Quetta, Balochistan

[Ray]

I would be indeed surprised if the Pakistan govt would say anything that is detrimental to their country, especially when the world (going by media reports and some comments by the leaders of countries) are commenting on Pakistan and terrorism in the same breath.

But then, since you are in the country, I take it that you are better placed to judge than the political leaders and the reports.

[Agnostic Muslim]

I would be indeed surprised if the Pakistan govt would say anything that is detrimental to their country, especially when the world (going by media reports and some comments by the leaders of countries) are commenting on Pakistan and terrorism in the same breath.

But then, since you are in the country, I take it that you are better placed to judge than the political leaders and the reports.

People, like Chishti, can say what they want.

The real test is whether their claims stand up to scrutiny, and as I pointed out in my first response to his article, Chishti's claims are merely a regurgitation of the claims made in the Indian media, and not any new or independent research or information.

[Ray]

He is from the Chisti order of Sufis, right?

Would it be correct given the angst of the Sufis over repeated attacks on them, they would be more analytical and searching for facts that can expose those who are ruining the tranquillity of Pakistan?

[Pak Nationalist]

He is from the Chisti order of Sufis, right?

I don't think so. Chisti is also a family title.

[Ray]

Just for my update, can a Chisti be a Sunni?

From Wikipedia:

Chishti (Persian: چشتی) is a common family name in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The family name indicates ancestry from Sufi Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti of the Chishti order.

Chishti can also be spelt as "Chishty". in India, where the order began, it is usually spelt as "Chishty".


Chishti of Pakpattan

The Chishti family of Pakpattan traces its ancestry back to Fariduddin Ganjshakar, who was the khalif (in Sufism a nominated successor) of Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, who himself was the khalif of Moinuddin Chishti, the founder of the Chishti Sufi order in South Asia. Farīd was descended from Umar ibn Khattab, the second khalif of Islam, and as such the Pakpattan Chishtis are Farooqi shaikhs. They now form a considerable population in Pakpattan District, occupying several villages. They were a largely pastoral tribe until the 19th Century, but were compelled to settle down, when the British began to the colonize the Neeli Bar.

Prior to the partition of India, there were a good many settlements of the Chishti tribe in Firozpur and Sirsa districts in East Punjab.

Chisti surname

[Ray]

BBC News - Why we should worry about Balochistan
BBC News - Why we should worry about Balochistan


Worsening violence in Balochistan is going largely unnoticed as Pakistan slides ever deeper into crisis. The province has become the epicentre for regional warfare - threatening stability in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, reports guest columnist Ahmed Rashid.

It was a normal Sunday on 16 January in Pakistan's insurgency wracked province of Balochistan - five people were killed in targeted killings by unknown gunmen.

They included a lady health worker who was gunned down near the capital, Quetta; a taxi driver near the south-western town of Qila Saifullah shot dead in his cab; a teenage member of the Baloch Students' Organisation.

Also found was the body of Ghulam Hussain who had been kidnapped and was missing for the past eight months.

On the same day two tankers carrying fuel for Nato troops in Afghanistan were attacked near Quetta by the Taliban with rocket propelled grenades and torched.

The day before, 18 Nato tankers were burnt to cinders by gunmen operating further south.

Mayhem

As Pakistan slithers down the slope of Islamic extremism, economic meltdown and a continuing political crisis, there has been little concern for the long running insurgency in Balochistan that has picked up pace as Baloch separatists take advantage of the national chaos, while ever more ruthless retaliatory actions by the state go unchecked.


The region is heavily militarised Every day dead bodies turn up, many of them innocent victims of the mayhem in the province.

According to human rights groups, the suspected killers either belong to the intelligence services or Baloch militant groups.

Nobody claims responsibility for the spiralling death toll.

The government launched a so-called peace process 15 months ago but it is stalled.

Of the 61 steps envisaged in the package, only 15 have been implemented so far, according to Dawn newspaper.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
Balochistan has also become the epicentre for growing regional rivalries and warfare ”
End Quote The government package was introduced to reduce the alienation and growing poverty of the Baloch people.

But the lack of action by the government and army has led to a stepped up hatred for the Pakistan state by Baloch youth, a terrible climate of fear because of the targeted killings and the collapse of the local economy and jobs as business flees the province.

No organ of the state has fulfilled its promises to the Baloch people over the past two years.

Parts of eastern Balochistan suffered massively from the devastating summer floods, but aid workers say help to the Baloch farmers has been far less than in other parts of the country.

No remedies

If the government has failed, so have the courts and the army.

A year ago the Supreme Court promised to look into the cases of hundreds of Baloch who have gone missing over the years or made to disappear, but no remedies have been offered.

"Missing" usually means they have been kidnapped and then killed or kept in secret locations.


Blasts and ethnic violence have become a way of life in Balochistan province Some of those missing are political figures, others victims of criminal syndicates looking for ransom, while others are just innocent bystanders.

The Baloch accuse the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of carrying out the kidnappings.

The ISI denies the charges and says government officials are being targeted by the Baloch.

The army has made little attempt to speed up political reconciliation.

As part of the government package, the army said it would not build any more cantonments in the province, nor extend its presence.

But it has handed over its powers to the much more loathed Frontier Corps (FC), which is officered by the army.

Baloch leaders say the FC is not accountable to the province's chief minister or governor and a new demand - to place it under civilian control - has come up.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says the situation in the province is close to civil war.

In a recent report it says security has further deteriorated and 45 decomposed bodies have been found since July 2010 while 298 persons have gone missing.

There were 117 incidents of targeted killings last year, while another 119 people died in explosions and 19 in sectarian attacks.

Last October, Amnesty International called on the government to investigate the torture and killings of more than 40 Baloch political activists and leaders in what it termed ''a kill and dump policy", as the dead were usually found with a bullet wound to the head and torture marks on their bodies.


Last year's floods displaced many in Balochistan The military does not allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to monitor human rights abuses or take care of prisoners in the province.

The militants too have been wrecking havoc on non-Baloch who have been settled in the province for decades.

Human Rights Watch has documented the killings of nearly two dozen non-Baloch teachers and professors in the province over the past 12 months.

Hundreds of teachers are fleeing the province bringing the already dire educational system to a standstill.

Balochistan has seen five insurgencies since 1947, but never before have militants targeted non-Baloch residents and civilians in this manner.

On 7 December, Balochistan Chief Minister Nawab Aslam Raisani survived a bomb blast on his motorcade that wounded nine people.

Nobody claimed responsibility but it is suspected that militants carried out the attack.


Balochistan has also become the epicentre for growing regional rivalries and warfare.

Leaders of the Afghan Taliban are based in Quetta, Chaman and Qila Saifullah - towns which border Afghanistan and are inhabited by Pashtun tribes.


Fuel tanks en route to Nato forces in Afghanistan are often set on fire in the province The US and Nato command in Afghanistan say the Taliban use these sanctuaries to re-arm and rest their fighters, who then attack Nato forces in southern Afghanistan.

Gen David Petraeus, the Nato commander in Afghanistan, has threatened to bomb these sanctuaries if Pakistan does not deal with them.

Iran accuses Pakistan of allowing Jundullah, an anti-Iranian government terrorist group, to maintain bases in south-western Balochistan.

On 15 December, a suicide bomber killed 30 people at the Iranian port of Chabahar which borders Balochistan.

Jundullah claimed the bombing was a revenge for the execution of its leaders by Iran, some of whom had been handed over by Pakistan to Iran last year.

Pakistan says it has ousted all members of Jundullah from its soil.

Meanwhile, sectarian killings also have an international dimension.

Sunni extremist groups, some funded by supporters in the Arabian Gulf states, are actively killing Shias in Quetta, who largely belong to the Hazara ethnic group.

The Taliban are also involved in killing Hazaras, because they say they work for the Americans in Afghanistan.

Given the political chaos in the country it is unlikely that Balochistan will receive much attention in the months ahead.

But the collapse of law and order in the province could have serious repercussions on Pakistan's territorial integrity and heighten tensions between the largest province Punjab and the smaller provinces.

[1980s]

Inside Balochistan

The Pakistani province of Balochistan, tight up against the Taliban stronghold of Helmand and sitting on untold mineral wealth, is riven by violent revolt

Declan Walsh
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 March 2011 23.00 BST

Heroin smuggling routes Balochistan borders Helmand province in Afghanistan, the centre of the Taliban insurgency and the world's single largest source of heroin. Baram Cha, a small town tucked into the Chagai Hills just inside the Afghan border, is a notorious hub of heroin processing labs, and has been raided by helicopter-borne teams of British special forces and Afghan counter-narcotics soldiers. From Helmand, the drugs cross Balochistan via two routes – west to Iran and south to the Makran coast on the Arabian Sea.

Gwadar port Completed in 2008, this Chinese-built project transformed a sleepy Baloch fishing village into a major deep-water port. It's strategically located near the Straits of Hormuz – a major oil shipping lane – and China wants access to the sea for its land-locked western provinces. But the US sees it as a potential military base, and the UAE considers it unwelcome competition. Baloch nationalists view Gwadar as an imposition by the central government whose benefits will bypass the province. It has become a hub of violent upheaval in the past two years, with shootings and bombings by nationalists, and reprisal abductions and killings by the security forces. Gwadar was not traditionally under the sway of tribal leaders, suggesting that Balochistan's fifth insurgency has a broader reach than previous ones.

Nato supply lines After the Khyber Pass, Balochistan is Nato's second largest Pakistani supply route to troops in Afghanistan. More than 3,000 trucks pass through Balochistan every month. Between nine and 12 of them are attacked and burned every month, according to army figures. It is not clear whether the attacks are by Baloch militants or pro-Taliban Islamists.

Taliban bases Taliban fighters rest and recuperate in madrasas and mosques dotted along the ethnic Pashtun belt of Balochistan, between Quetta and the border, where at least 30% of the population lives.

Nationalist insurgency One of the world largest natural gas fields is located at Sui, which provides approximately 30% of Pakistan's gas needs. The insurgency started in earnest from this region from 2005, when Bugti tribesmen attacked Pakistani security forces guarding the gas field. In 2006, the army killed the Bugti leader, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, at a cave in the mountains near Kohlu, dramatically fuelling the insurgency. Quetta, the provincial capital, has seen many "disappearances" of Baloch nationalists in recent years. Since July it has also seen a steady stream of bodies dropped on the edge of the city. Electricity, gas supplies and train services to the city are frequently attacked by Baloch rebels. The small town of Khuzdar is home to the Mengal tribe, which has been involved in several of Balochistan's insurgencies over the past six decades. It has seen a string of violent acts in the past year – shootings of journalists, abduction of Baloch activists by security forces, dumping of bodies bearing torture marks. Nationalist rebels, in turn, have lobbed rockets into the local Frontier Corps base and ambushed military convoys.

Inside Balochistan | World news | The Guardian

[1980s]

Pakistan's secret dirty war

In Balochistan, mutilated corpses bearing the signs of torture keep turning up, among them lawyers, students and farm workers. Why is no one investigating and what have they got to do with the bloody battle for Pakistan's largest province?

Declan Walsh
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 March 2011 23.00 BST

The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.

This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.

If you have not heard of this epic killing spree, though, don't worry: neither have most Pakistanis. Newspaper reports from Balochistan are buried quietly on the inside pages, cloaked in euphemisms or, quite often, not published at all.

The forces of law and order also seem to be curiously indifferent to the plight of the dead men. Not a single person has been arrested or prosecuted; in fact, police investigators openly admit they are not even looking for anyone. The stunning lack of interest in Pakistan's greatest murder mystery in decades becomes more understandable, however, when it emerges that the prime suspect is not some shady gang of sadistic serial killers, but the country's powerful military and its unaccountable intelligence men.

This is Pakistan's dirty little war. While foreign attention is focused on the Taliban, a deadly secondary conflict is bubbling in Balochistan, a sprawling, mineral-rich province along the western borders with Afghanistan and Iran. On one side is a scrappy coalition of guerrillas fighting for independence from Pakistan; on the other is a powerful army that seeks to quash their insurgency with maximum prejudice. The revolt, which has been rumbling for more than six years, is spiced by foreign interests and intrigues – US spy bases, Chinese business, vast underground reserves of copper, oil and gold.

And in recent months it has grown dramatically worse. At the airport in Quetta, the provincial capital, a brusque man in a cheap suit marches up to my taxi with a rattle of questions. "Who is this? What's he doing here? Where is he staying?" he asks the driver, jerking a thumb towards me. Scribbling the answers, he waves us on. "Intelligence," says the driver.

The city itself is tense, ringed by jagged, snow-dusted hills and crowded with military checkposts manned by the Frontier Corps (FC), a paramilitary force in charge of security. Schools have recently raised their walls; sand-filled Hesco barricades, like the ones used in Kabul and Baghdad, surround the FC headquarters. In a restaurant the waiter apologises: tandoori meat is off the menu because the nationalists blew up the city's gas pipeline a day earlier. The gas company had plugged the hole that morning, he explains, but then the rebels blew it up again.

The home secretary, Akbar Hussain Durrani, a neatly suited, well-spoken man, sits in a dark and chilly office. Pens, staplers and telephones are neatly laid on the wide desk before him, but his computer is blank. The rebels have blown up a main pylon, he explains, so the power is off. Still, he insists, things are fine. "The government agencies are operating in concert, everyone is acting in the best public interest," he says. "This is just a . . . political problem." As we speak, a smiling young man walks in and starts to take my photo; I later learn he works for the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.

We cut across the city, twisting through the backstreets, my guide glancing nervously out the rear window. The car halts before a tall gate that snaps shut behind us. Inside, a 55-year-old woman named Lal Bibi is waiting, wrapped in a shawl that betrays only her eyes, trembling as she holds forth a picture of her dead son Najibullah. The 20-year-old, who ran a shop selling motorbike parts, went missing last April after being arrested at an FC checkpost, she says. His body turned up three months later, dumped in a public park on the edge of Quetta, badly tortured. "He had just two teeth in his mouth," she says in a voice crackling with pain. She turns to her father, a turbaned old man sitting beside her, and leans into his shoulder. He grimaces.

Bibi says her family was probably targeted for its nationalist ties – Najibullah's older brother, now dead, had joined the "men in the mountains" years earlier, she says. Now a nephew, 28-year-old Maqbool, is missing. She prays for him, regularly calling the hospitals for any sign of him and, occasionally, the city morgues.

Over a week of interviews in Karachi and Quetta, I meet the relatives of seven dead men and nine "disappeared" – men presumed to have been abducted by the security forces. One man produces a mobile phone picture of the body of his 22-year-old cousin, Mumtaz Ali Kurd, his eyes black with swelling and his shirt drenched in blood. A relative of Zaman Khan, one of three lawyers killed in the past nine months, produces court papers. A third trembles as he describes finding his brother's body in an orchard near Quetta.

Patterns emerge. The victims were generally men between 20 and 40 years old – nationalist politicians, students, shopkeepers, labourers. In many cases they were abducted in broad daylight – dragged off buses, marched out of shops, detained at FC checkposts – by a combination of uniformed soldiers and plain-clothes intelligence men. Others just vanished. They re-emerge, dead, with an eerie tempo – approximately 15 bodies every month, although the average was disturbed last Saturday when eight bodies were found in three locations across Balochistan.

Activists have little doubt who is behind the atrocities. Human Rights Watch says "indisputable" evidence points to the hand of the FC, the ISI and its sister agency, Military Intelligence. A local group, Voice for Missing Persons, says the body count has surpassed 110. "This is becoming a state of terror," says its chairman, Naseerullah Baloch.

The army denies the charges, saying its good name is being blemished by impersonators. "Militants are using FC uniforms to kidnap people and malign our good name," says Major General Obaid Ullah Khan Niazi, commander of the 46,000 FC troops stationed in Balochistan. "Our job is to enforce the law, not to break it."

Despairing relatives feel cornered. Abdul Rahim, a farmer wearing a jewelled skullcap, is from Khuzdar, a hotbed of insurgent violence. He produces court papers detailing the abduction of his son Saadullah in 2009. First he went to the courts but then his lawyer was shot dead. Then he went to the media but the local press club president was killed. Now, Rahim says, "nobody will help in case they are targeted too. We are hopeless."

Balochistan has long been an edgy place. Its vast, empty deserts and long borders are a magnet for provocateurs of every stripe. Taliban fighters slip back and forth along the 800-mile Afghan border; Iranian dissidents hide inside the 570-mile frontier with Iran. Drug criminals cross the border from Helmand, the world's largest source of heroin, on their way to Iran or lonely beaches on the Arabian Sea. Wealthy Arab sheikhs fly into remote airstrips on hunting expeditions for the houbara bustard, a bird they believe improves their lovemaking. At Shamsi, a secretive airbase in a remote valley in the centre of the province, CIA operatives launch drones that attack Islamists in the tribal belt.

The US spies appreciate the lack of neighbours – Balochistan covers 44% of Pakistan yet has half the population of Karachi. The province's other big draw is its natural wealth. At Reko Diq, 70 miles from the Afghan border, a Canadian-Chilean mining consortium has struck gold, big-time. The Tethyan company has discovered 4bn tonnes of mineable ore that will produce an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper and 250,000 ounces of gold per year, making it one of the largest such mines in the world. The project is currently stalled by a tangled legal dispute, but offers a tantalising taste of Balochistan's vast mineral riches, which also includes oil, gas, platinum and coal. So far it is largely untapped, though, and what mining exists is scrappy and dangerous. On 21 March, 50 coal workers perished in horrific circumstances when methane gas flooded their mine near Quetta, then catastrophically exploded.

Two conflicts are rocking the province. North of Quetta, in a belt of land adjoining the Afghan border, is the ethnic Pashtun belt. Here, Afghan Taliban insurgents shelter in hardline madrasas and lawless refugee camps, taking rest in between bouts of battle with western soldiers in Afghanistan. It is home to the infamous "Quetta shura", the Taliban war council, and western officials say the ISI is assisting them. Some locals agree. "It's an open secret," an elder from Kuchlak tells me. "The ISI gave a fleet of motorbikes to local elders, who distributed them to the fighters crossing the border. Nobody can stop them."

The other conflict is unfolding south of Quetta, in a vast sweep that stretches from the Quetta suburbs to the Arabian Sea, in the ethnic Baloch and Brahui area, whose people have always been reluctant Pakistanis. The first Baloch revolt erupted in 1948, barely six months after Pakistan was born; this is the fifth. The rebels are splintered into several factions, the largest of which is the Balochistan Liberation Army. They use classic guerrilla tactics – ambushing military convoys, bombing gas pipelines, occasionally lobbing rockets into Quetta city. Casualties are relatively low: 152 FC soldiers died between 2007 and 2010, according to official figures, compared with more than 8,000 soldiers and rebels in the 1970s conflagration.

But this insurgency seems to have spread deeper into Baloch society than ever before. Anti-Pakistani fervour has gripped the province. Baloch schoolchildren refuse to sing the national anthem or fly its flag; women, traditionally secluded, have joined the struggle. Universities have become hotbeds of nationalist sentiment. "This is not just the usual suspects," says Rashed Rahman, editor of the Daily Times, one of few papers that regularly covers the conflict.

At a Quetta safehouse I meet Asad Baloch, a wiry, talkative 22-year-old activist with the Baloch Students' Organisation (Azad). "We provide moral and political support to the fighters," he says. "We are making people aware. When they are aware, they act." It is a risky business: about one-third of all "kill and dump" victims were members of the BSO.

Baloch anger is rooted in poverty. Despite its vast natural wealth, Balochistan is desperately poor – barely 25% of the population is literate (the national average is 47%), around 30% are unemployed and just 7% have access to tap water. And while Balochistan provides one-third of Pakistan's natural gas, only a handful of towns are hooked up to the supply grid.

The insurgents are demanding immediate control of the natural resources and, ultimately, independence. "We are not part of Pakistan," says Baloch.

His phone rings. News comes through that another two bodies have been discovered near the coast. One, Abdul Qayuum, was a BSO activist. Days later, videos posted on YouTube show an angry crowd carrying his bloodied corpse into a mortuary. He had been shot in the head.

The FC commander, Maj Gen Niazi, wearing a sharp, dark suit and with neatly combed hair (he has just come from a conference) says he has little time for the rebel demand. "The Baloch are being manipulated by their leaders," he says, noting that the scions of the main nationalist groups live in exile abroad – Hyrbyair Marri in London; Brahamdagh Bugti in Geneva. "They are enjoying the life in Europe while their people suffer in the mountains," he says with a sigh.

Worse again, he adds, they were supported by India. The Punjabi general offers no proof for his claim, but US and British intelligence broadly agree, according to the recent WikiLeaks cables. India sees Balochistan as payback for Pakistani meddling in Kashmir – which explains why Pakistani generals despise the nationalists so much. "Paid killers," says Niazi. He vehemently denies involvement in human rights violations. "To us, each and every citizen of Balochistan is equally dear," he says.

Civilian officials in the province, however, have another story. Last November, the provincial chief minister, Aslam Raisani, told the BBC that the security forces were "definitely" guilty of some killings; earlier this month, the province's top lawyer, Salahuddin Mengal, told the supreme court the FC was "lifting people at will". He resigned a week later.

However, gross human rights abuses are not limited to the army. As the conflict drags on, the insurgents have become increasingly brutal and ruthless. In the past two years, militants have kidnapped aid workers, killed at least four journalists and, most disturbingly, started to target "settlers" – unarmed civilians, mostly from neighbouring Punjab, many of whom have lived in Balochistan for decades. Some 113 settlers were killed in cold blood last year, according to government figures – civil servants, shopkeepers, miners. On 21 March, militants riding motorbikes sprayed gunfire into a camp of construction workers near Gwadar, killing 11; the Baloch Liberation Front claimed responsibility. Most grotesque, perhaps, are the attacks on education: 22 school teachers, university lecturers and education officials have been assassinated since January 2008, causing another 200 to flee their jobs.

As attitudes harden, the middle ground is being swept away in tide of bloodshed. "Our politicians have been silenced," says Habib Tahir, a human rights lawyer in Quetta. "They are afraid of the young." I ask a student in Quetta to defend the killing of teachers. "They are not teachers, they work for the intelligence agencies," one student tells me. "They are like thieves coming into our homes. They must go."

The Islamabad government seems helpless to halt Balochistan's slide into chaos. Two years ago, President Asif Ali Zardari announced a sweeping package of measures intended to assuage Baloch grievances, including thousands of jobs, a ban on new military garrisons and payment of $1.4bn (£800m) in overdue natural gas royalties. But violence has hijacked politics, the plan is largely untouched, and anaemic press coverage means there is little outside pressure for action.

Pakistan's foreign allies, obsessed with hunting Islamists, have ignored the problem. "We are the most secular people in the region, and still we are being ignored," says Noordin Mengal, who represents Balochistan on the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

In this information vacuum, the powerful do as they please. Lawyer Kachkol Ali witnessed security forces drag three men from his office in April 2009. Their bodies turned up five days later, dead and decomposed. After telling his story to the press, Ali was harassed by military intelligence, who warned him his life was in danger. He fled the country. "In Pakistan, there is only rule of the jungle," he says by phone from Lørenskog, a small Norwegian town where he won asylum last summer. "Our security agencies pick people up and treat them like war criminals," he says. "They don't even respect the dead."

Balochistan's dirty little war pales beside Pakistan's larger problems – the Taliban, al-Qaida, political upheaval. But it highlights a very fundamental danger – the ability of Pakistanis to live together in a country that, under its Islamic cloak, is a patchwork of ethnicities and cultures. "Balochistan is a warning of the real battle for Pakistan, which is about power and resources," says Haris Gazdar, a Karachi-based researcher. "And if we don't get it right, we're headed for a major conflict."

Before leaving Quetta I meet Faiza Mir, a 36-year-old lecturer in international relations at Quetta's Balochistan University. Militants have murdered four of her colleagues in the past three years, all because they were "Punjabi". Driving on to the campus, she points out the spots where they were killed, knowing she could be next.

"I can't leave," says Mir, a sparky woman with an irrepressible smile. "This is my home too." And so she engages in debate with students, sympathising with their concerns. "I try to make them understand that talk is better than war," she says.

But some compromises are impossible. Earlier on, students had asked Mir to remove a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, from her office wall. Mir politely refused, and Jinnah – an austere lawyer in a Savile Row suit - still stares down from her wall.

But how long will he stay there? "That's difficult to say," she answers.

Pakistan's secret dirty war | World news | The Guardian

[S2]

1980s Reply

Thanks for the contributions. They appear interesting and I'll read them this evening when I return from work.

[1980s]

Thanks for the contributions. They appear interesting and I'll read them this evening when I return from work.

Its a very informative article. It confirms once again the Afghan Taliban sanctuaries in and around Quetta and to the north of it, and the material support they receive there. It also sheds more light into how widespread the hatred and alienation among Baluch people towards Pakistan is. Looks like another Darfur is on the way...

[1980s]

Losses in Pakistani Haven Strain Afghan Taliban

By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: March 31, 2011

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan Taliban are showing signs of increasing strain after a number of killings, arrests and internal disputes that have reached them even in their haven in Pakistan, Afghan security officials and Afghans with contacts in the Taliban say.

The killings, coming just as the insurgents are mobilizing for the new fighting season in Afghanistan, have unnerved many in the Taliban and have spread a climate of paranoia and distrust within the insurgent movement, the Afghans said.

Three powerful Taliban commanders were killed in February in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, well known to be the command center of the Taliban leadership, according to an Afghan businessman and a mujahedeen commander from the region with links to the Taliban. A fourth commander, a former Taliban minister, was shot four times by unidentified assailants in the border town of Chaman in March, and survived.

There have also been several arrests in Pakistan of senior Taliban commanders, including those from Zabul and Kabul Provinces, and the shadow governor of Herat, Afghan officials said. Mullah Agha Muhammad, a brother of Mullah Baradar, the former second in command of the Taliban who was arrested by Pakistani security forces over a year ago to stop him from negotiating with the Afghan government, was also held briefly to send the same warning, said the chief of the Afghan border police in Kandahar, Col. Abdul Razziq.

While the arrests have been conducted by Pakistan security forces, it is not clear who is behind the killings. Members of the Taliban attribute them to American spies, running Pakistani and Afghan agents, in an extension of the American campaigns that have used night raids to track down and kill scores of midlevel Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and drone strikes to kill militants with links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Others, including Pakistani and Afghan Parliament members from the region, say that the Pakistani intelligence agencies have long used threats, arrests and killings to control the Taliban and that they could be doing so again to maintain their influence over the insurgents.

Afghan officials in Kabul denied any involvement in attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan, as did American and NATO military officials. “We’ve heard of infighting that reportedly has led to internal violence at several points in recent months,” one senior American military official said of the Taliban, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of discussing events in Pakistan. Military forces were not involved, he added.

Whatever the case, Taliban commanders and fighters, who used to be a common sight in parts of Quetta, have now gone underground and are not moving around openly as before. Two members of the Taliban, including a senior official, declined to talk about the issue of killings on the telephone, saying it was too dangerous. Many will not answer their phones at all.

The Taliban have been under stress since American forces doubled their presence in southern Afghanistan last year and greatly increased the number of special forces raids aimed at hunting down Taliban commanders. Yet they still control a number of remote districts, and in those areas the insurgents can still muster forces to storm government positions, as demonstrated by their capture of a district in Afghanistan’s eastern Nuristan Province this week.

While there is still some debate over the insurgents’ overall strength, Pakistanis with deep knowledge of the Afghan Taliban say that they have suffered heavy losses in the last year and that they are struggling in some areas to continue the fight.

“The Afghan Taliban have, I think, run into problems,” said Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani interior minister who served as ambassador in Afghanistan after 2001 and as a peace negotiator with the Taliban.

“So many of them have been killed in the last one to one and a half years as a consequence of targeted assassinations,” he said in an interview. “That has depleted the strength, capacity and ability of the Taliban.” Commanders were without communications and resources and were struggling to find recruits to replace those killed, he said.

One Taliban commander from Kunar Province said losses had been so high that he was considering going over to the side of the Afghan government in order to get assistance for his beleaguered community. “This does not mean the Taliban will stop fighting, but maybe it will be at a reduced level,” Mr. Mohmand said.

Insurgents have already switched tactics to suicide attacks on soft targets — such as recent attacks on a bank, an army recruitment center and a construction company that all caused high casualties — because they are not capable of confronting American and NATO forces in conventional battles, said Samina Ahmed, director of the International Crisis Group in Pakistan.

The Taliban have always been able to survive temporary setbacks on the battlefield by pulling back to Pakistan, where many have homes and businesses. Fighters have also found sanctuary and medical care in the anonymity of the refugee camps where over a million Afghans have lived for a generation through Afghanistan’s various wars, and in the outlying suburbs of Pakistani cities like Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi.

Yet Pakistan has become a much more uncertain environment for the Taliban as the new civilian government is openly hostile to them, the military seeks to control them and influence any future settlement they make with Kabul, and the United States increases its attacks in Pakistan, two former ambassadors, Lakhdar Brahimi and Thomas Pickering, who lead an International Task Force on Afghanistan, reported last week.

In the anti-American spy mania that seized Pakistan after an American working for the C.I.A., Raymond A. Davis, shot and killed two men in the city of Lahore on Jan. 27, Pakistani officials and politicians have accused the C.I.A. of running numerous covert programs around the country.

A Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that C.I.A. operatives were using their own local agents to target Qaeda-linked militants with drones in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and speculated that they could be trying to expand that campaign to reach other Pakistani militants and Afghan Taliban inside Pakistan.

The C.I.A. has been formulating such a plan for months, according to two former Afghan security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the covert nature of their work. The Americans have been using tribesmen, including members of the Taliban they have turned, to attack other Taliban groups in the border areas, one official said.

But others, including officials on both sides of the border, said it could be the work of Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

“Their method is brutality,” Abdul Rahim Mandokhail, a Pakistani senator from the southwestern border region near Quetta, said of the ISI. “If there is only a little opposition, their method is to kill the man,” he said.

A Pakistani government official working in the border region said both American and Pakistani intelligence agencies favored different insurgent groups and were striking at each other’s.

The three commanders killed in Quetta last month all led units fighting in Marja, in Helmand, the southern Afghan province where American Marines have struggled to establish security after more than a year of counterinsurgency operations.

One of the commanders was Hajji Khalil, in his late 30s, who commanded several groups of fighters in Marja, according to Baz Gul Khan, a pro-government militia leader in Marja. “He was famous in all of Marja,” Mr. Khan said. “He had about 300 men or more.”

Hajji Khalil was killed in his own house, by two men who appeared to be Taliban who stayed the night with him in his guest room. The two men left unseen by the street entrance, and the next morning Hajji Khalil’s family found him slain in the room, an Afghan businessman who is close to the Taliban said.

Another commander, known as Mansour, was gunned down while riding his motorbike along Saryab Road west of the city. He led up to five units of men in Marja and operated out of a rented house in Quetta, a clear sign that he enjoyed the patronage of the ISI, the businessman said.

He did not know the name of the third Taliban commander who was killed but said that he was also from Marja and that he was responsible for communication between the senior Taliban and the fighters.

The militia leader, Mr. Khan, said the killings were a sign that the Taliban was in decline. “We have a saying, that when a goat becomes sick, he attracts every disease,” he said. “I think the Taliban have lost momentum, they are losing the fight, and so the Pakistanis do not need them and so they will kill them,” he said.

American, NATO and Afghan officials said Taliban leaders are struggling to adapt to the pressures on the movement after heavy losses on the battlefield last year and are finding commanders reluctant to return to Afghanistan to fight.

“Almost 900 were killed last year,” a senior Afghan security official said. “And now the commanders are telling their leaders, ‘You have a nice life, your kids are in school, you are going on trips to Dubai, and you are telling us to go and fight?’ ”

Carlotta Gall reported from Kabul, and from Islamabad, Pakistan. Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kabul, and from southern Afghanistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/wo...pagewanted=all

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1980s Reply

I saw this article. It received play at SWJ two days running but I've long-concluded these events were entirely predictable.

Field commanders resentful of fat-cat mullahs skimming the cream from the resistance pie for their safely-escounced families and themselves in Quettaville? No surprise there. The taliban suffer from PRD (professional revolutionary disease). Given enough time, such becomes a growth industry for the true believers so long as there remain willing dupes to do the dying for them.

It's also why the notion of negotiating with these loons is D.O.A. They've no incentive to do so and there's nobody able to forge a consensus on their side anyway. Hell, we can't forge a consensus between Karzai and ourselves so that shouldn't be a surprise.

Last, gotta love the speculation of the ISI having a hand in these killings. The Afghan taliban exist at the sole discretion of the Pakistani military. Who else except Baloch rebels would even have a remote interest so "...the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away..."

[1980s]

Last, gotta love the speculation of the ISI having a hand in these killings. The Afghan taliban exist at the sole discretion of the Pakistani military. Who else except Baloch rebels would even have a remote interest so "...the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away..."

Indeed. The whole Mullah Baradar issue should have reconfirmed that for everyone. I wonder how much, if any, Afghan Taliban retaliation takes place through the TTP. I suspect anyway that since the long anticipated confrontation between Baluch rebels and Afghan Taliban in and around Quetta has yet to take place that the Baluh are aware enough that the Taliban are themselves under various forms of control, and even assault when 'needed', by the Pakistani military establishment. Certainly, the Taliban and Pakistani military establishment are not 'partners', not equal partners... As such, i think it is unlikely now that the Baluch and Afghan Taliban will clash at all. But who knows..

[1980s]

TTP owns attack on DIG residence in Quetta
Bureau report
Sunday, April 10, 2011

PESHAWAR: The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) led by Hakimullah Mahsud on Saturday claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on the residence of senior police official in Quetta on Thursday.

TTP spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan called The News from an undisclosed location and said their organisation had staged the car suicide attack on the residence of deputy inspector general of Balochistan police in Quetta.

He said the DIG was target of the suicide bomber but he and his family survived in the attack.

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman said their men are present everywhere in the country and can carry out attacks wherever required. The spokesman when asked why they targetted a police official in a far away place like Quetta, he argued it was revenge of drone attacks in the tribal areas.

Asked why the TTP approached media to claim responsibility for the attack almost two days after the incident, Ihsanullah said they were facing problems in movement and communications due to drone attacks and then bombing by Pakistani planes on their hideouts in the tribal areas.

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"Asked why the TTP approached media to claim responsibility for the attack almost two days after the incident, Ihsanullah said they were facing problems in movement and communications due to drone attacks and then bombing by Pakistani planes on their hideouts in the tribal areas."

Makes you wonder how those "...problems..." impede operational communications and coordination?