Center for a New American Security

Posting will be sparse over the next few days as Londonstani is playing host to the potential future Mrs. Londonstani (who is presently just known as Ms. Henley-on-Thames).

So, while Londonstani tries to figure out a security-conscious tourist itinerary, say hello to Mr Todd Shea, a remarkable American who Londonstani had the pleasure of meeting a few days ago. Todd is a one-man reconstruction team in his efforts to build and operate a hospital in a remote and largely forgotten area of Pakistan. He has also done more to challenge the abysmal image of America amongst Pakistanis than countless costly outreach programmes. And he's done it with pretty much just energy, enthusiasm and  force of personality.

If that wasn't difficult enough, he's also trying against the odds to open up country and western music to a new (and as yet unappreciative) audience.

Seriously, watching him sing "Dil Dil Pakistan", a famous patriotic song, to a collection of bemused and delighted villagers is the funniest and most heart warming thing Londonstani has seen for ages.

Does Britain collude in the torture of terror suspects or not?

The head of MI5 said in a speech the other day that torturing people might be OK for Jack Bauer, but it's not OK for his officers..  Well, he basically said that without the television reference.

However, Londonstani has a good friend who went to Pakistan totally off his own bat and filmed interviews with Pakistani military people saying that British officials had asked them to obtain information through torture. The material was not broadcast or developed as UK news organisations couldn't afford to buy the footage and repay their costs.

In Londonstani's experience, nothing has been as damaging to the fight against radicalisation, extremism and terrorism as accounts and images of people being tortured by UK and US personnel, or those acting on their behalf. This isn't to say information of such occurences should be suppressed, rather that they should just plain not happen. Anyone who has spent time in the places between Casablanca, Cairo, Karachi and Jakarta and talked to people about al Qaeda/terrorism etc will have heard pre-2006 that AQ's fight was justified by the US and UK's practices. And after 2006 would have heard that AQ was no worse in its actions than Washington and London. Even that change in view came about because of AQ's bloodlust in Iraq and not actions undertaken by the international community.

Hiding information about torture is counterproductive. It gets out anyway. And if it's seeping out through the families and friends of people who have suffered it, the shadowy details will be much worse than the actual facts. This isn't to say that the UK did collude in torture, but rather that the sense of doubt is harmful. If Londonstani was a government accused of involvement in torture (the government of Londonistan, maybe), he would put it out in the open, denounce it as an abberation of normal conduct, hold people accountable and make sure it doesn't happen again

So, everyone know's who.. sorry what.. Kerry Lugar is, right?

There have been some references in the comments section about the Pakistani military's public relations efforts. Londonstani can only assume the following article by Kamran Khan of The News is the kind of thing we are talking about here:

KARACHI: When the top military commanders declared their serious concern regarding clauses of the Kerry-Lugar Bill impacting on the national security, the top brass had knowledge and evidence that a few elements within the government deployed resources to lobby several key United States congressmen for inclusion of anti-military and anti-nuclear programme segments in the controversial US aid bill, informed officials said.

“This is actually an attempt to cripple the Pakistan Army and the ISI and it is not the first or last attempt. There are some elements with clandestine job in all this,” said an informed official, who disclosed that Pakistani security officials were constantly getting information from their sources in Washington that illustrated vast difference between the public and private positions adopted by individuals and organizations representing Pakistan’s national interest in Washington.

There you have it people, you just can't trust the politicians to protect the country, apparently.

You're western European diplomatic staff in a country with a security problem, and the people kinda suspect that you and your ilk are to blame for it. However, the top priority for your and your international partners is winning hearts and minds and thereby defusing the security problem so people inside the country and abroad can go about without getting blown up. So what do you do?... Yep, drive around with a car full of illegal weapons.

From the Daily News; "ISLAMABAD - City police on Tuesday held two diplomats of Netherlands’ Embassy and recovered unlicensed arms and ammunition from their vehicle."

And then what do you do? Ask your American friends - who everyone thinks are out to destroy the country, but who are going to spend loads of scarce cash to try and change that view - to come bail you out of jail. 

"The diplomats were later released, besides (ie. with) their weapons, on the intervention of top diplomatic officials from Netherlands and the US Embassy, sources told The Nation."

Just what you need when Pakistanis are debating whether signing a civilian aid deal will actually sell the country to an estwhile American ally who can't really be trusted.

Londonstani is not in a position to vouch for the reporting (when can you ever really do that unless you've written it yourself) but these seem to be the generally agreed details of the case. Various outlets differ slightly in details. The News, for example, says the weapons belonged to the Americans anyway.

"On search, police recovered sophisticated weapons including four hand grenades including two smoke equipments and two flash bombs, two handguns, four magazines and six bullet-proof vests from their vehicle. This arms and ammunition reportedly belonged to the US embassy and was being transported to the US Embassy by the Dutch, the sources said."

This sort of skullduggery - as it was described by a Pakistani friend - is not new. Apparently, these sorts of strange events have a habit of happening quite a lot in Pakistan and prove the prejudgement many people hold that the Americans, British, Israelis, Indians (and now Dutch) are secretly working to destablise the country. It's also a classic example of the kind of event that feeds into an understanding held by your regular person while outside observers are unlikely to hear about it. This event is front page news in every Pakistani newspaper I've read today (English and Urdu), while it's nowhere to be seen on the websites of the BBC, New York Times, USAToday or CNN. On a google search, I can only see the story coming up in Pakistani outlets.

It's said that "hearts and minds" is a difficult strategy to pursue because it's difficult for people from one culture to understand how those from another think and feel. Really? Why not just start with something easy like keeping your weapons in your embassy.. or at least getting proper permission to move them around. Failing that, what about some reporting that sheds light on the incidents that make local people go "WTF?!" so we can all get a little closer to being on the same page.

Things NOT to do in Islamabad when you are a diplomat...

Londonstani has decamped to Pakistan for the coming weeks (and possibly months). Although, his assignment this time doesn't involve news reporting or undercover investigative journalism, habits of a career lifetime are proving hard to drop. So, to fill the psychological gap as well as the hole in Pakistan coverage, Londonstani will aim to provide AM readers the details and context behind the headlines.

Before anyone thinks this is in danger of becoming a little too serious and grown up, rest assured Londonstani will be mining his information in Pakistan's best underground  dens of inequity. And, anyway, will probably exploit this opportunity to indulge his secret desire to have actually been a celebrity reporter. 

Anyone looking to find out what gossip and overheard conversations can add to some of the most challenging foreign policy questions of the day, should stay tuned....

... the scarf is optional...

It's a bit of a jolt to find yourself in Islamabad, the capital of a country seen by some policy makers in Washington as the real centre of the  fight against international terrorism. You expect burnt buildings, menacing soldiers, at least a few bullet holes. You expect something like.. well, at least Khartoum, which is facing an insurgency 1,000 kms away in Darfur. What you get in Islamabad are tree-lined streets, grass verges, Walls ice cream sold on bicycles and some very relaxed people. So relaxed in fact, that a suicide bomb going off within ear shot elicts only a shrug.

Zein had spent the last 10 minutes explaining to me why an Indian writer's new book on the founding father of Pakistan was worth reading. We had been inspecting the stack of copies arranged into an in-store attraction when we heard the blast.

"We've been on high alert for the past few days. I guess that was why," was all Zein said as I looked at him quizzically. I learnt later that a suicide attacker dressed in the uniform of a Frontier Corps soldier had denoted a bomb at UN offices nearby killing five people, amongst them were two women and an Iraqi.

You expect a country that has a raging insurgency and widespread anti-western sentiment to look kinda ... anti-Western. The wierd thing about Pakistan is that it doesn't. Western brands are everywhere. OK, so this happens in plenty of Arab countries like Jordan and Egypt with pro-western governments that through a dysfunctional engagement with Western economic models have managed to impoverish the majority of their population or have been forced to adopt foreign policies that their population doesn't support (mostly the two are linked).

But, Egyptian and Jordanian high-end book shops don't carry many books on Western politics. OK, so they carry loads more of them than the Borders book store in Brent Cross, northwest London, but still, they tend to be a couple of the big titles of the year, mostly biographies. They almost never carry books by Israeli authors. Any decision to sell Israeli "propaganda" could only come about through national (hysterical) debate and a decision from the president/king. What they wouldn't be doing is arranging Amos Oz into a circular mini-tower on the floor of a bookshop.

Zein returned to telling me about Jinnah - India, Partition, Independence, a (quite sympathetic) book by a former member of India's Hindu nationalist political party about Pakistan's founding father.

"Some people don't like it because they say its boring and full of stuff that we know about Jinnah anyway. Other people say its important that an Indian nationalist politician written it," he told me.

I asked him if he had read it. He said no, but "Miss Fatima" who also works in the shop in her spare time away from studying at university read it as soon as it came out and told him all about it. Miss Fatima had great English. In fact, everyone who seemed to be employed in an office job had great English. I was beginning to feel idiotic for speaking Urdu.

She pointed out other books I might like including; Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, Mark Steyn's America Alone, Michael Dobbs' One Minute to Midnight, a bunch of Steve Coll books and The Man Who Would be King about Josiah Harlan, the 19th century American adventurer in Afghanistan.

The shop had an Urdu section and an English section but most of the books were mixed together. "Books are books," Zein said. Well healed older men came in for the political tomes. One was particularly interested in A Woman in Charge - The Life of Hilary Rodham Clinton. A young housewife wanted Mighty Heart, about the killing of journalist Daniel Pearl.

After buying an Urdu and Pashtu dictionary I sat outside at the Kabul Grill watching a talk show on the state television channel PTV about state efforts to improve women's rights. The journalist and official were both women. As a cynical journalist I wasn't inclined to believe what the official was saying about holding different government agencies to account for their efforts to ensure "gender friendliness", but I couldn't help but notice how half the discussion was in English and unsubtitled. Both women slipped into English in mid sentence without pausing.

The next programme was another discussion, this time with a cultural figure who complained that Pakistan didn't do enough to promote its own indigenous culture. Instead, he said, the whole country was "running to try and be a bad imitation of an American or a Britisher". I liked the fact he said that in English. I liked it almost as his point that visiting foreign dignitaries shouldn't be regaled with "pop shows of starlets singing in English" because "why aim to be second best? It's not like we have a Beyonce to show off anyway."

I was watching this thinking about what it means for the new strategy developing in Washington in relation to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"We must engage the Pakistani people based on our longterm commitment to helping them build a stable economy, a stronger democracy and a vibrant civil society," says the March whitepaper.

The Western officials who have tried to engage in public diplomacy in the Muslim world, and Pakistan in particular, have made the observation before that there is much familiarity and even affection in societies such as Pakistan which could be built upon. But in those early post 9/11 days, the aim was generally "make them like us enough to not want to kill us."

But the administration is talking now about a more specific aim. OK, so it's still about making them "like us enough to.. etc", but now that means interventions to build civil society, good governance and a bunch of other stuff that will require trust.

And that's a challenge that clever PR alone cannot solve. Zein later walked over to the grill and what he had to say illustrated just far the trust level had fallen.

Zein told me he's from Dir, near the border with Afghanistan, one of the areas swept up in the army's recent campaign against insurgents. Dir had been emptied of inhabitants, he said. He'd moved his family to Rawalpindi, near Islamabad and they were living in a rented house that he hoped to be able to continue paying for. He didn't know what had happened to his family's home or their belongings. But he was thankful that he and his brother's had jobs and their family wasn't in a refugee camp.

Who did he blame, I asked. Well, he said, it was the army that destroyed the houses when it came to dislodge militants. And, it was the army that was picking up young men and taking them into custody after which they would never be heard of again. There had been talk of reconstruction, money for which the Americans were supposed to be providing, but Zein thought that even if that was true, it wouldn't get past corrupt politicians.

Weren't the militants to blame for provoking the army, I asked. The militants, he said, were mainly foreign agents who had paid some local mercenaries to fight for their side. "They are Israelis, Indians and Americans," he said.

Zein's belief that the root of his troubles lies outside the country's borders is one I have found often in other communities afflicted by internal conflict. And it's understandable. Almost without exception, people find it difficult to believe that their neighbours, friends and even relatives could be blood thirsty killers. In simple terms, people cannot believe those they have grown up with could have carried out the actions they have seen on television.

This is as true for Iraqis and British Muslims as it is for the American and British public. The average American finds it tough to imagine a marine, no different from his neighbour's chirpy, good humoured son, could be involved in an atrocity like Haditha. Similarly, a Brit looks at the faces of British soldiers and sees his mates down the pub or his Sunday football team mates. How would any of them abuse prisoners. And, it's just as personal for Zein.

But without recognising that the insurgents are home grown, Pakistan is caught in a catch 22 situation. As long as the war is seen as a result of American policy in Afghanistan, or an American secret aim to destabilise Pakistan, the county's government's will never have the politician backing to carryout the fighting and building it needs to do for its own longterm survival. As it stands now, the army's action, according to Zein, is creating new resentment that will push more people to fight the state.

"People didn't really have a good reason to fight the state before, but now every family with a missing son will want to fight," he said before adding, "This is going to go on for the next 10 to 12 years."