Author Archives: Razeshta Sethna

Not without a fight

By |
Reply
A demonstration by members of the Solidarity Party

A demonstration by members of the Solidarity Party

More than a decade ago, women in Afghanistan lived under the blue burqa, their mobility restricted, in the company of male guardians when out in public, and they were denied education; many were persecuted for their ‘immoral’ behaviour, and hundreds forced to give up their jobs as teachers, doctors, lawyers, curators, painters, writers and policewomen. Today, important gains have been made, even in sparsely-populated provinces like Farah and Helmand — girls go to school, for example, in Parwan province, north of Kabul where even Taliban sympathisers support girls’ education.  Of the nearly seven million children back in school in Afghanistan, 2.4 million are girls — but there is now fear that this number could decline. Women hold 28 per cent of the seats in parliament; the country’s first law on ending violence against women (the law on the Elimination of Violence enacted in 2009), and the establishment of shelters offering legal services for female victims of violence is evidence of steps taken by women to protect themselves.

Afghan women now shop at local bazaars, eat at restaurants without fear of being brutalised and beauty salons are no longer an underground business; female politicians head defence budget committees and some have plans to run for the 2014 presidential elections; a female entrepreneur is trying to bring the fun back into Kabul with a bowling alley. Kabul University has a high ratio of female students studying in the same classrooms as men in all faculties; cultural activities are common in cities like Herat, Mazar and Badakhshan. These freedoms, by no means small, have not been easy to attain for women, who have not only overcome immense adversity in their fight to ensure their voice is heard but are participants in the redevelopment of their country.

But can women’s rights and opportunities in Afghanistan remain secure as Nato troops get ready to withdraw from the country and economic opportunities and foreign aid budgets subsequently drop? Will the gains that Afghan women have fought for see a backward slide? Last year, a Reuters Poll ranked Afghanistan as the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman. Religious leaders known to justify domestic violence are calling for women to stop their education and wear the hijab. Women’s rights have not entered the conversation at international multi-donor conferences that talk about assisting security and development. Should their struggle be isolated from the overall struggle for peace, change and a better Afghanistan? In the next five years, answers might emerge, but as four brave Afghan women explain, the destiny and power of Afghan women lies in their own hands.

“You can cut the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of spring”

Malalai Joya

Name: Malalai Joya  Age: 34

Occupation: Activist/former parliamentarian

Former parliamentarian-turned-activist Malalai Joya has survived six assassination attempts. She moves between a number of safe houses run by supporters, wears a burqa to travel and is protected by 12 bodyguards; Joya cannot attend public meetings for fear of her life. In March, in the latest attempt on her life, gunmen shot at her bodyguards at 3 am in her office in Farah province. In 2003, Joya dared to publicly speak out against Afghanistan’s warlords in the Loya Jirga (an assembly that debated the Afghan constitution). When elected to the lower house of parliament in 2005 as its youngest member and as a representative of Farah province – with the second-highest votes – Joya was suspended because of her outspokenness: she compared the lower house to a zoo.

A woman with extraordinary courage and the power of expression, Joya believes an election under the shadow of warlords and the Taliban has no legitimacy and is undemocratic: “Why would you allow criminals to be present [in parliament]? Warlords responsible for our country’s situation … this parliament is a dirty, mafia parliament of law breakers. They are the most anti-women people in this society, who brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again.”

Joya was just four years old when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and her mother took her 10 siblings to refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. In 1998, she finished high school in Peshawar, and became an adult literacy teacher, working with a charity, the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women’s Capability. At 16, she travelled to Herat with her family to set up underground schools for girls. “I have many memories of the time during the Taliban’s rule when we would hide a small Holy Quran under the mattress with our books. I would tell the younger girls not to travel to the house [that was our school] together because that made the Taliban suspicious. They would beat the children. But the girls would come together, because they were terrified but wanted to study.” She says this was one of the blackest moments in the history of her country.

Joya has never been afraid to speak up against what she terms the brutalities suffered by Afghans: once the Taliban were ousted by the US-led coalition, support for the warlords in Karzai’s government increased, compromises were made and amnesty laws enacted. “The foundation of the fundamentalist Islamist parties lies in the shopkeepers of Afghanistan. They invited the head of the [Pakistan’s] ISI during the civil war to form a party and millions of CIA dollars were pumped into this country. This is one of the darkest pages in the history of Afghanistan,” Joya explains. “They committed unforgettable and unforgivable crimes. That’s why Afghanistan is a safe haven for terror and that’s why the situation for women is catastrophic even today, and worse than under the misogynist Taliban.”

When asked if Afghans are ready to take over security once foreign troops leave and if her country is even prepared for a transition to democracy, she replies: “That’s a good question to ask the White House because of the chess game that they are playing. Taliban, drug barons, jihadis … Today my country looks like a sick body, everybody wants their own piece. They [the US] must end the occupation. The blood of Afghans is not water they shed.Afghanistan today is the worst place to be a woman and the second most corrupt nation in the world. We don’t even have a caricature of democracy: we have democracy for Sayaf, Khalili, Fahim [warlords in government] and now the Taliban.”

She worries about security for the younger generation, but Joya is proud of youth-led pro-democracy movements: “This is a war generation. They want the US-led forces to leave their country but these foreigners will not leave voluntarily. Freedom, democracy and human rights cannot be gifted to us. No nation can donate democracy. Only a nation can liberate itself.” She feels that this agitation is because “we know that the Taliban have been in power for the past 10 years as lawmakers in parliament. When they [the Taliban] are not ready to say sorry, how can people trust them? They are worse than wild animals. We cannot negotiate with them. What is good or bad Taliban? You say we negotiate with good Taliban? Is Mullah Omar a good Taliban?”

Joya is married to a man supportive of her activism, and whom she doesn’t name for fear of his life. She has an almost resigned-to-life kind of humour (and a natural ability to laugh and love), once she lets her activist-guard down. But personal questions, she says are pointless: “I want to have a normal life, but I wear the burqa just to stay alive because I told the truth and they want to kill me for that. Let me tell you something. I have memories that give me hope that things can change. People in Farah province trust me because I set up schools; I taught their girls and distributed free medicine. For the first time in a backwater province, when I didn’t wear a burqa or hijab, at first it wasn’t easy. It’s not easy to change the mindset of those men in power but slowly they allowed women to work with me and my team. We wore scarves. Small steps need courage and are important. In the beginning you are alone but slowly people accept you. Men would come to my office and discuss private issues. If you are honest, they trust you. Gender doesn’t matter.”

Joya and her supporters say they are planning for the future, and will resist being sandwiched between Afghanistan’s warlords, the Taliban and the foreign ‘occupation’. “One day the truth will find its place.” Joya is unwilling to be struck down without a fight.

Educating Parwan

Samia Azizi Sadat

Name: Samia Azizi Sadat  Age: 42

Occupation: Underground teacher/parliamentarian

Director of education in Parwan province, Samia Azizi Sadat has helped establish 200 schools in a Taliban district where the community complained about the lack of proper schooling facilities. Sadat’s popularity as an education campaigner rose when she ensured that schools were adequately equipped [using donor funding] with trained teachers and students were able to study in a secure environment. When former Parwan governor Abdul Jabar Taqwa once inquired about why community leaders pasted a poster of Sadat on the wall – an uncommon practice in rural districts – they replied that she was ‘like a man who helps their community.’ Sadat has been elected twice from Parwan as a member of the lower house of parliament on what is seen as an ‘education ticket’.

Her first teaching experience during the time of the Taliban was challenging because she ran underground schools. “We received funding from the French government to organise underground schools. I headed 24 secret schools with 600 girls which meant we had to organise them in homes without the Taliban knowing we were running this network. In 1999, the Taliban suspected I had a class in my home so [they] attacked the house. We hid students under carpets and chairs but they found out and beat them all.” Sadat says she was beaten and was unconscious for seven days. What happened next? “I continued teaching,” she says hoping that Afghanistan would progress someday. “My mother always told me to work hard and hope.”

Sadat was born in Parwan’s Charikan district and studied at the Faculty of Science at the University of Kabul before doing her Master’s degree in economics in 2008. She still lives in Parwan – her home well-guarded – where she started her career as an algebra teacher at the Hura Jalili High School; later she was promoted to the post of director of education for the province. Even today she commutes to Kabul when parliament is in session, despite volatile security conditions.

In 2007, Sadat escaped an assassination attempt when travelling from Kabul to Parwan; six others were injured in this bomb attack. She says it’s the 10 per cent, a minority, who object to education in the province. “I’m not afraid. I will continue doing what I do for the people and women in my district. I am apolitical, and I don’t have a problem with Hekmatyar or the Taliban. Forty per cent of Parwan is Taliban and the security is not stable at all times but because they respect my efforts for women’s education, they don’t bother me. It’s not possible that the Taliban will be allowed to come back with their old policies, even if they join the government after the 2014 election. But my guess is that they work for their self-interest: they might negotiate peace and then chances are they could even go back to their old ways,” Sadat says.

For now Sadat’s working relationship with Parwan’s Taliban sounds like a win-win proposition for both sides but for how long is anyone’s guess.

Changing perceptions

Name: Shamsia Hussani   Age: 23

Occupation: Graffiti artist

“Freedom is not to remove the burqa; freedom is to have peace,” says 23-year-old Shamsia Hussani, Afghanistan’s first female graffiti artist. Born in Iran, she moved back to Kabul with her family seven years ago and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Kabul University. After graduating in 2010, she teaches at her alma mater and works with a team of 10 Afghan artists, a group called ‘Roshd’, meaning ‘growth.’ At the Venue in Kabul, Hussani’s collection of modern art gets her attention and praise: paintings show fish covered with bubbles over their bodies, in brilliant blues and softer pale shades, with swirling strokes forming mysterious connections. “It’s a conceptual idea I have created about not being free to express yourself. When the bubbles escape, they are like ideas that are free to float,” she explains over a cup of coffee.

Hussani has been creating art for six years now and her work is priced on average at 250 US dollars and above. Selected as one of 10 top Afghan artists by the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, Hussani says she enjoys working as a graffiti artist but is unable to walk through the city freely and create street art. Because she doesn’t get to practice as much in the real world, she innovates. “I take pictures of roads and streets in Kabul and then use Photoshop and do digital graffiti. I dream of graffiti. I can’t go outside and explore because it’s still dangerous for a woman,” she says. Once, at the Russian Cultural Centre in Kabul to graffiti a wall, Hassani was terrified — it was dark and she was afraid she’d step on a landmine.

Politics confuses her because there are no answers to her questions. “The Taliban and the Americans are the same is what I hear people say in public. I focus on the role of art and culture in changing perceptions and expressing emotion. People come to this country thinking there is only war and politics, but we have artists and musicians and culture,” Hussani says as she smiles and wraps her headscarf tightly around herself.

Saving Sahar Gul

Shukria KhaliqiName: Shukria Khaliqi

Occupation: Activist/lawyer

At a modest house on the road to the Darul Aman Palace in Kabul, legal adviser Shukria Khaliqi and her team of counsellors, lawyers and trainers keep the door open for female victims of violence. The house serves as a domestic violence referral centre and temporary shelter, where Khaliqi has some hard work cut out for her, often earning her disapproval from certain religious elements. Seventy per cent of cases referred to Khaliqi’s Women for Afghan Women organisation are domestic violence incidents which find their roots in poverty, insecurity and harmful traditions.

Established in 2007, the Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a grass roots organisation, advocates and protects the rights of women in their fight against gender-based violence. At the WAW referral centre, where Khaliqi heads the legal programme, victims of violence are either sent by the court, police or hospitals: Khaliqi’s team assesses the case, deciding whether to mediate between husband and wife in the case of domestic violence or go to court against the perpetrator.

Earlier this year, Khaliqi was the lawyer on the widely-publicised Sahar Gul case. Gul, a 13-year-old Afghan girl from Badakhshan was sold to a man twice her age in Baghlan for 200,000 Afghanis (4,000 US dollars) by her brother. Gul was beaten, burnt, scalded with water, her fingernails pulled out and locked up without food in a basement by her in-laws. “She was kept there for six months until her brother got suspicious and called the police. Her husband escaped, but her in-laws have been jailed,” she says.

Gul is at a shelter in Kabul recovering from her ordeal until she is granted a divorce. In a 2008 study by Global Rights, it was reported that 87 per cent of women in Afghanistan suffered from domestic abuse but are more aware of their rights and are now refusing to stay in violent marriages, unlike during the Taliban era when they suffered silently. Khaliqi, who lived in Pakistan as a refugee during the Taliban’s time, has worked as a lawyer in Afghanistan since 2008, representing 156 women. “The important thing is I’ve won all my cases. In the future, if the Taliban return, women like me will sit at home if security deteriorates. Because the Taliban know me, they will kill me for supporting the rights of women and because I’ve made sure so many men are put behind bars for violent crimes,” she smiles.

Hope after war

By |
Reply
Photo Razeshta Sethna

Photo Razeshta Sethna

It’s called the ‘happiest place in Afghanistan’. Teachers at Kabul’s Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), the first academy of its kind in the country, hope that one day their students will form Afghanistan’s first national symphony orchestra.

The road to ANIM is uneven, marked by potholes and crowded by traffic. An unmarked tall red boundary wall welcomes you at the corner of a long road; once inside the large iron gate manned by two old caretakers, your perceptions of Afghanistan – shaped by stories of the brutality of war and lack of education that Afghanistan’s war-weary generation, especially its women banned from public life during the Taliban regime, understands only too well – dissolve into nothingness.

A city that needs to watch its back, Kabul is a maze of tall, blast-resistant walls and multiple security barriers that are often no more than 10 metres apart. It is unimaginable that this city is home to a dangerous new breed of Taliban and 150 students – orphans, girls and street children making up half of them – who are committed to reviving Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. The sounds of the piano, cello and violin resound in the corridor here. With facilities equal to any world-class music school, including soundproof rehearsing rooms, a collection of instruments and an international faculty, ANIM’s Afghan Youth Orchestra frequently performs for President Hamid Karzai, members of the Afghan cabinet and visiting ambassadors. In May, the orchestra played for the Nato summit in Chicagovia a live broadcast session. In 2013, the Youth Orchestra has a packed calendar: they tour Brussels and France in January and later in the year they will perform at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Carnegie Hall in the US.

When Dr Ahmad Sarmast, a 49-year-old trumpet player and musicologist who has studied in Moscow and Australia, decided to return to his home country in 2008, he formed the music academy with the support of the Ministry of Education and the World Bank at the very site where his own musical education began. As Afghans, particularly women and children, began the arduous process of rebuilding their lives in a post-Taliban country, Sarmast felt that music was an essential component in the process. “It’s been a long journey,” he says, but a very rewarding experience. “I see the progress and the impact these students are making on society and it makes me happy. My main goal is to return the musical rights of Afghan children taken away by the wars and discrimination against music,” he adds.

In a culture which is historically known for the legacy of its rich ancient civilisation at the crossroads of various Greek, Indian, Persian, and Central Asian empires, decades of war and repressive regimes have clamped down on Afghanistan’s artistic milieu. For more than a dark decade of Taliban rule, the Afghan people defied the authorities and hired professional musicians for clandestine music recitals. In Afghan culture, music is equated with happiness, pleasure and peace; music was banned not just during the Taliban era but also during the civil war when Afghans were pressured not to play music as a tribute to martyred resistance fighters. In 1992, after the Soviets withdrew from the country, music was not broadcast on radio or television. The already-bombed Kabul Museum was looted and artefacts and paintings from the National Gallery were hidden away in underground vaults in the archives. Today, the museum’s curators express great relief that many valuable paintings dating to the 18th century and artefacts (including Bactrian gold from the TelaTepa burial site, 2nd century AD) have remerged from these crypts. Over the last 10 years, however, the Afghan people’s resilience and desire for reconstruction are perhaps best gauged from the country’s nascent cultural awakening.

At ANIM, Fazeela is the first female rubab player, who will graduate to teach other students at the academy; young Wahid, a street child who sold plastic bags and is now learning to play the piano, “has come a long way,” explains trumpet and flute teacher James Herzog, also a music educator. Listening to Wahid’s magical recital in this austere-looking building where students are taught to play Asian string instruments and given tuition in Western classical music, you can scarcely believe you’re in Afghanistan. The academy runs under the Ministry of Education to provide internationally accredited music education and training in both Western and Afghan traditions. Here, Afghan musicians teach the sitar, sarod, rubab, ghichak, and dhol alongside foreign instructors who introduce students to the drums, piano, violin, string, wind, and percussion instruments. Peek into a classroom and you may see Aziza, an acclaimed poet, her laptop open on a table, teaching a physics lesson, as ANIM’s students are also taught from the standard Afghan secondary school curriculum so they may graduate with a high school certificate: after two additional years of study, the students gain an internally-recognised diploma in music.

ANIM’s 141 students are a diverse group from all provinces; the school maintains that a third of the students must be girls, and accepts children of all ages. “It’s complicated in Afghanistan,” explains one teacher. “You’ll find children of all ages in one classroom because so many of them have lost out on their education and need to catch up.” The students here receive full scholarships, with significant assistance from India, Britain, Germany and Denmark, as well as a 30-dollar monthly stipend “so that they don’t need to work on the streets,” Herzog says.

“The idea is to create economic opportunities for our students so that the older ones can go on to graduate and teach others,” says Herzog, who also teaches a business class at ANIM. Come 2014, he wants his students to be able to apply for donor funding and develop business models that lay out a structure for applying for funding for the school. ANIM’s future plans include a recording studio, a modern library and a 300-seat concert hall for future on-site performances, a girls’ dormitory and a medical centre. With a recording label and evening tuition-paying classes in the works, Sarmast believes that when international donors leave Afghanistan, the academy will be in a position to generate revenue using its existing and developing infrastructure.

In one of the school’s carpeted rooms, you may meet Afghanistan’s first trumpet players — Khalida and Meena, both aged nine. Sarmast explains that he has been liaising closely for the past two years with government-run organisations, like Ashiana (which runs literacy programmes for street-working children), and the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization (a non-governmental organisation that operates 11 orphanages providing education and homes) so that deprived children have the opportunity to learn music. “About 50 per cent of the students are from these organisations,” he says.

Another room is packed with students playing various instruments with orchestra director William Harvey at the helm. Also supporting Cultures in Harmony, a not-for-profit organisation working to forge understanding between different cultures through music,Harveyhas been a resident in Kabul since March 2010. In another studio, soundproofed with Afghan timber, students learning to play the tabla showcase a masterly performance with expert movement: many will travel to India on scholarships to further their musical education. One of the 16 foreign instructors, Indian harmonium teacher Ustad Murad is proud of his enthusiastic students but says economic conditions mean students lack opportunities that could help their music careers in the future. Additionally, the unending cycle of war and poverty hinders students from buying and owning instruments to practise on and with the average cost of a saxophone at 600 US dollars – 100 US dollars more than an average salary in major cities – the institute’s sustainability requires long-term international funding.

The Taliban’s censorship of music was one of the worst in the history of repressive regimes. They severely punished musicians, destroyed musical instruments and it is said that they displayed mangled audio cassettes with tape innards strewn to the winds as warnings to those music aficionados who thought to defy them. Professional musicians left Afghanistan during this period, returning after 2001 when Afghan music made a comeback with financial support from donors. The international community, keen to support and fund this cultural legacy and fusion with Western popular music through European teachers, has opened up windows of opportunity – such as ANIM – to a younger generation keen to rebuild its traditions and create economic avenues. Young artists, many having lived in exile in Iran and Pakistan until 2001, have also benefitted from international assistance and expertise provided to the Afghan cultural sector: Kabul University’s faculty of Fine Arts encourages students to experiment with their styles; a not-for-profit organisation, Turquoise Mountain, formed an Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture in Kabul in 2007 (see Making a difference).

As caretaker of ANIM’s prized musical instruments, Abdul Mohammad has worked at this institute for 32 years, bearing witness to how political upheavals have destroyed the academy, first formed in 1973. He says he worked under the government of Najibullah (who led the last Communist government in Kabul) and then during the civil war in the 1980s, when the mujahideen looted the academy and refused to pay salaries to the staff. Mohammad shows photographs of the School of Fine Arts’ music department, forced to shut down in the 1990s and later turned into a madrasah.

When piano student Wahid rehearses a piece of Afghan music, the happiness on his face and the inherent pride in his performance moves you to tears. This is Afghanistan. And the future is waiting for young men and women like Wahid and Fazeela.

The political void

By |
Reply
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, flanked by First Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim (left) and Second Vice President Karim Khalili (right)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, flanked by First Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim (left) and Second Vice President Karim Khalili (right)

When at the Bonn conference in 2001 Hamid Karzai was appointed Afghanistan’s interim president by his international supporters, he came to occupy this position without any local backers. He had no traditional constituency and no political party, but has been able to exert his power for the past 10 years through his strong associations with the international community, power-seeking warlords and former Taliban sympathisers, many of whom have been part of his cabinet since 2004. Despite Afghan fears that the Nato withdrawal will bring back the Taliban in the absence of a strong government, the Karzai administration has not changed the political process and structure.

Today, almost 40 years after the country’s ‘first decade of democracy’ (1963-1973), and in the aftermath of the Bonn conference that initiated the process of statebuilding in theory – the creation of a constitution followed by elections for president and parliament – Afghans are critical of the Kabul-based, centralised government’s failure to promote regional autonomy and wider political party participation. This is because after years of war and political upheaval, Afghanistan is a different country from what it was in 1978, with a majority of Afghans – the war generation eligible to vote in the next election – judging the government’s legitimacy by its actions and its dismal record on governance.

Last month, when for the first time after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 the government banned a small, but vocal, leftist party rapidly gaining recognition, there was public outcry and the ban was overturned. The Solidarity Party had angered powerful politicians at an April demonstration in Kabul held on a national holiday which commemorates the victory of mujahideen fighters over Soviet troops; hundreds of protesters openly denounced and burnt pictures of politicians whom they consider war criminals. “[We] demand the prosecution of the criminal leaders,” the group said in a statement issued on the day. “Our party is committed to breaking the atmosphere of fear and dread.”

Human Rights Watch and other international observers strongly condemned the controversial ban; the government accused the party of violating Article 59 of the constitution which stipulates that no one can misuse their rights and freedoms to damage national sovereignty or unity. At the Kabul headquarters of the Solidarity Party, Hafiz Rasiq, a senior party member, explains that the party was summoned in May by the upper house of parliament to answer questions about the demonstration. Then, in early June, it received a letter informing that the party’s activities had been suspended to allow the attorney general to investigate the demonstration, Rasiq adds.

According to him, the party’s “main goal is to work towards peace and equal justice for all and ensure warlords involved in war crimes over the past three decades are brought to justice.” Having boycotted the last two elections to the lower house of parliament (“because of corruption”), the Solidarity Party has one senator in the upper house, barely standing as a political force to contend with other heavyweight power brokers and traditional patrons.

Thomas Rutting, a director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, explains that “two years ago the Solidarity Party’s old leadership was voted out by young people refusing to participate in the post-2001 political process which they perceive as a facade democracy. They not only oppose human-rights violators from all factions but condemn what they term the ‘Nato occupation’ of Afghanistan demanding that western troops withdraw.” Solidarity Party representatives explain why their members refuse to sit in parliament: “We are not against sitting in parliament, if it is free and independent. Under the present conditions, parliamentarians are unable to voice the real concerns of Afghans. Alternately, the media operates as our mouthpiece,” Rasiq tells the Herald. Said Mohammad, a party spokesperson, adds that contacts with leftist parties in Europe have increased; posters reflecting this are prominent in the party’s Kabul office.

The clampdown is a reminder that the Karzai government has zero tolerance for dissent, with limited freedom of expression for political parties. “Political parties are crucial for shaping the future. The international community talks about democracy and relates political parties to democracy — this is a positive ideal. But I’m not sure if democracy is a realistic goal in the Afghan context. For the moment, the most important step is to authorise pluralism so that Afghan people feel that their opinions are voiced,” explains Herve Nicolle, a political analyst with Samuel Hall Strategy in Kabul.

In the real absence of mature political parties – most have failed to grow beyond representing constituencies with a narrow ethnic base – the real challenge towards a democratic transition is mobilising the younger generation which shares a deep mistrust of the Karzai government and its ministers. “They [Solidarity Party] may be more like a protest movement but they don’t fear talking against the US-led intervention. I have sympathy for them. Young people in Afghanistan today don’t want to make compromises. The Afghan system is very young; they need their own experiences,” Rutting says.

Political parties in Afghanistan date back to the 1940s when [Afghan king] Zahir Shah’s modernisation strategies nurtured various political groups, and the 1960s later witnessed the rise of communist parties, but such fragmented movements gave way to military factions divided along ethnic, tribal and religious lines – even in post-Taliban times political party identities and ideological profiles have not changed. (See Uneasy Political Histories). With 45 registered political parties to date in Afghanistan, they continue to face public distrust because of links to armed militias from pre-Taliban times. “In Afghanistan, politics is about individuals, alliances and ethnicities [rather] than parties. When we asked people [during a research survey: 80 households in 10 provinces] to name political parties, they mentioned Jamiat-e-Islami, Hezb-e-Islami, Jumbosh, the Haqqani network etc. These are political factions or insurgents; not exactly political parties with clear identities and frameworks,” Nicolle explains.

The Bonn Process initiated the post-war reconstruction of Afghan institutions which meant a political process of democratisation with the establishment of a presidential and parliamentary system, a bicameral parliament and an electoral cycle. This included the formation of a transitional government at the Emergency Loya Jirga in 2002 and the ratification of a new constitution 18 months later. According to this system, two elections, both for president and parliament, have been conducted. In the October 2004 presidential election, Karzai sought electoral approval for the first time, followed by parliamentary and provincial elections in 2005. While the Karzai-backed government established its legitimacy, many were dissatisfied with its performance, which meant lower popularity ratings in Karzai’s second term.

Analysts explain that when the 2004 constitution was ratified, the US-led international coalition perceived the problem to be the lack of a centralised system, so put in place a new constitution which made the Karzai government responsible for everything — from appointing provincial governors to police chiefs to paying local teachers. Certain provisions in the constitution state that the president as head of state “conducts authority in executive, legislative and judicial branches” which in the past two years has resulted in parliamentarians disgruntled by government interventions. Another heavily-criticised and controversial 2010 amnesty law (The National Reconciliation and General Amnesty Law) drafted and ratified by parliament gave blanket amnesty to war criminals: former warlords and militia commanders guilty of human rights abuses over the past three decades are not liable to prosecution.

Afghans now see these factors, that transformed the political landscape, as detrimental to their future post-2015: many believe the US-backed Karzai government has suffered from corruption, and incompetence; that development aid has inflated the Afghan economy; powerful regional commanders (such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and Mohammad Ata) have become stronger while former discredited leaders from the civil war responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of civilians (Ishmail Khan from the west and Gul Aga Sherzai from the south) now live in Kabul surrounded by ministerial trappings of power; and Taliban sympathisers in the cabinet continue to dominate the judiciary.

Ramzan Bashardost’s independent presidential campaign in 2009 won him supporters because he is a critic of Karzai, warlords-turned-ministers, and foreign and local aid agencies for spending millions on development projects with no results. This might have lost him Karzai’s favour (he resigned as Minister of Planning in 2004) but struck a chord with ordinary Afghans. The 50-year-old parliamentarian who came third in the last presidential election after Dr Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main rival, and ahead of Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister, says: “I am clean. I am not a criminal of war. I work for the Afghans; not just one ethnic group. I do everything I say and I say everything I do.” He gives most of his 2,000 dollar monthly salary to the poor, lives in a small room in his father’s house and even though he has no personal wealth and no powerful backers, his popularity is increasing.

But even if Bashardost is the people’s choice, he appears destined to remain an independent fringe politician with no political party support and, given his anti-Karzai stance, he has failed to win international backers — for now. “Today we have Karzai, [Qasim] Fahim (the Vice President and a former Tajik warlord), [Karim] Khalili (a former mujahideen commander who is the current second Vice President) and if you add Mullah Omar, [Gulbadin] Hekmatyar and [Jalaluddin] Haqqani, we will have six enemies to deal with here. They have killed a lot of innocent people in the past. We cannot make political deals with them. We cannot respect human rights values with criminals of war. The US supports them as ministers, senators … this is damaging American taxpayers and young [US] soldiers who come to fight for this corrupt government. If the US supports a young Afghan generation, they in turn will support its values,” he adds.

Critics argue when it comes to newer, pro-secular and post-Taliban era political parties, their internal organisation and capacity building has been neglected by the government and international community during the last 10 years when other political institutions were provided developmental assistance. “After the fall of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan had the opportunity for political parties to emerge in a new environment of progress and democracy but, unfortunately, this didn’t materialise. Instead of political parties, we saw ethnic and tribal national groups emerge,” Ali Aklaqui, a parliamentarian from Ghazni province tells the Herald. He explains that none of the existing registered parties has a solid mandate or even a constitution. “There are very few parties where all members have decision-making powers. The problem is that the international community was focused on human rights, the war against terror and drugs in the last 10 years but there is a responsibility to support Afghan political development which is in a transitory phase towards democracy,” Aklaqui adds. When aid money benefits only the existing older factions of Islamist parties, newer democratic parties are excluded and sidelined, Rutting concurs.

The Afghan electoral system, formed around the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV), backs independent candidates and larger organised political parties. Rutting explains that “it’s an unfair system and worse in Afghanistan because there are multi-seat constituencies and no limits on the number of candidates that can stand from a constituency.” For example,Kabulhas many seats and support is given to those who have power and control such as the mujahideen parties. Voicing concern about ethnic-identity-based parties, Rutting believes “they will become a hurdle to forming an efficient political process because ethnic policies mean mujahideen parties will dominate, forming alliances and resulting in infighting.”

The 2004 presidential election had 18 contesting candidates, but only four – Yunus Qanooni, Latif Pedram, Syed Ishaq Gailani and Ghulam Farooq Nejrabi – were backed by political parties. The 2005 parliamentary election was conducted along similar lines: 14 per cent of 2,835 candidates declared their party affiliations. Party-affiliated candidates with grass-roots influence and campaign money to spend mobilised supporters which meant that parties with the most representation in the 2005 Wolesi Jirga (lower house of the Afghan parliament) were those which emerged from the seven mujahideen organisations, Shia parties representing regional factions and the Hazara community. Independent candidates, with ethnic associations and community support, won seats based on personalities that dominated; manifestos or even party objectives or slogans were absent. For example, parliamentarian and rights activist Shukria Barakzai from Kabul won a parliamentary seat in 2004 after a street campaign whereas, she explains, her husband spent thousands of dollars but was unable to win in the same election.

In 2003, the first political Party Law was passed allowing parties to register with the Ministry of Justice, but a modification in 2009 required that they needed the signatures of 10,000 members to register as opposed to 700. “Political party affiliations are closer to their ethnic, tribal and regional roots as opposed to being truly nationalistic in orientation. How participative and open these parties are in their functioning is also questionable. Political parties will have to adopt a balanced approach and not appear to be on a Western payroll or follow the West’s agenda. The issues of the Afghans will have to be the central theme,” Arif Ansar, chief analyst at PoliTact, a Washington-based think tank, explains.

The US-backed Karzai government is criticised for deliberately neglecting a political process through which parties are given space and raise awareness about the electoral system among the country’s rural districts. “Karzai didn’t encourage the development of strong multi-ethnic political parties, nor did he form his own political group which leads one to believe that he had an [implicit] political agenda,” Hamidullah Farooqi, the spokesperson of the Truth and Justice Party and an ex-transport minister explains. Karzai is known to have selected certain key warlords to form his inner ministerial coterie; as his popularity waned and he needed support from former mujahideen groups, Khalili as Vice President fitted the bill. This has left a dangerous political vacuum and, with no pro-reform, pro-moderation party in the last 10 years, the government also refuses to build political coalitions.

“Karzai intentionally didn’t want to build the political capacity of the country,” Farooqi adds. This would imply that Karzai is taking advantage of the weaknesses inherent in the political system to ensure that he retains power for years to come in some form. “[Afghan] Political party structures cannot be compared to that of other countries: Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, [Ali Ahmed] Jalali etc do not represent a specific party or political choice, based on political concepts (socialist, socio-democratic, liberal). They represent a personal way to deal with the US, insurgents,Pakistan, warlords and ethnic groups. They also represent a specific relationship with the past and Afghan history [mujahideen and Taliban time] and that drastically changes the way people do and understand politics,” says Nicolle.

Independent candidates have also had it tough not only while campaigning with minimum resources but many needed to form alliances with traditional powerbrokers in a multi-ethnic political milieu. “Alliances are complex but that is the only way to get things done in polarised societies such as the one that exists in Afghanistan,” Ansar adds. When it comes to political survival, despite factional infighting, the two largest opposition alliances – The National Coalition of Afghanistan (NCA) and the National Front of Afghanistan (NFA) – have played the game well. Abdullah Abdullah (a candidate in the 2009 presidential elections) fronts the NCA with Qanooni as another senior leader whereas NFA is a political alliance between Ahmad Zia Massoud, former first Vice President (and a Jamiat-e-Islami member), General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the founder of the Junbish-i-Milli, and Muhammad Muhaqqiq, a Kabul parliamentarian and the leader of a faction of Hezb-e-Wahdat.

Donor assistance, development and security forces alone won’t bring peace and stability, but an intra-Afghan political process supported by regional countries might be closer to the reconciliatory politics that Afghanistan needs. In two years, when Karzai will have to step down, the government will require a strong successor and not a weak proxy. The question is not simply decentralising the Kabul-government or ensuring that a proper electoral voter system is in place for the elections, but the solution lies in working to invigorate independent political parties. Because of SNTV, which suited the Karzai government at the time, analysts say that parliament is not only fractured but has strong ties to the Taliban leadership and other older extremist factions with regional links. If political parties and youth movements are denied an entry point into this system, the third parliamentary election will result in an even fragmented parliament — only with greater chances of extremist candidates and their supporters winning seats to continue with the old system, and this time without international intervention to guide as in previous elections.

Access to information about the elections has a clear impact on electoral participation, states an Asia Foundation Report titled Voter Behavior Survey: Afghanistan’s 2010 Parliamentary Elections. With low education levels, the first hurdle is educating the Afghan electorate. Secondly, political parties hardly deliver on promises and corruption levels are high. “Most candidates running for public office do so to get rich than to serve the people. This further dents public perceptions about the role of politicians,” a member of the Awakened Youth Movement explains. With a large part of the population based in rural areas where the writ of the government is weak, services offered negligible, and where traditional structures are more enduring, the media, especially radio, has to play a role in developing awareness and to illustrate where voters as citizens fit in. Ansar explains that “it’s a really tough place where status quo is much preferred over change, where people do not have the appetite for grand visions and promises. They have to make it through the day and if you are going to help do that, they’ll believe you.”

Tired of the war, young Afghans are joining anti-Karzai movements and secular-leaning parties that stay away from playing the ethnic card. “They [the youth] are critical to the future of any state. It also depends on how successful their experience with the state has been. This can be called the issue of national integration. Afghanistan needs a period of calm that lasts up to 10 years where positive experiences can be developed. Moreover, any political party that targets the youth on a nationalistic agenda and brings them into its fold, will have a huge advantage over the others. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, next door, is a case in point,” Ansar explains.

Afghanistan in transition

By |
Reply

When Nato-led combat forces leave Afghanistan, the Karzai government will need to fundamentally focus on security, the rule of law, strong governance and economic development. This will mark the beginning of Afghanistan’s challenges as it stabilises. More importantly, it will cost 4.1 billion US dollars annually to equip and maintain the Afghan National Security Forces — and with troop readiness by 2014 termed unrealistic by most western military commanders, a possible security vacuum after the Nato withdrawal could escalate a mid-level insurgency.

Still waiting for real leaders

By |
Reply

A few decades ago this was Bhutto-land. Any other political party making inroads into Karachi’s oldest district of Lyari was unimaginable. Today there is deep uncertainty over what will happen in political terms after the vociferous show of anti-Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) sentiment in one of the largest slum settlements in South Asia. It is impossible to tell that this constituency of over 1.5 million people has been the party’s strongest vote bank since 1970. The PPP might have got Lyari’s ‘sympathy’ vote in 2008 after Benazir Bhutto’s death, but public dissatisfaction with the party’s performance has altered its image. Benazir’s Oxford-educated son Bilawal is hardly likely to be received with the welcome that his mother and his grandfather were accorded here before him.

“Kill me, but don’t marry me off”

By |
21

Looking for her missing daughter outside the gates of Panah Shelter home, Karachi 2012. Photo: Stephan Andrew/White Star

In a black abaya, her headscarf wrapped tightly around her hair, a middle-aged woman stands outside the gate. She is holding a photograph of her twenty-year old daughter gone missing for nine months. Someone at a legal aid office told her to check with the Edhi office and this women’s shelter. She says young women from her extended family often disappear. Why? Because they fall in love, then marry of their own choice.

When two watchmen open the gate to the shelter home, they say they haven’t seen her daughter. It’s a weekday when traffic gets heavy near Karachi’s Superhighway with cars honking for space and loaded passenger buses tilting sideways but we hardly notice the hullabaloo. The woman standing outside the gate with her sister, pleads with me to check if her daughter is taking shelter inside; promising she won’t ‘harm’ her if she comes home.

Tucked away on a residential street, Panah, a women’s shelter home has been around for nearly twelve years housing victims of violence seeking refuge because they fear they will be killed if they exercise their choice in marriage or divorce. When the Panah Trust was handed the Darul Aman premises, this government-run shelter for women was in a dilapidated condition says Justice (retd) Shaiq Usmani who is on the board of trustees. Legal activist, Zia Awan explains the very few government run shelters do not accept women victims of violence without a court referral unlike the Panah shelter home.

Panah housed 32 residents including 11 children when I visited last month: a daily routine for the fourteen or so women means the usual chores, cooking, cleaning, looking after their children, sewing, watching television. Usually they would never get the chance to learn computer skills, or learn to read or even study to become beauticians, but here the focus is to teach them skills that will serve them when they leave. The only thing is that they can’t leave the shelter until their cases have been resolved. But for most that isn’t an issue: they either fear they will be killed [by their male relatives] and even if they wanted to leave they’d have no where to go.

The sewing room is packed with women of all ages sitting against the walls, some with toddlers, some cradling crying infants. An embroidery class is mid-way and there’s a sense of eagerness. They want to learn to read and write as well, so that they can deal with their lives better, some say. Looking around this room, nineteen-year old Sagheera from Bahawalpur sits with her three year old son next to Badam Gul who appears sadder and more aloof than the rest. Shelter manager, Madiha Latif, a trained psychologist explains “When these women experience the kind of trauma that they do before they come here, we need to deal with them slowly. Counseling sessions for post-traumatic stress disorder are helpful. With cognitive behavior therapy we change negative thoughts to alter their behaviour patterns,” she says. They teach women how to use yoga techniques to release pain through deep breathing exercises and the tightening and opening their fists, Latif adds.

Badam Gul is in a white polyester shalwar kameez suit with bright silver sequins as if she were a traditional Pashtoon bride on her honeymoon weekend. Fists tightly clenched, her dangling amber earrings calling attention, she hides behind her chiffon dupatta. She has spent around a fortnight at Panah after running away from her husband’s home in Karachi. She went to the Malir court for help. Gul was regularly beaten, dragged by her brown hair, and strangled at night by her husband and his brothers. At twenty, Gul from Peshawar has been married for two years to Dad Mohammad, a fifty-year old suffering from severe mental illness. Gul was sold when she was eight years old because her father was unable to repay a 20,000 rupee loan. “My mother told him to kill me but not marry me to this man. But he was desperate so he sold me,” tears stain her face. She has seen her mother once since then and misses her. Now Gul wants a divorce and to return to her family home in peace. Her once carefree life haunts her present. I walk past the yellow marigolds in the garden and question why.

Nobody told us we were guilty

By |
1
A photograph of the detention centre

A photograph of the detention centre. Courtesy CBS News

There are currently more than 2,400 prisoners at Bagram prison and there is no legal system that differentiates between real militants and illiterate, jobless Afghans and foreigners rendered by their own governments. In August 2009, the then top US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), produced a report on Bagram prison recommending that 400 of the 600 prisoners there at the time should be released because they posed no threat to US forces or their coalition partners. These were poor village people swept up in raids, with no useful information. Since then, the US has spent millions of dollars to expand the Bagram internment facility. Two thirds of its non-Afghan prisoners are Pakistani citizens. Some of them were as young as 13 when they were detained, and have spent years without being charged, often locked in solitary confinement.
For two former Afghan detainees, both brothers, their detention at Bagram in 2003 for six and a half months, left them puzzled and taught them not to ask too many questions about why they had been picked up. Mohammad Naeem and Abdul Qayum were later released without charge at the same time. In 2004, Pakistani Kamil Shah was 17 when he was picked up by American forces in a crowded market while trying to locate a doctor’s clinic in the Afghan town of Spin Boldak near the Chaman border crossing. He was detained until 2009 without charge.
His American English sounds perfect. “The American guards would speak to us, so we picked up words and phrases,” he explains. He is now married and has a family in Gilgit but life after Bagram is difficult without a proper education and job.
The three men have the same story — mostly. Naeem, now 25, is married with two daughters. He runs a bakery and often works as a mechanic in Paghman town, near Kabul. Qayum is a full-time mechanic. Both brothers were picked up in a night-time raid when 100 American soldiers entered their home on information received from local informants. Naeem says he was transferred from Kabul’s Pol-i-Charkhi prison to Bagram. “Two other young boys from Paghman were also arrested that night along with a commander loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who lived down the street from our house at the time,” he adds.
Naeem was hooded, handcuffed and had chains on his legs when he was interrogated at Bagram. “What do you know about Mullah Omar? How do you make bombs?” he was asked. When he repeatedly told his American interrogators he was a mechanic and imported engines from Iran, Dubai and Pakistan, they insisted he was lying. He was locked up in solitary confinement for 40 days in a tiny cell. “I was punched and kicked around by American interrogators, questioned with blindfolds through a local translator whose face was covered.”
Shah’s story is not very different: he was locked up in isolation for a fortnight and interrogated. It was a routine and the mind and body adjusted: Are you al-Qaeda? Are you a Talib? The questions always solicited the same response and he was never charged. He was allowed to speak to his family twice on the phone.
Born at Jalozai refugee camp in Peshawar to Afghan parents, Naeem was schooled in Pakistan until grade seven. At Bagram, he shared a cell with Iranian, Afghan and Pakistani prisoners, including Abdul Haleem Saifullah (who disappeared in 2005 from Karachi) and Amal Khan (who disappeared in 2002 from Mansehra). When he was released in 2003, Naeem traveled to Mansehra to meet Amal Khan’s family who learnt for the first time that their son was in Bagram. Amal Khan spoke to them for the first time in 2003-2004 on the phone, says his cousin Gulsher.
“There were about 15 prisoners in a room where we slept on beds on the floor and often there was no proper food,” says Naeem. “The rooms were dirty until a high level American official was about to arrive and they cleaned it up, giving us clean drinking water. The white, red-faced American guards beat prisoners with their shoes or sticks for no apparent reason.”
When prisoners were transferred from their cells to the showers or for interrogation, their head was covered with a heavy, dark, burqa-like covering. “We didn’t know if it was day or night,” Naeem says. Yes, there were decent guards also, he recalls, especially a female soldier who smuggled in the occasional cigarette and naan bread. “I knew I would get out of Bagram, if it was God’s will,” he says. “I never asked them why they were keeping me.”
Like Shah, Naeem speaks English with an American twang. Many detainees went into Bagram semi-literate and came out able to read and write in Urdu, Farsi, Arabic and English.
Shah also met other Pakistani detainees including Fazal Karim, detained since 2003, and the youngest Pakistani detainee, Hamidullah Khan. “Karim was in isolation and punishment cells for many months,” says Shah. “He was disturbed, always shouting and fighting with the guards. He was mentally unwell and the Americans gave him sleeping tablets.”
Shah recalls how Dr Ghairat Baheer, the son-in-law of Hekmatyar, counselled Pakistani prisoners. Baheer was taken from his home in Islamabad in October 2002, rendered to Bagram for four years without charge. “When there was a problem, he would negotiate between the prisoners and the Americans, advising us to be calm and patient,” Shah recalls. “The Pakistani prisoners barely spoke to one another. We were too scared of informants.” Naeem concurs: “There were spies among us asking us questions, which we never answered because everyone was too scared to trust the other.”
Shah was released with three other Pakistani detainees in 2009, flown to Peshawar and debriefed. “When I left Bagram,” he says, “I asked Colonel Dalson: Why did you keep me here all these years? He replied, ‘We didn’t keep you here. The Pakistani government didn’t want you. We should have released you a long time ago.’”

Illegal detentions: Stories from Bagram

By |
4

Over the years Karim has told his family he has been interrogated and physically abused by the Americans, but not charged for any wrongdoing. His brother has letters written in Urdu (some marked censored) and sent hand-made embroidered wrist bands and prayer beads through the ICRC. Karim was put in solitary confinement for 6 years because he protested, reportedly biting the nose of an American guard and struggling when handcuffed. He even attempted to escape Bagram prison through a window, says Rehman, who was also arrested last year in August in Karachi.

Jason Burke

By |
15

Jason Burke in Bajaur, Pakistan

Jason Burke in Bajaur, Pakistan. Photo Courtesy Jason Burke


With radical changes to the phenomenon of Islamic militancy in the past decade and the induction of hundreds of recruits globally, Jason Burke shares his findings, spanning over a decade, reflecting on what we’ve learnt after inglorious, if necessary, wars. In a new book, The 9/11 Wars, he focuses on ordinary people affected by the conflicts as well as on al-Qaeda as an “amorphous, dynamic and fragmented movement based more on personal relations and a shared world view than on formal membership of an organisation.” Here, Burke talks to the Herald about the Afghan endgame and the tenuous relations between Pakistan and the United States.

Q. You argue about the local versus the global and you’re cautious about the West’s policies when it comes to promoting democracy in the region. Has the lack of understanding been a failure on the part of policymakers or simply a political strategy of no engagement beyond a point?
A. There have been epic failures of policymaking during the 9/11 wars and the second failure has been of global thinking where human agencies have been written out. To understand this, look closely at how the West has viewed the Islamic world and then at how the Islamic world projects itself using the language of pan-Islamism. In the 1990s, the collapse of the major narrative of Communism and the Cold War led to the structuring of a new world order with radical Islamists. Take the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) in Pakistan which, since the last decade, has had enormous success in embedding its values in society but doesn’t get votes in an election. There is a need to understand why Pakistanis think the way they do to support the JI vision and how that thinking has emerged in the past decade: why they talk about veils, the role of Shariah within the legal system and other views such as why the US is the ‘bad guy’ and Jews are running the world. There is a religious component that is running the country, and that component is prevalent within the PPP [Pakistan Peoples Party] and PML–N [Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz] and Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf as well. Pakistan has changed since I was living there in the early 1990s and in a sense the classic political system has a religious, conservative thread. In a city like Karachi, it’s the middle classes now that have emerged with greater mobility of thought than 10 years ago, when a family that owned a motorbike at the time, now has a Suzuki Mehran. But ‘Middle Pakistan’ is more anti-American and religiously conservative today. There’s a consolidation of a more religious, and a moderately Islamist thread with a socially conservative tilt towards the Middle East. What happened to other countries in the central Middle East has happened to Pakistan in the past decade. A polarisation of consciousness since 9/11 has paid a considerable role. On her return to Pakistan, I was travelling with Benazir Bhutto to Islamabad from Peshawar, when she said to me, “Pakistan has changed, Mr Burke.” When Bhutto bought oranges at a roadside stall in Peshawar, she said she wasn’t aware of the prices that had changed. What Bhutto didn’t get when she returned to Pakistan after 10 years was how much it had changed. She must have picked up vibes and with her foreign backers, she had an idea of the problems when she spoke of human rights policies and letting in UN inspectors to visit nuclear plants but she wasn’t on the ground long enough to find out.

Q. Who are the drivers of global Islam today?
A. With al-Qaeda on the fringes, its influence waning and its worldview largely rejected, today, the actual drivers of global Islam are the urban middle classes. In countries like Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has discredited itself by resorting to violent militancy, not acceptable to local populations. But in Pakistan, take the example of why Lashkar-e-Taiba went to Mumbai, because it was losing its grip on the jihadi movement at home. The last 10 years have generated a new strand of militancy in the Islamic world and Pakistan is acting like a pressure cooker for these variations. What you saw pre-2001 in Pakistan was local sectarianism and international/regional militancy in Kashmir and a bit of involvement in Afghanistan. But since then, all of this has become much more mixed, with new strands such as the Pakistani Taliban, which makes the situation in Pakistan fragmented and these groups able to escape the security establishment. This is a microcosm of a larger picture. There is an extra chaotic galaxy of militant cells now operating in the country.

Q. Diplomatic relations between the US and Pakistan remain volatile, with Washington wanting Pakistan to clamp down on the Haqqani network. What’s the nature of this relationship and how sustainable is it?
A. Pakistan and America remain in a complex relationship. They are not by any means natural allies, though there is a strange assumption in the West that this isn’t the case. Nothing indicates they are natural allies in terms of shared history, religion, a shared project or identity except the Cold War alliance. From the Pakistani side, why would the US be a natural ally? It doesn’t work for both sides.

Q. What of the stability of this region in the long term with the Afghan endgame?
A. India becomes a superpower because it’s growing at eight per cent per year and Pakistan will have no choice but to go along with this development. There will come a point when the weight of development and money will have a regional impact even if it takes decades. The strategic thinking in Islamabad is that the Indians will come across the border but the focus in India is on getting rich and not righting the wrongs of Partition. And Kashmir doesn’t dominate the news everyday in India either. As the endgame in Afghanistan nears, if the nightmare scenario is of total collapse with the Taliban controlling the south and the east and retaking Kabul, then the optimistic scenario is that aid keeps coming in and the Afghan army gets its act together to ensure stability and there’s some kind of Taliban representation in the government. In reality what will probably happen is something in the middle with the Taliban installing their government in the south and east of the country and inevitably be limited to pockets in the north. But the Taliban have internal rifts, so a return to the nasty, unstable and violent conflict-like situation before the West turned up is perhaps not going to happen. If Pakistan is thinking intelligently at this point, they will want good relations with Iran and a stable and prosperous Afghanistan with which it could share cordial relations and trade routes into Central Asia and not as a base of militancy. Until Pakistan’s security establishment works out that funding militant proxies is about conflict, not much will change. And can that happen? It would need an internal sea-change but geopolitical game-changers are not impossible.

Q. In your book, even as you conclude, there is sympathy with those whose lives have been wrecked by the war on terror, wherever in the world: civilians, soldiers, even failed suicide bombers. As a reporter travelling through these regions, what has gripped you the most?
A. A woman in Baghdad in 2004 with two disabled children aged seven and nine who needed special care. She was well-educated and her husband had been killed by the Baathists. She had limited resources and I saw how desperate her situation was at the time; that situation multiplied many times. If you put down how many people have lost their lives: civilians, army persons, combatants, militants, in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the rest of the world, the quarter of a million people and with hundreds of thousands injured, disabled, bereaved — it’s a huge figure to contend with.

Q. Do you see change in the cycle of violence and terrorism?
A. I wrote this book keeping in mind what this decade will look like and that the world has certainly changed. Al-Qaeda’s message and ideology has failed and been rejected by many communities; the Arab revolts are without al-Qaeda’s intervention and are a call for democracy. Even after engaging in wars costing trillions, western democracies like the US are still standing. There are no winners, no victories but lots of losers. Each individual war story, of the injured, the bereaved, the disabled, stories told by a US soldier or a failed suicide bomber who never really understood what he was doing, is a tragedy.