Are the Europeans Normal? Hiking Naked in Germany

When “Germany’s first hiking trail for nudists” opened on May 29, 2010, near the town of Dankerode, enthusiasm was running high — and not just among those who enjoy braving nature in the buff. Mayor Monika Rauhut hailed the trail as “the latest attraction here in beautiful Wippertal.”

The trail was an instant hit, which got us wondering if such a thing might be a good idea in Switzerland, where the issue of nude hiking will soon be taken up by the Supreme Court. The “unofficial spokesperson” for Swiss lovers of the outdoor activity isn’t so sure. But Puistola Grottenpösch (not his real name) does see some upsides. A sanctioned trail would give many people an opportunity to experience the “bodily freedom” that only hiking in the nude offers — an experience that “fills you with happiness,” he says.

In Germany, signs placed around the nude trail area warn: “If you don’t want to run into any naked people, stop right here!” The message makes Grottenpösch uneasy. “It seems to suggest such a thing would be terrible,” he says. “The sign could be taken as more of an encouragement than a deterrent.” Nor does he like the idea that such a trail could be seen as a “ghetto” for nude hikers, particularly as such a thing might make people think “that it’s obligatory to be clothed everywhere else.”

Grottenpösch recently appeared in court in Appenzell-Ausserrhoden to support a fellow nude hiker who was arrested for practicing the peculiar pastime.

The first year that the German trail — played up initially as a “paradise” for nude hikers — was up and running, there were no legal problems. But there have been some red faces. The brains behind the endeavor is a nearby campground owner who had hoped the novel trail would bring him more paying guests. He no longer wishes his full name to be given in the press, reports German nude-hiking aficionado Horst K. on the Nacktwandern website, which has provided information about the trail since it opened.

Integrating the naturist trail and the family-oriented campsite proved more difficult than anticipated for the owner, whose initial enthusiasm soon gave way to concern. Instead of trying to draw nude hikers as customers, he found himself telling them to give his campsite “a wide berth.”

“Yes, there were some problems,” Horst K. says. “But we cleared those up, and now things are okay for both sides.” As things presently stand, the mood in Harz seems to be one of determined conflict avoidance.

Even among backers of the birthday-suit lifestyle, nude hiking can be a prickly issue. The president of the German naturists’ association called naked hikers “neurotics and psychopaths.” Fans of the activity, in both Germany and Switzerland, reject the labels flat out.

“We are careful,” Puistola Grottenpösch explains, citing by way of example an outing he took near Toggenburg (Appenzell,Switzerland), where he came across a group of people celebrating a religious service in a field. Grottenpösch conscientiously hid his privates with a scarf, something he carries for just such occasions. “You quickly wrap it around yourself and all conflict is avoided.”

Why Has ISI Arrested CIA Informants?

by Eric Schmitt & Mark Mazzetti/ NYT

ISI has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the CIA in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials. Pakistan’s detention of five CIA informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between theUnited States andPakistan. It comes at a time when the Obama administration is seekingPakistan’s support in brokering an endgame in the war in neighboringAfghanistan.

At a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Michael J. Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director, to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism operations, on a scale of 1 to 10.  “Three,” Mr. Morell replied, according to officials familiar with the exchange.

The fate of the CIA informants arrested in Pakistanis unclear, but American officials said that the CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.

Some in Washington see the arrests as illustrative of the disconnect between Pakistani and American priorities at a time when they are supposed to be allies in the fight against Al Qaeda — instead of hunting down the support network that allowed Bin Laden to live comfortably for years, the Pakistani authorities are arresting those who assisted in the raid that killed the world’s most wanted man.

The Bin Laden raid and more recent attacks by militants inPakistan have been blows to the country’s military, a revered institution in the country. Some officials and outside experts said the military is mired in its worst crisis of confidence in decades.

American officials cautioned that Mr. Morell’s comments about Pakistani support was a snapshot of the current relationship, and did not represent the administration’s overall assessment.

“We have a strong relationship with our Pakistani counterparts and work through issues when they arise,” said Marie E. Harf, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. “Director Panetta had productive meetings last week inIslamabad. It’s a crucial partnership, and we will continue to work together in the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups who threaten our country and theirs.”

Husain Haqqani,Pakistan’s ambassador to theUnited States, said in a brief telephone interview that the C.I.A. and the Pakistani spy agency “are working out mutually agreeable terms for their cooperation in fighting the menace of terrorism. It is not appropriate for us to get into the details at this stage.”

Over the past several weeks the Pakistani military has been distancing itself from American intelligence and counterterrorism operations against militant groups in Pakistan. This has angered many in Washington who believe that Bin Laden’s death has shaken Al Qaeda and that there is now an opportunity to further weaken the terrorist organization with more raids and armed drone strikes.

But in recent months, dating approximately to when a C.I.A. contractor killed two Pakistanis on a street in the eastern city of Lahore in January, American officials said that Pakistani spies from the Directorate for ISI, have been generally unwilling to carry out surveillance operations for the CIA. The Pakistanis have also resisted granting visas allowing American intelligence officers to operate inPakistan, and have threatened to put greater restrictions on the drone flights.

It is the future of the drone program that is a particular worry for the C.I.A. American officials said that during his meetings in Pakistan last week, Mr. Panetta was particularly forceful about trying to get Pakistani officials to allow armed drones to fly over even wider areas in the northwest tribal regions. But the C.I.A. is already preparing for the worst: relocating some of the drones fromPakistanto a base in Afghanistan, where they can take off and fly east across the mountains and into the tribal areas, where terrorist groups find safe haven.

Another casualty of the recent tension is an ambitious Pentagon program to train Pakistani paramilitary troops to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban in those same tribal areas. That program has ended, both American and Pakistani officials acknowledge, and the last of about 120 American military advisers have left the country.

American officials are now scrambling to find temporary jobs for about 50 Special Forces support personnel who had been helping the trainers with logistics and communications. Their visas were difficult to obtain and officials fear if these troops are sent home,Pakistanwill not allow them to return.

In a sign of the growing anger on Capitol Hill, Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that he believed elements of the ISI and the military had helped protect Bin Laden.

Mr Rogers, who met with senior security officials in Pakistan last week, said he had no evidence that senior Pakistani military or civilian leaders were complicit in sheltering Bin Laden. And he did not offer any proof to support his assertion, saying only his accusation was based on “information that I’ve seen.”He warned that both lawmakers and the Obama administration could end up putting more restrictions on the $2 billion in American military aid received annually by Pakistan. He also called for “benchmarks” in the relationship, including more sharing of information about militant activities inKarachi,Lahore and elsewhere and more American access to militants detained in Pakistan.

American military commanders inAfghanistanappear cautiously optimistic that they are making progress in pushing the Taliban from its strongholds in that country’s south, but many say a significant American military withdrawal can occur only if the warring sides inAfghanistanbroker some kind of peace deal.

But theUnited Statesis reliant onPakistanto apply pressure on Taliban leaders, over whom they have historically had great influence.

For now, at least,America’s relationship with Pakistan keeps getting tripped up. When he visitedPakistan, Mr. Panetta offered evidence of collusion between Pakistani security officials and the militants staging attacks inAfghanistan.

American officials said Mr. Panetta presented satellite photographs of two bomb-making factories that American spies several weeks ago had asked the ISI to raid. When Pakistani troops showed up days later, the militants were gone, causing American officials to question whether the militants had been warned by someone on the Pakistani side.

Shortly after the failed raids, the Defense Department put a hold on a $300 million payment reimbursingPakistanfor the cost of deploying more than 100,000 troops along the border with Afghanistan, two officials said.  The Pentagon declined to comment on the payment, except to say it was “continuing to process several claims.”

 

M.F. Husain: Victim of Indian Intolerance

by Ram Puniyani

On June 9, 2011, M.F. Husain breathed his last in London, and was later buried in the cemetery in London as per his wish that he should be buried at a place of his death.

The most celebrated painter of India, more Indian than any of his detractors died, away from his home, due to self imposed exile.

This self imposed exile was due to the threats of Hindu fundamentalists. The renowned painter called by many as Picasso of India, had the fate similar to that of Picasso, who also went into self exile in the regime of Fascist Franco of Spain.

M.F. Husain’s work spanned a long period, evolving with time and deeply rooted in the rich traditions of India, plural, diverse Hinduism. He was confronted as to why he does not pick up Islamic motifs for his work to which he replied that Islam has Calligraphy alone and human figures are not drawn in Islamic tradition.  He came more into the news from the decade of 1980s, with the rise of sectarian politics, as the intolerant Hindutva groups started attacking his painting- exhibitions regularly. The allegation was that he is hurting the sensibilities of Hindus, and is doing it deliberately as he is a Muslim. He was abused for painting Hindu Goddesses like Sarswati, Durga, Draupadi and the one titled Bharat Mata in nude. Interestingly some of these paintings were done in 1970s or so. With the rise of the movement for Ram Temple the Hindu Fundamentalist forces became more assertive, the intolerance grew in the society, many a magazines and newspapers stated fanning the fire of ‘hurting our sentiments’ and that’s when the followers of VHP, Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena started attacking Husain’s, exhibition, his Gufa in Ahmadabad, SAHMAT painting exhibition and so.

Later these communal forces went on filing case after case against him to harass him. The Courts ruled in Husain’s favor saying that his paintings are not promoting enmity between communities in any way, and that he is well within the limits of his artistic freedm. Husain by this time was quiet old, he was offered the security by the state but he declined to be imprisoned in the cordon of security and decided to take the citizenship in Qatar to continue his work in his own uninterrupted way, while maintaining that the Passport is a piece of paper and he remains an Indian at heart. He also missedIndiabut it was a strong choice, to do the work in an uninterrupted way or to face the physical and mental wrath of the Hindu fundamentalists. As such he was not spared by Muslim Fundamentalists also, who had objected to his film, Meenaxi: ‘A Tale of Three cities’ on the charge that it blasphemes Koran.

As such Husain probably represents the best of Indian syncretic traditions and that too his rooting in Hindu mythology and culture may be much deeper than those who kept attacking him. He was born in the Maharashtrian town ofPandharpur; a place of pilgrimage for the Warkari’s the followers of great Marathi Saint Tukaram. He belongs to Sulaimani sect of Shias, whose some practices are like Hindus and they also believe in the theory of reincarnation. During his childhood years he was very impressed by the staging of Ramlila and along with his Hindu friend used to enact it. He also went to study the Valmiki and Tulsidas versions of Ramayana. His quest for understanding the society led him to the study and discussion of Gita, Puranas and other spiritual texts. His rooting in liberal Hindu culture, not the Brahmanical variety, was very deep. One example we can glean from the information card which he designed for telling people about his daughter Raeesa’s marraige, who did not want any ceremonies. His card showed Parvati sitting on the thigh of Lord Shiv with Shiva’s hands on Parvati’s breast. Husain regarded this union as the first marriage in the cosmos.

When he was inHyderabad, Ram Manohar Lohia suggested to him to paint Ramayana. Husain was broke at that time, but he undertook this job seriously and drew 150 canvasses around Ramayana mythology over a period of eight years. He also used to discuss with the Pundits of Kashi on the themes when drawing this Hindu epic. He regards Ganesha as one of the figures with a delightful form, a brilliant material to draw and generally before beginning on a large painting first used to draw Ganesha. The major criticism against him was and is definitely politically motivated. Being a Muslim and drawing these motifs so boldly was unacceptable to the offshoots of Sangh Parivar. As such the charge that nudity is an insult to Hindu Goddesses does not hold water as Husain pointed out that Nudity is a metaphor for purity in Hindu mythology. The example of Khajuraho cannot be dismissed on the ground that people wanted to increase the population so these were drawn, and were otherwise of no consequence to Hindu culture. As such Khajuraho paintings were expression of the prevalent culture.  The painting or any other work of art has to be seen in the context of the artist and the cultural rooting of the work. Nudity can express vulgarity as well as purity, and that’s where the fundamentalists of all variety show their intolerance to the extreme.

The rise of fundamentalism for various reasons has exiled the creative people, like Tasleema Nasreen, Salman Rushdi and tormented the likes of Vijay Tendulakar and Deepa Mehta in recent times. The case of Husain is a bit more unique, as here is an artist whose work on Hindu iconography is insurmountable, one who is deeply rooted in the deeper spirit of broad Hindu culture, still he has been hounded by both varieties of fundamentalists.  All this has taken place while the other political formations have been so ineffectual in protecting him, creating an atmosphere where the creative people can undertake their work without  any fear or intimidation. While the Hindutva party has been the blatant opponent of his work the other parties have done precious little for protecting the maestro.

Maqbool Fida Hussein  was much complex artist than depicted. He was seemingly  the’ most controversial’ painter in contemporary Indian art scene. His concern mainly evolved as a painter to make a living . He called himself a man of culture, but not a man of politics.

Yet he was close to Indian National Congress and also closely  associated with Jawaharlal  Nehru. He was nominated to Rajya Sabha mainly because of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. He claimed himself to be a contemporary artist. Yet he forcefully talked about tribal arts. He restlessly painted thousands of canvasses with larger than life postures Hussein began to churn out canvass after canvass after he was commercially hit.

India is a communal state in the mask of secular upfront. Since independence, India has increasingly become partial shamelessly to one particular religion. More and more educated people and intellectuals are giving in to the idea of passive communalism. Passive secularism and passive communalism are two sides of the same coin.

Hussein became a victim of passive secularism. An artist has no religion.

 

 

 

US Diver Searches for Osama’s Body

Eccentric California salvage diver and entrepreneur Bill Warren, 59, has announced that he wants to find Osama Bin Laden’s body as proof the Al Qaeda leader is really dead.

“I’m doing it because I am a patriotic American who wants to know the truth. I do it for the world,” Warren told the New York Post.

The nearly decade-long hunt for the elusive Al Qaeda leader, believed to be the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, ended on May 2 after US Navy Seals gunned him down in Abbottabad.

The terrorist’s body was buried at sea.

The White House said it would not release graphic images of Osama’s corpse, but the CIA did later show the photographs to select US lawmakers.

“I have a Russian girlfriend, and she tells me that over there, in intelligence circles, they don’t believe bin Laden’s really dead,” Warren said. “I do not trust my government or Obama.”

Warren expects the search will cost about $400,000 and will rely on several boats and high-end technology. If Warren finds the body, he will hold a DNA test at the ship

5 Militants Out of 708 Killed in Drone Attacks in 2009

On June 3, when Ilyas Kashmiri was killed in a US drone strike, he had already been dead for over a year.

In September 2009, the CIA claimed that it killed Kashmiri along with two other senior Taliban leaders in North Waziristan. But the lure of the limelight was seemingly irresistible even in death, because on October 9, Kashmiri returned to give an interview to the late Syed Saleem Shahzad of Asia Times Online.

Baitullah Mehsud, the former commander of the Tehreek-e-TalibanPakistan(TTP), also rose from the dead many times.  On at least 16 occasions, Mehsud was in the gun-sights when CIA drones loosed their Hellfire missiles. Yet, until August 2009, he proved unable to settle into the afterlife.

Mullah Sangeen also experienced at least two resurrections.

Death is clearly not what it used to be.

Or perhaps the people who were killed in the other attacks were not Kashmiri, Sangeen or Mehsud. Indeed, the attack on a funeral procession on June 23, 2009, which killed Sangeen was supposedly aimed at the TTP chief. It killed 83 people who certainly were not who they were supposed to be.

These are not isolated events. At the end of 2009, the Pakistani daily Dawn calculated that, of the 708 people killed in 44 drone attacks that year, only 5 were known militants.

The News had calculated that between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009, 60 drone attacks killed 701 people – of whom only 14 were known militants.

The US has come a long way since July 2001 when it rebuked the Israeli government for its policy of “targeted assassination”, which it said were really “extrajudicial killings”. In September of that year, CIA director George Tenet confessed that it would be a “terrible mistake” for someone in his position to fire a weapon such as the predator drone. By 2009, such qualms were obsolete. Indeed, the new CIA director Leon Panetta declared predator drones “the only game in town”. The catalyst was 9/11 – and lifting the ban on extrajudicial killings was just one of the many illegal policies it licensed.

Many of the post-9/11 criminalities were eventually rolled back, yet the policy of extrajudicial killings not only survived the Bush years, it was intensified. During his eight years in office, Bush ordered a total of 45 drone strikes inPakistan; in fewer than three years, Obama has ordered more than 200. On his third day in office the president ordered two drone strikes, one of which incinerated a pro-government tribal leader along with his whole family, including three children. Obama has since also expanded the drone war inAfghanistan.

The new tactic has many sceptics, and not all of them are antiwar activists. Criticism has also been voiced from within the CIA and the military. Yet drones have been embraced with remarkable warmth by Obama and the US intelligentsia. This partly has to do with an existing US tendency to see technology as a panacea for all problems, including military ones. But the tactic is also made palatable by a routine exaggeration of its accuracy and a downplaying of its human cost.

Take, for example, the statistics produced by the Long War Journal (LWJ), a website maintained by individuals associated with the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think-tank advocating the “war on terror” which was founded two days after the 9/11 attacks.

The statistics have been often quoted in the Western media though all they show is the boundless credulity of LWJ proprietors. Relying solely on media reports – which in turn rely almost exclusively on unnamed Pakistani and US officials – the website claims that a mere seven percent of the 1,954 people killed in Pakistan so far have been civilians. It claims – for example – that, of the 73 people killed in 2007, none were civilians, even though it couldn’t name a single individual killed.

The more widely cited New America Foundation (NAF) study fares only slightly better.  Employing a seemingly rigorous method, the project records every drone attack along with its intended target and presumed outcome. Of the 1,542 to 2,541 people killed inPakistan by drones since 2004, it claims between 1,249 and 1,960 were militants.

Like the LWJ, the NAF also relies on media reports and errs conspicuously on the side of official claims. For example, its data shows that, of the 287 Pakistanis killed so far this year, 251 were militants. This of course cannot be true, since a single incident – the March 17 killing of 38 pro-government tribal elders at a gathering in Datta Khel, North Waziristan- undermines these calculations. The slaughter even managed to provoke a rare outburst from the Pakistani military chief, a tacit supporter of the drone war.

These civilian deaths were only acknowledged because the victims were known notables with favourable relations with the Pakistani government – otherwise, as Wazir Malik Gulabat Khan has pointed out, the government never investigates how many of those killed are actual militants.

But beyond the reliance on official sources, there is also a fundamental question of honesty. Take two of the most tragic incidents of the drone war. On January 13, 2006, a drone struck the villageof Damadolain Bajaur, killing 18 villagers, mainly women and children. US and Pakistani officials initially claimed that four “al-Qaeda terrorists” were among the dead, a claim which they later retracted. Yet if you visit the NAF database, you will find that it lists all 18 as “militants” - and none as civilians. On October 30, another drone strike hit Chenagai, also in Bajaur, killing 82 children at a seminary. Bu t if you visit the NAF database, you find that it lists “up to 80″ militants killed – and again no civilians. The editors, however, note that they have excluded these figures altogether from their list of fatalities.

These two incidents alone should void the NAF study’s credibility, but there are other reasons why its figures should be taken with a grain of salt. In its annual report on the CIA assassination program, the Islamabad-based Conflict Monitoring Center highlights several. Besides the tendency to exaggerate success and downplay failure in order to avoid adverse public reaction, neither the US nor the Pakistan government has a mechanism in place to verify the identity of those killed. There is also a concern that the drones are no longer targeting only high value suspects; under expanded authority granted by Bush and continued under Obama the agency can target all suspected militants based on “pattern of life” analysis collected from surveillance cameras. In the tribal areas, where traditionally most adult males carry guns and ammunition, this makes everybody a potential target. A year before Osama bin Laden was killed, a CIA officer told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, that because of the drone surveillance, “no tall man with a beard is safe anywhere inSouthwest Asia”.

But human intelligence is no less defective, since inPakistanas inAfghanistan, informants have often settled scores with rival tribes by denouncing them as “Taliban”‘

None of this, however, has deterred the NAF project’s Peter Bergen from making confident claims about the presumed success of the strategy. He now claims that only six per cent of those killed were civilians, even though he can only name 35 high value targets among the more than two thousand killed.

It is of course possible that the dead included unnamed foot soldiers, but one can only conclude this by placing extraordinary faith in the veracity of unnamed CIA and Pakistani officials. A rare case-by-case analysis of nine attacks by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), however, uncovered 30 civilian deaths, including 14 women and children, unreported in the media. Testimonies of survivors collected by Voices for Creative Non-Violence (VCNV) paint an even bleaker picture.

My own conversations aroundPeshawarwith FATA residents and Frontier Constabulary (FC) men revealed that the drones are sometimes successful in reaching their targets – but the human cost is invariably steep. There has been no accounting of the psychological costs of the war.

Because of the secrecy around the program, there is no way to confirm if there are any safeguards in place to avoid civilian casualties; or, if there are, how well they are being enforced. As a consequence, there is no oversight, accountability or redress. The drone war in Pakistan is, in this respect, very different to the drone war inAfghanistan. The latter is under the command of the military and is therefore subject to the minimal constraints of military rules of engagement. The CIA however has none, so is entirely unaccountable.

The possibility of oversight is further diminished by the fact that the CIA employs private contractors (read “mercenaries”) who operate in an even murkier legal terrain. With no democratic checks or institutional barriers, the drones are, in effect, operating in a heart of darkness. This was brought home last year when the CIA went on a rampage after one of its bases in Khost was blown up by a Jordanian militant.

The pro-war propaganda is not always successful in maintaining its veneer of sophistication. Last May, during an exchange on MSNBC between Colonel Tony Shaffer, a Defence Intelligence Agency veteran advocating “boots on the ground”, and Christine Fair, an eccentric US academic much in favour in national security circles for her ultra-hawkish views, it dropped altogether. When Shaffer suggested that civilian casualties resulting from the drone attacks were increasing anti-Americanism in Pakistan, Fair took “extreme exception” and retorted categorically that “the drones are not killing innocent civilians”. She dismissed Pakistani press reports as “deeply unreliable and dubious” and claimed that “a number of surveys on the ground in FATA” had shown that residents “generally welcome the drone strikes”.

As a matter of fact, the only known survey ”on the ground in FATA” at the time was carried out by a “letterhead organisation” named the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy whose conclusions can fairly be described as deeply unreliable and dubious. It claimed that 55 per cent of respondents in a survey it carried out in “parts of FATA that are often hit by American drones” (among which it curiously included Parachinar, which has never been hit and whose overwhelmingly Shia population is deeply hostile to the virulently anti-Shia Taliban) did not think that the attacks caused “fear and terror in the common people”; 52 per cent found them “accurate in their strikes”; and 58 per cent did not think they increased anti-Americanism.

The survey got much play in the media, quoted among others in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Its conclusions were found particularly agreeable by proponents of drone escalation and the label of an “institute” gave them an ostensibly academic pedigree. Few wondered why the survey’s claims were so at odds with known public opinion in the wider region where, according to a Gallup/Al Jazeera poll conducted around the same period, only nine per cent of people showed support for the drone attacks. Those who did wonder, such as the journalists I spoke to in Peshawar, were universally dismissive. But the Institute had served its purpose and, typical of many LHOs, it vanished after a year (Web Archive shows that its website only existed between 2008-2009).

Ironically, Aryana’s claims were discredited just a year later by a survey in FATA by an institution no less enthusiastic about the drones. A poll conducted by the NAF and Terror Free Tomorrow found that 76 per cent of respondents opposed the drone attacks; 40 per cent held the US most responsible for the violence in the region (as opposed to seven per cent for al-Qaeda and 11 per cent for the TTP); 59 per cent considered suicide attacks against the US forces justified; 48 per cent believed the drones mainly killed civilians (only 16 per cent thought otherwise); and 77 per cent said their opinion of the US would improve if it withdrew its forces (72 per cent if it brokered Middle East peace).

Magical realism in politics

In a context where life is so devalued that a general could say without reproof that he doesn’t “do body counts”, any attempt to pierce the otherwise impenetrable wall of obfuscation and denial should be welcome. And indeed, if the NAF were only tallying drone attacks and compiling a list of official claims, while issuing a strong disclaimer about their unverifiability, it would be a worthwhile exercise indeed. But that is not what it is doing. It has been using its fallible statistics to make bold assertions about the strategy’s success and effectively endorsing official claims about the guilt of the dead. The NAF has made no effort to suggest that its civilian casualty figures might be a serious undercount. Yet, because of the certainty it seemingly brings to the debate, it has become de rigueur for commentators to quote the NAF figures in their discussions on Obama’s war.

In this, the NAF study has a precedent. A similar exercise using more or less the same methodology also produced statistics on civilian casualties in Iraq, and ended up becoming one of the most widely cited reports. Like the NAF, the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project initially compiled its data solely from media reports (later it claims to have added morgue and hospital records), producing a predictably low number. Though in Iraq the media were less constrained than in FATA, the study was nevertheless based on the assumption that journalists in Iraq were recording every fatality caused by the invasion. Of course, no journalist had made such a commitment and – except for a few independent journalists – most were competing for politically significant stories.

But like the NAF, IBC did not confine itself to merely recording the data; nor did it concede the inherent limitation of the methods which made its statistics a definite undercount. Instead it waged a sustained campaign against the two highly regarded scientific mortality surveys carried out by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, volunteering its “expert opinion” to any establishment hack eager to cast doubt on the reports’ findings.

The value of projects such as Aryana, the NAF, and IBC are that they provide a serviceable number for proponents of a strategy which would otherwise be unpalatable if its real human cost were known. When the upper and lower limits for a disputed statistic are set, the figure that ultimately prevails is a function of political power. To produce an artificially low figure without necessary caveats in a situation where the apparent success, continuation and potential extension of a strategy depend on its low cost cannot possibly be an innocent act.

Once the low figures receive official sanction, quoting them becomes one way for journalists to signal their dependability. This also forces others who might know better to adopt the low figures, lest their seriousness as commentators be brought into question. Over time, as the lower figure congeals into conventional wisdom, the victims suffer a double death, erased from memory as they were from life.

Garcia Marquez once said that he owed his style, which combines fantastic scenarios with painstaking detail, as much to Kafka as to his grandmother who would tell the most improbable stories in perfect deadpan. The same style also obtains in the world of think tankery today – an apparent rigour of method obscuring a fanciful underlying reality. So the make-believe world of the news media requires us to suspend disbelief and accept these operators not for who they are, but in the roles that they have been assigned. This is one reason why most pressure groups today have established their own think tanks, so that they can use their their pseudo-academic veneer to credential lobbyists for the media. This show may yet go on, but is it not time we looked for the exit?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a Glasgow-based sociologist, born in Chitral and raised in Abbottabad and Peshawar. He is the co-editor of Pulsemedia.org. He can be reached at idrees@pulsemedia.org

NYT Mai Jane Says Kayani Under Pressure

Pakistan’s Chief of Army Fights to Keep His Job

By Jane Perlez

Pakistan’s army chief is fighting to save his position in the face of seething anger from top generals and junior officers since the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

 

Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has led the army since 2007, faces such intense discontent over what is seen as his cozy relationship with theUnited States that a colonels’ coup, while unlikely, was not out of the question.

The Pakistani Army is essentially run by consensus among 11 top commanders, known as the Corps Commanders, and almost all of them, if not all, were demanding that General Kayani get much tougher with the Americans, even edging toward a break.

Washington, with its own hard line againstPakistan, had pushed General Kayani into a defensive crouch, along with his troops, and if the general was pushed out, theUnited Stateswould face a more uncompromising anti-American army chief.

To repair the reputation of the army, and to ensure his own survival, General Kayani made an extraordinary tour of more than a dozen garrisons, mess halls and other institutions in the six weeks since the May 2 raid that killed Bin Laden. His goal was to rally support among his rank-and-file troops, who are almost uniformly anti-American.

During a long session in late May at the NationalDefenseUniversity, the premier academy in Islamabad, the capital, one officer got up after General Kayani’s address and challenged his policy of cooperation with the United States. The officer asked, “If they don’t trust us, how can we trust them?” General Kayani essentially responded, “We can’t.”

In response to pressure from his troops, Pakistani and American officials said, General Kayani had already become a more obstinate partner, standing ever more firm with each high-level American delegation that has visited since the raid to try and rescue the shattered American-Pakistani relationship.

In a prominent example of the new Pakistani intransigence, ISI has arrested five Pakistani informants who helped the CIA before the Bin Laden raid. One of them is a doctor who has served as a major in the Pakistani Army. In a statement, a Pakistani military spokesman called the NYT story “false” and said no army officer had been detained. Over all, Pakistani and American officials said, the relationship was now more competitive and combative than cooperative.

General Kayani told the director of the C.I.A., Leon E. Panetta, during a visit thatPakistanwould not accede to his request for independent operations by the agency.

A long statement after the regular monthly meeting of the 11 corps commanders illuminated the mounting hostility toward the

The statement, aimed at rebuilding support within the army and among the public, said that American training in Pakistanhad United States, even as it remains the army’s biggest patron, supplying at least $2 billion a year in aid.

The statement said that “it needs to be clarified that the army had never accepted any training assistance from the United States except for training on the newly inducted weapons and some training assistance for the Frontier Corps only,” a reference to paramilitary troops in the northwest tribal areas.

The statement said that the C.I.A.-run drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas “were not acceptable under any circumstances.”

Allowing the drones to continue to operate fromPakistanwas “politically unsustainable”. As part of his survival mechanism, General Kayani could well order the Americans to stop the drone program completely.

The Pakistanis have already blocked the supply of food and water to the base used for the drones. The army is gradually “strangling the alliance” by making things difficult for the Americans in Pakistan.

The turmoil within the Pakistani Army has engendered the lowest morale since it lost the war in 1971 against East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The anger and disillusionment stems from the fact that the Obama administration decided not to tell Pakistan in advance about the Bin Laden raid — and thatPakistanwas then unable to detect or stop it.

That Bin Laden was living comfortably in Pakistan for years has evinced little outrage here among a population that has consistently told pollsters it is more sympathetic to Al Qaeda than to the United States.

Even a well-known pro-American commander, Lt. Gen. Tariq Khan, who spent more than a year at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had fallen in line with the new ultranationalist sentiment against the Americans.

The anger at the Americans was now making it more difficult for General Kayani to motivate the army to fight against the Pakistani Taliban in what is increasingly seen as a fight on behalf of theUnited States, former Pakistani soldiers said.

“The feeling that they are fightingAmerica’s war against their own people has a negative impact on the fighting efficiency”.

Discipline has become a worry, as has an open rebellion in the middle ranks of officers, particularly as rumors circulate that some enlisted men have questioned whether General Kayani and his partner, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI should remain in their jobs.

A special three-year extension General Kayani won in his position in 2010 did not sit well among the rank and file who perceived it as having been pushed by theUnited Statesto keep its man in the top job.

Keeping discipline in the lower ranks is a challenge.

General Kayani’s problems have been magnified by a groundswell of unprecedented criticism from the public, questioning both the army’s competence and the lavish rewards for its top brass, something that also increasingly rankles modestly paid enlisted men.

“Adding to this frustration and public pique is the lifestyle that the top brass of all the services has maintained,” Talat Hussain, a prominent journalist who generally writes favorably about the military, said. “This is not a guns versus butter argument, but a contrast between the reality of the life led by the military elite at state expense and the general situation for ordinary citizens.”

Despite the resources the army soaks up — about 23 percent of Pakistan’s annual expenditures — it has appeared impotent since the May 2 raid. The infiltration three weeks later of the nation’s largest naval base by Qaeda commandos that left at least 10 security officers dead added to the sense of disarray.

General Kayani acknowledges that Pakistan had mortgaged itself to theUnited States.

In making the analogy to Pakistan as a mortgaged house, General Kayani says that if a person gave his house against a loan and was unable to pay back the loan, the mortgage holder would intervene. “We are helpless,” General Kayani said. “Can we fight America?”