The PM fired the defense minister, a former general, earlier today. The charges: "gross misconduct and illegal action which created misunderstanding."

Let's see how long the PM lasts.

Recently the def min stated publicly that the civilian government does not control Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Icy Eye.

By Ahmed Humayun
Best Defense guest reviewer

America's decade-long war in South Asia has prompted a spate of books that purport to explain how Pakistan really works. Though everyone agrees that insurgent-infested and nuclear-armed Pakistan is tremendously important to U.S. interests, few have been able to unravel the country's byzantine complexity. In the excellent Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, Steve Inskeep sidesteps the machinations of Pakistan's national politics, the grinding geopolitical competition in Afghanistan, and the apocalyptic scenarios of terrorists seizing nuclear weapons, and focuses instead on scrupulously narrating the everyday stories of the beleaguered citizens who inhabit Pakistan's most important city. This ostensibly narrow approach ends up illuminating a vast landscape, showing how decaying institutions have constrained Pakistani aspirations in tragic and tortuous ways.

According to Inskeep, an "instant city" is characterized by above average population growth relative to the rest of the country, often due to mass migration induced by severe political and economic unrest. Pakistan's partition from India in 1947 produced millions of desperate refugees on both sides of the bloody border; as a result, Karachi's population doubled overnight. Pakistan's largest city and a financial and industrial hub, Karachi still lures migrants in search of economic opportunities from all across the country. The unremitting influx has overwhelmed an inadequately resourced government's ability to provide basic services. The yawning gap between what people need and what the state can deliver, exacerbated by deep ethnic and sectarian cleavages, has spawned crime and corruption and violence. Karachi is a sprawling urban mess that cannot be cleaned up by a municipal authority which is hapless when it is not perfidious.

Nonetheless, desperate people keep streaming in and the city totters forward. Inskeep is best when delineating the tactics Karachites use to forge ahead in the face of improbable odds. The katchi abadis -- so-called 'temporary settlements' comprised of shacks made of mud and timber -- are technically illegal because they are created by people simply squatting on vacant land; in reality they house as many as half of the city's population. Bereft of amenities such as water and energy, residents devise expedient workarounds -- for example, by planting hooks on main electrical lines, siphoning off power, and bribing the police to look the other way. Over time, the process of illegal settlement has become regularized: profiteering land developers -- who include the local government, political parties, and the police -- have gained control over vast swathes of real estate which they rent out to individual residents and communities. As Karachi's titular government flails, an alternative form of government -- predatory but characterized by certain informal rules -- has sprung up.

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Pakistani's Army Service Book Club every year picks one book and apparently sends it to all commissioned officers as well as some civilian officials, with the cost automatically deducted from their salaries. Interestingly, this year's pick is Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars.

Pakistan's defense minister utterly rejects American allegations that his government is playing footsie with the Haqqani network. If the U.S. government has such information, it should pass it on, he says with some indignation.

Meanwhile, a little grasshopper/ant writes to ask if there is anything he can read to understand why Pakistan feels so threatened by India. "i'm a naive westerner and can't figure out why pakistan anticipates that india would want to invade - what does it have of value that india might wish to dispossess it of ? i understand the rudiments of the kashmir conflict and a disputed border, but i'm having trouble extrapolating that to existential threat levels."

Anyone got a good suggestion?

By Tom Lynch
Best Defense department of dysfunctional diplomacy

Recent comments by Senator Kirk from Illinois exemplify a familiar pattern by senior U.S. political, military and diplomatic officials struggling to understand the devilish intricacies and deep challenges of South Asian politics through the constrained access portal of experience in or focus on Afghanistan. This struggle all too frequently takes the pattern of a seven-step process of "discovery learning" regarding the complexities of South Asia security by Americans first introduced to Afghanistan without background in the wider region. That process goes something like this ....

STEP 1 - MEET Afghans, find them engaging, look for the quick way to help them with a "hand up," ignore the vexing, decades-long regional security dilemmas underpinning their plight.

STEP 2 - DISCOVER Afghans suffer from multiple internal and external challenges -- take the (northern) Afghan viewpoint that theirs is all a problem of Pakistan's making.

STEP 3 - BLAME Pakistan for all Afghanistan's ills and despair of American engagement with Pakistan or Afghanistan, throw out the "I" word suggesting that more India in Afghanistan would "teach" Pakistan a lesson (and presumably save some cash).

STEP 4 - DISCOVER Pakistan already believes there is an Indian under every rock in Afghanistan - and that threatening a quicker Coalition departure and greater Indian involvement won't faze Pakistan.... Rawalpindi will move more quickly to bolster its Afghan Taliban allies for a proxy war.

STEP 5 - DETERMINE that India isn't really interested in bailing out the Coalition (or American politicians and diplomats) on western terms, has its own regional objectives and timetables, and isn't much responsive to boisterous American rhetoric accelerating the timelines on a Pakistan-India proxy war in Afghanistan. That proxy war may come, but India will work to prolong its onset as long as possible.

STEP 6 - RECOGNIZE that a rapidly-accelerating proxy war between two nuclear-armed nations encouraged by a precipitous withdrawal of US/Coalition forces before some political mechanism in place to limit the possibilities for that war is irresponsible, an approach that is all too similar to America's walk away from Afghanistan and Pakistan back the early 1990s that led to a proxy war in Afghanistan between India and Pakistan before both were fully tested nuclear-armed states.

STEP 7 - RESOLVE either to remain engaged with Afghanistan, Pakistan and India for a lengthy and challenging diplomatic-military process (including some level of non-trivial economic and military aid to both Afghanistan and Pakistan for some time); or, SUCCUMB to the personal frustrations of it all and quit the field, making room for the next nouveau American to start the process at STEP 1.

Tom Lynch is a research fellow for South Asia & Near East at NDU. A retired Army Colonel, he was a special assistant focused on South Asian security for the CENTCOM Commander and later the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during 2004-2010. The opinions here are his own.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, essentially accused the Pakistani government of beating a journalist to death in May. "It was sanctioned by the government," he said.

There is an interesting parallel here to the murder of Danny Pearl back in 2002. He was killed by al Qaeda in Pakistan. Saleem Shahzad was killed by the government of Pakistan, Mullen is saying.

Also, the New York Times reports that there is new evidence that the Pakistani military sold nuclear weapons technology to North Korea.

Again, I wonder why anyone thinks Pakistan should still be considered an ally.

Meanwhile, Karachi continues to writhe with political violence. For reasons I don't understand, the Edhi Foundation's ambulances are being attacked.

The New York Times reports that the ISI ordered the recent murder of a Pakistani journalist. (As a former Washington Post reporter, it chafes me a bit to admit it, but the Times seems to me to have been doing a really good job lately on Pakistan and on foreign coverage in general. I hope they keep it up under the Abramson regime -- Jill is a former colleague and a terrific journalist but she lacks foreign experience.)

And here is an interesting memory of the early '80s in Pakistan.

By "Kriegsakademie"
Best Defense department of politco-military affairs

Many, many years I was serving in Islamabad when Deane Hinton arrived as the new ambassador. Pakistani provincial elections were scheduled about three weeks after his arrival.

At the first country team meeting Deane distributed sheets of paper with all the political parties in Pakistan and all the provinces. Everyone on the country team was given five minutes to write down their predictions of the percentage of the vote each party would get in each province and then hand it to the ambassador in a signed and sealed envelope.

On the morning after the election results came out, we came to country team meeting to find all the name plates in "the bubble" re-arranged and re-titled. The Ag attaché was now listed as the DCM (he had done the best prediction), I was listed as Pol Couns (2nd best) etc. The actual Political Counselor was 2nd to last and the Defense Attaché (an Army Intel guy and FAO) was dead last.

That was one of many wake-up calls from Hinton that he expected his team to get out and know what was going on in Pakistan.

Younger staff generally enjoyed the challenge, senior staff generally resented it.

Amb Hinton's little game nicely captured the lack of local knowledge that it the theme of this discussion.

I recently finished David Ignatius' new novel, Bloodmoney, which is set mainly in Pakistan, the U.S., and London. I think anyone who reads this blog would enjoy it.

I think fiction must use a different part of the brain. I wouldn't read an academic analysis of CIA-ISI relations til past midnight, but after a long day of travel, I stayed up hours to finish reading this book.

As it happens, the other day I ran into an American diplomat who is an expert in the Middle East and strongly recommended Ignatius' previous novel, The Increment, about Iran.

So what should foreign policy wonks read on the beach this summer? I'd say the complete works of Ignatius, which amount to a grand tour of the Middle East -- start with Agents of Innocence (Lebanon, and worth the price of admission just for the stomach-churning chapter in the middle about being an Israeli agent in Syria) and work your way with him through the region. 

Here are some other takes on beach reading for wonks.

By Anna Coll
Best Defense bureau of frenemy relations

This past Monday, SAIS and the Middle East Institute hosted the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung, RAND's Arturo Munoz, and the Atlantic Council's Shuja Nawaz for a timely panel on the intelligence service that everyone loves to hate, Pakistan's ISI. From the outset, moderator Walter Andersen and the panelists confessed that the panel's title "Inside Pakistan's ISI" was misleading, correctly pointing out that any attempt to dissect an intelligence service from the outside is at best an extremely difficult task, let alone a "Janus-faced" one, as Andersen himself noted. The panelists nonetheless raised some interesting issues:

1. On the question of how much Pakistani military leadership knew about bin Laden's whereabouts, DeYoung described that both ISI head Pasha and Chief of the Army Staff Kayani don't appear to have known very much at all: voice analyses of their initial reactions to bin Laden's death reveal "genuine surprise" on their parts. Either that or their skills at duping foreign authorities have become remarkably sophisticated.
2. Recent incidents in which IED facilities were abandoned shortly after the U.S. informed the Pakistanis of the facilities' locations suggest the existence of rogue elements or individuals within the ISI, but the panelists said this does not mean the ISI itself has gone rogue.
3. The ISI's role is two-fold, said Nawaz: to control the domestic situation and penetrate neighboring countries. While it tends to do the latter quite well, the ISI's dismal record in terms of predicting domestic election results (Nawaz described the agency as always being "180 degrees off-target") is just one indicator that the ISI has a long way to go on the former. The diffusion of new technologies including mobile phones and the Internet will only magnify the difficulty of controlling information flows domestically, Nawaz reminded the audience.
4. Nawaz offered interesting insight into the significance of the agency as a professional stepping stone. He described that while the ISI was traditionally seen as the "backwater for appointments" with the exception of those at the highest echelons, now some of the key Corps Commanders in the Pakistani army are those who held the position of Major General within the ISI. Service in the ISI is thus "not a dead end anymore," but rather becoming a necessary rung on the professional ladder for members of the Pakistani military.

"A frontal assault of this kind on nuclear weapons storage facilities, which are the most robustly defended elements of Pakistan's nuclear weapons cycle, is no longer an implausible event. The successful location and penetration of such a site by terrorists, even if they were ultimately unsuccessful in accessing nuclear assets, would itself be a transformative event both in terms of the U.S.-Pakistani nuclear relationship and in terms of international anxiety about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Such an assault would also critically undermine Pakistan's reassurances about the security of nuclear weapons elsewhere in the weapons cycle, particularly in transit. As the number of Pakistani nuclear weapons inexorably continues to rise, and as the nuclear weapons security challenges thereby steadily multiply, the odds that Pakistan's nuclear weapons security will eventually be compromised continue to rise."--

Professor Shaun Gregory, Director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford, Britain, in the new issue of West Point's CTC Sentinel.

My italics, just to help scare you more.

I think this is a good contender for the title of Biggest Problem in the World. Speaking of which, a new book just arrived in the mail from the Naval Institute Press, Confronting al Qaeda: New Strategies to Combat Terrorism, by Kevin McGrath. It looks interesting, especially the chapter on Pakistan, but I don't know when I am gonna get to it as I have developed a huge reading backlog.   

According to testimony in a current trial:

--An ISI agent specifically added Chabad House as a Jewish target to the list of places to be hit in the Mumbai terrorist action.

--Handlers in Pakistan also instructed the terrorists during the raid on how to kill hostages at Chabad House:

After approaching from behind, place the barrel on the back of their head and fire," one handler said, according to a transcript of an intercepted conversation from the Chabad House that was read in court yesterday.

Hmm -- this must be a new category of NATO partner, one that shoots at our helicopters, proliferates nuclear weaponry, and plays footsie with terrorists.

By Elizabeth Flora
Best Defense aging alliances deputy bureau chief

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stopped by SAIS last week as part of a tour across America to promote the geriatric alliance's purported current and future relevance. In addition to dishing out the usual mush about the alliance, he fielded questions about current security challenges:

On Libya: When questioned on whether or not NATO would engage in nation-building in a "post-Qaddafi era," he said that it will have a "role to play" in the transition to democracy, especially by ensuring that the military can be controlled by a new government. Fortunately, he did not have to answer when this era will emerge.

On Afghanistan: His recommendations have not changed in the post-bin Laden era, which call for the same timeline with a contingent of non-combat troops remaining past 2014, when Afghans should "stand on their own feet" but "will not stand alone."

On Pakistan: However, to accomplish success in Afghanistan, NATO will need a "positive engagement" and "partnership" with Pakistan. "Despite recent events" and "many questions that need to be answered," Rasmussen said that "we appreciate" that Pakistan has "taken steps" against terrorism in the border region, but in an diplomatic understatement, "we do believe there is potential for strengthened efforts."

Sen. John McCain knocks down the idea that torture -- specifically waterboarding -- was essential in getting bin Laden:

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that "the intelligence that led to bin Laden … began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information -- including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden." That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti -- the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden -- as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed's real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator -- none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee -- information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden -- was obtained through standard, noncoercive means.

No one is ever right all the time, especially on problems as vexing as U.S. relations with Pakistan. That's why I try to run guest columns that disagree with me. Here's a take on Pakistan somewhat different from my view offered yesterday.

By Col. Tom Lynch, U.S. Army (ret.)
Best Defense bureau of responsible opposing viewpoints

This is truly America's most troubled relationship with an erstwhile ally since the Soviet Union in World War II, but an important one to manage soberly and realistically.

Realism requires us to grudgingly understand that Pakistan continues to operate from a paradigm where it demands equality with India, blames India for all of its perils, leverages "irregular warfare groups" (that are predominantly Islamic radicals) and nuclear weapons in a quixotic effort to level the security playing field with New Delhi, and ascribes nefarious motives to any country that doesn't consistently help it score points against India in the region and internationally. It also requires us to acknowledge that designating Pakistan as enemy remains a course fraught with peril and outcomes far worse than we've seen to this point.

In this context, our policy approach toward Pakistan since 2008/09 is wrongly branded as failure. Instead it has course-corrected a failed policy from 2001-07 of just feeding Musharraf money and trusting that he was committed to ending support for regional and international terrorists. Our efforts since late 2008 have been expensive, but far from failed. We've built a CT intel and strike network of depth and complexity in Afghanistan that has enabled many of our drone strikes and an extensive mapping of terrorist and militant ops there and in much of Pakistan. Capitalizing on Pakistani civilian differences with their mil-intel complex, and on PakMIL-ISI embarrassments over the entrails from the failed May 2010 Times Square terrorist bombing episode (and others), we've built an independent network of intelligence operatives within Pakistan.

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