Villages in Balochistan were bombed on Pakistan's minorities day

No taxation, no representation and asking to raise the voting age to 25 - Pakistan's very non-serious government

Pakistan must not wage more war with Afghanistan

Pakistan must not go back to its war with Afghanistan. Pakistan and Afghanistan have a 46 year long history of conflict since the Soviet invasion of Kabul in 1979 and they went to war this month. The two countries then had a ceasefire over the Eid holiday.

There are people trying to set this ceasefire aflame.

Pakistan needs to maintain its ceasefire with Afghanistan and not break it. This certainly is not the time to pointlessly expend military or air force on a stupid regime next door that lacks even air defences. At this stage, keeping your powder dry, has never been a more sensible path to take. Iran next door is being bombed by America and Israel and Iran can only hit back at Israel, and the conflict is cracking the economy for everyone everywhere. At a time like this, a sudden military adventure into Afghanistan would seem like the most stupid strategic move and one that we would be foolish to resume.

Frankly, the Pakistan Army was being considered an Israeli stooge for pushing an attack on Afghanistan while both countries powerful neighbour Iran was coming under joint US-Israeli attack. What really disappointed me was that the Pakistan Army could not go even nine months without going to war. Nine months after the May 2025 India-Pakistan war, Pakistan was fighting Afghanistan. This felt embarrassing, like a true failure.

Since Pakistan stopped the bombing during Eid and has tried to act as peacemaker between Iran and America, the country's reputation has skyrocketed. The best thing to do would be to keep it up and a way to do that is to not violate the international borders of another country by attacking Afghanistan. It is one thing to have suffered and put up with the depredations of the Pakistan Army and military inside Pakistan for most of this millennium. It is adding insult and reputational damage to this country and its citizens for Pakistan’s military to violate the national sovereignty of another country (whatever condition it may be in) and bomb another neighbour of ours. Pakistan needs to keep its reputation together, because God knows when we might need the political capital soon, and maintain our ceasefire and not bomb or attack Afghanistan. Sorry if I’m really repeating myself, but in 2026 people are really dumb and cruel and act like they either don’t know anything or are actively ignoring something.

Pakistan embarrassed themselves after they bombed too large of a civilian target two weeks ago (a drug rehabilitation centre) and this country doesn’t need more controversy than it has already accumulated. The Pakistan Army pushed for the attack on Afghanistan and the Pakistan Air Force tarnished its reputation with too large of a civilian casualty on the drug rehabilitation centre that was hit. Pakistan needs to get out of this international conflict while it has an easy chance because the country and its military need to not be involved in more crimes. Political capital will also be wasted defending the Pakistan military if we are involved in a foolish war of choice in Afghanistan. The military also failed to take the chance it had in fighting during Ramzaan to surgically target Pakistani Taliban leaders via commandos and air strikes, a more rational way to fight a terrorist organisation than the massed military campaign we saw pursued. It’s better to focus on more covert or diplomatic ways of dealing with cross-border terrorism, not “Open war” against Afghanistan, as we were quoted the day before Iran was hit by Israel and America.

Locations of Pakistan-Afghan Taliban firefights and aerial bombing by Pakistan. Source: Al Jazeera.

I have also considered this question: Is the Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif and the army chief Asim Munir being fooled by Donald Trump, the American president? Here is an even more serious question: Asim Munir and Shehbaz Sharif are men who have caused the deaths of other human beings, mostly their fellow Pakistanis - so are they being fooled by Donald Trump on behalf of gold star strategic liability and global pariah extraordinaire: Israel?

The Israeli government lies every time it opens its mouth so disregarding its opinion is the most sensible path anyone can take. Their genocide in Gaza has reduced them to a mass murdering mafia with nuclear weapons. Nobody respects their government or the IDF. The problem is that for America, and this White House, you have to read them as Israel. The White House is coordinating its war against Iran, and any attached policies, in lock-step with Israel. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the Army Chief Asim Munir still love cozying up to the White House. They mutually fellate each other’s egos and it is a disgusting sight to behold. However, in this process of these insecure men pumping up each other’s ego they could be believing their own bullshit and Israel could be passing it’s plans along for Pakistan through the White House, or at least telling our government that its stupid ideas are genius moves the US will support. A stupid idea Pakistan recently had that I can think of, is attacking Afghanistan. For Israel and this White House, it could have worked, to have one Muslim country, Pakistan, attacking another Muslim country, Afghanistan, while America and Israel bomb the neighbour of both countries, Iran. This makes the region more chaotic during an unpopular military operation those two are conducting and decreases Pakistan’s political and diplomatic standing to run any interference on behalf of Iran – which it now is, with Islamabad’s hectic diplomacy on Tehran’s behalf. All of these are good enough reasons to not have the Pakistan Army or Air Force bombing Afghanistan again.

There is also the massive issues of the Pakistan Army and its behaviour. For all their self-congratulatory talk, the Pakistan Army is bad at strategy and are idiots with guns. Asim Munir has beaten down an internal schism in the officer corps of the army against pro-Imran Khan Pakistan Army officers. Creating a schism in a nuclear armed-army for Imran Khan is the definition of stupidity, but it is not discussed online or in the now very controlled Pakistani electronic media, but it is well known on the ground in Pakistan that this happened (I will discuss this later, but if you want to go down this path just start with the arrest of ex-ISI chief General Faiz and keep going) and the existence of this, uh, “conspiracy” to create a new Imran Khan hybrid regime should be enough to convince you of the amount of stupidity circulating in the Pakistan Army. The problem is, that these dumbasses have power in this country. My larger point is, we cannot discount the Pakistan Army and its religious greaser of an Army Chief from doing something particularly stupid or being enticed to or asked to do something dumb and they must be restrained by any force from doing so.

One thing that might put the brakes on Pakistan Army stupidity is that its restraint makes it look good to the public during the current Iran war. Bombing Afghanistan was part of the Pakistan Army trying to recover its opinion among the public, and this fascist route needs/or has been abandoned due to regional circumstances. China’s pressure and opinion might also have helped, as they would not be fans of more chaos while their rival the United States are acting completely mad. But in my opinion, this leadership we have with Asim Munir has slipped any serious Chinese control. The level of autonomy demonstrates no effective Chinese veto except for Beijing’s opinion.

Immediate Mercy for Refugees

One of the things I want to talk about the most is refugees. I have not spoken much about this because there is so little attention paid to it (and money is taken away from this issue and at times people who talk about it) but also governments, I must insist on this fact: governments, do not want to talk about refugees and for the last three years have been going insane against refugees. The world has turned against refugees since the ISIS wars of 2014 and 2015. I have really wanted to talk about this topic because it doesn’t just break my heart, it shatters it; that things have been bad, like really, really, really bad for refugees for the last twelve years and they have now just gotten spectacularly worse since 2023. I believe that Pakistan’s anti-refugee turn against Afghan refugees along with that of Azerbaijan when it took that part of Armenia that was disputed, Nagorno-Karabakh, and then displaced the Armenian people from there was coordinated/copied from them. Then 7 October 2023 happened and everything went to complete hell in the middle east and here we are.

Now the Israeli regime has conducted a genocide along with invading Lebanon and survivors have been reduced to internal or external refugees. One out of every five Lebanese has been driven out of their homes by the demons in the IDF. This war in Iran is turning Iranians internally into refugees in their own country.

For their sake this war has to stop. Simultaneously, Pakistan must not restart its war inside Afghanistan because it will create more refugees inside that country. Pakistan must also stop forcing refugees out of this country in lieu of an effective counter-terrorist strategy. I know for a fact that there are vultures in Pakistan’s police, in the bureaucracy and among some of the neighbours of these refugees who fantasise about the bank accounts, the property, the land, the businesses and the small middle class quantities of wealth that these Afghan refugees have accumulated over their lives and want to rush in and take it over. This is ethnic cleansing masquerading as counter-terrorism. Just off the top of my head, I can tell you, any child born in Pakistan, in this country created amidst the largest refugee crisis at the time of independence in 1947, is a Pakistani citizen. It doesn’t matter who their parent were, their kid gets to stay. I know what the factotums in the Pakistan government are up to and it’s all about the money they can stack up.

I also want to send this message to anyone from the Pakistan government: Ethnic cleansing is no substitute for a counter-terrorism strategy because I know you’re idiots and you don’t know what you are doing. Your racist garbage will bite you in your waddling ass when you’ve slandered the Afghans and the next terrorist attack happens. Everyone can then look at how much money you’ve looted and use that as an excuse to fire your incompetent discriminatory asses.

Stop persecuting refugees.

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Everyone lost except the Pakistan Air Force and China — The 2025 India-Pakistan war report

I think Pakistan's independence day is a good date to recount the near-atomic disaster the subcontinent faced in May 2025.

The living nightmare of an nuclear war breaking out in your country is something no one should have to experience. That is something I did so in Karachi, this May 2025 along with everyone else in Pakistan and India. Even though Pakistan has come out as the more successful side in the four day conflict of 7 to 10 May 2025, in its eyes and visibly, in the eyes of the world, I only don't feel victorious — I only feel lucky. I feel fortunate, that we're....still here.

Recalling the events that lead to the Indo-Pak air and missile war of May 2025 feels like staring down the barrel of a disaster that was visibly oncoming. But our government, our army, our entire fucking state, was too stupid and short-sighted to prevent it from happening. In its myopia, it's extremely far-right short-sightedness, it allowed us all to sleep-walk into a war, people are dead, and if you pointed it out before the war, you would earn a free trip in a tinted SUV for pointing out the hell we were careening into.

Those who do not learn from their own history are doomed to fight sectarian psychos in Kurram

Anybody who hates Jimmy Carter and Manmohan Singh is an ugly human being who hates peace

Jimmy Carter and Manmohan Singh were amazing men with vile successors.

Biden did the right thing by leaving Afghanistan then Jimmy Cartered his own party to advance neo-conservative American goals in the Middle East

Bloodbath after bloodbath across Balochistan

Balochistan has been in a state of mass-murder by terrorist bombing, ambushes and army counter-ambushes for the last five months. Since the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) decided to celebrate Nawab Akbar Bugti's killing on 26 August with a spate of terrorist attacks across Balochistan there have been attacks every couple of weeks since then. November saw over 200 people killed in the last month across the province.

This blood soaked November in Balochistan lead to the total number of people killed by violence since August to over 500. More than half a thousand being killed in a province by terrorism is a lot of people, and the geographic variance of the attacks obviously shows the spread of terrorist cells far and wide across its territory.

The problem however goes above and beyond the terrorists and extends into politics - the cruelty, political and material theft of the political rights of the Baloch people and their province are what is clearly feeding the violence, and frankly preventing an off-ramp from the mayhem and murder. If I went through every terrorist attack since August over here, the uptick in deaths and murders would be repulsive. What also would be repulsive would be the response, or non-response, of the Quetta provincial government that has/was put into power by the Army through the rigging of the Balochistan elections (along with the federal one) in February 2024.

Alongwith the rise in the TTP's violence in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan is facing a massive security crisis that this hybrid regime (Pakistan's fourth in six years) is frankly, not interested in competently facing. From the Taliban in Afghanistan providing a back-yard for genocidally anti-Shia Sunni terrorists to escape to, to the Baloch insurgency, to the return of the TTP and the general hostility and threat of India, especially under Modi, Pakistan has a really spiky security situation on its border and inside its home. This security crisis pre-dates Pakistan and its Army inflicting a massive political crisis on itself by rigging the February election this year that would have seen Imran Khan return to power in stunning numbers. The result shocked too many people inside Pakistan close to the beginning of 2024 and should be seen as one of the first few elections of this year's historic anti-incumbency wave. 

The insurgency in Balochistan has now been a 24 year long wound that Pakistan has inflicted on itself and frankly, the election this year could have been an off-ramp from the violence, but the Pakistan Army, with the connivance of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) decided to keep rigging the votes in Balochistan so that the Pakistan Army's disastrous, frankly, rule there could continue. What is the Pakistan Army's rule in Balochistan? Illegal mining and siphoning money off it or Pakistan Army officers owning those mines or fuel (gas or oil) wells or part of them out right. Alongside stealing Balochistan's mineral wealth, to which the Baloch and their provincial government have first rights, there are kickbacks from the provincial budget to select officers. And finally, there is the smuggling. So much money from taking kickbacks from smuggling across the frontiers of Balochistan are going into Pakistan Army officers pockets. If there was a half-way functional government from Quetta like there is in Sindh or Punjab, so much of this would, just from a jurisdictional perspective, have to be cut down to size.

The moment of the suicide bombing in Quetta, captured on surveillance video

However, the Pakistan Army's neo-colonial rule of Balochistan continues, the world has easily ignored it because of the keeping out of foreign reporters and the successful intimidation of Pakistani reporters not to cover the flood of disastrous information coming out of the province. I feel incredibly lonely being one of the few people who has, can and still write about the Balochistan conflict, but the lack of other people writing on this topic because of the Pakistan Army's successful blackout by threatening newspapers, television channels, journalists and the disappearing of journalists or their killing by them or the BLA has kept the story out of the world's eye, a tragedy for the people of Balochistan. Frankly, the only way to cover Balochistan is for foreign channels to hire a Pakistani local, have them cover the province once and just leave the country - an expensive proposition.

All that leaves us with our the extremely bloody terrorist attacks. Just to talk about what happened last month and in this one the biggest terrorist attack was the bombing of Quetta's railway station. A Baloch separatist/nationalist suicide bomber set himself off killing 32 people and injuring over 60. The crowd for the morning train out of the city to Rawalpindi were targeted, specifically a lot of soldiers from a local unit who were scheduled to leave. This indicates the terrorists have their sights set on hitting the security forces (and still have) a good understanding and local surveillance on the Pakistani military. The terrorists obviously targeted the crowd because it was the one for the train heading to Pakistan's "garrison" city; Rawalpindi.

Before the Quetta railway bombing, 9 people were killed and 29 injured in Mastung district by a bomb blast near its Civil Hospital. This vile attack happened at the beginning of November, literally 1 November 2024. Children were killed and this was absolutely heinous. If anyone wants to know why I can never give the BLA any sympathy, here you have it.

Then after the Quetta bombing, in Kalat on 17 November, a check post of the Frontier Corps was attacked by the BLA and 7 of the men were killed with 18 injured in a three hour gun battle. These were just the major attacks last month, but they indicate the pattern of the attacks. I am leaving a lot of violent incidents or attacks that failed or had smaller casualties for the sake of being concise. December in Balochistan has basically been a constant hum of disappearances, raids, scouring operations by the Pakistan Army/Frontier Corps in some areas and the loss of soldiers or paramilitaries of the Frontier Corps in ones or twos every week in encounters with militants. The province is very much insurgency struck and at the end of the day, this will require a political solution.

Frontier Corps paramilitaries controlling traffic near the checkpoint attacked in Kalat

Why the current situation is made worse is because the government is not interested in responding to this massive upsurge in terrorism. The men running the government, are by their constitution, just not willing to confront terrorism that destroys the lives of Pakistanis. That is because the men running this government are the worst boomers to emerge from the end of the Cold War. The Army Chief, Asim Munir is a deeply reactionary, actually, member of Generation-X allied with our frankly insane Prime Minister, Shahbaz Sharif, a psychotically reactionary boomer from the end of the Cold War (I will write a profile about Shahbaz Sharif some time later). Forget conservativism, the levels of reaction among two men who lived through the end of the Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship and thought it was so good they should join it, Asim Munir by signing up for the Pakistan Army and Shahbaz Sharif by co-signing off to his elder brother becoming the puppet chief minister of Punjab province for the dictator Zia-ul-Haq.

Does Balochistan need new elections?

As for Balochistan, the place frankly needs a new election to a provincial government that is actually freely elected, the stopping of federal officers from looting the minerals of that place and a cessation of violence. The elections should be fair and without interference by the Pakistan Army or Frontier Corps because we saw in February how the public and political parties in the province easily recognise a fixed election. After the votes were rigged earlier this year protests and multiple riots broke out across Balochistan with the traditional political parties there up in arms and leading the protests. The current Chief Minister of Balochistan Sarfaraz Bugti Is a product of that rigged election and is running the province after defecting to the PPP, who are nominally supposed to be running the province, but are really just providing cover to this puppet of the Pakistan Army to be a figurehead for military control of Balochistan. Frankly, I think Sarfaraz Bugti is in over his head and too incompetent to run a war-ridden province.

A map of all the places that where a terrorist attack happened on 26 August 2024. Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1854838

In August over 12 cities were attacked by the Baloch separatists across the province. I wondered then if Pakistan was going to take Baloch grievances seriously now or was it going to wait until 20 cities went up in flames. Let me also say, there is pretty much a continuum from the elections being stolen in February, to terrorist groups having enough sympathy and room to maneuvre for a dozen cities to see terrorists attacks in August. This is why I think an election for a new provincial assembly and chief minister should be called in Balochistan.

I know a free and open election, where the Baloch and everyone who lives there elects who they want, will not immediately end the violence or make the militant groups go away. But the people will at least have their representatives in power, they can decide their priorities, an elected provincial government will have responsibility for its own internal security. A new provincial election for the province, without military interference is a hard ask, but it is a necessity for an off-ramp from this thrum of violence. To get to some peace, an actual freely elected representation for Balochistan would be a start.

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Pakistan's Minority Day at Frere Hall

Have you ever gotten news that just made you happy? Well I did last Friday when I opened the newspaper and was extremely pleasantly surprised to see the announcement of a Minority March – a pro-religious minority march patterned on the successful feminist Aurat March that happens in Frere Hall, Karachi and across Pakistani cities every 8 March.

It was great to see that a group of Pakistani minority activists plus the famous Sheema Kermani, had planned to hold a minority rights march ala the women’s march. Except this would be on 11 August, a day that was declared 13 years ago as Pakistan’s national minority day. This was in memory of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah (called by Pakistanis as the Quaid-e-Azam aka the great leader) making what is generally understood as a quite secular a speech on 11 August 1947. On that day Muhammad Ali Jinnah said, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

It was in rememberance of that statement in 2011 (and a lot of mobilisation and organisation amidst the mass murder of the Pakistani Taliban in the years prior to that, especially the murder of Governor Salmaan Taseer) which saw 11 August officially declared Pakistan’s national minority day. So the organisers of the Minority Rights March (who held this event last year) held a press conference at the Karachi Press club last week to announce that they would hold their protest at Frere Hall (the park and colonial era town hall) and march out from there. Sheema Kermani was at the presser and tried to give what became a rally a neutral position. Kermani pointed out that the Minority Rights March is not a political party or NGO when she said, “We are just an organic movement of people who have come together for a good cause. The majority can defend the minority.”

The march's list of demands - click on them to read them

The Hindu and Christian minority activists spoke about the broken promises of the Pakistani state and they also made a point that minorities from India, to Pakistan to Europe and North America have made: The minorities were the original inhabitants of the land. Whether its Hindus in Pakistan or Muslims from India, they are from the land and these countries are their countries as well.

As we got to 11 August, we heard that permission for the march had been taken away, but the organisers decided to go ahead. A Karachi bureaucrat said that there was a terrorist threat — it turned out to be the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan who specialise more in sectarian rioting, assassinations and blasphemy mobs rather than bombing.

So on 11 August 2024, the march happened at Frere Hall. It was supposed to be the starting point for the march, but it instead was restricted into just being a rally in the park. When I approached the location, I found that both the major streets that Frere Hall is bound by had shipping containers on them. The police had done that and I found that all entrances to Frere Hall’s park had been restricted except one. The police presence was heavy and visible all around the block that Frere Hall’s at.

As I saw the mix of regular police, Special Security Unit (essentially SWAT cops), riot cops and traffic police I had a hard time making out the poor volunteers for the minority march.

The massive police presence confirmed what I had heard — there were Islamist TLP counter-protestors afoot. They were the ones who didn’t want this march to take place, but the protest had begun with the rally in Frere Hall amidst the rain.

The rain made things...kind of strange and odd. I had to park in an incredibly unusual way, worrying about what would happen with the car if I left it where it did. Then I had to skirt around standing pools of water/sewage and get to the entrance all while it was not even raining, but drizzling, making everything slimy and disgusting. It really felt like between the right wing and the security forces of this country, we were going to have to wade through garbage to get basic liberal rights. Seriously, a minority march is not a particularly radical thing, but in Karachi on 11 August 2024, even having what turned out to be just a heavily policed rally for minority rights felt like a dicey affair. And the policing may have been loudly stated by the cops and government for “our protection” but considering the number of normal people who were trying to attend the march in Frere Hall, the police presence just felt intimidating and lent an oppressive air to the day’s proceedings. The police were visibly scattered throughout Frere Hall, even after you entered through the single metal detector-ed entrance.

However once I was in, it was good to see that the rally was happening. There were performances on stage that covered the horror of forced conversion of young minority girls and the lynching of people accused of blasphemy. This was all done in the style of South Asian street theatre. There were little flags which said “Stop forced conversions” and I took pictures and waved one of them. That, the plays on stage, the speeches and the crowd made the event really nice, while you were there. It was a benign middle class sort of affair. The march's list of demands was something that is important and needs to be implemented for the sake of minorities in Pakistan. If you discuss each of them, you can point to some horrible act of persecution in the past that lead to the creation of that demand.

The weather was overcast and threatened to rain. The real problem that was made apparent as I spent more time there amid the over-policed event was, that there was not going to be a march despite what the title of the event being “The Minority March.” I started asking the cops about the TLP presence and how far away it was. They either lied or pretended not to know anything. Typical cops. After being told, “I don’t know” twice by cops when I was asking how far away the fundamentalist protestors of the TLP were from the event, one policeman just lied and said they had dispersed. You can listen to what a cop says, but don’t believe what they say until you have proof or evidence of what these people are saying.

I spoke to one of the protestors and they gave me the details: The TLP were some distance away, the heavy police presence had kept them from getting to where the protest was and because of the presence of the TLP, the organisers of the march had restricted themselves to just holding a rally within Frere Hall, and not to march to the Press Club, or even outside the perimeter of Frere Hall, as originally planned. The attendee conceded that at least the Minority March had happened as a rally that day and stated that even having the event, as it was, had been an achievement. In light of the TLP threat, this person, who was a relative of one of the organisers of the march, seemed slightly relieved.

Attendants watching a street theatre play on people being oppressed by blasphemy allegations and religious oppression 

Between the crazed threats from the TLP and the security overkill that seemed to be posting forces from five to six police stations, there was some disappointment and a sense of subdued feelings at what should have been a polite, but fun political summer event. That just to have, what by 21st century standards would be a run off the mill affair — a rally for minority rights —  had, no thanks to fundamentalists and frankly, an administration and a city/province bureaucracy that doesn't want to deal with the problem of fundamentalists, become an affair where one had to hunt for a location to get off their vehicle, trudge through mud to a security point over a long distance, and only then could you enter the arena. No thanks to the threats faced, there would also be no public march through the streets, and so the event ends with people milling around and then walking or trudging back to their vehicles through that single security point. It's the fundamentalist TLP and their supporters and the PPP people who run Sindh and Karachi who are the problem.

"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

  - Office Space, talking about the TLP and their supporters in the public and the Pakistani state

A large poster showing the dangers minorities in Pakistan face as a Snakes and Ladders board game

While I was there, I hung around for nearly an hour and as the evening wore on, and the rain slowly came down, I decided to leave, but also check the TLP situation, after I exited Frere Hall. I drove around and found that traffic from Shahrah-e-Faisal (Karachi's main central road) past the abandoned Metropole Hotel, was choked, likely because of the TLP march that the cops were earlier denying. The entire street where Shahrah-e-Faisal terminates and leads to Frere Hall, had been blocked by shipping containers placed by the police. Later it was revealed by the Dawn newspaper that fundamentalists on motorcycles had been trying to probe the perimeter of the event by driving up and seeing if they could get past the cops or security. The traffic situation I saw after leaving the event, with the shipping containers, the traffic jams and everything and the news from the next day, justified the air of menace that seemed to pervade the perimeter and beyond of the event. The police lied, and the fundamentalists tried to be a pain. What should have been a celebratory affair, felt a little grim once you weren’t in it. The fundamentalists need to be exiled beyond the back of society. However, I’m at least glad that an in-person, physical event, a protest for minority rights in Pakistan was held.

Politics year at These Long Wars

You may have noticed there have been a lot of elections this year  - and for better or worse, they have effected the wars that have been going on. We're leaving judgement out until winter, but the effects of these elections on conflict has been for the worse. So we'll have to talk about them. I'm not the only person whose noticed how 2024 has been the year of elections across the globe.

Honest Government Ad | Democracy Ad — Banned in India

A decisive knockout blow to reactionaries and wannabe fascists was not delivered by many of these votes. However, the replacement of some egregious governments, especially in the UK and the prospect of a new, explicitly left-wing Prime Minister in France, are a good development. However, the fact that so many people around the world have voted has been globally for the better for democracy and freedom. It at least puts to bed one particularly crazed argument broached by the satirical Honest Government ad, that right-wingers and various wannabe dictatorial types have, which is that people don't care about voting or democracy. 

Some of the more strange things that happened this year were when Iran, Pakistan and Russia held votes, with the most disappointing and obviously faked "results" while the crazed government of Israel is avoiding having an election Then there's the fact that India is still lead by a man, in the person of Narendra Modi, who is still haunted by mentions of the riots and pogroms he oversaw 22 years ago. The first ex-president ever was convicted of a crime in the 248 year history of the United States of America.

Since I'll be talking about elections and politics in the rest of 2024, I'll talk about some other social and economic topics as well. These issues might have some political salience - they may also be personal opinions. Since I think it's relevant to talk about other stuff besides conflict for 2024 (I'll still mostly be talking about conflicts), I think it might be good to clear these matters as well.

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Corrupt Cold Wars

It's politics month at These Long Wars!

Since the election I've been meaning to dedicate a month talking about politics - just getting my views and opinions on current issues that aren't related to conflict out there and I think after a government's been installed after a frankly, badly rigged election, I think this might be a decent enough time to write these things down. We didn't get much of an option in February 2024 but the election and its results were worse than a person who wanted democracy to grow in Pakistan, could expect. I had started this blog with the expectation that arguments about democracy and dictatorship in Pakistan were behind us but after the February 2024 elections were rigged by the Pakistan Army against Imran Khan, the whole situation post 8 February reeks of the Musharraf era, when the military pushed out an authoritarian minded right-winger (Nawaz Sharif then, Imran Khan now) to take control of the whole country then, and effectively we are confronted with the same situation now, just through a few more civilian layers.

 

My modus operandi since 2010 has been covering terrorist attacks in Pakistan via my blog. Frankly, the Pakistan government would prefer that attention not be drawn to them, but that’s because their incompetence and collusion in cases has caused these attacks to break out. The reality is, I would prefer to cover the peaceful end of the conflicts Pakistan is involved with internally and externally. But since the Pakistan Army has a chokehold on Pakistani politics and much of Pakistan’s political elite cannot imagine, or would prefer not to take responsibility for Pakistan’s security, the violence is not going to completely go away because that would be unfavorable to the Pakistan Army’s position as a perpetual nuisance in Pakistani politics.

However, that’s just my personal views on Pakistani political violence and terrorism. Pakistani politics has degenerated further this year, making the Pakistan Army’s position stronger, 16 years after the Musharraf dictatorship was ousted. The Army’s position has been strengthened but this has also made politics more volatile. This has come to the point where political violence can (and has) broken out because of the destabilisations caused by the Pakistan Army blocking democratic consolidation in the country.

You may have noticed I don't discuss politics that much. I think that talking about Pakistani politics on a regular basis, day in and day out, taxes the sanity of a person. For one thing, nothing materially changes, and the absurdity and enforced austerity, both material and spiritual of Pakistani politics, just taxes you if you discuss it regularly. This is why I haven’t started some stupid podcast or Youtube channel that tracks Pakistani politics. This stuff is insane and more like professional wrestling, with the real deals being done behind backdoors. However, surprise, surprise, elections have come to have significance in Pakistan. But the rightwing, which is 80% of the state and the politics, hates this.

People who discuss Pakistani politics are not normal. It is distorted by the military and intelligence, it acquires a weird sheen and behaviour, and I have realised that weirdness works in favour of the military and the spies (and in other spy or police derived politics) because it alienates regular people and that would hurt the people they are against. At least when you cover a terrorist attack, the casualties make a material difference from before and after the attack.

Pakistani politics is in such a bad place that any reactionary should love it. And they do, by regularly engaging with it to make it more deadly and reactionary. That is not what I am here for.

I also need to discuss society and demographics as well. Don't worry - I mean demographics in the purely census terms. Things like infant mortality, maternal mortality and education rates, etc. One of the reasons Pakistan’s population has continued to shoot up is because this country continues to have a maternal and infant mortality rate that is among the highest in Asia (CHECK) And this necessitates poor people in Pakistan to have a large number of children so that they survive infancy. Of course so many are surviving but the disastrous part of my country’s politics and vicious non-priorities is that it never tackled its third world rate of infant and maternal mortality effectively. The result is that if you are below a certain income level the chances of the survival of your baby and the mother declines catastrophically. This is a consequence of Pakistan’s politicians never, ever tackling population growth issues and especially their lack of tackling maternal and infant mortality – consequently, too many dead mothers and babies.

The Pakistan Army keeps the Balochistan Insurgency going

The Baloch nationalist parties, from across all of the ethnicities there, called for a general strike on 18 February across the province. Balochistan went on strike against Pakistan's election results in the provine.

Pakistan's political leadership needs to quickly stand up a coalition government

Pakistan's political leadership has a chance to re-calibrate the state and enforce civilian supremacy if they unite. The overwhelming turnout of the Pakistani voter has handed the civilian leadership of the country a historic chance to push back against the generals. 

The election of 2024 was supposed to happen in 2023. After Imran Khan's government was removed in a vote of no confidence in 2002, after the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) along with some smaller parties joined together in the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) to oust Imran's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government. The PDM saw the chance to take control of the government and they did, with former three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's brother Shahbaz Sharif becoming the new Premier of Pakistan after Imran Khan. This guy was and is, a crazy extremist and he lived up to the reputation he had gathered as the manic Chief Minister of Pakistan's largest province, Punjab. He spent a week complaining about blasphemy against Islam in Sweden (a statement would have been enough) while causing back breaking inflation in Pakistan by implementing an IMF plan that saw oil prices double along with the cost of everything else in the country. Shahbaz was notorious during his stints as Chief Minister of Punjab for having terrorists from Islamic extremist groups killed extra-judicially by the Punjab police. This guy was (and is) nuts. Maybe all of this is why when his family's party went to the polls on Thursday, the entire country just seemed to kick his brother's party in the teeth.

Source: Al Jazeera.

The Imran Khan government was called a hybrid regime because it was brought into power by the Army. Hopes that the PDM government of Shahbaz Sharif would prove itself as a re-assertion of some actual democracy were dashed when it became clear that the extra-judicial disappearances and tortures would continue. This hybridity was enforced by Shahbaz's strange and maniacal behaviour along with his and his party and allies willingness to be used as a cover by the Pakistan Army to institute un-popular structural adjustments by the IMF and the World Bank that doubled prices in the second half of 2022 and through 2023. The floods in August 2022 made things worse. The consequences of all this was felt in the spring of 2023 when Imran Khan and his party suicide bombed the constitutional structre of Pakistan by rioting across the country and attacking Army bases when now ex-PM Imran Khan was faced with his first arrest. This stupid Pakistani reboot of the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol gave the Army carte blanche to start not just arresting, but kidnapping and torturing members of Imran Khan's party, disappearing them into military dungeons and doing this especially to the leadership of the party. Once the PTI attacked Pakistan Army bases (frankly, more like rioted at their entrances) the military used this to declare open season on the PTI, treated the whole party as a threat to the Pakistan Army and dismantled the above-ground manifestations of the party. This lead to multiple arrests of the leadership and countless cases against Imran Khan. The PDM went along with this madcap and extra-constitutional response by the army and cemented itself as a second manifestation of a hybrid regime.

When Shahbaz Sharif stepped down in August 2023 for the interim government to hold elections, instead of a normal campaign period, we were confronted by the third manifestation of a hybrid regime. This got bad very quickly, it's still around like a bad STD and it tried to pretend it was a real government. The "interim government" delayed the elections by another three months, instead of holding the vote by August as it was constitutionally required. This bending of the constitution, along with the lack of provincial government that Khyeber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab have suffered from for a year have left the country in a severe case of a sort of constitutional drift. That interim government was stuffed with clowns from the puppet government the Pakistan Army had created to run Balochistan through a fake party in 2018, as they strong-armed Imran Khan into the centre. They ran Pakistan as disastrously for six months as they had Balochistan for five years. The economy nose-dived, terrorism rose and they tried to ethnically cleanse Afghan refugees from Pakistan to pressure the Afghan Taliban and in lieu of actually having a counter-terrorism plan where one part of the government doesn't go chasing terrorists while another part of the Pakistan Army is propping up fundamentalists. The arrests and pre-poll rigging against the PTI's members and leaders continued while the media continued to be pushed against the wall and enforced disappearances and torture continued to be used as instruments of policy and governance. PTI election candidates would turn up to register and they would be arrested. The most insane and egregious part of this pre-poll rigging, that will be discussed in history book, is how PTI candidates were denied a single unified symbol (for example the PPP has an arrow and the PML-N has a tiger). While every PPP or PML-N candidate across the country has an arrow or a tiger next to their name, the PTI was effectively de-registered as a party and if it's candidates hadn't been tortured or bribed to jump ship to another party, the remaining candidates of the PTI were forced to run as "indpendents" with their own separate symbols across every single constituency. So rather than vote for a cricket bat, these "independents" (effectively PTI) ran with strange symbols like pans, beds, ceiling fans, drums, etc. 

The interim "government" also spent half of its six months, not announcing an election date with the day of the vote being subject to a vicious rumour mongering campaign that alleged it would be delayed. The result was confusion and an election campaign that did not get off the ground until one month before the voting started. But then people voted on 8 February and it created the crisis we are expriencing now.

Suddenly, a 100 "independents" have been elected to parliament, by an angered PTI voter base that coordinated voting across mobile phones and the internet and a bunch of, dare I say it, Pakistani swing voters, who didn't want their democracy taken away by the generals.

Polling staff count ballots after voting ends in Hyderabad. Source: BBC

At this stage, with the PML-N coming in second and the PPP third, when no one party has reached a majority so a coalition will have to be formed. The serious advice that's coming in is telling the PML-N and PPP to sort of go ahead with, frankly, in some sense the now successful Army plan to have the PML-N in government by creating a coalition. This coalition needs to grow the economy, keep the army of its back and try to work for some kind of civilian supremacy. The hybridity of Pakistan's system has to be exorcised in one way or another. Frankly, I would prefer immediate civilian supremacy.

The messing with Pakistan's politics since 2017, especially the imposition of what have now been three back to back hybrid regimes has lead Pakistan to a social, political, economic and security disaster. All that's left is military disaster (and you can make a case that's happened in Balochistan) and you can basically make a case for full state failure at that point. The path out of this is a coalition that focuses on growing the economy and fixing Pakistan's economic problems. The voters were the heroes on 8 February and provided the people in power a way out by showing up and demonstrating a full democracy is what they care about, with a nearly 50% participation rate in the country that now has the fifth largest population in the world (our demographic explosion is a discussion for a different day).

To anyone who is sarcastic about Pakistan holding elections, I would remind them that tens of millions of people voted to try and make their voice heard in government. Frankly, considering the history of Pakistani democracy, the very act of holding these elections was important, has moved us forward and structurally changed politics inside Pakistan.

Source: Al Jazeera.

If anyone wants to talk about an extreme military option for the Pakistan Army to reassert power over the country, there is the example of Burma and Sudan to contemplate, where the state (and army) is falling apart in the face of a pro-democracy insurgency and where the state already broke up after mass oppression over a decade ago, the elite haven't learnt a lesson and are going to go break something further again. The Pakistan Army still has all its cards and just be keeping quiet it can keep them. Despite being in the same region (and sharing a former part of Pakistan with it) the Pakistan Army should also know when it's lost and not proceed with the Burma Progression.

Frankly, the Pakistan Army and especially its high command has demonstrated gross incompetence. General Bajwa created project Imran Khan and it blew up in his face. He was encouraged to do this from abroad, especially from European countries, but launching Imran Khan was a domestic Pakistan Army initiative to try and carve space away from the political parties that had signed the charter of democracy. Then when it blew up, the current leadership under General Asim Munir collaborated with a second hybrid regime and created a third one, while intensifying the oppression experienced in Balochistan and spreading it to the rest of the country. That has now blown up in their face.

The Pakistan Army and its stooges in the interim government spent a year making a mockery of democracy and now with warnings poring in from the world's foreign offices, it has had a mockery made of itself and Pakistan.

The problem is that Pakistan and especially the Pakistan Army never loses an opportunity to lose an opportunity. However the generals are now working in a more restricted landscape and they need to be further turfed out of policy making. If nothing else, the voters have shown they want this. 

Late Evening at the Karachi Police Office versus the TTP

There was a terrorist attack yesterday at the central Karachi Police Office (KPO) close to downtown Karachi. This was not a police station but rather a central office for senior members of the Karachi police, that was stormed at 7:10 pm by a group of terrorists from the Pakistani Taliban. They took over the building and held people who were still in the offices, hostage. This set off a three hour plus stand-off and storming off the building to take it back from the three terrorists who attacked it.

The police running across Shahrah-e-Faisal to the KPO from the Finance and Trace Centre side of the road

I was deeply shocked that the TTP would choose such an obvious hard target to assault with only gunmen (armed with bombs and grenades, but still) but thankfully they couldn't pull off a car bombing like they did a decade ago on a police HQ further in towards downtown Karachi. The KPO office is also shocking because I am incredibly familiar with that place's lay out. It is opposite Gora Qabristan (the Christian graveyard) which is a historic landmark in Karachi, well known to commuters, and the interchange the KPO is on at the intersection of Shahrah-e-Faisal (Karachi's main thoroughfare that leads directly to the airport) and Korangi road (which leads across the Malir river to the sprawling Korangi peninsula and its industrial area). There is security in all four directions around the KPO and within minutes of the firing and explosions, police and the paramilitary rangers began converging on the scene. The terrorists probably chose the location for maximum shock and because since the Pakistan Super League is happening, to implicitly threaten this large cricket event because the cricketers (Pakistani and foreign players) have to travel along Shahrah-e-Faisal.

You can see the KPO building in the beginning of this video (Sidenote - I get to use the red circle now!)

The return of the Pakistani Taliban

Writing about violence in Karachi really makes me feel cheap - like I'm competing for eyeball space with the maila creeps at ARY or some shitty nationalistic blog or Facebook group or Twitter account called Pak-Patriot-$tr0nG. I'm over a decade removed from the Pakistani blog scene but hey the TTP are back no thanks to the Afghan Taliban taking over that country and letting those bastards loose, and the online astro-turf ultra-nationalist types won't admit that Pakistani policy lead to this Pakistani disaster. That however, is my general stance. 90% of what goes wrong in Pakistan is because of the failure of Pakistani policy, and the resurgence of the Pakistani Taliban is because of the Imran Khan/Pakistan Army hybrid regime's policy of helping the Afghan Taliban foist themselves on to that country. Pakistan deserves at least a fifth or a quarter of the reason why the Afghan Taliban took over.

The previous Afghan government had jailed so many of the Pakistani Taliban who had ran to that country and the Afghan Taliban let them loose. Then the Imran Khan/Pakistan Army combine decided to resettle the TTP people down in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa/ex-FATA districts where they were from/had terrorised (!) to the effect you would expect. The bombings and shootings and assassinations that have been going on since last Novemeber, when the Pakistani Taliban called off their "ceasefire the day that Army Chief General Bajwa, the nexus of the previous Imran Khan hybrid regime retired. So we have been facing this campaign of terrorist attacks for three months, which have crescendoed every month with the Bannu army jail uprising by TTP prisoners in December, the Peshawar bombing of the police mosque that killed over a hundred people, 90% of them policemen, 20 days ago, and now this attack on a nerve centre of the Karachi police's command, which was and is intended as a spectacular demonstration of the TTP's reach and capacity. There is certainly reach and capacity, but thankfully not the rat-a-tat consistency of dozens dead, which we saw over a decade ago.

The Afghan Taliban do not have the capacity (I think) to help the Pakistani Taliban mount a successful campaign to overthrow the Pakistan government. They don't have the breadth of resources the Pakistan government (or actually Army) offered them to reciprocate in the same way that the Pakistani Taliban want them to do for them. And the Afghan Taliban want to help the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Talibanise Pakistan. The best they can do right now is offer TTP terrorists a bolthole and a place to store their weapons caches and a place to organise eye-catching terrorist attacks from, like we saw yesterday and in Peshawar. Imran Khan and his regime's supporters should always be reminded that they helped cause this. Meanwhile, the police and spies of Pakistan should hunt down the Pakistani Taliban inside this country. There is no need to roll artillery or tanks, because (I think) at this stage the Pakistani Taliban do not control territory inside Pakistan. If there is any information to the contrary, well, get in touch with me through the comments.

Yesterday's attack was disturbing, but it's not like the Pakistani state doesn't have the capacity to confront it. However due to the Pakistan Army's decision to overthrow the previous Afghan government and to try and bend democracy inside this country into a one-party hybrid regime (and Imran Khan and his people's decision to be the vehicle for with this madness) innocent people are going to continue to die in further terrorist attacks by the TTP, because they have safe boltholes in Afghanistan.

The pattern of terrorist attacks in Karachi the last few years

Since the last PML-N government in 2018, which unleashed the Pakistan Rangers and police on militants in Karachi to end the violence of the post-Musharraf era, the nature of terrorist attacks has changed in this city. Mass casualty attacks with dozens of victims are a little harder to organise due to increased police presence and the Pakistan Rangers (who are corrupt but do flood the zone) being here. Increased coordination via the Chief Minister Sindh has had since 2015, Murad Ali Shah has also helped the security situation. His relative youth and active demeanour compared to his predecessor have been to the province's and his political advantage.

What we see now are spectacular gun and bomb attacks, like the Baloch militants who attacked the Chinese consulate in November 2018, the other attack they committed in June 2020 on the Karachi Stock Exchange, the bombing in Saddar last year by Sindhi nationalists and their campaign of terror and attacks against ethnic Chinese Pakistanis who work as traditional dentists. Guns, grenades even suicide jackets - but no cars filled to the brim with explosives - are what has been used to commit terrorist attacks in Karachi over the last half decade, unlike what used to happen 8 to 15 years ago. I can't guarantee it will stay that way.

Video from inside the KPO allegedly during the firefight with the terrorists

Back at the KPO

So the Karachi Police Office was taken back within three and a half hours by a combination of Karachi police and Pakistan Rangers with two policemen, a ranger and a civilian killed. Along with these four innocents, the three terrorists were killed, so the casualties for this terrorist attack were seven dead. You can fudge the numbers and only count the non-terrorists dead, but seven dead, even including the suicidal attackers, is a serious number killed.

To their credit at least, police and rangers immediately ran from every direction at the KPO building, especially since it was located at such a ridiculously central location and surrounded the building. The terrorists didn't even last the night, but they got the attention they wanted. However this should spur the crypto-fascist neo-Islamist weirdos who run this country's government to stop giving the TTP any space. Doing that is a fool's errand and will get Pakistanis killed. Which frankly some of the people in our government don't mind, but people in and outside this country will ask questions and that'll make those reactionaries look bad.

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Didn't we have a bunch of terrorist attacks? Shahbaz Sharif needs to call parliament and stop waiting on the PTI

The first sentence of this headline was originally written on 31 July 2020 during the hybrid regime/premiership of Imran Khan. It is being rescued and repurposed for current events.

Pakistan has faced a spate of terrorist attacks since last November when the Pakistan Army chief who held up the previous hybrid regime stepped down and the Pakistani Taliban restarted their campaign against this country. After the horrible bombing in Peshawar that killed a 101 people, 90% of them policemen on 30 January, the PML-N government wanted to call an all party conference.

The PTI, the previous government, did not respond and kept attacking the current PML-N government in the face of the horrific bombing that had happened and the calls for unity against the Pakistani Taliban. Imran Khan, the PTI’s leader’s, pro-Taliban rhetoric has been well known at this time, along with his unwavering characterisation of the PML-N which runs Pakistan now as thieves. Whatever. The Taliban are murderers. Basic morality would dictate uniting against murderers. But no. The PTI would not climb off its high horse over the mere issue of a 101 charred and crushed corpses of policemen in Peshawar. So here we are. There is no direction to Pakistan’s attempt to counter the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) campaign against it. The PTI would also not cooperate, because its actions, in welcoming the overthrow of the previous Afghan government next door, that had imprisoned the TTP members who had been captured in Afghanistan, and were now freed by the Taliban, to the crazy idea in which it resettled (!) those TTP members in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa districts they had previously terrorised, had also contributed to the problem of the TTP’s resurgence.

In the face of the PTI’s intransigience, I think it is time that the PML-N government of Shahbaz Sharif make a move that strengthens democracy, rather than privatising it among an alliance of parties, and calls a session of parliament to discuss the issue of terrorism, the TTP’s resurgence and how to counter it. It would definitely be more democratic, clear the air as everyone gets to have their say and would be more within the ambit of the constitution than an “All Parties Conference.” There's something about not having this debate in parliament that strikes me as anti-democratic. I know also that Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif is essentially a far-right man and strengthening democracy is never front and centre with his plans, but in the face of the pointlessness of engaging with those who ignore or make excuses for the Taliban like the PTI and its leader, and the resurgence of the TTP, we are left with no choice but to have parliament debate how to deal with these terrorists.

And hey – Ali Wazir’s free and he will get to have his say! I’m up for it.

Ali Wazir, MNA from South Waziristan and Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) leader, has been released from Karachi prison. PHOTO: TWITTER/@mjdawar

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Pakistani views on the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban

The world is surprised, and now even memeing, about the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the outside country most responsible for this (unless you count America and the stupidity of its occupation strategies as the most responsible) there have been broadly three camps on this. The majority feeling was one of awkwardness, trepidation and a calling of the equivalent of councils of war. In the Army Chief’s staff rooms, in the Prime Minister’s and Chief Ministers and political party heads’ secretariats and across media stations in Pakistan, the national security and Afghanistan experts were on display and they were giving their council to their respective audiences on what was happening with the fall of Kabul and what it meant.

 
A smaller minority was one that was sometimes part of this but also openly condemning the takeover of the Taliban. Honourable mention should go to the Women’s Democratic Front for openly condemning the takeover of Afghanistan and various branches of Pakistan’s new-on-the-scene Aurat March (Women’s March) parroted their view. Frankly, I am very happy for the Aurat Marchers to get an explicit foreign policy – that would be cool. The PPP, as far as I can tell did not explicitly condemn the Taliban takeover in Kabul and as far as I know, no Pashtun nationalist formation did either, although if the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement did, I am waiting for their views.

 

The official Pakistan government view, of the foreign ministry, the part allegedly controlled by Imran Khan says that they will not stick their neck out as an individual country and will only recognise Taliban control of Afghanistan if a group of countries, likely Russia, China and Iran, all simultaneously recognise the Taliban's control of Kabul. I used the word alleged, because the foreign ministry takes its marching orders from the Pakistan Army's General Hear Quarters, Imran Khan is fine with that, and so the foreign ministry's views are the Army and establishment's views. Honestly, the Taliban victory in Afghanistan feels like the logical end of the hybrid regime and a subsidiary or partial objective of the Pakistan Army engineering Imran Khan into office. It's like when Imran Khan became Prime Minister, one of the things the Army wanted was the Afghan Taliban taking over that country. Now these fools have to deal with the consequences of getting what they want.

Lastly, I have to mention the Taliban supporters. From heads of religious groups, to Taliban and ’80’s Afghan Mujahideen fanboys in the Pakistani media, this was, I feel, an even smaller group, restricted by age, that was openly hailing the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. It really was/is a sight to behold to see men in the media, of or beyond retirement age, hailing the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban – a sick joke. My guess is younger fans of the Taliban were either intelligently hiding, or more likely taking part in either jihadi ops or doing propaganda or harassment for the Taliban. So the pro-Taliban crowd inside Pakistan might be quieter than its portrayed – a bit like Italy after it switched ides in WWII to join the Allies against Germany.

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General Bajwa, please retire

This blog was previously published on 28 November 2019 and is being re-published, like many recovered blogposts, over here.

There has been a crisis of governance in Pakistan over the last few days as the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) controlled government of Prime Minister Imran Khan has abandoned all its governance reponsibilities to try and get General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) an extension of three more years.

Now he is about to begin a period as Army Chief, beyond his entitlement. Unlike calling for his firing, like I did the last time a COAS got an extension, I will take a more measured approach to what should be done here. Let's look at the era that General Bajwa inhabited as the leader of Pakistan's 550,000 man army.

Since General Bajwa came to power in late November 2016, (coincidentially, after Donald Trump secured a victory in the 2016 US elections, distracting the US from political developments across the world) he has presided over, in the words of former columnist Cyril Almeida, "the greatest rollback of civil liberties, political rights and media freedom in a generation."

More dissident parts of the media came under active surveillance, Pakistani Facebook bloggers were picked up with accusations of first blasphemy, then switching to allegations of personal corruption, and the PML-N's political activists (and those of other non military allied political formations) were pursued and locked up with a vengeance throughout 2017.

The Prime Minister at that time, Nawaz Sharif, of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), was under a serious cloud of scandal from his relation to the Pakistan section of the Panama Paper leaks. This had emboldened the reactionary right wing under Imran Khan and his PTI party as well as other the reactionary segments of the political opposition, the media, and much of the army which was not happy with him due to his consolidating position as Prime Minister and pursued a whisper campaign against him as a tainted friend of Pakistan's rival, India.

This all came to a head with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's removal from power in July 2017 and his succession by the hapless Shahid Khaqan Abbasi as Pakistan's new Prime Minister.

This win for the military and reactionary nationalist segments of the state are consolidated by the months long crisis that happens in Pakistan at the hands of the extremists of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasollullah (TLYRA) .

Abbasi's months old government is then hounded by sit-ins in the capital by the sectarian extremists of the TLYRA who created such an air of fanaticism that a PML-N minister, Ahsan Iqbal was shot at and nearly died.

With the government on the ropes, the country went into an election in 2018 that was charged with mounting repression of the media by the state, of the political government's party members or their allied groups coming under mounting threats and oppression and a society that was being repressed by anti-blasphemy paranoia, turbo charged by roaming fanatics who claimed to be partisans of the Prophet of Islam, in an anti-Ahmedi sort of way that cut into the PML-N's own anti-Ahmedi, pro-blasphemy votebank.

So the election of July 2018 happens and the margin of difference between the PTI and the PML-N is the approximately 4 million votes half of which go to the TLYRA's political formation, the TLP. Clearly, Imran Khan's two decades of political demonisation of the not very above board PML-N and PPP has paid off and now Mr Imran Khan is Pakistan's Prime Minister.

The banned cover of Sohail Warraich's 2010 book “Yay Company Nahi Chalay Gi” (This Company Will Not Run) all copies of which were confiscated from its publisher in Lahore.

As his governance begins, the abysmal and darkly comic performance of his government at the federal centre of Pakistan lay bare the Prime Minister's incompetence and ignorance of governance. There is a balance of payment crisis and the government mis-judges India's mood as friendly, when the newly re-elected Narendra Modi government clamps down on Kashmir instead of opening up with it's fellow religio-nationalist reactionaries across the border. Active moves to suppress the opposition and the media continue from 2018 into 2019. It is small wonder that this political government has been called a hybrid regime and seen as being hand-in-glove with the Pakistan Army.

All this time, General Bajwa stood in the background, the shady shogun of a reactionary nationalist, allegedly democratic dispensation. Unlike previous Army Chiefs this century, such as Generals Raheel Sharif, Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and Pervez Musharraf, there is very little critique published in regards to him.

Since I've read very few printed critiques of General Bajwa I had only a basic frame with which to describe him. It made writing this blog feel a little strange. Like flexing a numb hand.

However, watching events this week, an old quote from General Musharraf's decade-long dictatorship came to mind: the graveyards are full of indispensible men.

Imran Khan's government granted General Bajwa an extension in August 2019. However, when it was challenged this week in the Supreme Court, the retiring Chief Justice decided to take up the petition on a suo motu basis and simply questioned the legality of the extension. When it came up that the extension had no basis in the law, the reactionary nationalist PTI moved to quickly change the law. This lead to the situation we are in now, where the decision to extend an Army Chief's tenure has now been kicked into parliament.

For one military bureaucrat, the Army Chief, the entire federal machinery of Pakistan has ground to a halt to shamelessly grant him an extension as the chief. This is embarrassing for this country.

The PTI government will remain a shambolic mess. And if General Qamar Javed Bajwa extends his tenure, then his name will be etched with this slow moving disaster. However, the General remains a military man, and there is an honourable way for him to write his name in this country's history. In my retelling of the PML-N government's fall and the PTI government's rise General Bajwa only remains a grey eminence. If he takes this extension and decides to continue to be the military support beam for this chaos Imran Khan and his acolytes call governance, then his name will be forever attached to this disaster.

There is an honourable way out of this, an easy opportunity to still take the ride into the sunset, that General Bajwa's age and bureaucratic convention entitle him to. Retire. Take the way out. Leave this overgrown teenager who you have foisted on this country, grow up and take the responsibility that he has been howling for.

And don't be the fall guy for an institute that you served but harboured the snakes who tried to have you condemned for sectarian reasons. I did not mention this earlier, but I think it bears mentioning that the Ahmadi sect is considered heretical by a dangerously large number of Pakistanis who consider themselves devout. When General Bajwa became Chief of the Army in November 2016 he was dogged by rumours of either being an Ahmedi or being related to them, in a country that is dangerous for Ahmedis. This is dangerous in Pakistan, and the vectors of this sectarian rumour mongering was alleged to be from the army or the more anti-Ahmedi parts of then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's PML-N party. This was a poisonous start to what should have been a relatively smooth transition of power from the tough-against-terrorism General Raheel Sharif to a successor who would be leading an army in a relatively less violent Pakistan.

Now however General Bajwa is powerful. But he will not be so forever. The PTI, can falter. And as a man explicitly soon tied to this party and his votebank for a further three years, General Bajwa will be dragged from a grey eminence into an exposed support beam for this government. Bajwa can contemplate the position of General Kayani, and how he became inextricably linked to the disasters of President Zardari's government, how much of a cleanser it felt when in 2013, General Raheel Sharif, brother to one martyr, nephew to another, bought a fully martial bearing on an army that had to fight the Taliban in North Waziristan and chase them out of the rest of the country. General Bajwa can also remember what a sheepish figure the retired Kayani looked like in his sherwani at one of the military parades held under General Raheel.  Pakistan can do without all this neo-Shogunism. Being an Islamic shogunate is tiresome for a country and a people.

If this is not enough, General Bajwa can contemplate the snakes, the poisonous snakes in civil politics and in his own army. And then he can think about a future where these creeps aren't his problem. Simultaneously, General Bajwa doesn't have to end up like Kayani. There's still time. General sahab can still buy the ticket, take the ride and GTFO from the disaster that is Pakistani politics. The rest of us still have to live here.

Please retire.

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30 days? That's an excuse to run consulate shredders — Kabul’s government won’t last the week

I started yesterday with a news article about how US intelligence said that the Taliban could take Kabul in 90 days. After the previous week had been filled with over half a dozen Afghan provincial capitals falling, it became clear that the Taliban were deploying all their strength across the country to capture as much territory and control as they could before US forces pulled out before the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

While the news of those northern cities falling had been bad, and it was felt that the Taliban were likely trying to prevent a replay of the 1990's Afghan civil war when the north fought them for five years, 12th August got progressively grim. It started to seem that the Taliban were not just going to put a knife to the Afghan government's throat (and northern escape routes) by taking Tajik and Uzbek cities, but rather box Kabul in. This became clear when not just small towns but larger Afghan cities were put on the chopping block by the Taliban's offensive. There is a wave of anti-Shia mobilisation across the region and I suspect that it also might have something to do with the expanded, multi-ethnic Taliban mobilisation in the north of Afghanistan. As these provinces border the ex-Soviet Central Asian states, and ISIS school-shooter sectarianism has had salience in many places where Muslims were previously considered un-radicalised or nominally secular, I suspect Taliban lines might not be a bad place for Central Asian, Afghan or even Pakistani potential ISIS recruits to flee.

As news of more fighting came in, the reports of Herat and Kandahar in the north-west and south of the country respectively, being surrounded and attacked threw whatever strategic calculus the great powers thought they had in Afghanistan, into the bin.

The updates from panicked civilians about the Taliban attacks killed whatever illusions about America having a semi-peaceful withdrawal from Afghanistan, or Pakistan smoothly sliding a re-furbished Taliban into power in Kabul, might have been harboured by the countries that have sponsored destructive wars in that nation since the eighties. The distressed calls, postings, video reports of Afghan citizens, especially educated women trapped in these cities, came flooding out. No one was crying but everyone was deadly serious. 

Simultaneously, clips of refugees flooding out of captured cities, camps of the displaced going up in Kabul and where the government stood were broadcast. Among the wretched sights was the Afghan military vehicles zooming out of cities and from among people they were supposed to defend were broadcast as afternoon turned to evening, and then night fell.

The west, south and north of Afghanistan are out of that government's hand. Kabul is boxed in. If you look at the map above, it's sitting in the open jaws of Taliban controlled territory.

The BBC generally has the best maps, and frankly the best and most accurate, un-sentimental coverage on the rout in Afghanistan of the Kabul government. Hey, I guess after four disastrous wars into a country, they end up knowing their stuff. The second best coverage is by Al Jazeera, which also sobered up once it stopped sourcing its maps from neo-conservative American outfits, and ditched a sort of mawkish patronising tone for the Afghans.

As for America's intelligence reports, which we started Thursday with - they have achieved the typical notoriety of stupidity that American intelligence reports are known for. By nightfall, the American bureaucrats had, in typical CYA fashion, re-assessed their estimate down to 30 days. That feels optimistic.

Yup. The business groups have already started removing equipment and personnel.

— Nutellastaan 😷 (@Nutellastaan) August 12, 2021

As reports come in of Afghan business interests trying to wrap up and send their equipment, personnel and capital out of the country, and the various state and private banks withdrawing funds to forward abroad, it becomes clear that the Kabul government, especially the career of one President Ashraf Ghani, is very over. At least at the prospect of anything beyond 2021.

30 days. According to a close friend with extensive links in Afghan govt. Apparently they are all set.

— Nutellastaan 😷 (@Nutellastaan) August 12, 2021

What happens to the rest of the Kabul government is anyone's guess. I don't know if the Taliban have much to worry about "holding" their territory if part of their offensive was contacting Afghan defence forces commanders and asking them to stop fighting/withdraw or switch sides. A government counter-offensive seems highly unlikely, especially with the hollow, broken Afghan Army that has been described. If the Taliban went in for the kill against the government, then they would win and also be saddled with a lot of prisoners, many extremely high value ones as well as seas of refugees and an isolated country. I suspect they might be willing to live with that. 

“This means losing your houses, your dreams, your goals, your ambition... everything.”

Pashtana Durrani, executive director of an NGO for girls' education speaks to @krishgm from Kandahar in Afghanistan, a city under siege by the Taliban. pic.twitter.com/j6qUPzDkP3

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) August 12, 2021

How soon will the end happen? The fall of Kabul, the closing of the Taliban's jaws on what is left of Afghanistan's government, that is now in the Taliban's hands.

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