PAKISTAN ARMY CHIEF BALKS AT U.S. DEMANDS TO COOPERATE

[The United States will now push harder than ever for General Kayani to break relations with other militant leaders who American officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, with the support of the military and intelligence service, a senior American official said.]

 

By Jane Perlez

Gen. Kayani. Image TOI

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Despite mounting pressure from the United States since the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden,Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, seems unlikely to respond to American demands to root out other militant leaders, according to people who have met with him in the last 10 days.

While the general does not want to abandon the alliance completely, he is more likely to pursue a strategy of decreasing Pakistan’s reliance on the United States, and continuing to offer just enough cooperation to keep the billions of dollars in American aid flowing, said a confidant of the general who has spoken with him recently.

Such a response is certain to test American officials, who are more mistrustful of Pakistan than ever.

Emboldened by the May 2 raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan, American officials say they now have greater leverage to force Pakistani cooperation in hunting down Taliban and Qaeda leaders so the United States can end the war in Afghanistan.

The United States will now push harder than ever for General Kayani to break relations with other militant leaders who American officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, with the support of the military and intelligence service, a senior American official said.

These leaders include Mullah Muhammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban; the allied militant network of Sirajuddin Haqqani; and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that the United States holds responsible for the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, in 2008, the American official said.

Pakistani officials, meanwhile, are anxiously waiting to see if any new intelligence about Al Qaeda in Pakistan spills from the American raid that could be used to exert more pressure on them, and what form that pressure might take.

But those who have spoken with General Kayani recently said that demands to break with top militant leaders were likely to be too much for the military chief, who is scheduled to address an unusual, closed-door joint session of Parliament on Friday to salvage his reputation and explain the military’s lapses surrounding the American raid.

The American wish list is tantamount to an overnight transformation of Pakistan’s long held strategic posture that calls for using the militant groups as proxies against Pakistan’s neighbors, they said. It comes as General Kayani faces mounting anti-American pressure from hard-line generals in his top command, two of the people who met with him said.

Many in the lower ranks of the military have greater sympathy for the militant groups than for the United States.

To take out the leadership of these groups — longtime assets of the Pakistani Army and intelligence services — would result in such a severe backlash from the militants that a “civil war” in Pakistan would result, said a former senior Pakistani official who was consulted by General Kayani in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid.

The general, who has been courted for nearly three years by the United States’ most senior military officers in an effort to persuade him to launch an attack against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, was even more unlikely to do so now, the Pakistani said.

While increasingly frustrated with Pakistan, American officials would also like to avoid a complete rupture of relations with a nuclear-armed state that is essential to ending the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

With the United States eager to wind down in Afghanistan, Washington needs Pakistan more than ever, a factor that would play into the general’s next moves, said Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, a former director general of Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, who met with General Kayani recently.

“Without Pakistani support, the United States cannot win the battle in Afghanistan,” he said. “Now the Americans are saying, please bring the Taliban to the table.”

The army chief was described as angered that the Obama administration failed to trust him enough to tell him before the raid, asserting that in keeping him in the dark the United States had alienated Pakistan’s best friend, General Qazi said.

General Kayani cannot ignore the sentiment of his soldiers, said Riaz Khokhar, a former ambassador to the United States, who met with General Kayani.

“There is a feeling in the rank and file of the army from A to Z that the United States is a most untrustworthy ally,” Mr. Khokhar said.

“We don’t want to be an enemy of the United States, but the experience of friendship with the United States has not been a pleasant experience, so we have to find a middle road,” he said.

General Qazi said hard questions were being asked about whether the American financial support to the Pakistani military was “worth the lives we have lost” in fighting Islamic militants.

Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has granted more than $20 billion in military and development assistance, an amount that does not include covert aid, according to K. Alan Kronstadt , the South Asian Affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service.

Cutting ties would be extremely costly for the Pakistani military, said Shuja Nawaz , head of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Anti-Pakistan sentiment was hardening in Congress as Pakistan waited for approval of payment arrears for its costs in fighting insurgents, Mr. Nawaz said.

In the short term, however, General Kayani seemed to be more concerned with the blow to the morale of his troops than with further damage to the already eroded relationship with the United States, according to the accounts from those who met him.

General Kayani visited six army garrisons this week in an effort to dispel doubts about the army and his leadership.

During his appearances, according to soldiers interviewed afterward, General Kayani acknowledged an intelligence failure in not knowing that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. But he added that this did not mean that Pakistan was to be “blamed for everything.”
@ The New York Times 

COMMUNISTS OVERTHROWN IN TWO INDIAN STATES

[West Bengal's outgoing Communist chief minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, conceded defeat while thanking those who had supported the Communist-led alliance over the years. A Communist lawmaker in the national assembly said it was normal for Bengalis to seek change after 34 years, and that the party would be back.]

 

Associated Press

NEW DELHI: A fiery opposition leader won a sweeping victory Friday against the Communists who have controlled the Indian state of West Bengal for more than three decades, in one of two major losses for the Communists in state elections.

Mamata Banerjee's victory came as votes were being tallied in four other state elections across India.

Her allies in the nationally ruling Congress party expressed confidence that their coalition would emerge from the polls relatively unscathed despite a string of national corruption scandals and recent protests against food inflation.

The Communists also lost narrowly in southern Kerala, the only other state they had controlled, suggesting the party may have trouble in the next general elections in 2014. The results are a vindication of the pro-market reforms of Congress and its allies, which drew vocal opposition from the Communists.

Opponents have been trying to unseat the Communists in West Bengal since 1977, and Banerjee's Trinamool Congress finally succeeded in a landslide.

Banerjee said the Bengali results reflected a 34-year "freedom struggle" and a "victory for the people." She had asked her supporters to abstain from alcohol and victory rallies to help maintain calm in the volatile state. Security was tight against possible violence by Communist supporters upset about losing their source of patronage.

"We want to dedicate our victory to our people and motherland," said Banerjee, who will likely quit as national railways minister to be West Bengal's chief minister. "We will give good governance and good administration, not autocracy."

Trinamool and Congress had led an aggressive campaign in the mostly rural state, hammering the Communist-led government for economic stagnation, corruption, agricultural malaise and industrial decline.

"West Bengal was once the pride of India. The Communists have ruined it," Congress leader Sonia Gandhi told some 10,000 villagers packed into a recent schoolyard rally in the state's agricultural Murshidabad district.

West Bengal's outgoing Communist chief minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, conceded defeat while thanking those who had supported the Communist-led alliance over the years. A Communist lawmaker in the national assembly said it was normal for Bengalis to seek change after 34 years, and that the party would be back.

He conceded that the Communists had lost re-election in the southern state of Kerala, but said the "unprecedented" narrow margin revealed it had been "one of the closest-fought elections" in the state's history.

Partial results from northeastern Assam, where Congress has been holding peace talks with secessionist militants, also showed Congress and its allies with a wide lead over a fractured opposition.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh congratulated Banerjee as well as Assam's incumbent chief minister, Tarun Gogoi.

"Voters have reaffirmed their faith in the Congress government," after it had reached out to the militants and helped calm the violent region, Gogoi said.

But in Tamil Nadu, Congress and regional ally Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam — which ruled the southern state — appeared headed for a major beating. The DMK was deeply implicated in a cell-phone licensing scandal that cost the nation an estimated tens of billions of dollars and forced one of the party's leaders to resign as national telecoms minister before being charged with conspiracy and fraud.

Analysts said the loss, however, could end up benefiting Congress nationally by allowing it to divorce itself from its scandal-plagued partner.

Political analyst Mahesh Rangaranjan said it would now be "very difficult to say corruption doesn't matter."

Congress has also come under fire for alleged mismanagement and corruption tied to the staging of last year's Commonwealth Games and to the takeover of valuable Mumbai apartments intended for poor war widows by powerful bureaucrats and politicians' relatives.

The tiny neighboring state of Pondicherry also voted.

@ The Himalayan Times