Mark Steyn sums up perfectly the dichotomy of U.S. power and incompetence in the assassination of the Osama bin Laden, pointing to superbly trained elite warriors dispatched by a government that, up until recently, seems to have had no inkling of Pakistan’s subterfuge:

Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Pakistan’s complicity in terrorism is the worst-kept secret on the planet, cowed as they were into collaboration with the Americans after 9/11 finally got the attention of the west. In those immediate months and years after the terrorist attack, the Middle East and Central Asia were all too aware that they’d gotten more attention than they would have liked. But following a detour into Baghdad, the collapse of cooperation between Pakistan and the United States has been as self-evident as the war effort across the border.

The dumping of bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean before using it as a propaganda weapon against America’s enemies was wasted. Steyn is mindful of history’s instructive examples. I mentioned MacBeth, but Britain’s revenge in Sudan in 1884 is also useful:

But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message.

Indeed, far from dragging bin Laden’s porous cranium onto a stage and driving in onto a pike, the U.S. reportedly gave bin Laden a respectful funeral observing Muslim customs and traditions before his body was converted to fish food. And did this shallow appeasement of the Muslim world do anything more than serve as another excuse to hate America? Nay. In fact, it gave the liberally enlightened academics another excuse to blame the country for its own predicaments:

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them.

By the wording of Chomsky’s opening graph, you’d think bin Laden was busy drinking cups of Chai tea whilst planning the construction of girl’s schools in Waziristan. And rather than acknowledging the morally consistent use of a woman as a human shield by these fanatical Muslims, he chooses to focus on the fact she and her husband was shot, thereby denying the world the opportunity at giving the world’s most notorious bastard a fair trial under international law.

It is probably fitting bin Laden was killed in the heroic raid, for I have no doubt the Chomskys of the world would have given him full benefit of the doubt for his crimes, before leading the vociferous charge for a humanitarian stay of execution by intellectually massaging the moral conundrum of state-sanctioned murder. Thank God for Navy Seals.

The recent assassination attempt of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has shocked the North American continent like nothing since the terrorist attacks nearly a decade ago. And rightly so. That sort of prolific violence in America is usually relegated to the drug war or organized crime.

The reaction from media has been predictably voluminous. I don’t mean that in a cynical or disparaging way. The story hits on all points for news interest — timely, significant, proximal, prominent and human interest. The fact a nine-year-old victim was born on 9/11 was one of the more tragic aspects of the affair.

But nearly a world away, this sort of story happens far more frequently. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, political leaders, policemen and tribal elders are targeted and assassinated by the Taliban with little media fanfare in the west.

It’s important that I clarify this isn’t meant to be a scolding of western media’s coverage of Afghan mayhem, though it certainly has its share of shortcomings on that front. I merely want to put into perspective the scope of reality for which an Afghan citizen might consider normalcy.

The truth is that part of the reason it’s been difficult to really keep Afghanistan in the spotlight is that it fails some of the points for newsworthiness listed above. Afghanistan is as far from Canada as can be, taking three days travel by airplane, particularly if the jumping point is the Eastern United States.

Significance and prominence of such events tend to be fairly difficult to judge, given the frequency with which people are killed in Afghanistan. Sadly, a murdered government official over there isn’t very significant in this part of the world.

It’s also no small fact that Afghanistan is a war zone, so our expectation of such events are fairly routine. We’ve become accustomed to reading about large numbers of people being murdered on a daily basis without raising so much as a “what a shame.”

It doesn’t make us heartless. But it does explain why sustaining interest in Afghanistan has been so difficult. Could it be that if the country were as near as the United States that events would have as much resonance as the Arizona murders? It’s certainly plausible.

Though by now everybody is probably aware of a heretofore relatively obscure congresswoman, there are a lot of people who would have no idea who Salman Taseer is. If you’re one of those people, don’t feel bad. He was the Pakistani governor of Punjab, gunned down in a market in Islamabad on Jan. 4.

Canada’s large Sikh community has contributed to the increased awareness of this assassination, but news articles bearing mention of it pale in comparison to the Arizona shootings.

Though the definition of targeted assassination and random suicide bombing seem blurred in the violence of Afghanistan’s troubled southern provinces and Pakistan’s western frontier, the bloodshed has been significantly greater than anything we’re likely to see on this side of the world.

On Christmas day, a suicide bomber murdered 46 people in a United Nations food center in the Bajaur region of Pakistan. On Nov. 11 while people in the west were remembering the fallen of past wars, a truck bomb killed 18 and wounded hundreds in Karachi, Pakistan. Those are only a couple of what the military refers to as “spectaculars”, large explosions designed to maximize casualties and cow political leaders into acquiescing to extremist demands.

But a simple google search involving the terms “Afghanistan” or “Pakistan” and “bomb” reveals a near daily toll of Arizona-shooting-sized casualties.

It isn’t that we should weigh tragedy with artificial equality; proximity will always be the prism through which events affect us. But it does offer a clue as to our fatigue in the Afghan war.

Three worth reading:

1) Foreign Policy’s “AfPak Channel“:

Salmaan Taseer and the Punjabi Taliban

The brutal assassination of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer by a man in his security detail is being tied to a courageous stand he took opposing the nation’s antiquated blasphemy laws and supporting a Catholic woman, Aasia Bibi, accused of blasphemy.

But there is another important position Taseer has taken that should be emphasized: he was one of very few Pakistani politicians who honestly and openly recognized the existence of the “Tehrik-i-Taliban Punjab,” sometimes called the “Punjabi Taliban,” comprised, through the years, of an alphabet soup of sectarian militant organizations: Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) Harkat-ul Mujahideen (HUM), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP), among others, inspired by an intolerant brand of Sunni Islam called Deobandism [the subcontinental counterpart of Salafism/Wahhabism--more here and here].

This past June, Dawn, a leading English language daily in Pakistan, carried this headline: “Punjabi Taliban are a reality: Taseer.” The governor of the province of Punjab was taking a brave stand because the militants of these groups were born in his state in towns with names such as Bahawalpur and Raheem Yar Khan. But, with attacks on mosques, bazaars and police stations in Punjab, they were also killing his innocent citizens. Aasia Bibi, the Catholic woman sitting in jail for blasphemy, was one of the citizens of Punjab, and the call to kill her comes out of supporters of the Punjabi Taliban.

The best way for Pakistan to honor Taseer is to admit its homegrown militancy and destroy it. America and the West must also recognize that the problem of militancy in South Asia isn’t restricted to Afghanistan or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. It’s also in the very heartland of Pakistan…

A Facebook page went up hours after the assassination with messages of support for Qadri. One message: “nation hero u win a hearts of All muslim umaah……..Saluteeeee You……..!!!!” (“Umaah” is a reference to “ummah,” or “community.”) It’s not clear if the assassin was directly linked to any militant groups, but his sympathies most certainly would have been with them…

2) Wall St. Journal:

The End of Jinnah’s Pakistan
Governor Salmaan Taseer’s murder raises questions about the future of Pakistan’s Western-educated elites.

Every time you think things can’t possibly get worse in Pakistan, along comes something to prove you wrong. On Tuesday, in possibly the country’s most consequential political shock since the 2007 murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Salmaan Taseer, the 65-year-old governor of Punjab province, was gunned down in an upscale Islamabad market by one of his police bodyguards. The reason: the governor’s plain-spoken defense of Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws. According to press reports, Taseer’s killer pumped nine bullets into him for daring to call the blasphemy provision a “black law.”

Needless to say, Taseer was right. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws belong more in a chronicle of medieval horrors than in a modern society, let alone one that receives billions of dollars in Western largesse. Since the mid-1980s, blasphemy—including criticizing the prophet Mohammed—has carried a mandatory death sentence. Amnesty International calls the laws “vaguely formulated and arbitrarily enforced” and “typically employed to harass and persecute religious minorities.” Over the past quarter century, at least 30 people have been lynched by mobs after being accused of blasphemy. Many others have been forced to flee the country. Though Christians make up less than 2% of Pakistan’s population, they account for about half the country’s blasphemy cases.

In a larger sense, however, the significance of Taseer’s murder lies in what it says about the future of nuclear-armed Pakistan [see below]. Carved out of the Muslim-majority provinces of British India in 1947, the country has long struggled to reconcile two competing visions of its reason for being. Is Pakistan, as imagined by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah—a London-trained barrister with a fondness for pork sandwiches and two-toned spats—merely a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims? Or was it created to echo the far more ambitious formulation of Abul Ala Maududi, the radical Islamist ideologue born roughly a generation after Jinnah: for the enforcement of Islamic Shariah law upon every aspect of society and the state?

Taseer broadly belonged to Jinnah’s Pakistan…

The murder highlights anew the way in which Pakistan’s English-speaking classes resemble a small island of urbanity surrounded by a rising tide of fundamentalist zeal. They have only themselves to blame for their predicament. From independence onward, successive governments—military and civilian alike—have ridden the tiger of fundamentalism out of political expediency, misplaced piety or geopolitical ambition. A statistic from Zahid Hussain’s “Frontline Pakistan” is telling: When Pakistan gained independence in 1947 it housed 137 madrassas. That number has since swelled to about 13,000, between 10% and 15% of which are linked to sectarian militancy (Sunni versus Shia) or terrorism…

3) The Economist:

Pakistan’s increasing radicalisation
Staring into the abyss
Salman Taseer’s murder deals a huge blow to liberal Pakistan

THERE is a small space in which a liberal vision of Pakistan hangs on. It shrank a lot further with the murder on January 4th of a notable progressive politician and critic of religious extremism, Salman Taseer. Even before the assassination, the leading liberal-minded political party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which heads the government in Islamabad and counted Mr Taseer as an activist since the 1970s, was in deep trouble. On January 2nd the PPP lost its majority in parliament when the second-biggest party in the government coalition, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), walked out…

Mr Taseer was the governor of Punjab, a largely ceremonial position in Pakistan’s most populous province, but a high-profile one for all that. He had run a lonely but fearless campaign against Pakistan’s pernicious blasphemy law and was gunned down in broad daylight in Islamabad by one of his own police guards. The smirking killer later said he acted because Mr Taseer’s call for the blasphemy law to be repealed made Mr Taseer himself a “blasphemer”…

Mr Taseer’s killer, Mumtaz Qadri, may have acted alone—an investigation may get to the root of it. Yet his cause has support in Pakistan. Lawyers outside the court showered him with rose petals. The murder follows a campaign of vilification by the clergy and sections of the press. A broad alliance of the clergy rushed out a statement lionising the assassin. “No Muslim should attend the funeral or even try to pray for Salman Taseer,” said Jamaate Ahle Sunnat Pakistan, which represents the large and moderate Barelvi sect of Islam.

Religious parties do not attract much support at election time—they polled less than 5% of votes in the last ballot, in 2008. However, Ijaz Gilani, head of Gallup Pakistan, argues that it would be a “very serious miscalculation” to judge society’s religiosity by the showing of Islamist parties at election time. Pakistan has a first-past-the-post system, so people vote for one of the mainstream parties that have the best chance of coming to power. It means that both the PPP and, especially, the other main party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by Nawaz Sharif, have a bank of religious-minded voters whom they must be careful not to offend.

Pakistan’s public culture is riddled with hardline views, from the school curriculum to the nightly political talk shows. Meanwhile, as Mr Taseer himself never failed to point out, the state gives succour to violent, extremist organisations…

Related:

Great Gaming: Pak paranoia and a WikiHoax

How a nuclear war may begin

Predate: Do you think this sort of, er, context from ace Globeite Graeme Smith (of Taliban reporting renown) is worth reading?

…
Some analysts expressed hope that the death might ease the in-fighting among political elites, forcing them to confront the broader division between Pakistan’s wealthy urbanites [and the feudal landowners like the Bhuttos] and the poorer, conservative masses. The spot where Mr. Taseer lay bleeding to death could not have been more symbolic of that divide, a row of expensive shops and restaurants known as Kohsar Market. Not far from the presidential palace, it’s one of the rare places in Islamabad that overflows with Christmas decorations during the holiday season [how terribly provocative, eh?], and where stylish cafés rival their European counterparts.

Such places stand a world apart from the village outside Islamabad where Mr. Taseer’s bodyguard reportedly grew up…

Guess he deserved it. But it is true that those few who have effectively ruled the country since 1947 have done a dreadfully dismal job for their people whilst mesmerizing them with the Indian menace.  And one consequence of emphasizing that menace?  A naturally increasing focus on Islam the religion itself (no big deal for Jinnah for whom it simply defined a distinct society) as the essence of Pakistani identity–and hence of what should shape Pakistani reality.  The elites have much to answer for.

Mark
Ottawa

Louise Arbour (of whom this blog generally disapproves) looks like she’s actually on to something in the view of Terry Glavin:

As I Was Saying: Get Real.

Most recently here, which I was then pleased to find Christopher Hitchens reiterating here, Louise Arbour, former Supreme Court judge, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and currently president of the International Crisis Group, asserts in clear and unforgiving terms here:

“Shortcuts and backroom deals just won’t cut it. Instead, Canada and other NATO members must focus their efforts on reforms that can give Afghans stability, security and rule of law. More attention and resources, not less, must be focused on building governmental capacity and combatting corruption…

…Canadians must recognize that their continued engagement in Afghanistan must rest not on wishful thinking but on a policy grounded in reality.”

Thank you, Justice Arbour. You’ve just neatly summarized everything the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee has been saying [disclosure: I'm a member--MC].

A truly eclectic meeting of minds.  But achieving their ends will take an awful lot of neo-imperial twisting of Afghan arms, primarily by the US.  And, I suspect, at least tacit Pakistani acquiescence.

Mark
Ottawa

1) NATO fails to deliver half of trainers promised for Afghanistan

…
A further complication is that some contributing countries, including Canada, have placed restrictions on how and where their trainers can be used in Afghanistan.

The pledge of Canadian trainers last month came with the caveat that they not be used outside the Kabul area or “outside the wire,” such as in mentoring roles that would put them in the field with Afghan soldiers or police officers.

Although the makeup of the Canadian training force has yet to be announced [the US has been pressing us], the limitation sets a domino effect into motion. To find places for them, NATO commanders will likely have to move trainers from other countries out of bases and schools in the Afghan capital…

Lots more on that wee difficulty from BruceR. at Flit.

2) Foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan top 700 in 2010: site

…
The latest figures came as The New York Times reported that senior US military commanders in Afghanistan are pushing to expand special operations ground raids across the border in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.

But the story was denied by a spokesman for ISAF, who said there was “absolutely no truth” to any suggestion that ground operations into Pakistan were planned.

3) U.S. Military Seeks to Expand Raids in Pakistan

WASHINGTON — Senior American military commanders in Afghanistan are pushing for an expanded campaign of Special Operations ground raids across the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas, a risky strategy reflecting the growing frustration with Pakistan’s efforts to root out militants there.

The proposal, described by American officials in Washington and Afghanistan, would escalate military activities inside Pakistan, where the movement of American forces has been largely prohibited because of fears of provoking a backlash.

The plan has not yet been approved, but military and political leaders say a renewed sense of urgency has taken hold, as the deadline approaches for the Obama administration to begin withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan. Even with the risks, military commanders say that using American Special Operations troops could bring an intelligence windfall, if militants were captured, brought back across the border into Afghanistan and interrogated…

…one senior American officer said, “We’ve never been as close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go across.”..

Update: From Terry Glavin:

…

…
All I’m saying here is that nothing cheers me up more than the sight of an unveiled Afghan woman cradling a machine gun [actually an AK assault rifle variant].

Mark
Ottawa

Following up on these posts,

Afghans and Americans at arms together/Kandahar progress Update

“Obama administration Afghan war review due out tomorrow”/Tourists/What happens to foreigners Update

the start of a thoughtful post by Andrew Potter at his Maclean’s blog:

In Afghanistan, all roads lead to Pakistan

Today’s summary of the president’s report on the war strategy is getting tons of press [see also the president's remarks and the "Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Gates and General Cartwright"], and while the picture being shown is positive, the truth is that on virtually every measure, the overall situation is very complicated. For every story you read about things getting better, there is one about how they are getting worse somewhere else [see, e.g., the NY Times and the "Kandahar progress Update" above]…

After that, see this must-read from BruceR. at Flit on how things may play out:

…I don’t understand why anyone would assume that the Tajiks and Hazara and Kabuli Pashtuns who still hate the Taliban will not fight for their homes if we left. They’re not going to be so easy to roll the second time, and the fact the ANA make poor doorkickers in our concept of ops does not mean they’d do just fine against similarly armed Pashtun insurgents, especially if we left a SOF/FID/CAS/Fires thumb on the pro-government side of the scales.

We shouldn’t confuse a lack of Afghan army enthusiasm with being cannon fodder in the south with a lack of determination to fight for the north when the time comes…

…When I deployed, I remember looking at this pretty analytically. I had a contempt for the Taliban I no longer have quite so much, and the reports from the field were rosier than even my bullcrap filter could compensate for, so it’s fair to say I was of a more optimistic cast than now. But when I could look at it coldly and logically, I basically saw what Junger saw… that, worst-case, fighting in the south bought time in the north, and ISAF’s presence could give those people after 20 years of war an indeterminate number of years of relative peace while we were there. Worst case, we could give them a shot at normalcy. To me that was enough of a humanitarian argument to justify my serving in ISAF. Still is…

…If the violence starts ramping up again in the summer of 2011, as it has every year higher than the year before, than we really need to start digging the fallback positions and figuring out what ANSF with ISAF enablers can realistically hold onto in the years to come. Because the only alternative will be an indefinite, fruitless Western commitment.

Hell of a lot to think about.

Mark
Ottawa

Just in case you didn’t know, from Foreign Policy’s AfPak “Daily brief“:

…
No surprises here

The Obama administration’s one-year review of the Afghan war strategy, which White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said will “not surprise” anyone following the issue, is due out tomorrow, and Barack Obama met with his national security team for two hours yesterday to give the final approval (Post, FT, Tel). The report is said to note that although progress has been made in some areas of Afghanistan and the transition to Afghan security control “can and should begin” in July 2011, the Karzai government receives low marks for efficiency and corruption (Post)…

The NYT and LAT add to reporting about two grim new National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan, representing the consensus views of the U.S.’s 16 intelligence agencies, which military officials reportedly claim were “written by desk-bound Washington analysts who have spent limited time, if any, in Afghanistan and have no feel for the war” (NYT, LAT) [see also this post four days ago]. The NYT reports that the dispute reflects two things: debate in Washington over whether the U.S. can succeed in Afghanistan without more Pakistani cooperation, and “longstanding cultural differences between intelligence analysts, whose job is to warn of potential bad news, and military commanders, who are trained to promote “can do” optimism.”..

UBC’s intrepid Brian Platt (see the whole blog on his recent Afghan trip) would count as one of these tourists:

…
New Year’s in Kabul?

An Afghan official said earlier today that in spite of daily violence in Afghanistan, the tourism industry is up from last year, with around 12,000 visitors going to see the sites in Kabul, Bamyan, Parwan, and other provinces (Pajhwok). Most of the tourists were from the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and Norway. Bonus click: Afghanistan 2010 — a year in photos (FP).

Sign up here to receive the daily brief in your inbox. Follow the AfPak Channel on Twitter and Facebook.

Update: From Terry Glavin:

…

Mark
Ottawa

A pretty good preview I think, though dealing militarily (even if quasi-covertly) with Pakistan’s FATA would be very hard even if Pakistan were non-nuclear.

Earlier:

“Afghanistan: Progress-more needs to be done”/”Bleak Intelligence Brief”/Polish Update

Plus.

Mark
Ottawa

Plus “CANADIAN FORCES AND CANADIAN DEFENCE ISSUES” and “INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENCE ISSUES”, the Conference of Defence Associations’ media round-up.

Then there’s this, rather sobering, on two major US estimates:

Afghanistan, Pakistan Get Bleak Intelligence Brief

WASHINGTON — New U.S. intelligence reports paint a bleak picture of the security conditions in Afghanistan and say the war cannot be won unless Pakistan roots out militants on its side of the border, according to several U.S. officials who have been briefed on the findings.

The reports, one on Afghanistan, the other on Pakistan, could complicate the Obama administration’s plans to report next week that the war is turning a corner. U.S. military commanders have challenged the new conclusions, however, saying they are based on outdated information that does not take into account progress made in recent months, says a senior U.S. official who is part of the review process.

The analyses were detailed in briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee this week and some of the findings were shared with members of the House Intelligence Committee, officials said.

All the officials interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified documents.

The reports, known as National Intelligence Estimates, are prepared by the Director of National Intelligence and used by policymakers as senior as the president to understand trends in a region. The new reports are the first ones done in two years on Afghanistan and six years on Pakistan, officials said. Neither the Director of National Intelligence nor the CIA would comment on either report…

In describing the Afghanistan report, military officials said there is a disconnect between the findings, completed in recent weeks, and separate battlefield assessments done by the war commander, Gen. David Petraeus, and others that contain more up-to-date and sometimes more promising accounts [see here].

A military official familiar with the reports said the gloomier prognosis in the Afghanistan report became a source of friction as a preliminary version was passed among government agencies.

Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the contrast between the Afghan estimate and Petraeus’ reports.

“It’s a very disciplined, structured process, so it’s got a cutoff date that’s substantially earlier in the game than, say, the military review,” Cartwright said in a recent interview.

He said officials will have to grapple with whether intelligence and battlefield reports are starting to diverge or whether the gloomier intelligence analysis is “more an artifact of time. Those are the questions that we’ll have to work our way through and either feel comfortable about or not feel comfortable about.”..

Update: This article from Time is illuminating–at least the Poles are a combat force:

For U.S. Troops in Afghanistan, Coalition Forces Are Mixed Blessing

U.S. forces have long expected to do the heavy lifting on the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but even then, the Army battalion that arrived in Ghazni province last summer were troubled by what they found. The Taliban were resurgent in areas that U.S. forces had pacified before handing control to Polish forces a year earlier. “It was as if the [Polish] were waiting for us to come back and release them from their base” and then take the credit, says one U.S. officer, describing how failure to patrol the roads has allowed a route between coalition bases to become choked with roadside bombs. Americans had to return to take charge, he said, because the Poles are “just kind of hanging around.”

Such criticism is common among U.S. officers who have served in Afghanistan, and it is directed not only at Polish forces but also at other NATO forces, some of which are hamstrung by so-called caveats that range from prohibitions against fighting at night to traveling without an ambulance, thereby precluding foot patrols. The Polish force is not bound by any of these constraints, but U.S. officers say the Poles’ top-down approach to war-fighting is ill-suited to a counter-insurgency campaign that requires real-time decision-making by mid- and lower-level officers on the ground. They add that the Poles’ six-month deployments strain continuity, and that logistics snafus make them dependent on U.S. support…

Via Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

Mark
Ottawa

The country is pervaded with conspiracy theories; no wonder some fell for this. From Foreign Policy’s “AfPak Daily brief“:

Crude propaganda hoax

Yesterday morning, major Pakistani newspapers carried stories allegedly based on U.S. diplomatic cables released by the web site Wikileaks in which U.S. officials purportedly described Indian spies supporting Islamist militants in Baluchistan and Waziristan, called former Indian army chief General Deepak Kapoor “an incompetent combat leader and rather a geek,” said a “Bosnia-like genocide” is occurring in Indian-administered Kashmir, and asserted that the Indian military is supporting Hindu fundamentalist groups, among other claims (Guardian). The cables, however, could not be found in the Wikileaks database, suggesting Wikileaks was exploited for propaganda purposes.

Pakistan’s Express Tribune and The News have issued mea culpas admitting that the “story was dubious and may have been planted,” acknowledging that the reports came from the Islamabad-based Online wire service, which is “known for their close connections with certain intelligence agencies” (AP, AFP, BBC, ET, The News). However, the Urdu-language Jang, which carried the story on its front page yesterday, has not mentioned the incident, and the right-wing daily The Nation, which “still appeared to believe the story,” editorialized that the cables revealed “India’s true face” and “Washington’s hypocrisy” (BBC, Nation)…

More on that paranoia at this post:

The Indo-Pak-Afghan Great Game–and the US

Mark
Ottawa