07/05/13 – Muhammad Idrees Ahmad – The Scott Horton Show

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Our next guest on the show today is Mohammed Idris Ahmad.
He is a Glasgow-based sociologist, born in Chitral, which I'm sure I said wrong, sorry about your hometown there, and raised in Abbottabad, which might be familiar to you, and in Peshawar as well.
And you might remember he was on the show when we were talking about the real death toll from the Iraq War, so often ignored just back a couple of months ago, I think it was.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammed.
How are you doing?
My pleasure to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
And a great couple of articles you have here.
One of them is at Al Jazeera, Obama won't end the drone war, but Pakistan might.
That's the one really to look at.
But also here at The Atlantic, how Pakistan can stop drone strikes.
And there have been some really big drone strikes just in the past couple of weeks in Pakistan.
First of all, get us up to date on the latest in the drone war?
Yeah, I think these two are actually rather significant, because they're coming.
The first one came just two days after the new Pakistani government assumed office, and in the inaugural address, the new Pakistani Prime Minister had very explicitly asked the United States to stop violating the country's sovereignty and to stop the drone strikes.
And also significant is the fact that these attacks were coming just two weeks after Obama made his speech on drones.
So the speech, the Obama speech had been greeted in Pakistan as maybe a welcome development.
People were expecting that maybe now the drone attacks would stop.
And so immediately, just within two weeks, when it happens again, it's obviously not only that people are incensed by just this disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality, but also that a new government which has come to power, which has a significant mandate and it shows that these people, one of the factors in bringing this new party to power was that the last party, which was the ruling party, was seen as being just too weak.
And this one people expect to be able to stand up to the U.S., at least on this score.
And so people were quite angered by that, and the government itself was quite angered by that, and it issued a statement.
And it called in the U.S. ambassador and said that it shouldn't be happening again, except just within a month it was repeated.
So now there has been another drone strike.
So in Pakistan there's a whole lot of anger, and I think what hasn't been established in the U.S. or what hasn't been recognized by people, I think that the diplomats recognize this, but the CIA hasn't really taken in the fact that government has changed and Pakistan has also changed.
So I don't think that Pakistan, at least the Pakistanis, won't be very client this time.
The government is popular, it has support, unlike the previous government.
So it can take positions which the previous government couldn't.
Okay, now on that last point first, this new government of Nawaz Sharif back, and he was the guy who was overthrown by Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator, back in 1998 or 1999, I think it was, right?
Mm-hmm.
That's right, yeah.
Now to oversimplify it, does this signify, you know, with the end of Mr. 20% there, and now the re-rise of Sharif, does that mean the last president was a CIA sock puppet, but this one really is not?
That he is coming to claim Pakistani independence back in some severe way?
Well, at least that is the understanding of the people who voted for him, because he is seen as, he comes from the most populous province of Pakistan, it's called Punjab, and he has this reputation for being a nationalist.
And he also has quite a bit of credibility, I mean, it's in some way similar to the way Republicans in the U.S. have had greater credibility in relation to national security.
So in Pakistan, this party is seen as being slightly stronger on national security, and this guy, he was also the person under whom Pakistan became a nuclear power, or at least it became public as a nuclear power.
So because of that, he has sort of that kind of credibility as being somebody who can make decisions, who can act more, who can assert himself more, as compared to the last government.
One of the things about the last government was that Mr. 20% would never have been able to become the president had it not been for his wife's assassination.
And the second factor was that the wife herself, what she had done was, when she was returning to power, she had initially come back, when she was assassinated, she had come back as part of a deal that was brokered by the U.S.
And the understanding was that Musharraf's power was flagging.
And so they wanted somebody who can give him some degree of democratic legitimacy.
So they were bringing Benazir Bhutto back, basically, to shore up Pervaiz Musharraf, and she had made this arrangement.
And then she did, when she went back, so she started making these speeches saying that how she was going to be more aggressive in waging the war on terror, except I don't think that she has realized that that is not exactly a popular style in Pakistan.
And then, you know, she was assassinated.
We still don't know who did it, but I would not be surprised if it was the Taliban or some of the other overall elements within the military, because she was seen as somebody who was going to put Pakistan in a position which will weaken Pakistan, because one thing, it's similar to Iran in that respect, that the nuclear, the fact that Pakistan has nuclear power is generally among the population, it's a sort of a source of pride.
A country which doesn't have much else, which doesn't have, its economy is quite decrepit, and the country itself, its infrastructure is rather limited.
But being a nuclear power and being part of such an exclusive club is sort of some degree, it brings some degree of pride in Pakistan.
So when she made speeches saying that she was also going to hand over AQ Khan for interrogation, so that wasn't really well received in Pakistan.
But when she was assassinated, so suddenly that brought a whole lot of sympathy to her party.
So she just, her husband, Mr. Twenty Percent benefited from the sympathy vote.
And then, I guess it's sort of widely believed that Musharraf was the one who killed her.
Do you think that's right?
I think that that's absolutely implausible, because, I mean, the thing was, for Musharraf, she was a new lease on life, because she was coming in to shore up his power.
And for him, it was the worst possible outcome, because it also resulted just less than a year later in his ouster.
So I don't think that's...
But did he understand how well that was working for him, the way you do?
Of course he did.
I mean, that's why he obstructed the deal, because both the U.S. understood that he understood this.
They both understood that his power was flagging, and he needed some kind of support.
And so who did kill her then?
Was it the Taliban or what?
Well, there's one of the obvious story, which is the Taliban.
They had grounds for killing her, although the TPP itself denied it, you know, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitul Masood, denied it.
But there is another factor which gets a bit mixed up.
In Pakistan, the military itself, formally it is allied with the U.S., but within the elements which are rogue, and these are not at the top, but further down, rogue in the sense that there are elements which are even, you know, because they saw the defeat of the Soviet Union back in the 80s as this big achievement for the ISI.
So these people are not very keen to have their work undone in Afghanistan.
So they're not very keen to help the U.S. out in Afghanistan.
So these elements are not very happy.
I mean, they're not part of the ruling structure, but they are within the military, and they haven't been exactly, Musharraf tried, but he didn't succeed in trying to eliminate all the, you know, these recalcitrant elements within the military.
So the military itself has some elements who are not very keen to assist the U.S. and who also see the hostility towards the, they are very much motivated by the hostility towards India much more than anything having to do with the Taliban.
So they don't see the Taliban as a threat.
They see that it's sort of a distraction for them, because for them, the key factor, the one main motivating factor has always been Kashmir.
Right.
Well, and of course, America has an alliance with India in Afghanistan, which just motivates the Pakistanis to intervene in Afghanistan even more against us.
And just the whole thing is a perpetual motion machine.
I don't think they're smart enough to have built it on purpose, but it sure works that way, it looks like.
Well, I think, yeah, I mean, it's, they, that's the problem with when people make very narrow temporary alliances and don't really consider the context.
So a lot of the decision making has been very piecemeal.
So what has happened, for example, is that the alliance with India was made at such a time that it's really a rank all the Pakistanis, because Pakistan has made, in terms of human lives, Pakistan has made the biggest price for the war on terror, because, you know, all the blowback comes in Pakistan, most of it, and the U.S. sees very little of it.
You know, you have these amateur attempts every once every two years or something.
But in Pakistan, you're talking about daily bombings and at very large scale, and every time there's a drone attack, so the retaliation comes in Peshawar or comes in, you know, Rawalpindi or Islamabad or some other city.
And so the thing is that the country is pretty large, and because of that, it's vulnerable.
So you can't really always protect every corner, and attacks always come as surprises.
I mean, that's what happened with the last drone attack.
But as soon as the drone attack happened, the next attack came in Gilgit-Baltistan, which is to the northeast, and it's a completely shielded area.
I spent part of my childhood there, and it's one of the safest areas to be in, and it's kind of a place where people don't lock their doors, and it's mostly rural communities.
So what has happened is that, obviously, because of that, it's vulnerable, because nobody was expecting the attack there.
And here, for some foreigners, and they are vulnerable, so suddenly they become easy prey.
All right.
Well, because they hate freedom, right?
Yeah.
I just want to make sure that everybody's on the same page about the real motivation of these terrible terrorists.
Hey, listen, so America had a deal with...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just going to say that, yes, of course, I mean, it says, because of the way of life, which they discovered since 2001, is that they don't like very much.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Americans let their daughters go to college and vote in primary elections, and so therefore jihad, obviously.
Yes.
Right.
Yes.
And they realized that in 2001.
Yeah.
Yes.
For the first time in their lives.
Now, listen here.
Yes.
So Bush had a deal with Musharraf, right, that said, you let me hunt and kill people inside...
Well, and Obama, too.
You let me hunt and kill people inside Pakistan and Waziristan and the federally administered tribal areas, etc., like that, and I'll go ahead and take out the people on your hit list, too, the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban who are giving you trouble.
And that was the deal that they made, more or less, and correct me wherever you feel like I'm wrong there, for sure, but the real question is, does Nawaz Sharif have any interest whatsoever in pursuing that, or he just comes from a completely different point of view on that subject?
Well, the thing was that it didn't start off that way.
The very first attack, I would be surprised if Musharraf was informed at all, or maybe he was.
I mean, you know, the...
Well, he certainly had a gun to his head, no doubt about it.
We'll bomb you back to the Stone Age, he was told.
No, no, I'm talking about 2004, so when the first drone strike happened.
So what happened is that you had this guy with whom the Pakistani military had just struck a deal, this guy called Naik Mohammad, and then he was killed.
Now, it's not still very clear whether at that time the Pakistanis knew or not, but immediately what they did was, because it was embarrassing for them to admit that Pakistan's sovereignty has been breached.
So what they did is that they immediately took the responsibility themselves.
They said that it was our rockets that killed him.
And the result of that was that immediately, until then, what had happened was all the fighting was happening inside the Sparta region.
And that's when this retaliation for the first time started hitting mainland Pakistan, outside the tribal region.
And it was a very stupid move on Pakistan's part.
But I think, you know, if you look at the intensity of drone attacks, so I think that Musharraf still kept some degree of a lid there, because under him, there were, in the four years that he remained in power, since between the first drone attack and the last one, so there had been a total of 17 drone attacks under his rule.
So it's clear that he didn't give a carte blanche.
But that changed when Zardari took over.
And because in the five years since Zardari has been in power, so there were more than 355 drone attacks.
So that's when it seemed like, you know, a blank check was handed to the CIA.
And so initially, it seemed that Musharraf had, to a certain degree, he had kept a limit on what the U.S. could do.
And after that, this deal was struck.
And it is true that what the Pakistani military started doing is that it started using that as an opportunity to have its own opponents eliminated, while at the same time, the ones that the U.S. is interested in, mainly the ones who are fighting in Afghanistan, so they are, because they are allies of Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban are allies of Pakistan.
So the Pakistanis have no interest in having them killed.
So what would happen is that they would protect them, but they would eliminate their domestic enemies.
So the Pakistani Taliban will be the ones which will be eliminated in these drone strikes.
My God, this is ridiculous.
I mean, I guess you could take any country where America is intervening, and it's just about as ridiculous in every case.
But really, I mean, you know, we're fighting their Taliban while they're back in the one we're fighting in the country next door, because we're allies with their number one enemy on the other side.
And on and on, for a decade in a row, you know, yeah, I, you know, sometimes one of the things which is sort of, I think one of the history has been rewritten in the 80s.
I remember that when the Afghans were being back, so the U.S. used to be actually quite popular in Pakistan.
I mean, I know that one of the reasons why I can speak English is because I grew up in Peshawar, and the places that I used to go to the library most of the time was the American Cultural Center.
It was in the city, it was a very popular location, we used to get jazz bands come and play there, and all kinds of interesting cultural activity used to take place.
So the thing was, you know, I mean, I have states can sometimes make alliances.
And so the thing was that it was more the way the people felt used that as soon as the Russians left, so then all of Afghanistan was completely abandoned.
At that time, the U.S. had the credibility that it could have helped with the new state formation, it could have stayed back and provided developmental aid or something, and it won't even have cost the U.S. much, and it would have been a completely different story.
So there's no direct correlation that I see between what was happening in the 80s and a lot of people draw that correlation that somehow the 80s enabled 9-11, but that's not what happened.
And, you know, even if you read what's his name's book, The Looming Towers, I forget the guy's name, Lawrence Wright, yeah.
So the thing is, as he mentioned as well, that even somebody like Osama bin Laden didn't come to the idea of attacking the U.S. automatically, it took a significant amount of persuasion from people like Zabahiri to eventually get him to agree to something like that.
So...
Well, and years and years of other interventions after the Afghan war, and they had no one else to fight, no other job skills.
And here the Americans are giving them every excuse in the world to hate our guts with the Gulf War.
Right.
That was part of the story in Lawrence Wright's book, I think, is bin Laden volunteered to, hey, I'll use my Mujahideen to expel that infidel socialist Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
And the king said, no, I'm going to go with James Baker and the American fighter bombers.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the 90s and especially, you know, the sanctions in Iraq were a factor of which rankled everybody.
And the story about Mohammed Atta is that he wrote his will after he witnessed the bombing in Kana.
Right.
You know, when the Israelis bombed, yeah, in 96, that was that the Lebanese refugees were bombed in Kana.
And so what happened is that that's when he wrote his will.
And that's also when bin Laden wrote his first fatwa as well.
One third of it is about the Kana massacre, the first Kana massacre.
There's another one in 2006.
So yeah.
So what has happened is that this kind of a role in the Middle East has angered everybody.
And right now, the thing is, you know, when you talk about some place like Fatah, it is very unlikely.
In fact, it is extremely unlikely that anyone from Fatah can come and attack the United States.
And, you know, there are so many practical barriers now.
But what does happen is that there are people who get angered by what they see happening in Fatah, and then they try to take revenge for that.
I mean, there was a case of that guy, the Times Square bomber, the guy who tried to bomb the Times Square.
Faisal Shahzad.
Yeah.
So the thing about Faisal Shahzad is that his father is a very high ranking officer.
And he's, you know, he has been to the U.S. and he's not exactly living in Fatah.
But the thing is that he has been angered, he has been radicalized by what he sees happening in Fatah.
And that is what has angered him.
So somebody like him can carry out an attack or at least attempt to, whereas anybody sitting in Fatah, they don't have the means.
I mean, they just simply can't do it.
I mean, me, with all my education, my resources, it's impossible for even somebody like me.
I mean, not impossible, but it's extremely difficult for somebody like me to visit the U.S.
And so for somebody from Fatah, it's absolutely impossible.
I mean, there are just so many practical barriers.
Well, now, so about that, that brings up the question, then, whether any of this is worth it or not.
If, after all, Americans are safe here in North America and everything, and the bad guys can hardly get here, the only reason, as you say, Faisal Shahzad could get here is because he's the son of somebody and he, you know, was a naturalized citizen and had a job and a wife and all that stuff, but, you know, hardly anybody else can.
But I wonder, you know, for Pakistan, for example, the Pakistani Taliban, they're certainly not nice guys, and do the people of Pakistan see them as a real destabilizing threat?
Does anyone appreciate America helping taking care of these guys for them?
Or is it all just, like the polls say, 90-plus percent hate our guts for it?
Well, I think there are two people who do, and I think both of them get quoted in Western media very often.
So, I mean, it's something like that.
You have, you know, a few very people who have loud voices, as in the sense that they are saying something that Western media likes to hear.
So they are the ones who are pounced on.
And I was just speaking to this Pakistani scholar in the U.S. called Akbar Az-Ahmad, and he had just written a book called The Thistle and the Drone.
And the thing about it was that he was in London, and then he was completely gobsmacked because there was this Pakistani journalist, and it's actually somebody that I have written about, and who came out and he said, oh, actually, the drone strikes are very popular in the tribal areas.
And so he asked him, how do you know?
So he said, well, because there's this one woman who carried out this research.
And actually, this is a very interesting story, that you have a woman called Farhat Taj.
She sits somewhere in Oslo, and she, a few years back, established, you know, they call them these letterhead organizations, but the organization which actually doesn't exist, but you invent it.
And so she established a letterhead organization called Ariana Institute, and then she published something saying that I have carried out research in the tribal areas, and we have found that there is 60% support for the drone strikes, and blah, blah, and anyway, it went on.
So it was a very interesting story, because it didn't jive with anything that I knew or anybody else knew.
So what happened is, I already found it a bit suspicious, because when you looked at the places she claimed that she had carried out the research, included places like Parachinar, which is sort of a Shia stronghold where there has never been a drone attack.
And so anyway, when I went and investigated a little that, did this woman actually carry out any kind of research?
So one of the people who was her fixer, she said that, well, no, actually, she just came here to Peshawar, she just visited an IDP camp and went back, and no research was actually carried out.
So the thing was that she just, she invented numbers and put it out, and because that is the story that a lot of the Western press wanted to hear, and also the supporters of the drone attack in Pakistan wanted to hear.
So what they did is that they immediately latched onto that, and the most shocking thing was that, you know, then that story gets, those numbers get cited in places like the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times.
And so that's, in fact, that was the reason, what first prompted me to write this article for Al Jazeera, not this one, previously, and in which I expose or actually look at numbers of bogus, and I show that the reason why they are bogus.
And the thing was that soon afterwards, when an actual poll was carried out by the New America Foundation, and so they commissioned a poll inside Bata region.
So it was established very quickly that, well, one thing, majority of people oppose the drone strike.
Second thing, majority of the people also dislike the Taliban.
So being opposed to the drone strike does not mean that you are somehow a Taliban sympathizer.
In fact, one of the reasons why people do not like the drone attacks is because it has swelled the ranks of the Taliban.
Right.
Of course.
Which, I mean, I don't know, I think it's questionable whether they're meant to or not.
I guess I suppose not, but it sure seems like that's the obvious result.
And then meanwhile, you know, the polls in the rest of the country where there's not even drone strikes, or at least not very often, all the polls there say super, super majorities, way over 70 percent, 80, 90 percent of people have an unfavorable view of the United States and because of the drone strikes.
So we're supposed to believe that the people who are actually living under the buzzing bombers are the ones who like it, while everyone who's actually not under the direct threat are the ones who have a chip on their shoulder about it.
Come on.
And then the New York Times, you mentioned the New York Times, their story is that, well, Pakistanis, because they believe in Islam, they also believe in really stupid conspiracy theories like America's out to get them or something.
And that's what to that's what explains the negative poll numbers.
Yeah, I think, you know, that was sort of the rationalization that was being used and it was quite absurd to begin with.
I mean, I don't even think the word drone was in that article, actually, the one about the paranoid Islamic conspiracy theories.
It was funny.
But anyway.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is that, you know, it's always easier to dismiss your opposition as being conspiracist.
And the thing about it is the proportion of conspiracists in Pakistan is no higher than it is in other countries, certainly not more than in Washington, D.C.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, we got to go.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Thank you, Mohammed.
I really appreciate it.
It was a pleasure.
All right, everybody.
That is Mohammed Idris Ahmad writing for Al Jazeera dot com.
Obama won't end the drone war, but Pakistan might.
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