Gobind Thukral

FOR decades Kashmir has been caught in a cycle of violence with only some periods of comparative peace. Two nuclear power countries, India and Pakistan have often gone on war and for years, a low intensity war has been draining out India’s military and other resources. Pakistan has been carrying out overt and covert operations, keeping the state destabilized. There has been lot of innocent blood letting. This has only added to the economic backwardness of Kashmir. The other Kashmir with Pakistan is no better. Its grinding poverty is seen to be believed. It has only fattened politicians and bureaucrats who have been merrily pocketing whatever aid went from New Delhi. Nature’s bounty bestowed upon Kashmir has become an eyesore.
Yet only a few months back, it looked that Kashmir was slowly and surely limping back to normalcy. Militancy was under control and another election appeared to further deepen the roots of democracy. It also looked that severed links between the two Kashmirs would help repair the raptures. Confidence building measures between the two warring countries were also yielding results as the Track Two diplomacy seemed to have been bearing some positive results. No longer now.
Look at the newspapers of just one day, August 28.  “Security forces tonight killed the last of the three militants who held seven persons — four children and three women — captive in a house on the outskirts Jammu, ending a 19-hour hostage drama and gun battle. They had infiltrated from Pakistan. Three captives were also killed. Elsewhere, after three days of stringent curfew restrictions across Kashmir, relaxation was given in phases in different areas during which two persons were killed in protests in Budgam and Kupwara districts and 10 injured.
“Life remained paralysed in Srinagar and other towns in the Kashmir valley for the sixth day due to strike and curfew restrictions. Reports from Kashmir valley said shops and other business establishments remained closed and traffic was off the road. Government offices, educational institutions and banks also remained closed. Kashmir University has postponed all its examinations till August 31. People in the valley continued to face an acute shortage of essential commodities due to an indefinite curfew. People from almost all parts of the valley complained about the shortage of essential items, particularly milk for kids. “
For the past several weeks, curfew, firing and blockade have been the order of the day. Whole of the Kashmir valley, with majority Muslim population has been expressing unprecedented anger though massive demonstrations. Jammu region, nursing the grievance that the valley had attracted too much attention and resources had a chance to react with some vengeance and it did not let the chance go out of its hands.
The competing politics has brought the state to a standstill with bundhs, blockades, curfews and firings. Vote banks politics is now nearly blinding our class of politicians and they see nothing beyond that. A kind of lumped leadership has emerged both in the Valley and the Jammu region. This unrest in Kashmir has not only undermined peace prospects between the two nuclear powers, but whole of India seemed to getting embroiled. The ruling United Progressive Alliance and the Prime Minister Dr Man Mohan Singh as well as Mrs. Sonia Gandhi had been relying on a pack of officials to bring peace. The ruling leadership is bereft of ideas and lacks courage and political initiative, the main opposition party; the BJP is keen to make political capital and cares little what happens to the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The protests in Jammu and Kashmir have been ongoing since June, but have turned increasingly violent igniting religious hatred. Violence in Jammu and Kashmir has seen at least 30 people killed and hundreds more injured. The local economy is at a standstill. Tourism has dried up.  Schools and trade is shut and even many medicines are not available as also essential food items.
The immediate trigger for current protests seemed innocuous. A tract of land was handed over to a trust to provide facilities during an annual Hindu pilgrimage, Amarnath Yatra. What followed was a disproportionate outburst of fear, rumour and rage. Muslim Kashmiris were quick to believe it was ploy to populate the area with Hindus and alter the demography of the region. Hindus said that Kashmiri Muslims were opposed even to providing rest sheds and toilets to pilgrims. With state elections due soon, political parties advanced their causes while separatist groups led pro-secession marches.
New Delhi’s failure to act promptly allowed the violence to escalate. In the predominantly Muslim Kashmir valley hundreds of thousands gather on the streets, usually after noon prayers at the mosque, shouting slogans, starting fires and pelting stones, evoking memories of similar anti-India protests in 1989 and 1990. The protests in the predominantly Hindu Jammu areas are even more shocking. But these were to happen one day. There have been daily demonstrations for weeks, with a violent enforcement of strikes and even protest suicides.
In Jammu, protesters insist that the Indian government only tries to appease Muslim sentiments in the valley, ignoring the claims of the minority Hindus. In 1990, tens of thousands of Hindus living in the Kashmir valley had to flee their ancestral homes because of threats and attacks. In the Kashmir valley, fury against the government stems from the failure to punish those that commit human rights violations.
The Indian government has long presented the Muslim-majority state in Jammu and Kashmir as a symbol of India’s identity as a secular state. For some time, the influx of tourists, the drop in violence, and good turnouts in local elections had allowed officials to mistakenly believe that the Kashmir issue had been more or less resolved. But the Amarnath Yatra became a catalyst for the assertion of Muslim or Hindu identity and religious hatred, not just in Jammu and Kashmir, but in the rest of India.
Since 1989, the wails of family members mourning their dead have become ubiquitous to life in Jammu And Kashmir State.
Kashmiris are trapped in an armed conflict between abusive Indian government forces and armed militant groups waging a brutal separatist struggle with the backing of the Pakistani government. Most Kashmiri families have lost a relative, friend, or neighbor in the violence. At least twenty thousand Kashmiri civilians have been killed (Kashmiri groups say that the number is much higher). Tens of thousands have been injured. Hundreds of thousands have been internally displaced, including some three hundred thousand Hindu Kashmiris. Approximately thirty thousand Muslim Kashmiris have fled to neighboring Pakistan as refugees, while thousands have crossed that same border to train as fighters. Ordinary, day-to-day life has been degraded.
Suspicion and fear continue to permeate the Kashmir valley. A knock on the door late at night sends spasms of anxiety through households, afraid that a family member will be asked by the security forces or militants to step outside for “a minute” and then never return. The bombs of militants go off in crowded markets without any warning. Psychological trauma related to the violence has been enormous, as life itself is constantly under threat. Yet, do we listen to any serious proposals or even soothing words from our leaders, embroiled as they are in daily power games.

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Bush covered up Musharraf ties with Qaeda, Khan

Gareth Porter* for IPS

PAKISTANI President Pervez Musharraf's resignation Monday brings to an end an extraordinarily close relationship between Musharraf and the George W. Bush administration, in which Musharraf was lavished with political and economic benefits from the United States despite policies that were in sharp conflict with U.S. security interests.
It is well known that Bush repeatedly praised Musharraf as the most loyal ally of the United States against terrorism, even though the Pakistani military was deeply compromised by its relationship with the Taliban and Pakistani Islamic militants.
What has not been reported is that the Bush administration covered up the Musharraf regime's involvement in the activities of the A. Q. Khan nuclear technology export programme and its deals with al Qaeda's Pakistani tribal allies.
The problem faced by the Bush administration when it came into office was that the Pakistani military, over which Musharraf presided, was the real terrorist nexus with the Taliban and al Qaeda. As Bruce Riedel, National Security Council (NSC) senior director for South Asia in the Bill Clinton administration, who stayed on the NSC staff under the Bush administration, observed in an interview with this writer last September, al Qaeda "was a creation of the jihadist culture of the Pakistani army".
If there was a state sponsor of al Qaeda, Riedel said, it was the Pakistani military, acting through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.
Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservative-dominated Bush Pentagon were aware of the intimate relationship between Musharraf's regime and both the Taliban and al Qaeda. But al Qaeda was not a high priority for the Bush administration.
After 9/11, the White House created the political myth that Musharraf, faced with a clear choice, had "joined the free world in fighting the terrorists". But as Asia expert Selig S. Harrison has pointed out, on Sep. 19, 2001, just six days after he had supposedly agreed to U.S. demands for cooperation against the Taliban regime and al Qaeda, Musharraf gave a televised speech in Urdu in which he declared, "We are trying our best to come out of this critical situation without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban."
In his memoirs, published in 2006, Musharraf revealed the seven specific demands he had been given and claimed that he had refused both "blanket overflight and landing rights" and the use of Pakistan's naval ports and air bases to conduct anti-terrorism operations.
Musharraf also famously wrote that, immediately after 9/11, Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age" if Musharraf didn't side with the United States against bin Laden and his Afghan hosts. But Armitage categorically denied to this writer, through his assistant, Kara Bue, that he had made any threat whatsoever, let alone a threat to retaliate militarily against Pakistan.
For the next few years, Musharraf played a complicated game. The CIA was allowed to operate in Pakistan's border provinces to pursue al Qaeda operatives, but only as long as they had ISI units accompanying them. That restricted their ability to gather intelligence in the northwest frontier. At the same time, ISI was allowing Taliban and al Qaeda leaders to operate freely in the tribal areas and even in Karachi.
The Bush administration also gave Musharraf and the military regime a free ride on the A. Q. Khan network's selling of nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, even though there was plenty of evidence that the generals had been fully aware of and supported Khan's activities.
Journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins wrote in their book "The Nuclear Jihadist" that one retired general who had worked with Khan told them there was no question that Khan had acted with the full knowledge of the military leadership. "Of course the military knew," the general said. "They helped him."
But the Bush administration chose to help Musharraf cover up that inconvenient fact. According to CIA Director George Tenet's memoirs, in September 2003, he confronted Musharraf with the evidence the CIA had gathered on Khan's operation and made it clear he was expected to end its operations and arrest Khan.
The following January and early February, Khan's house arrest, public confession of guilt and pardon by Musharraf was accompanied by an extraordinary series of statements by high-ranking Bush administration officials exonerating Musharraf and the military of any involvement in Khan's activities.
That whole scenario had been "carefully orchestrated with Musharraf", Larry Wilkerson, then a State Department official but later Colin Powell's chief of staff, told IPS in an interview last year. The deal that had been made did not require Musharraf to allow U.S. officials to interrogate Khan.
But the Bush administration apparently conveyed to the Pakistani military after that episode that it now expected the Musharraf regime to deliver high-ranking al Qaeda officials -- and to do so at a particularly advantageous moment for the administration. The New Republic magazine reported Jul. 15, 2004 that a White House aide had told the visiting head of ISI, Ehsan ul-Haq, "it would be best if the arrest or killing of any HVT [high value target] were announced on 26, 27 or 28 July." Those were the last three days of the Democratic National Convention.
The military source added, "If we don't find these guys by the election, they are going to stick the whole nuclear mess up our a**hole."
Just hours before Democratic candidate John Kerry's acceptance speech, Pakistan announced the capture of an alleged al Qaeda leader.
Meanwhile, Musharraf was making a political pact with a five-party Islamic alliance in 2004 to ensure victory in state elections in the two border provinces where Islamic extremist influence was strongest. This explicit political accommodation, followed by a military withdrawal from South Waziristan, gave the pro-Taliban forces allied with al Qaeda in the region a free hand to recruit and train militants for war in Afghanistan.
Yet another deal with the Islamic extremists in 2006 strengthened the pro-Taliban forces even further.
But Bush chose to reward Musharraf by designating Pakistan a "Major Non-NATO Ally" in 2004 and by agreeing to sell the Pakistani Air Force 36 advanced F-16 fighter planes. Prior to that, Pakistan had been denied U.S. military technology for a decade.
In July 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that al Qaeda's new "safe haven" was in Pakistan's tribal areas and that the terrorist organisation had reconstituted its "homeland attack capability" there. That estimate ended the fiction that the Musharraf regime was firmly committed to combating al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Had the Bush administration accurately portrayed Musharraf's policies rather than hiding them, it would not have avoided the al Qaeda safe haven there. But it would have facilitated a more realistic debate about the real options available for U.S. policy.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006. [Courtesy IPS]

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Afghanistan: free Aafia Siddiqui’s 11-year-old son
Child is too young to be treated as criminal suspect

THE Afghan government should immediately relinquish 11-year-old Ahmed Siddiqui to the custody of his family, Human Rights Watch said today. Siddiqui, a US citizen, is believed to be the son of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman held on US federal charges in New York. The two were reportedly arrested together in Afghanistan last month.
According to an Afghan Interior Ministry official quoted in the Washington Post, Ahmed Siddiqui was held briefly by the Interior Ministry after the arrest, and then transferred to the custody of the Afghan National Security Directorate (NDS), the country’s intelligence agency. His current whereabouts are unknown. The NDS is notorious for its brutal treatment of detainees.
“Under Afghan and international law, Ahmed Siddiqui is too young to be treated as a criminal suspect,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism program director at Human Rights Watch. “He should never have been transferred to the custody of Afghanistan’s abusive intelligence agency.”
Afghan police reportedly arrested Aafia Siddiqui and her son in Ghazni, Afghanistan, on July 17, 2008. US federal prosecutors allege that the day after her arrest, while in Afghan custody, she grabbed a gun from the floor and fired it at a team of US soldiers and federal intelligence agents. In August, she was charged with assaulting and trying to kill US officials.
In a letter sent recently to Aafia Siddiqui’s family, US prosecutors said photos and DNA tests strongly suggested that the boy arrested with Siddiqui was her son Ahmed.
The federal complaint against Aafia Siddiqui states that the Afghan police officers who arrested her found suspicious items in her handbag, including “documents describing the creation of explosives, chemical weapons, and other weapons involving biological material and radiological agents.” Siddiqui’s lawyers reject the official account, suggesting that the charges against Siddiqui are a sham.
Whether or not his mother is implicated in criminal acts, Ahmed Siddiqui should not be held responsible. Under both Afghan and international law, he is too young to be considered criminally responsible for his mother’s alleged acts.
According to Afghanistan’s Juvenile Code, the minimum age of criminal responsibility is 13.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Afghanistan is a party, defines a child as any person under the age of 18. In its General Comment on Children’s Rights in Juvenile Justice of February 9, 2007, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors states’ compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, explicitly stated that a minimum age of criminal responsibility below age 12 “is considered by the Committee not to be internationally acceptable.”
Human Rights Watch said that Ahmed Siddiqui should be released to his biological family members, who reside in Pakistan, or to a child welfare organization that can provide proper care until he is reunited with his family.
Human Rights Watch expressed concern not only for Ahmed Siddiqui, but also for two siblings, Mariam, age 10, and Suleman, age 5, who have been missing since March 2003.
Siddiqui, along with her three children (then aged 6 years, 5 years and 6 months), was reportedly apprehended in Karachi, Pakistan on March 28, 2003. Ten days earlier, on March 18, 2003, the FBI had issued an alert requesting information about Siddiqui in an effort to locate and question her.
The US government has alleged that Siddiqui is linked to al Qaeda suspects Majid Khan and Ali ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ‘Ali (also known as Ammar al-Baluchi), who were both arrested in early 2003 and held for years in secret prisons operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). A number of reports alleged that Siddiqui had been handed over to US custody after her March 2003 disappearance, raising concerns that she, too, was in secret CIA custody.
Yet on May 26, 2004, then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III identified Siddiqui as someone who posed a threat to the United States, suggesting that she was not in custody. For more than five years, until Siddiqui suddenly reappeared in Afghanistan, her whereabouts were unknown.
Since Siddiqui’s reappearance this summer, the CIA and the US Department of Justice have denied that the United States had held Siddiqui or her children during the period of her disappearance, calling her a “fugitive from American justice.” Her family claims that Siddiqui and her children were held in secret US detention during at least part of that period.

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