Because the pakistani government has lost ground in flood hit provinces KP and Balochistan, and the international relief response has not yet met minimum requirements, it is likely that extremism will increase rapidly in the area. That will not only affect the war in Afghanistan, as the Pakistan Army is not capable of defending the borders while all hands are bound to relief work, and therefore extremist will find the border region a new save haven and see an inflow of newly recruited fighters. Pakistan will also struggle to keep the Taliban at bay in Pakistan itself. So far the fatal possibilities of the flood have been neglected by western nations and India.

Article in the Daily Telegraph

Article in the New York Review of Books

A US drone attack on Pakistani soil which kills 16 ‘civilians’ is labelled as Pakistan drone attack. (Mind you that only 2 militants were killed on 24th July, 2010 twin drone attacks with 24 civilian deaths) It doesn’t look like a US drone attack to a naive eye (say, someone who’s sitting in Latin America, not sure what’s happening in this part of the world) but instead a Pakistan drone attack. Fabulous and ridiculous at the same time, depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting!

Background material:

World Bank Pakistan Country Assistance Evaluation (2006)

The Political Economy of Growth Without Development: A Case Study of Pakistan. Paper for the Analytical Narratives of Growth Project, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, William Easterly, Development Research Group, World Bank, June 2001

The U.S. Aid “Surge” to Pakistan: Repeating a Failed Experiment? Lessons for U.S. Policymakers from the World Bank’sSocial-Sector Lending in the 1990s, Nancy Birdsall and Molly Kinder

Yale Journal of International Affairs, Winter 2010

Helpful Internet Resources:

An essential Reading List from the CGDev.

AidWatchers by William Easterly.

On the low army budget of some European states, the 21 states with the lowest budget together spend less than Vietnam on their armies, Howorth remarks:

One might ask exactly what those nation states believe they are buying with their money.

An interesting concept he brings up from the Venusberg report is the fighting intensity scale:

This poses the crucial question of the type of warfare the EU intends to fight. According to one analysis (Venusberg 2004: 68), the average US soldier, trained for high intensity warfare, operates at levels 8 to10 on an intensity scale of 1 to 10. If forced to, he can “operate down” to level 6 but is uncomfortable with that, owing to lack of training in the art of peace-keeping and nation-building.  Many UK and French troops as well as some crack German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch special-forces can operate up to level 8 but the vast majority are more comfortable lower down the intensity scale dealing with irregular forces in a peace-keeping environment. Most other EU troops cannot operate much above level 5 on the US intensity scale and are therefore incapable of assuming peace-keeping duties such as those required in 2004 in Iraq.

While he sees that as a problem for European troops (and I agree), in light of the current troubles in COIN, I see the fact that the average US soldier “is uncomfortable with [the low intensity warfare]“, an equally problematic aspect.

A book by Howorth on the topic is available here.

(The title of the post comes also from the article (”When, in 1958, the UK prime minister was asked by a young journalist what can most easily steer a government off its chosen course, Harold Macmillan replied: “Events, dear boy! Events!”), and made me wonder about Austrian internal politics. If there is no chosen course, you need no events …

[Article] Karachi water mafia by Alex Rodriguez in LA Times

[Article] Fishermen pay for the political hickhack by Alex Rodriguez in LA Times

These are stories by all means not new. But they are rather what the journalists now again increasingly posted in Pakistan seem to churn out when there is no Taliban-head capture controversy to report about. Or when they simply realize, that the country has many other issues apart from the Taliban threat.

[Blog] Hunza landslide at PamirTimes.

A natural disaster still relatively unnoticed by foreign media has occured in Hunza and is threatening to become an ever bigger problem. The landslide took a whole village north of Aliabad and Karimabad into the Hunza river in January, until now the earth masses are holding back the water which is now reaching back nearly all the way to Passu. The first of the famous foot bridges is already under water. The lake already has a length of 12 km.

[Interview] Recent interview with the Indus Water Comissioner for Pakistan Jamaat Ali Shah in Dawn. Talks about the water issues between the two countries began today in Lahore (see Dawn article).

On the other side of the border, the idea of discussions with the Taliban has recently become popular again. Without any experience in dealing with Islamist groups in when it comes to state-running rather than state-wretching it looks like nobody really has a clue where to start.

Shadi Hamis argues in his papers for a Western appreciation of Islamist parties in the Miidle East and how the US and EU should not fear to approach those and step away from continued support, especially of the repressive regimes.

Perhaps a bigger obstacle to engagement is the mistrust that Islamists evince toward America and Europe, a result of the sometimes striking gap between Western pro-democracy rhetoric and policies that support repressive regimes. For example, France (as well as most European countries) voiced support for Algerian democratization in the late 1980s, but after the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), a legal opposition party, swept the first round of parliamentary elections in 1991, France was the first nation to recognize the new military-led government.11 Similarly, the United States routinely expresses “concern” about human rights abuses in a variety of countries, while continuing to provide billions of dollars in economic and military support to these same regimes. As a result, many in the Middle East question how the U.S. can be interested in Middle East democracy if its policies are actively preventing it. from the paper at POMED.

By choosing to focus specifically on the motivations of al Qaeda jihadists, Freeman neglects the Muslim population at large. It is true that among most doctrinaire Salafists, democracy is seen as an intrusion by man into God’s sacred domain.3 But neither these Salafists, nor al Qaeda, are representative of Islamists, let alone the broader Muslim community. from Stanford University Policy Review.

On Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood he writes in the Democarcy Journal:

Just as neoconservatives got a lot wrong, progressives, in reaction, have learned some of the wrong lessons for the wrong reasons. Strong democracy rhetoric is not necessarily counterproductive, and there is little reason to think the Middle East is immune to democratic interventions. Pragmatism, the new and rather hollow progressive catch-all term, is not a substitute for well-considered policy. Nor should it obscure deeply held principles and ideals, principles that, sadly, we have so often failed to uphold in the Middle East.

For the case of Pakistan, while the local government should look for it’s roots in the visions of his founding father Jinnah who proclaimed “If we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor… you are free- you are free to go to your temples mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state… in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to Muslims- not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state”. On the other side the Western governments should be prepared to acknowledge that Islamist parties, when supported by a democatic movement can be taken serious as well.

Numerous Bloggers and Scholars have taken that result as a proof for what they see as an increased unpopularity of the Taliban and thus an argument for continued presence in the region and apparent accordance on the goals of the current war. But the question was not “Do you support the actions/ideology of the Taliban?” or “Do you favor the Taliban over your civilian government?”. The presence of the Taliban is of course unpopular – with all it’s consequences including the presence of Western forces on their soil. But that doen’t mean that the questioned people favor the West’s interference in the region over the Taliban’s presence.

We keep asking questions in a way we already know what to expect as a pleasing answer. Justifying our actions in retrospect with flawed polls is not going to help us ahead.