Business Recirder editorial May 31, 2916

Security for Chinese in Pakistan A Chinese engineer, his driver and private guard were injured in a bomb blast on the National Highway in Karachi on May 30. According to reports, the engineer, Mr Finche, works at a power plant at Bin Qasim Port and lives in Guldhan-i-Hadeed. On the day of the incident, he was travelling to work when the bomb, planted in a flowerpot on the green verge, went off as his vehicle passed. Fortunately, none of the passengers in the vehicle was seriously hurt and all of them were discharged after first aid. Strangely, an officer of the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) revealed that a pamphlet was discovered near the site of the blast, claiming responsibility by a little known Sindhi nationalist group, the Sindhudesh Revolutionary Army. In previous such attacks on Chinese nationals working on various projects in Sindh, the CTD official said responsibility was claimed by the Shafi Burfat-led Sindh Liberation Army. It seems strange that such sensitive information should immediately be released to the media. Surely the wiser course would have been not to thereby alert the elements involved. Nevertheless, the attack is the latest in a long series of such incidents in Sindh and Balochistan involving Chinese nationals working in Pakistan. These are, as the pamphlet mentioned above states, the consequence of opposition from Sindhi and Baloch nationalist groups to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which they view as detrimental to the interests of their respective provinces and an attempt to control their resources. The recurrence of such attacks and the proliferation of groups of a nationalist hue claiming responsibility is a worrying development, especially considering the stakes for both China and Pakistan in the CPEC, viewed as a strategic, political and economic game-changer for the region and the wider world. When the CPEC was initially announced, and in the backdrop of the dissidence on display from nationalist groups, militant and mainstream, to the project and especially Gwadar port, the government and military announced a special security force to be raised to safeguard the CPEC project/s and especially the Chinese nationals expected to work on them. While the proposed new security force was focused on the CPEC, what appears to have been overlooked or not paid sufficient attention to are similar risks faced by Chinese nationals working elsewhere in the country. This is doubly surprising when it is recalled that attacks on Chinese nationals working in Pakistan predate in some instances, the announcement of the CPEC. Given the size and importance of the CPEC, this is perhaps an all too human error to fall into. But having said that, and in the light of the latest incident in Karachi, some fresh thinking may be required. The Chinese engineer attacked in the latest incident is reported to be amongst three or four of his fellow nationals and colleagues who have chosen to live in rented accommodation in Gulshan-i-Hadeed next to Steel Town, where most of their colleagues are housed in securer colonies. Police claim the engineer in question and his colleagues in Gulzhan-i-Hadeed were warned and requested to move to Steel Town, but they refused. Mr Finche also reportedly refused police security. After the incident, it has been announced that police security will be provided to all Chinese nationals, especially when moving around. This may seem like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but it is better that such steps are being taken late rather than never. The strategic and economic gains of the CPEC and other projects on which Chinese nationals are working in Pakistan can only be realised if the Chinese engineers and workers are assured of security of life and limb. In the light of the reports of Chinese nationals' reluctance to accept the security agencies' advice regarding their residence and movements, it is imperative that the authorities talk to the managements of the Chinese companies as well as the Chinese government to persuade their nationals working in Pakistan to cooperate with our security agencies in their own interest. That may save us some blushes if, God forbid, some of our Chinese friends in Pakistan were not to get off as lightly as Mr Finche.

A belated reckoning Rashed Rahman An Argentinian federal court has sentenced the country's last military dictator, 88-year-old General Reynaldo Bignone, to 20 years imprisonment for kidnapping and 'disappearing' more than 100 people during the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Of this period, Bignone was himself holding absolute power in 1982-1983. The General is already serving life sentences for multiple human rights violations during that dark period. In the landmark trial, 14 other former military officers were sentenced to between eight and 25 years imprisonment for criminal association, kidnapping and torture. Many of them are also serving prison sentences already. They include one Uruguayan former Colonel, Manuel Cordero Piacentini, who tortured prisoners inside Automotores Orletti, the Buenos Aires repair shop where many captured leftists were 'interrogated' under orders from their home countries. One other defendant was convicted on charges separate from the larger case, involving a different set of victims. Two other accused were absolved of similar charges against them. The unprecedented court verdict after a trial lasting three years in which the four-member judges' bench received testimony from about 370 witnesses, ruled that Operation Condor was a criminal conspiracy to kidnap and forcibly disappear people across international borders. The covert operation was launched in the 1970s by six South American military dictatorships that used their secret police and intelligence networks in a coordinated effort to track down and eliminate their opponents abroad. Most of those disappeared, tortured and killed were leftists who had sought refuge from brutal repression at home in neighbouring countries and further abroad. The sentences are seen as a milestone because they mark the first time a court has proved that Operation Condor was an international criminal conspiracy by the US-backed regimes in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The investigation into the affair was launched in the 1990s when an amnesty law still protected many of the accused. Argentina's Supreme Court overturned the amnesty in 2005 at the urging of then President Nestor Kirchner. It has taken 40 years after Operation Condor was formally founded and 16 years since the judicial investigation began to deliver justice to some of the victims of Latin America's past military dictatorships. During this protracted process, several defendants either died or were removed from the judicial process. Their victims reflected conflicted and bitter feelings about the verdict. Since the bodies of many victims have never been found, Argentine prosecutors argued that the crime of covering up their deaths continues to date and therefore statutory time limits do not apply. A key piece of evidence in the case was a declassified FBI agent's cable sent in 1976 that described in detail the conspiracy to share intelligence and eliminate leftists across South America. Operation Condor was launched in 1975 by notoriously brutal military dictator General Auguste Pinochet of Chile, who had come to power through a bloody US-backed coup in 1973, during which elected Marxist President Salvador Allende went down fighting. Pinochet enlisted the other military dictators in the six countries named above for the conspiracy. Peru and Ecuador joined later. The outreach of Operation Condor did not even spare Chilean former ambassador Orlando Letelier and his US aide Ronnie Moffitt who were assassinated in Washington D.C. in September 1976 by Chilean agents involved in Operation Condor. Condor agents tracked other political exiles across Europe to eliminate them. South American military governments in the 1970s and 1980s kidnapped, tortured and murdered thousands of rebel guerrillas and dissidents. The victims spanned the spectrum from the revolutionary left to democratic dissidents. Of these thousands, at least 377 of those who fell victim to Operation Condor's tender mercies have been accounted for. This is obviously the small tip of a very large iceberg. But at least an important legal precedent has now been set by the verdict that lays down that there is no bar on bringing to justice those responsible for such heinous crimes, no matter how long it takes. Argentina has taken the lead in carrying out scores of trials over the the last decade in which at least 666 accused have been convicted of such crimes during Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s and 1980s. In other South American countries, however, efforts to bring such violators of human rights to justice have sputtered. Francesca Lessa, a researcher at Oxford University's Latin American Centre who has closely watched the trial, argues that prosecutors in the Operation Condor case "broke new ground in accountability" by successfully pursuing crimes beyond Argentina's borders. The case serves as a warning to all the perpetrators of these crimes that they cannot rest sanguine. It now appears that with this legal precedent, sooner or later the justice system will catch up with them. While Latin Americans generally, and the victims and their families have reason for satisfaction and even rejoicing, spare a thought for the thousands of political dissidents who have disappeared in Pakistan over the last one and a half decades. The greater number of these belong to Balochistan, where a nationalist insurgency is ongoing. But such disappearances have also been reported in Sindh, including Karachi. Enforced disappearances and tortured and bullet-riddled bodies dumped all over these areas first emerged during General Pervez Musharraf's nine-year military dictatorship. To date, the efforts of human rights defendants and the courts, including the august Supreme Court, have failed to account for those still missing or bring the perpetrators of the crime of torturing, killing and dumping bodies to justice. Compared to the South American example therefore, we are still stuck in the 1970s as far as accountability for such serious crimes is concerned. Apart from being horrendous violations of human, legal and political rights in a democratic system, such practices serve only to deepen hatred against the state's authority, legitimacy and writ. They therefore end up exacerbating the very problem they set out to resolve. As for our military dictators of the past, none has been held accountable or brought to justice for the overthrow of the constitutional order (constituting treason under Article 6 of the constitution) or for their actions while in power. Our first military dictator, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, was removed by another military coup in the face of a countrywide agitation against his 10-year rule and allowed to retire and pass away peacefully in his time. His successor, General Yahya Khan, having launched the ill-fated genocidal crackdown in East Pakistan to deny Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and his Awami League the electoral mandate they had received in the 1970 elections, ended up so isolating Pakistan internationally that when India intervened and our defeat followed, not a sound of sympathetic protest was heard from any corner of the world. He too was removed by an 'internal' military coup and put out to pasture. General Ziaul Haq met his maker in the 1988 aircraft crash, and therefore escaped too the process of accountability. Last but not least, General Musharraf, having been ousted from power in the obtaining balance of political and other forces after Benazir Bhutto's assassination in 2007 and the 2008 elections that followed, was allowed to depart for more salubrious foreign climes. However, hubris persuaded the General to abandon his comfortable and lucrative lecture tour life and return to Pakistan under the illusion that he had enormous support. What followed was even more farcical. The PML-N government's quixotic attempt to bring him to justice ended up finally with the dictator departing again on medical grounds, with the fate of his treason trial as that of the assassinations of Nawab Akbar Bugti and Benazir Bhutto being consigned to oblivion. Pakistan clearly has a long way to go before it can even begin to emulate the South American example. rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

Business Recorder editorial May 31, 2016

Obama's Hiroshima tryst Seventy one years ago, the world was rudely awakened to a holocaust ushered in by a horrific mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. A few days later, the mass carnage was repeated in Nagasaki. The death toll in Hiroshima alone was 130,000 people, thousands incinerated instantly, the rest dying painful deaths from burns and radiation over weeks, months and years. Along with Nagasaki, the total death toll was 200,000 people. Never before in history had this number of civilian non-combatants been obliterated in the blink of an eye, nor so many left to die slowly and painfully later. Since then, the US had never seen fit to apologise for this massacre, seeking to justify it by arguments about Japan's unwillingness to surrender. Others argue all the signs of an imminent surrender were visible, therefore the atomic bombs were dropped as an assertion of power in the post-Second World War world with an eye to the resurgent Soviet Union. Whatever the truth, successive US presidents have shied away from an admission of guilt reflected in an apology. President Barack Obama's visit, the first by a US president, diplomatically avoided any apology while explicating the human tragedy represented by the bombings and arguing for recognition of the potential demonstrated at Hiroshima of mankind having acquired the terrible means for its destruction. While the sentiment is laudable and in line with Obama's initial election pledge to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons, things have unfortunately turned out exactly the opposite since. In 2009 in a speech in Prague, Obama had reiterated his call for the elimination of nuclear weapons, a speech for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but his administration has since all but abandoned the idea. The US currently spends $ four million an hour on maintaining its nuclear arsenal (which, along with Russia's, constitutes 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world) and the Obama administration proposes to spend $ one trillion over the next 30 years to expand and modernise it. This will no doubt give rise to a fresh nuclear race and encourage smaller powers to attain or embellish their nuclear capability. While Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may have been justified in calling the carefully calibrated visit "courageous", China and North Korea differed. The former acknowledged the remembrance of Hiroshima as justified, but said the Nanjing massacre of 300,000 people over a six-week killing spree by invading Japanese troops in 1937 was far worse. North Korea condemned the visit as the "height of hypocrisy and impudence" and a naked attempt to castigate it for its nuclear weapons development, while both countries saw the visit's agenda as casting Japan as a victim rather than an aggressor. Time and distance may resolve these conflicting views but for us the terrible implications of nuclear weapons have yet to sink in. Pakistan casts its nuclear weapons development as a defensive measure against India's initiation of a nuclear arms race in the subcontinent, and while there is truth in that argument, it does not help matters. Both countries are contemplating the development of a second strike capability and tactical nuclear weapons, developments that can only lower the threshold of the unthinkable use of these weapons of mass murder. Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) should remind us even this far from those terrible events in 1945 that nuclear weapons are unusable, and as deterrents, run the concomitant risk of states testing the below nuclear conflict threshold. If proof is needed, one only has to cast an eye on post-1998 (the year of India and then Pakistan carrying out nuclear tests) conflicts such as Kargil (1999), the attack on the Indian parliament and subsequent sabre rattling (2001-02) and the Mumbai (2008) and Pathankot (2016) attacks. Mercifully, both countries were spared escalation of these events to the nuclear threshold, but playing this Russian roulette cannot continue indefinitely at the risk of mutual destruction. Along with the world, Pakistan and India too have to work for peaceful resolution of differences and an end to the terror of the mushroom cloud.

Business Recorder editorial May 28, 2016

Obama's Hiroshima tryst Seventy one years ago, the world was rudely awakened to a holocaust ushered in by a horrific mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. A few days later, the mass carnage was repeated in Nagasaki. The death toll in Hiroshima alone was 130,000 people, thousands incinerated instantly, the rest dying painful deaths from burns and radiation over weeks, months and years. Along with Nagasaki, the total death toll was 200,000 people. Never before in history had this number of civilian non-combatants been obliterated in the blink of an eye, nor so many left to die slowly and painfully later. Since then, the US had never seen fit to apologise for this massacre, seeking to justify it by arguments about Japan's unwillingness to surrender. Others argue all the signs of an imminent surrender were visible, therefore the atomic bombs were dropped as an assertion of power in the post-Second World War world with an eye to the resurgent Soviet Union. Whatever the truth, successive US presidents have shied away from an admission of guilt reflected in an apology. President Barack Obama's visit, the first by a US president, diplomatically avoided any apology while explicating the human tragedy represented by the bombings and arguing for recognition of the potential demonstrated at Hiroshima of mankind having acquired the terrible means for its destruction. While the sentiment is laudable and in line with Obama's initial election pledge to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons, things have unfortunately turned out exactly the opposite since. In 2009 in a speech in Prague, Obama had reiterated his call for the elimination of nuclear weapons, a speech for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but his administration has since all but abandoned the idea. The US currently spends $ four million an hour on maintaining its nuclear arsenal (which, along with Russia's, constitutes 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world) and the Obama administration proposes to spend $ one trillion over the next 30 years to expand and modernise it. This will no doubt give rise to a fresh nuclear race and encourage smaller powers to attain or embellish their nuclear capability. While Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may have been justified in calling the carefully calibrated visit "courageous", China and North Korea differed. The former acknowledged the remembrance of Hiroshima as justified, but said the Nanjing massacre of 300,000 people over a six-week killing spree by invading Japanese troops in 1937 was far worse. North Korea condemned the visit as the "height of hypocrisy and impudence" and a naked attempt to castigate it for its nuclear weapons development, while both countries saw the visit's agenda as casting Japan as a victim rather than an aggressor. Time and distance may resolve these conflicting views but for us the terrible implications of nuclear weapons have yet to sink in. Pakistan casts its nuclear weapons development as a defensive measure against India's initiation of a nuclear arms race in the subcontinent, and while there is truth in that argument, it does not help matters. Both countries are contemplating the development of a second strike capability and tactical nuclear weapons, developments that can only lower the threshold of the unthinkable use of these weapons of mass murder. Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) should remind us even this far from those terrible events in 1945 that nuclear weapons are unusable, and as deterrents, run the concomitant risk of states testing the below nuclear conflict threshold. If proof is needed, one only has to cast an eye on post-1998 (the year of India and then Pakistan carrying out nuclear tests) conflicts such as Kargil (1999), the attack on the Indian parliament and subsequent sabre rattling (2001-02) and the Mumbai (2008) and Pathankot (2016) attacks. Mercifully, both countries were spared escalation of these events to the nuclear threshold, but playing this Russian roulette cannot continue indefinitely at the risk of mutual destruction. Along with the world, Pakistan and India too have to work for peaceful resolution of differences and an end to the terror of the mushroom cloud.

Business Recorder editorial May 25, 2016

Chaudhry Nisar's presser Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar held another of his by now 'famous' press conferences on May 24 in the aftermath of the drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour. While the attending journalists and viewing public watching on television could be forgiven for thinking that Chaudhry Nisar would throw some light on the issue, the redoubtable minister left everyone scratching his head in perplexity, given the contradictions, obfuscations and confusions on show. Chaudhry Nisar's lengthy statement could be boiled down to three or four propositions. One, he refrained from confirming that the person killed in the drone strike was indeed Mullah Mansour, pending DNA tests. This in spite of the fact that the Afghan Taliban had not only accepted the death of their leader, but have now moved ahead on May 25 to elect, not unexpectedly, Mulla Haibatullah Akhundzada as his replacement. Two, Chaudhry Nisar tried to argue that Mullah Mansour was not opposed to peace talks, citing the first round of the Quadrilateral Group's meeting with the Afghan Taliban in June last year. The second round was stymied by the announcement of the death of Mulla Omar two years previous. Since then, Mullah Mansour seemed more interested in battlefield advances than the talks. Three, the minister condemned the drone strike as a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty. It would do to remind ourselves that Musharraf had quietly allowed drone strikes in the tribal areas, even providing a base for the purpose in Balochistan. Subsequently, the succeeding PPP government seemed to have arrived at an 'arrangement' whereby Pakistan would condemn drone strikes publicly, even if collusion existed. In the case of Mullah Mansour too, according to a New York Times report, the US Joint Command that had been given the go ahead by President Obama weeks ago, received, apart from other sources, intelligence regarding the movements of Mullah Mansour from Pakistani sources. This revelation, if true, would render the mildly apoplectic protests by Pakistan a joke. Fourth, and not insignificantly (this may even have been the main purpose of the press conference), Chaudhry Nisar shifted the blame for the issuance of Mullah Mansour's Pakistani CNIC and passport in the name of Wali Mohammad on the Musharraf and PPP governments, claiming the CNIC was cancelled last year by his government but NADRA, for reasons unknown, failed to have the passport cancelled too. Chaudhry Nisar announced action to be taken against all officers who had verified/attested Mullah Mansour's false documents. He boasted that a purge of false CNICs etc issued over the years to Afghan refugees and the corrupt officers who facilitated them was being carried out. Chaudhry Nisar's press conference left more questions unanswered. There is of course no further need for the DNA tests, except as final proof. If, as the minister asserted, Mullah Mansour was seeking peace, why has the ground situation in the war in Afghanistan worsened since he took over? Clearly, the failure of Pakistan to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table with Mansour in charge finally convinced the US that he was not a partner for peace. This has been confirmed by a US State Department spokesman. Whether, however, the same spokesman's logic that killing Mansour sends a message that safe havens (including in Pakistan) no longer exist, and the drone strike points the way to the peace road will play out in that manner in practice is a moot point. Last but not least, to equate the issuance of false documents to a high profile Afghan Taliban leader like Mullah Mansour with the rampant mismanagement and corruption in government departments issuing such documents is to insult the intelligence of the public. The killing of Mullah Mansour in Pakistan has caught the government with its pants down. Fulminating and railing at the US about the implications for our mutual relations is just so much sound and fury, signifying an impotent nothing.

Business Recorder Editorial May 24, 2016

Chabahar port The first visit by an Indian prime minister to Iran for 15 years has yielded rich dividends in terms of a trilateral series of agreements amongst India, Iran and Afghanistan regarding the development of Chabahar port and a railway line to connect it to Zahedan. India will provide $ 500 million for the purpose and hundreds of millions of dollars more for cooperation in trade, energy, and industries such as aluminium, steel, petrochemicals, etc. Iran's oil and gas industries will be at the heart of this bilateral cooperation. This, in Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's view, will see Iranian oil and gas exchanged for India's mineral wealth and industrial expertise. But the benefits will not be confined to bilateral advantage. Chabahar port and the rail and road link planned to Afghanistan will offer the latter an alternative route to its present exclusive dependence on Pakistan. The opening to Afghanistan will further allow interconnectivity with Central Asia and beyond, all the way to Europe eventually. The project not only frees Afghanistan and Central Asia from exclusive reliance on the Pakistan route, it represents a strategic victory for India as a riposte to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the development of Gwadar port. China is offering $ 46 billion for the CPEC in a potentially game-changing revival of the historical Silk Route, which will provide China's relatively less developed western regions a shorter and more convenient route to the sea, while laying the foundations for regional and international interconnectivity thereby on a hitherto undreamt of scale. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, stung by Pakistan's perceived cold shoulder to his domestically risky outreach to Islamabad soon after taking office, was visibly delighted at the three-way transit agreement. India too has cause for satisfaction. Both countries have problems with Pakistan re trade transit rights, India probably by now despairing of getting trade access to Afghanistan (and beyond) through Pakistan. Apart from the obvious advantages to landlocked Afghanistan and Central Asia, the Chabahar project will, like the CPEC, trigger substantial investment and business activity along its route. In that sense, the former may be considered the answer by India, Iran and Afghanistan to the latter. To seal the deal and make it even sweeter, India last week cleared $ 750 million of the $ six billion debt to Iran that was held up for years because of the nuclear-related sanctions against Iran. In January 2016, Tehran came to an agreement on the nuclear issue with its international interlocutors, leading to the lifting of sanctions. India and the rest of the world have since been making a beeline to Tehran to get in on the economic windfall represented by an Iranian market emerging from isolation. Pakistan on the other hand has remained bogged down in its inane and inept foreign policy generally, and in particular vis-a-vis the new opportunities presented by Iran. Instead, we are still lumbered by arguments such as Petroleum Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi's, who says we are unable to complete the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline on our side (it is already complete on the Iranian side) because financing for the $ two billion project is hard to come by for fear of the 'snap back' clause in the nuclear agreement that could see sanctions being reimposed if Iran reneges on its commitments. So we are condemned to sit on our hands while India and the rest of the world enjoy mileage with Tehran. Cutting off our nose to spite our face is what we are past masters at. When Iranian President Rouhani visited Pakistan not so long ago, the anticipation was the gas pipeline and many other projects of importance would be signed. Instead, the story of an Indian spy based in Iran being captured in Pakistan put paid to any such hopes. Now the Mullah Akhtar Mansour episode promises to involve us in a diplomatic row with Tehran. Strange are the ways in which things are run in Pakistan.

Mullah Mansour exits Rashed Rahman Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour's killing in a drone strike in Dalbandin district near the Iran border has once again altered all the permutations and combinations attending the Afghan war. The likely effects of this development cut across all the assumptions and prognoses regarding this long running conflict. For one, as happened when Mulla Omar's death was belatedly announced a year ago, there is likely to be a fresh struggle between rival Taliban factions to have their own candidate succeed Mullah Mansour. It may be recalled that in the wake of the announcement of Mulla Omar's death, despite Mullah Mansour being named his successor, rival factions, including the son and family of Mulla Omar, refused to accept Mullah Mansour as the new leader. It took Mullah Mansour time and effort to reconcile these rival factions through appointment of their candidates to senior leadership positions, including Sirajuddin Haqqani of the dreaded Haqqani network. Another round of similar factional struggle now cannot be ruled out. Whoever succeeds Mullah Mansour, his death will have further hardened the Taliban's stance. As it is, the peace process was floundering. Ironically, although Mullah Mansour was considered by both the US and Kabul as opposing participation in the peace talks, his death has all but put paid to any chance of a peaceful political resolution of the Afghanistan conundrum. Another fallout of Mullah Mansour's being taken out by a drone is increasing strains in the Pakistan-US relationship. Contradictory media reports speculated whether Pakistan was informed of the drone strike in advance. Going by past standard operating procedures in drone strikes, that seems unlikely, particularly in the case of such a high profile target. Pakistan has vociferously denounced the drone strike as a violation of its sovereignty. But such protestations mean little as even in the past they have had little effect on Washington. The only difference is that after the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the US, and despite the reports of the drone programme being allowed to operate from a base in Balochistan, such strikes remained confined to the tribal areas where there was a concentration of the Taliban. This strike in Balochistan means that Washington means business when it says it will continue to target Taliban leaders wherever they are found. It also means that it now concurs with Kabul's view that Pakistan is not doing enough to nudge the Taliban towards the negotiating table, despite protestations to the contrary. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has already given up on his initial outreach to Pakistan to partner Kabul and Washington in bringing the Taliban into the peace process. Now Washington seems convinced that Mullah Mansour's intractability vis-a-vis the peace talks and his reliance on aggressively pursuing tactical advantage on the battlefield has Pakistan's implicit support. The 'difficult' ally (Pakistan) is therefore going to have life made even more difficult for it in the days ahead. As it is, the chickens of Pakistan's duality of policy vis-a-vis the US/NATO campaign to defeat the Taliban are coming home to roost. The Obama administration has been trying to persuade a hostile Republican-dominated US Congress not to adopt strictures and conditionalities on support to Pakistan. Difficult as the relationship between Washington and Islamabad has proved, the administration still calculates the cost-benefit of maintaining the relationship militates against non-cooperation. This view is not shared by the Republicans, wide sections of the American media, and public. In a presidential election year, the Republicans may have latched onto the administration's Pakistan policy as one more stick to beat it with. Of course the real sufferer is Pakistan. Historically dependent on the US and the west for aid, including military help, Islamabad now faces a US Senate unwilling to subsidise the sale of F-16s to Pakistan and a US House of Representatives insisting on conditionalities before aid, even Coalition Support Fund reimbursements, are released. These conditionalities centre on Pakistan taking action against the Haqqani network, the US Secretary of Defence certifying that Pakistan is not using US aid or equipment to suppress religious and ethnic minorities, and the release of Dr Shakil Afridi, who is viewed as a hero for his role in helping the US track down and eliminate Osama bin Laden. All three conditionalities are difficult to fulfil for Pakistan. Taking on the Haqqani network means taking on the Afghan Taliban in the midst of the struggle against the homegrown Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). While the Pakistani military and security forces already have their hands full with that task despite the successes chalked up by Operation Zarb-e-Azb in FATA and the Rangers' operation in Karachi, any action taken against any Afghan Taliban faction would further consolidate the nexus between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. With the TTP having found safe havens in Afghanistan with the Haqqani network and millions of Afghan refugees (and Taliban amongst them) still on Pakistani soil, the Pakistani military and security forces cannot open up an internal front against the Afghan Taliban without enormous trouble and conflict following in its wake. Of course were such a foolhardy step to be taken, the Afghan Taliban would feel freed of any constraint in helping the TTP fight against Pakistan. Such an internal-external two-front situation would be a security disaster. Pakistan is increasingly seen in Washington and Kabul as waging or supporting a proxy war through the Afghan Taliban while paying lip service to reconciliation and peace. Pakistan's oft repeated denials cut no ice. Islamabad's failure to persuade, and subsequently turn the screws (short of military action) on the Afghan Taliban has now landed it in the doghouse. Now it is caught in the classical dilemma of damned if you do and damned if you don't. These are the fruits of an inept foreign policy being run by two 'Advisors' at loggerheads with each other, no permanent foreign minister (the prime minister holds this portfolio close to his chest without being able to do justice to this crucial area in terms of following trends and developments and undertaking proactive planning), and a consequent sense of drift just when the regional and international dynamic is undergoing dramatic changes. Pakistan's adventures with proxy wars (east and west) have now begun to extract a heavy price. The US, the administration's 'balancing' act notwithstanding, seems bent upon punishing Pakistan for its duality in the Afghanistan theatre over the last 15 years. It is also largely ignoring Pakistan's pleas to take into consideration its defence and security needs vis-a-vis India's overwhelming conventional military strength, pursuit of more powerful nuclear weapons and their delivery platforms, and perceived hegemonic regional designs. In other words, the US strategic calculation to have India on board as a counterweight to the growing might of China has left Pakistan out in the cold. As to the Afghanistan conundrum, peace seems dead in the water. Pakistan must now brace for the fallout. This may well include a resurgence of terrorism by the TTP, perhaps aided and abetted by the angry Afghan Taliban. The lesson, once again, is that a people that oppresses other people can never truly be free itself. Our sorry tale of long standing interventions in Afghanistan and their probable cost now only underlines that lesson emphatically.