Skip to content

UN takes cover as controversial election looms

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

Eight people were killed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, last week when Taliban gunmen attacked a guesthouse used by United Nations international staff. The three attackers – who were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, machine guns and grenades – also died during a fierce fire fight with security guards early last Wednesday morning in the centre of the city.

The incident brings to 23 the number of aid workers killed in Afghanistan so far this year, and comes barely a week before a controversial presidential run-off election due to take place on Saturday between the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

The violence has heightened concerns about further attacks on polling stations and election officials as the election draws near.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon condemned the killings before a meeting of the UN security council in New York, but implied that further attacks were a possibility. ‘‘Increasingly, the UN is being targeted, in this case precisely because of our support for the Afghan elections,” he said. The targeting of UN staff has been uncommon in recent years, given their relatively small presence in the country.

The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force is by far the most significant international presence in Afghanistan, with 61,000 troops from 42 nations.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) reports fielding a staff of about 1,500, (80 per cent of them Afghans), of whom140 are believed to be directly involved with the election preparations.

In the aftermath of the killings, Unama is conducting a security review, and many non-essential foreign staff have been ordered to take leave until after the elections. There are also plans to move personnel to more secure compounds that offer greater protection from such attacks.

A Taliban spokesman later warned that the targeting of the UN workers was deliberate, and a warning to all foreign non-governmental organisations not to assist in the election process.

The Taliban views Karzai as a puppet of the United States, and insists that any elections held under ‘‘foreign occupation’’ have no validity.

Karzai was initially credited with outright victory after the first round of voting on August 22. But after widespread accusations of ballot stuffing and electoral fraud, the country’s independent election commission later reduced his share of the vote to 49 per cent, just below the 50 per cent threshold needed to win outright victory and a second term in office.

The president’s reputation took a further hammering last week when reports surfaced that his brother has been on the payroll of the CIA for several years while simultaneously being involved in the blossoming Afghan opium trade.

Such widespread corruption in the Afghan government has bolstered the popularity of the Taliban in some parts of the country, with the result that many international observers believe an untainted electoral mandate is vital if Karzai’s central government in Kabul is to enjoy legitimacy in the years to come.

But with an ethnically-diverse population of around 30 million spread across remote and mountainous terrain, providing adequate security during this round of elections is going to stretch the resources, not to mention the credibility, of an already beleaguered president in desperate need of some good news.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

Pakistan reignites assault against Taliban

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

Pakistan’s army has reported killing more than 100 Taliban militants as part of an ongoing offensive in south Waziristan – a semi-autonomous region along the Afghan border. Two divisions – around 28,000 soldiers – have been deployed to target strongholds of the Tehreeke-Taliban network, the group linked to a continuing series of attacks across the country that have left nearly 200 dead so far this month.

This large-scale assault has involved heavy artillery and helicopter gunships. Military spokesmen have confirmed 18 army fatalities as they confront a guerrilla force estimated to be 10,000-strong and believed to include around 1,000 foreign fighters and al-Qaeda members.

The mission aims to bring some degree of centralised control to what had become a de facto Taliban ‘mini-state’ beyond the reach of the government.

The army also wants to disrupt militant training camps that have dispatched suicide bombers to civilian targets across Pakistan. A bombing in a university in the capital Islamabad prompted the government to close all schools last Wednesday, while a senior military officer was assassinated by two gunmen.

But this is not simply an internal issue. South Waziristan is also a logistical basis for the al-Qaeda network and other militants fighting Nato forces across the border in Afghanistan. The area is seen as a strategic fulcrum vital to any broader, regional security initiative.

Nato secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen praised Pakistan’s move last week at the organisation’s Brussels headquarters. Nato leads the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in neighbouring Afghanistan with around 67,000 troops. ‘‘It is crucial for stability in the whole region that the Pakistani government and military succeed in their endeavours,” he said.

Rasmussen added that Nato forces would ‘‘take sufficient measures to deal with a possible influx of Taliban fighters’’ attempting to escape into Afghanistan.

The ISAF wants to minimise the inflow of militants into Afghanistan, ahead of a controversial electoral run-off due to take place on November 7. President Hamid Karzai’s victory in an August election was overturned by the country’s electoral complaints commission, after accusations of widespread electoral fraud.

The uncertainty surrounding Karzai’s position has also compromised plans in Washington to increase its commitment to a government increasingly seen as venal and ineffective.

The importance of Pakistan to any regional security initiative has been emphasised by the visit of American senator John Kerry and General David Petraeus to Islamabad last week to discuss the ongoing military operation. The US has repeatedly asked Islamabad to target militants in south Waziristan, and used an unmanned aerial drone to kill a senior Taliban commander there last August.

Despite some public protestations of mutual objectives, Pakistan’s all-powerful generals and Nato do not share the same long-term goals, a point that has become increasingly apparent as the ISAF mission enters its ninth year.

Pakistan’s officer-class elite is primarily concerned with internal security, and has shown little desire to pursue militants in its Federally Administered Tribal Areas who choose to fight only in Afghanistan.

Besides, the army has been down this road before. Similar campaigns over the last four years have often ended in short-lived peace deals. A previous agreement allowed militants to assume control of the Swat valley in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province and implement their own version of sharia law. This experiment in containment fell apart last May and the army attempted to reassert control in an offensive that killed hundreds of militants.

The one consistency throughout these cycles of violence has been the suffering of the displaced civilian population. The current fighting has created a massive refugee problem, and tens of thousands fled the region prior to the military operation. The UN reported that 1.5 million people were displaced in May during the Swat valley operation.

Officials in Islamabad would do well to bear in mind that such large-scale military action often has far-reaching and unseen consequences.

It was from the flood of refugees created by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s that the Taliban initially sprang from – a destabilising force in the region to this day.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

Generals key to combating Pakistan violence

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

A series of coordinated attacks against Pakistan’s security forces last week left around 50 people dead. In Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province, militants linked to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan group attacked three separate police facilities using automatic rifles and grenades, while suicide bombers also targeted a police station in the northern city of Peshawar.

Over 150 people have been killed across the country in recent weeks, in an escalation of violence challenging the authority of both president Asif Ali Zardari and the Pakistani army.

The violence – including a rocket attack which killed three Pakistani soldiers and wounded four at a military camp in a remote tribal area last Friday – comes as the military prepares a major assault on militant strongholds in the Waziristan region along the Afghan border – also believed to be the hiding place of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.

While targeting civilians and politicians is not unusual – former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide attack in 2007 – directly confronting the security forces in such a brazen manner has been interpreted as a warning to the military ahead of its planned offensive against the ‘Pakistani Taliban’.

Since 2001, the Pakistani army has lost over 3,000 soldiers fighting militants within its borders.

But the recent violence has also focused attention on the long-standing links between Pakistan’s military and a rainbow of militant Islamic groups over the last decades.

During the 1980s, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency channelled weapons and money to Afghan mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion, and facilitated an influx of foreign fighters (backed by the US and Saudi Arabia) – out of which blossomed the al-Qaeda network.

Until today, the Pakistani army is believed to maintain links with Kashmiri militants at home and the Taliban in Afghanistan, in order to maintain ‘strategic depth’ in its ongoing struggle for regional supremacy with India.

Arif Rafiq, a regional specialist who writes the Pakistan Policy Blog, told The Sunday Business Post last week that the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ should not be seen as a homogenous group, and that the Pakistani military played certain factions off against the other to pursue its strategic goals.

However, he said that ‘‘the army has lost control of a large segment of the militants inside Pakistan who have developed a mind of their own,” he said.

The turmoil in Pakistan also highlights the dominant position of the armed forces, widely regarded as a ‘shadow government’ in their own right.

Not only do senior military officers often act independently of politicians regarding security affairs, the military runs its own multibillion dollar network of banks, insurance companies and cement factories, and is the largest property owner in the country.

Successive administrations in Washington have tried to alter this capricious balance of power – a weak civilian government competing against a powerful officer elite.

Only last week, an aid package to Pakistan – US$7.5 billion over five years – was passed by the US Congress, with a proviso demanding increased control of the military by elected officials.

However, there are strong historical factors that seem to ensure the pre-eminence of the military. Pakistan’s population of 170 million is both ethnically diverse and often impoverished.

This has resulted in numerous insurgencies against the central government since independence in 1947.

Baluchi separatists in the west and the Pashtun tribes of the Federal Administered Tribal Areas have little loyalty to Islamabad, and have turned to violence in the past – creating the need for a strong military to hold the country together.

Thus, when it comes to countering this violence, the answers appear to l ie with the nation’s generals, rather than its politicians.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

Latest bloodshed in Afghanistan spells more trouble for US alliance

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

An increase in violence across Afghanistan has ignited debate over what the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) can realistically hope to achieve in the war-torn country.

At least 17 people were killed in the capital Kabul last Thursday in a suicide bombing claimed by the Taliban. Casualties among US soldiers and Afghan security forces have also spiked in recent weeks.

Though the senior Nato commander supports a more expansive ‘nation building’ option involving up to 40,000 more troops, US president Barack Obama appears to favour a more targeted approach focusing on the al-Qaeda infrastructure.

The ISAF was initially conceived to provide security to the interim Afghan government after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. It now comprises nearly 70,000 soldiers from 24 countries, spread thinly across the country.

Increasingly, these troops have been drawn away from reconstruction work and into combat, often without the necessary resources. British marines in the southern Helmand province have complained about a lack of helicopters and armoured vehicles.

Regardless of which strategy is ultimately chosen, there seems little likelihood of the Taliban disappearing. It is clearly resurgent despite continued losses – Nato claimed that more than 100 militants were killed in combat over the last two weeks.

This may account for a possible shift in US strategy: negotiating a deal with Taliban elements willing to break away from al-Qaeda. There is also concern in Washington over Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whose legitimacy has been damaged by accusations of electoral fraud.

Then there is the thorny issue of the readiness and loyalty of the Afghan army, who were expected to assume a more prominent role in a post-Taliban state.

Tom A Peter, an American journalist currently embedded with the US military in the Paktika province, described to The Sunday Business Post the continuing gap between these expectations and the reality on the ground. ‘‘All the attitudes that US soldiers had towards their Iraqi counterparts – questionable allegiances and marginal abilities – carry over to Afghanistan’s security forces. Of course soldiers say there are good units and bad units, but, generally speaking, an Afghan unit really has to prove itself in order to win the trust of the average US soldier,” he said.

The reluctance of the Obama administration to deploy a large number of new troops is also influenced by another key factor – Pakistan.

In response to recent Taliban attacks, the US launched air strikes on Taliban positions in Pakistan’s federally-administered tribal areas – which have become a key operational base for al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders.

Committing more personnel and resources to Afghanistan, when Washington’s number one priority lies across the border in Pakistan, appears to have found little support in the White House.

However, pursuing a ‘Pak-Af’ strategy raises other awkward questions.

Ultimately, will the US military have to defy the Pakistani government and deploy significant ground forces inside Pakistan to defeat al-Qaeda and its allies in the Taliban, or can better intelligence and air strikes (and the inevitable civilian casualties they entail) succeed, despite having failed over the last eight years?

Ashley J Tellis, a defence specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes it is unlikely that the US will ever put significant numbers of ground troops inside Pakistani territory, even though US special forces have crossed the border in the past.

‘‘The US cannot put boots on the ground in Pakistan – whether it is targeting the Pakistani Taliban, alQaeda or the Afghan Taliban leadership. It will have to be done by standoff attacks,” Tellis told The Sunday Business Post this week.

The recent announcement of an annual $1.5 billion aid package to Islamabad – with the proviso that the government exercise ‘‘effective civilian control over the military’’ – indicates that US patience with the current situation inside Pakistan may not be infinite.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

Nato calls for 30,000 Afghan troops

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

The American commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan has warned of mission failure if more troops are not brought in to battle the Taliban insurgency.

In an internal policy review leaked to the Washington Post last week, General Stanley McChrystal portrayed a potentially grim future for the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) mission to bolster the fledgling Afghan government, while preventing al-Qaeda from using the country as a base of operations.

‘‘Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term [next 12 months] – while Afghan security capacity matures – risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” the report added.

The recommendations, due to land on the desk of US president Barack Obama this week, outline a number of options to tackle the Taliban resurgence. The most aggressive strategy calls for an extra 30,000 troops, over half of which would go towards training the nascent Afghan security forces, whose fighting ability and ‘‘commitment to the cause’’ has been questioned by some security experts.

This year has been the deadliest one for the coalition forces involved in Operation Enduring Freedom since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Nato forces have suffered more than 360 fatalities so far this year, compared to a total of 57 in 2003. The report also laid blame at the feet of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whose government is increasingly seen as both impotent and corrupt.

Karzai’s star has fallen considerably of late, reaching a nadir last month when he clashed with the US special representative to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, over alleged electoral fraud. The death of six Italian soldiers this month in a suicide bombing in the Afghan capital was further proof that the Taliban are gaining strength while the government’s position is weakening.

Increasingly, opponents are deriding Karzai as merely an US-backed ‘Mayor of Kabul’, with little real control over outlying insurgent strongholds, such as the southern province of Helmand. McChrystal’s call for ‘‘more boot s on the ground’’ had been widely expected, as the Bush administration’s strategy of ‘counterterrorism’, rather than ‘counterinsurgency’, has been labelled a failure.

Stephen Biddle, a senior Fellow for defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the strategic assessment group that devised the report, said last week that a major shift in tactics was needed. ‘‘Counterterrorist strategies focus on killing specific hostile individuals – members of terrorist organisations or their leadership. Counter insurgency focuses, not so much on killing the enemy, but on protecting civilians. They’re very different undertakings.”

In the past, Nato forces have relied on missile strikes from pilotless drones as they attempted to kill senior Taliban commanders. But such attacks generally involved high civilian casualties, with women and children often among the dead, generating further antipathy towards an Afghan government desperately in need of friends.

On taking office, the Obama administration acknowledged the failure of the previous counterterrorism strategy by removing the previous Nato commander and replacing him with McChrystal, who has the task of turning an increasingly blood-dimmed tide.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

Electoral truth hard to come by

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

Conspiracy theories are never far away when Middle Eastern politics are being analysed, and there seems little prospect of either side in the current impasse in Iran accepting the other’s view.

Following last week’s disputed presidential election, hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Iran in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated candidate representing the country’s burgeoning reform movement.

Yesterday, police warned they would deal firmly with any protest rallies, which they cited as illegal. Despite this, a planned protest in Tehran was set to go ahead yesterday afternoon, after Mousavi called on his supporters to take to the streets.

Mousavi’s supporters have disparaged the official results – which gave victory to the conservative incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by a 2:1 margin – and have demanded that fresh elections be held.

During a tumultuous five days of demonstrations, nearly a dozen protesters were killed by basij militia men closely linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the country’s ruling clerics. The protests have clearly startled the clerics who wield ultimate power in this Islamic republic of over 70 million people. Not since the Iranian revolution 30 years ago has Tehran seen such mass public dissent.

One side got a significant boost from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last Friday when, during prayers in Tehran, he dismissed opposition claims of electoral fraud and issued a ‘cease and desist’ warning to opposition leaders.

In his sermon, Ali Khamenei said that ‘‘street challenge is not acceptable’’ and insisted that ‘‘the Islamic republic would not cheat and would not betray the vote of the people’’.

There still remains two diametrically opposed groups facing off across the country, both of whom believe they are in sole possession of the truth. But after Friday’s sermon, it is clear that Ahmadinejad is in possession of the one vote that matters most.

In the aftermath of the election, opposition newspapers, SMS services, radio stations and internet access have all been targeted by the government in a bid to stifle communication between opposition groups.

The government has also arrested dozens of leading opposition activists in a bid to quell the protests.

While there is no doubting the intensity of the opposition and the scale of the ‘Green Movement’ – members of Iran’s football team sported green wristbands during a World Cup qualifying match in a show of solidarity – there is still no definitive proof that the election was rigged.

There have also been rallies in favour of Ahmadinejad, who enjoys strong support in the rural areas. Conservatives have also blamed ‘outside forces’ for stirring up the opposition.

But a number of questions have been raised regarding the poll results. Ranj Alaaldin, a Middle East specialist at the London School of Economics, told The Sunday Business Post last week that the electoral process seemed tainted.

‘‘There are serious discrepancies which suggest this wasn’t a free and fair election,” Alaaldin said. ‘‘What baffles many is how results from 40 million ballots could come within hours, rather than the customary three days.”

However, the counterclaims of culpability within Iran have been mirrored outside the country as well. Polling results published in the Washington Post revealed a 2:1 split in favour of Ahmadinejad, though others have dismissed the data as unreliable, given that more than half of the respondents failed to express a preference.

Since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, Iran’s opaque electoral history has always been difficult to predict.

Regional experts were shocked by Ahmadinejad’s first victory in 2005, when he comprehensively defeated influential former president Ali Rafsanjani – who, this time round, backed Mousavi.

In many ways, Rafsanjani’s looming presence in the shadows of Iranian politics makes it even more difficult to separate truth from fiction.

Rafsanjani is a multi-millionaire and is seen by many of Iran’s rural poor as sitting atop an oligarchy of urban wealth, education and privilege.

During a televised debate with Mousavi in the run-up to the election, Ahmadinejad launched a stinging attack on Rafsanjani to score points against Mousavi, accusing the former president of corruption.

While the protests over the presidential election are unprecedented, there seems little chance of any far-reaching structural change within Iran. Ultimate power lies not with the president, but with Ali Khamenei, and Ahmadinejad is his preferred candidate.

‘‘Key individuals behind the protests, like Mousavi and former president Rafsanjani, are all products of the Islamic revolution, men who are the system rather than men fighting it,” said Alaaldin.

Alaaldin also said that Iran was ‘‘witnessing a major concerted effort that demands more civil liberties, engagement with the west, economic opportunities, human, civil and women’s rights and, worryingly for the clerical elite, demands targeted at the non democratic institutions like the office of the Supreme Leader’’.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

New Jack Emirate

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Foreign Policy
By Raymond Barrett

A key to understanding the history of Dubai’s seamy underbelly.

The wooden dhows docked along the Dubai Creek sail trade routes that are centuries old, connecting this small city-state on the Persian Gulf with the outside world. But the boats have served a double purpose in Dubai’s history. A symbol of Dubai’s vibrant shipping industry, the dhows have also been used by generations of smugglers exploiting Dubai’s strategic position between East and West to move contraband back and forth across the Arabian Sea. Now, despite Dubai’s recent rebranding as an international hub for finance and education, it remains a hub for the darker side of the global economy, with modern-day smugglers using Dubai as a base for everything from property-based money laundering and illegal banking to the Afghan opium trade.

Dubai’s struggles during the global financial crisis will only strengthen its underworld, according to Christopher Davidson, a lecturer in Middle East politics at Durham University and the author of Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. “As Dubai’s efforts to fully liberalize its economy come undone and its attractiveness to foreign investors declines further, the international spotlight will eventually move away and it may become more attractive than ever to human traffickers, gunrunners, and money launderers,” he says. Dubai’s new smugglers may be Indian mobsters or Chechen strongmen instead of dhow sailors, but the old dual structure of legitimate and illegitimate business remains robust.

The necessary ingredients for a thriving underground economy were present in Dubai from the start. Unlike the oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Dubai — one of seven self-governing entities that constitute the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — was not built with petrodollars, or at least not directly; oil accounts for around 5 percent of the emirate’s economy. Instead, Dubai’s supercharged development strategy was property-driven, fueled by a tsunami of cheap credit and excess liquidity. Semipublic corporations with close links to the ruling Maktoum family borrowed an estimated $80 billion on global capital markets to fund iconic developments such as Burj Dubai and Palm Jumeirah. But as Dubai went in search of investors, it found some unsavory elements as well.

Laundering money through the city’s booming property market was relatively simple. Property paid for in cash could be quickly resold, often before the development broke ground. The vendor would then receive a check redeemable anywhere in the world. However, as Dubai’s property boom crashes — the Dubai Khaleej Times reported drops of up to 50 percent in prices in 2009 — experts like Davidson see signs of a change in strategy by the local authorities, with an increased focus on putting corrupt businessmen on trial, especially foreigners. Still, despite the added attention, a large number of developments sit empty, owned by investors instead of occupiers. And the fact that criminal elements may own large amounts of property in Dubai means that the real estate market will still be tainted with illegality.

Dubai’s unregulated economic markets have also offered a safe home for dubious financiers and shadowy entrepreneurs. Just this month, a local group of Iranian businessmen was named in a U.S. indictment relating to the illegal export of U.S. military aircraft parts to Iran. And Dubai might soon be forced to make some tough decisions about how much to police its resident white-collar criminals. At the recent G-20 meeting in London, world leaders called for a crackdown on tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein — and Dubai. But this puts Dubai in a bind: If the new Dubai International Financial Centre adopts stricter regulations than its neighbors, Bahrain and Qatar, it could lose much-needed business. Dubai must either continue with its laissez-faire attitude toward international financial regulations and risk pariah status, or adopt more stringent monitoring practices for its banking system and risk financial collapse. If the past is any hint, however, Dubai is not likely to accept regulatory measures that trim back growth, no matter how sublegal that growth may be.

Of all the black arts practiced in Dubai, none is more dangerous for the current U.S. administration than the “Afghan Connection.” Since 2003, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has more than doubled, and a U.N. report valued the opium trade at $4 billion in 2007. A good deal of this money is coming to Dubai. John Cassara, a former CIA officer and author of a recent book on terrorist financing, describes how Dubai is used as a clearinghouse for opium profits: Afghan drugs lords swap opium for luxury European vehicles, and drug shipments are paid for not in cash but with commercial goods such as building materials, electronics, and foodstuffs that are bought in Dubai and shipped to Afghanistan. According to Cassara, such transactions are “difficult to find, a proverbial needle in a haystack.” Dubai officials don’t help, either: Cassara accuses the authorities in Dubai of “willful blindness” when dealing with this hidden trade.

Thanks to its financial laxity, plus the lack of extradition agreements and the luxurious lifestyle, international underworld figures have flocked to Dubai. Dislodging them may prove difficult, as many operate under the protection of their respective governments. This is especially true when dealing with states from the former Soviet Union, East Africa, and South Asia. Except for those rare high-profile criminals like Mumbai underworld chief Dawood Ibrahim or alleged arms dealer and “merchant of death” Viktor Bout, who simply became embarrassments, fugitives from justice are only rarely forced out of Dubai. And their presence has brought a new level of violence to the normally very safe emirate. Recently, a former Chechen rebel commander was gunned down in the parking lot of a luxury apartment block — the result of an ongoing power struggle between groups involved in Chechnya’s wars with the Russian Federation.

If Dubai is to mend its ways, the impetus will have to come from outside — and it will have to be coupled with significant pressure. In the past, Dubai has generally only paid lip service to U.S. demands to tighten sanctions on Iran or regulate the hawala transfer system. Cassara says, “The authorities do enough to get the West off their back, but no more. What is particularly lacking is initiative, enforcement, and the political will to go after their own. Until all of those happen, nothing will change.”

Abu Dhabi could help. This most powerful emirate in the UAE recently bought $10 billion of Dubai government bonds and may yet buy another $10 billion. A bailout-by-another-name, the move gives Abu Dhabi significant leverage over its smaller neighbor and could be a backdoor channel for those seeking to effect a change in policy from Dubai’s ruling family. It was telling that in the wake of this bailout, Dubai quickly announced new guidelines regarding personal behavior and dress for expatriates outside the city’s tourist resorts — a possible sop to Abu Dhabi’s religious conservatism.

By embracing the deregulation and openness so fervently preached by Western governments, Dubai is now a nexus for both money and people from across Asia and Africa seeking to connect with the global economy. Because this global economy works underground as well as in the sun, it’s inevitable that Dubai should keep a hand in both. In recent days, reports have emerged in the London Independent that ransoms paid to pirates hijacking ships off the Somali coast may have been partially laundered through Somali businessmen based in Dubai, among other places. Sound familiar? It’s been part of Dubai for as long as the dhow has.

Filed in Foreign Policy | | Comments (0)

Pakistan under pressure to help Mumbai inquiry

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

Following the terrorist attack, the incoming US administration has signalled greater support for India and a shift away from Pakistan, writes Raymond Barrett in Trivandrum, India.

Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, made a whistle-stop tour of the Indian and Pakistani capitals last week against a backdrop of mounting tension between the two countries over Pakistani links to the recent attacks in Mumbai, which left more than 170 people dead.

Speaking at a press conference in New Delhi, Rice called on Pakistan to cooperate fully with India in hunting down those responsible for the slaughter in India’s financial capital. ‘‘Pakistan needs to act with resolve and urgency, and cooperate fully and transparently.

That message has been delivered and will be delivered to Pakistan,” she said.

The Indian government has demanded that Pakistan extradite around 20 suspects it accuses of coordinating multiple attacks on Indian soil over the last decade.

Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari rebuffed allegations of culpability, stating that India had yet to provide hard evidence that Pakistani nationals were responsible, this is despite growing evidence that former officers in the Pakistani security services trained the Mumbai attackers for several months before the military-style operation.

Successive Pakistani governments have trained and financed militant groups. Many commentators in the Indian press derided Zardari’s statement, while also questioning his ability to control the country’s all-powerful military.

Zardari, the husband of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto – who was assassinated by Islamic militants last year – has been in office for only a few months and many experts doubt his ability to tackle extremist elements within his country’s military and intelligence services. One of the key men on the Indian government’s list is Dawood Ibrahim- a noted Mumbai underworld figure labelled a ‘global terrorist’ by the US government – who has lived openly in Karachi for the last decade. Ibrahim is the main suspect behind the bombing of the Mumbai underground system in 1993 that killed more than 200 people.

The level of impunity enjoyed in Pakistan by suspects wanted by the Indian government has been widely criticised in the Indian media. Referring to Ibrahim, the Times of India reported last week that ‘‘the don was so confident that he would not be touched by the Pakistani establishment that he had made no changes in his daily routine’’.

Rice’s visit may well be the last by the Bush administration’s senior State Department official and brings into question the effectiveness of Washington’s foreign policy towards the region over the last eight years.

Since the September 11 attacks in 2001,Washington has tolerated Pakistani-sponsored violence against India in return for ‘help’ chasing senior al-Qaeda leaders in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Regional experts such as Ahmed Rashid – the author of several books on Islamic extremism – insist that Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service continues to support militant groups such as Laskar-e-Toiba, which have been linked to the Mumbai attacks, despite statements from senior Pakistani officials to the contrary.

In a book published this year, Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic Extremism is being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, Rashid describes how Washington was repeatedly misled by Pakistan over the issue of Islamic extremism.

Despite repeated criticism from Pakistani officials, militant groups have continued to operate openly and find support from within the country’s security forces.

The facts now point to a failed US policy of appeasement.

The Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan; al-Qaeda’s two most senior figures – Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri – are still at large, presumably in Pakistan, and attacks by Pakistani-based Islamic militants in India are on the rise.

The incoming administration of president-elect Barack Obama has promised an improved policy towards the region and has already called for closer links with India, ‘‘a fellow democracy’’. At a press conference last week announcing the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, Obama signalled greater support for India and a shift away from Pakistan.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Obama differentiated himself from John McCain by insisting that the US military in Afghanistan should strike al-Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan without prior approval from the authorities in Islamabad.

Asked if India also had the right to attack targets in Pakistan he replied: ‘‘I think that sovereign nations, obviously, have a right to protect themselves’’.

It was under the watch of former president Bill Clinton that the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, funded and armed by two key ‘allies’ of the US government – Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – transforming the region into al-Qaeda’s global headquarters in the process.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

Attack aimed at India’s commercial heart

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

The murderous rampage by Islamic militants in Mumbai threatens India’s important twin revenue streams of foreign investment and tourism, writes Raymond Barrett in Chennai.

A wave of attacks by Islamic militants in Mumbai last week left 195 people dead and more than 300 injured in India’s financial and entertainment capital.

At least a dozen gunmen attacked a number of prominent landmarks with automatic rifles and hand grenades before taking scores of hostages in two of the city’s most prominent five-star hotels. The three-day siege ended yesterday.

The attackers, all young men in their 20s, are believed to have travelled from Pakistan by ship before transferring to small dinghies. After coming ashore, the men spread out across the city, and attacked numerous targets including a hospital, a train station, a restaurant and luxury hotels. They also fired indiscriminately at passers-by from a commandeered police vehicle.

Throughout the military-style operation, the militants repeatedly tried to identify American and British citizens, though ultimately the vast majority of those killed were Indian nationals, including the commander of Mumbai’s anti-terror squad. Though Mumbai has suffered deadlier attacks in the past – a number of bombs in 2006 that targeted the city’s subway system left more than 200 dead – this assault marked a radical shift in the tactics used by Islamic militants in India.

The high-profile targeting of foreign tourists and iconic landmarks, such as the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, has generated an unprecedented level of global media coverage. Given the global economic downturn, last week’s wholesale slaughter has taken on a heightened significance for the broader Indian economy, as it threatens the important twin revenue streams of foreign investment and tourism.

The death toll has also brought intense pressure on the Indian government to crackdown on the ever-present issue of Islamic militancy. Since 2004 India has suffered more than 4,000 deaths related to Islamic extremism. This year alone, there have been numerous bombings across the country – in areas such as New Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Varanasi – which have killed approximately 200 people.

In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh laid the blame firmly at the feet of Islamic militants based in Pakistan. In a televised address to the nation, he criticized ‘‘neighbours’’ (a clear nod towards Pakistan) for providing support and safe havens for those responsible.

‘‘It is evident that the group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country,” he said. In response, the Islamabad government condemned the attacks and denied any involvement.’ “We need to take strict measures to eradicate terrorism and extremism from the region, while continuing with concerted efforts to make it a peaceful place to live,” said Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. However, there was a certain irony to this condemnation, as Gilani was himself the subject of an assassination attempt by Islamic militants earlier this year. Furthermore, a significant number of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service (known as ‘the shadow government’) and the all-powerful Pakistani military are known to support radical Islamist groups operating in both India and Afghanistan.

A previously unknown group called the Deccan Mujahedeen (Deccan is an area of southern India) has claimed responsibility for the attacks, although Indian media reported that one of the attackers captured by the security forces admitted a link to Laskar-e-Toiba (Soldiers of the Pure), a Kashmiri militant group based in Pakistan which has a long history of violence across India.

Though the exact affiliations of those responsible are as yet unknown, Reuters reported that one of attackers (speaking with a Kashmiri accent) telephoned an Indian television station and accused the Indian army of carrying out atrocities against Muslims in Kashmir. ‘‘Muslims in India should not be persecuted. We love this as our country, but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody? Release all the mujahedeens, and Muslims living in India should not be troubled,” he said.

Experts are still divided over the exact motivation behind the attack. Some view the killings as the work of a new generation of al-Qaeda-inspired Indian Islamists who feel threatened by Hindu hardliners. Others say Pakistan-based fighters venting their fury about the ongoing territorial dispute with the Indian government over Kashmir are the likely culprits. In the labyrinthine and opaque maze of Islamic militancy on the Indian sub-continent, clear answers are often difficult to come by. Bu t, if you follow the Islamist string in recent Indian history far enough, the trail regularly leads back across the border to Pakistan.

The ongoing issue of Islamist violence also hints at a deepening sense of sectarianism seeping into the political landscape of the country. Though India is constitutionally a secular nation, its population of more than one billion people is deeply religious, and faith-based violence has been a recurring issue since the founding of the state. An estimated half a million people were killed in the violence that greeted India’s independence from Britain in 1947, as the former raj was partitioned into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India.

To this day, Hindus account for around 80 per cent of India’s billion-plus population, while approximately 150 million are Muslims. Though the secular Congress Party had been the dominant force in Indian politics since independence, it has lost its complete monopoly on political power in the last decade. Hindu political parties, such as the BJP or Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), have increased their support.

Other pro-Hindu groups are also becoming more vociferous in their calls for more pro-Hindu legislation, openly challenging the ruling government and the federal courts. Last month, Hindu fanatics burned churches and murdered Christians in the state of Orissa after missionaries were accused of actively trying to covert Hindus to Christianity. At the same time, groups such as the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India, which have been linked to many recent bomb attacks, have seen an increase in their support outside of their traditional strongholds.

Even as police units were still flushing out the remaining militants from their barricaded strongholds, the political blame had already begun. BJP politicians criticised the ruling Congress Party anti-terrorism policy as weak and inefficient, and for being too soft towards Pakistan, always a populist issue in the aftermath of Islamist violence.

As well as being the nation’s most populous city, with 18million people, Mumbai has also become the fault-line for sectarian tensions in the country between certain Hindu and Islamist groups. Mumbai was the scene of savage inter-communal riots in 1992 and 1993 following the destruction of the Babri Mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya by Hindu extremists, when almost a thousand people were killed.

The largely Hindu police force in Mumbai has been accused of standing by while Hindu mobs murdered large numbers of Muslims. The violence resulted in a large-scale displacement of people within the city into religious enclaves, divisions that remain to this day. Throughout last week’s attacks are unprecedented, India – and Mumbai in particular – has proven to be resilient when faced with such crises.

Mumbai is home to India’s largest stock exchange, which reopened last Friday, after closing its doors for a day, with the Sensex index of leading shares trading slightly up.

Filed in Sunday Business Post | | Comments (0)

Kuwait ramps up deportation of Asian workers

Saturday, August 2, 2008

The Christian Science Monitor
By Raymond Barrett

More than 250 Bangladeshi workers have been deported on specially chartered flights out of Kuwait and hundreds more are expected to be sent home in the next few days.

The deportation follows violent demonstrations and a three-day strike last week by South Asian laborers demanding better pay and work conditions in this oil-rich Gulf state.

What began as an internal dispute involving one company over the non-payment of salaries, flared into a general strike by thousands of Asian cleaning workers calling for a complete overhaul of the industry, in which some of the poorest people in world pay as much as $3,500 to middlemen in Bangladesh to secure jobs in Kuwait. Upon arrival, however, the promised salary often shrinks by more than half, as a host of expenses for visa processing and health insurance are deducted from their salaries.

“In Bangladesh, they say they’ll pay 50 Kuwaiti Dinars ($188), but the company only gives KD 20 a month ($75),” says Nazrul (not his real name), standing outside the dilapidated seven-story apartment complex in the south of Kuwait City where he and several thousand other Bangladeshi workers live.

A Bangladeshi diplomatic source says that contracts are agreed to in Bangladesh but then other papers in Arabic are signed upon arrival in Kuwait.

“They are signing for their ill-fortune,” he says. “They are signing many papers they do not understand.”

The same diplomatic source explained that the sub-contractors who employ these workers in various government ministries receive up to KD 140 ($536) for each employee per month but only KD 20 ($75) is passed on to the workers – and nothing if the workers fall ill.

More than 200,000 Bangladeshis live in this country of 3.2 million, where foreigners account for two-thirds of the population.

In the recent riots, protesters destroyed cars and other property. Several company representatives trying to convince the men to end their strike were severely beaten – one man was thrown several floors from an apartment building and is in critical condition.

Police finally broke up the protests using tear gas and batons, arresting up to a thousand protesters both here and at other locations in the country.

Labor movements for foreign workers are non-existent in Kuwait and in the past, worker representatives have been deported for organizing strikes.

While the plight of poorly paid Asian workers in Kuwait and across the Gulf region is well-documented, it has been exacerbated of late by recent sharp increases in the price of food. Rice – the staple food of most lower-income Asians – has more than doubled this year. Also, the falling value of the US dollar has eroded the amount of money these workers can send to their families, who are often entirely dependent on remittances from sons and daughters working across the Gulf region.

Inside the fetid, crumbling apartment complex, Nazrul says that police had barged into the building and summarily arrested hundreds of men, many of whom were on strike but not protesting at the time, pointing to a door the police officers had kicked in.

On Tuesday, a Kuwait Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs spokesperson announced that it would meet some of the workers demands –such as introducing a minimum monthly wage of KD 40 ($150) and fining companies who break contract agreements.

But similar promises were made following protests in 2005.

Three years later, Nazrul and his fellow workers are still waiting for a change.

Filed in Christian Science Monitor | | Comments (0)