the perpetrators of the daily horrors we suffer in Kandahar to the table to carve up the Afghan pie. (For no matter how we package the idea of negotiating with the Taliban, that's what Afghans are sure it will amount to: cutting a power-sharing deal.)

The solution is to call to account the officials we installed here beginning in 2001 -- to reach beyond the power brokers to ordinary Afghan citizens and give their grievances a fair hearing. If the complaints prove to be well founded, Western officials should press for redress, using some of their enormous leverage. The successful mentoring program under which military personnel work side-by-side with Afghan National Army officers should be expanded to the civilian administration. Western governments should send experienced former mayors, district commissioners and water and health department officials to mentor Afghans in those roles.

If the United States and its allies had fulfilled their initial promise and pushed the Afghan government to become an institution its people could be proud of, the "reconcilable" Taliban would come into the fold of their own accord. The Afghans would take care of the rest.

sarah@arghand.org

Sarah Chayes, the author of "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban," runs an Afghan cooperative that produces skin-care products.

(Courtesy The Washingtonpost)

BAGHDAD, Dec. 13 -- They came for their mothers and daughters, their brothers and fathers, the young and old who died that day. Some hobbled in on crutches. Others were helped in by relatives. One man wore dark sunglasses to hide his ruined eye. One woman cried openly, gently wiping away the tears sliding down her cheeks.

Athra Khalil, 32, told a lie to her six toddlers before bringing them to this sprawling police base on Saturday. She didn't mind. She lies to them every day.

"Now, they ask me, 'Where's my father?' I always tell them he's at work," said Khalil, staring at her daughter in the hot-pink sweater.

"Today, I told them we are going to have a nice lunch to celebrate the end of Eid," she added, referring to the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha.

Her husband and the others were all shot by employees of the U.S.-based security contractor Blackwater Worldwide, an incident that reshaped the lives of these families -- and the direction of their nation. Now the relatives had arrived here to challenge a group of Americans with one question: Can they trust the United States to bring those contractors to justice?

Last week, five of the contractors were indicted on charges including manslaughter for the September 2007 shooting in Baghdad's Nisoor Square that killed at least 14 Iraqis and injured at least 20 others. A sixth Blackwater guard negotiated a plea agreement to avoid a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in prison.

On Saturday, a group of U.S. prosecutors arrived to explain to the families of the victims and the wounded both the charges and the procedures of the U.S. judicial system.

Most in the crowd had already imagined the punishment they would hand out, if only they could.

"We hope they jail them for life," said Douraid Ishmail, 31, whose brother Oday was killed when a bullet tore through his head. Ishmail held Oday's 4-year-old son Zaitoon in his lap.

"It's not enough for us that they jail them," said Khatoon Hassan, 55. "They have to burn them alive." She had accompanied her neighbor, Entisar Atchan, whose 18-year-old son was killed in the square. He was a soldier and the family depended on his salary.

Zuhair Hussein, the mother of Oday, and his wife and three children also depended on his salary. They hoped the Americans would talk about compensation. "A few days ago, when it rained, our roof started leaking," Hussein lamented. "Now, I give the children only small portions of food."

Mehdi Abdul Khudir wants something he cannot have. "If I am giving all the money in the world, can I ever get my eye back?" asked Khudir, staring from his black sunglasses. "There is no court in the world that can bring my eye back."

The Iraqis sat inside a sterile, white-walled room. Windows were covered by blue prints decorated with idyllic pictures of villages, parks and mountains. Just outside the base was the reminder of how imperfect their world truly was: Nisoor Square.

The Sept. 16, 2007, shooting triggered international outrage and launched congressional and FBI probes. Iraqis across the nation, of every sect, were furious at the actions of foreign security contractors, even more so by the blanket legal immunity they possessed, courtesy of the U.S. government. The shooting prompted the Iraqi government to demand the lifting of such immunity in a new security agreement with the United States signed earlier this month, although the protection remains for security contractors working with on-duty U.S. troops.

But hardly any of this mattered to those in the room. They listened intently as U.S. prosecutor Kenneth Kohl gave a brief statement to reporters.

"The aim of our visit is to meet the families of the victims and explain the charges that have been filed in the United States and to make ourselves available to any questions they might have," Kohl said.

To convince Entisar Atchan, Kohl had a lot to overcome. "I hate the Americans. They killed my only son. Until now, I have seen nothing from the Americans to get my rights," Atchan said.

Kohl spoke of the lengthy sentences that the Blackwater employees face if convicted: at least 30 years and perhaps the rest of their lives. Then he stressed that "sentencing will be left as a matter for the judge."

Hassan, Atchan's neighbor, snorted. "We want the jail for the whole life, not for 30 years," she said.

"We want execution," Atchan said. "When I remember this incident, fire burns inside my heart. He was my only son. And he joined the army to help feed us. And now he is gone."

After the meeting, Douraid Ishmail said he was not sure that the trial would bring justice. It is being conducted outside Iraq, and it might run on for months. But the Americans, he said, "promised us that justice will prevail."

(Courtesy The Washingtonpost).