by Michael Skinner
Sunday, 13 March – IslamabadI have a day off from scheduled meetings today, so Arshad takes me sightseeing.
We first visit the Faisal mosque, which is nestled in a beautiful location at the base of the Margalla Hills on the Northwest boundary of Islamabad. The immense mosque, was built as the principle mosque of Islamabad. Its four minarets pay homage to a rich Islamic architectural heritage, but the rest if the mosque exhibits the aesthetic of 1960s-1970s institutional modernism all too familiar to Europeans and North Americans. Other than its impressive dome, it is an angular building built with far too much concrete.
Arshad has brought a picnic lunch without realising we cannot enter the mosque carrying food. We decide to forgo viewing the inside of the mosque for the sake of our stomachs. At one of the nearby food huts, we buy drinks and roti to accompany our lunch. After a leisurely lunch, during which Arshad explains the fine points of Pakistani politics, we head off for a drive into the Margalla Hills.
After climbing a steep road with multiple hairpin turns, we reach a lookout point with observation decks overlooking Islamabad. This point, aligned perfectly with the broad expanse of the broad avenue that bisects Islamabad directly below, was obviously chosen to showcase the new city designed in 1960. The logical grid network of roads and neighbourhoods is easy to see from this vantage point. Arshad points out the various places we have visited in the past days as well as the government sector where he will take me shortly.
Unlike most Pakistanis during the last three years, Arshad is allowed to enter the government sector by virtue of his UN pass, which he carries as a contract employee of UNESCO. Arshad explains that the government sector, which houses the presidential offices, the parliament, and ministerial offices has been closed under the pretext of providing security against terrorist attacks. But Arshad believes the real reason for closing the government sector behind heavy fortifications of road blocks and concrete and steel blast walls reinforced by sandbags and razor-wire, guarded by heavily armed military and police personnel is to keep protestors out. Although Pakistanis have experienced terrorist attacks throughout the sixty plus years of the Baloch independence movement and a decade of the Global War on Terror, it was only after a successful series of protests by lawyers against the arbitrary suspension of the Pakistani judiciary that the government chose to militarize the government sector.
The fortifications around Pakistan’s government buildings remind me of downtown Toronto during the G20 protests, but these fortifications suggest they will be here permanently or at least until Pakistanis collectively tear them down. Arshad and I discuss the irony of the fact that in the two decades since Berliners tore down the wall that divided their city, leaders of the so-called free world have increasingly constructed new walls everywhere – sometimes temporarily around various summits to separate political leaders from the real people, but increasingly with the appearance of permanence as here in Islamabad. The capitals of the New World Order are increasingly taking on the look of medieval fortresses constructed to protect leaders from the rebellions of their own people more so than from alien invaders.
Monday, 14 March – Islamabad
Arshad is tied up in his work at the UNESCO office today so he sends his brother Basit over to guide me about town. For lunch, Basit takes me to a recently reconstructed village called, Said Pur, at the edge of town beneath the Margalla Hills. Said Pur was originally a Hindu village, but was occupied by Muslims following the ethnic-cleansings of the 1947 partition. Nevertheless, most of the Hindu era buildings, including a Hindu temple survived although they suffered significant decay over the years since. Poor Pakistanis inhabited the village since partition, but during the past few years, the Pakistani government has been reconstructing the historical buildings. The village is taking on a new character with the introduction of upscale restaurants and shops. Basit and I have lunch surrounded by obviously wealthy and well-educated Pakistanis who speak English rather than Urdu or Pashto and have driven here in expensive foreign cars.
Later in the day Arshad meets us and takes me to the Museum of History and Culture. I’m struck by a sign that articulates the theme of the museum collection: “Antiquity and Continuity.” This theme summarizes the social fabric of the people I have visited throughout Afghanistan and here in Pakistan. In North America, many of us consciously erase the past and reject tradition. I have found that many Pakistanis and Afghans consciously remember their past and have great reverence for tradition. This is of course a generalization and I must also add that both here and in the West conservative fundamentalists manipulate history and invent tradition to suit their own interests. As I mentioned in the previous dispatch, Muhammad Farooq among others document this politically motivated manipulation of history and rejection of rational sciences in Islamic texts. The parallel regressive movement is occurring among Christian fundamentalists in the West. It is heartening to see in this museum collection and in the work of the many Afghan and Pakistani academics and activists I have met demonstrations of resistance to both of these regressive fundamentalist movements. Members of the Afghan and Pakistani intelligentsia are resisting both the so-called Talibinization of society, which is a very recent movement contrary to traditional Islam, and the centuries-long project of liberal imperialism begun by the British that George Bush escalated under the religious guise of a crusade of good versus evil.
In my research, a phrase that symbolises significant meaning in a long historical context is “outside the wire.” The OEF and ISAF forces use “outside the wire” to describe everything and everyone beyond the perimeter of their fortified bases. The British colonial forces invented a similar phrase during the conquest of the Celts – “beyond the pale” – to differentiate between the supposedly civilized Brits and the supposedly uncivilized Celts. Although the words have changed, the underlying racist context that arbitrarily claims the right and responsibility of a supposedly civilized and civilizing force to conquer a supposedly uncivilized society has not changed.
Tuesday, 15 March – Islamabad and Peshawar
I finally have a reliable internet connection and electrical power today, so I spend a considerable amount of time trying to catch up on some necessary correspondence and research.
Late in the afternoon, Arshad drives me to Peshawar. We take the new M-1 six lane divided highway, which was completed only a few years ago. The M-1 superhighway cuts a considerable amount of time off the more direct Grand Truck Road. The GT Road was first established millennia ago and significantly improved four hundred years ago by the Mughals for use as their highway between their southern palaces in Delhi and northern palaces in Kabul. I regret that we do not have time to take the slower but scenic and historically significant GT Road.
After a brief stop at the Indus River, where I take some photos at sunset, we arrive in Khyber Pakhtunkwa, (the region formerly known as the North West Frontier Provinces) and finally enter the city of Peshawar after dark. The streets of Peshawar are a cacophonous chaotic mess of cars, autorickshaws, and garishly decorated transport trucks. This traffic chaos is in stark contrast to the relative cleanliness and order of Islamabad where autorickshaws and transport trucks are banned from city streets.
The dust and pollution is overwhelming, but Arshad notes the pollution is more bearable now that so many vehicles burn CNG (compressed natural gas) rather than diesel or gasoline. The CNG delivery network for vehicles is extensive across Pakistan; although, chronic shortages necessitate “load-sharing” that shuts down sales on scheduled days. Fortunately, today is not a load-sharing day and we can refill the tank before heading to our accommodations for the night.
One of our contacts in Peshawar has booked a room for us at the Federal Lodge – a state operated hotel that has seen far better days. The first room we enter is so filthy we have to tell the hotel operator we cannot stay there. He promises to find a better room while we impatiently pace the manicured garden out front that provides a false façade for the rooms inside.
Because we have so little time to spend in Peshawar, our first scheduled meeting is tonight. Afzal Khamosh, the president of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) greets me in the garden before we can get our new room. The new room the hotel manager leads us to a few minutes later is only marginally cleaner than the first, but it will suit our purposes to meet with Afzal and sleep for the night. (Although I’m not at all squeamish about bugs, I am, nonetheless, somewhat shocked when I see a cockroach half the size of my fist scurry across the bathroom floor later in the night).
Afzal tells me that, unlike in Afghanistan, socialist parties in Pakistan can practise openly, so I can discuss and publish the events of our meeting. In Afghanistan, socialist parties are not only illegal, but socialists face the death penalty. Through the illogic of a series of laws and official decrees, the state recognises socialists as atheists, but because all Afghans are legally considered Muslims except for those who are of another religion at birth by virtue of their parent’s religion, and finally because apostacy (conversion from Islam) is a crime punishable by death, Afghan socialists face the death penalty. Such is the nature of freedom legislated by the “democratic” Islamic Republic of Afghanistan installed by the American led Operation Enduring Freedom. The Canadian Forces are helping to secure the freedom for the Afghan state to suppress political movements and threaten the murder of political leaders. I will document my covert interviews with Afghan Maoist leaders in an upcoming article.
I ask Afzal to tell me about how the Global War on Terror now renamed Overseas Contingency Operations is affecting Pakistanis. The negative impact on Pakistanis is so complex that it takes Afzal an hour to complete his answer. The deaths of Pakistani civilians, which have exceeded Afghan civilian deaths this year, the unaccounted numbers of wounded, the destruction of homes and livelihoods, the displacement of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, the night-raids, arbitrary arrests, torture and general humiliation of Pakistanis that Afzal recounts parallel the stories I heard from Afghans. All these negative effects have severe psychological and physical impact on individual Pakistanis and collectively strain the social fabric. Moreover, the influx of as many as 2 million or more Afghan war refugees severally strains the resources of the Pakistani state and puts downward pressure on already abhorrent wages and conditions for Pakistani workers.
Afzal fears the regressive ideology of the Taliban and other insurgent groups are gaining greater traction among Pakistanis than the MKP’s progressive socialist opposition to imperialism. As I have heard from other interlocutors, Afzal tells me the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan are emerging as the anti-imperialist alternative to occupation. Although the MKP are attempting to develop an ideological and practical alternative to both Talibanization and imperialism, it is an uphill battle for these activists. Neither of us have concrete ideas about how to reverse this trend, but we agree it is necessary to open communications between progressive activists in the West and those in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afzal agrees to assist implementing the Dialogue on the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan this summer in order to establish communications with Western academics and activists.
Later in the night an old friend of Arshad’s, Saeed Khan, joins our conversation. Saeed is a project manager for the UN Development Program (UNDP) who describes himself as a lapsed socialist. We discuss how during the Cold War there was both a divide and a balance of powers between UN agencies such as the UNDP and UNESCO on one side, which represented the second world socialist interests of equitable development, and those such as the World Bank on the other side of the divide, which represented the liberal economic interests of securing profitability for investors of the first world. This balance of powers within the UN collapsed along with the USSR.
The World Bank is now the dominant economic actor in the UN and it can dictate policy to serve its shareholders’ interests. The concepts of microfinance, privatization, and individual responsibility, which have subsumed concepts of state-supported human development, have been devastating. For example, Arshad tells me that recipients of microfinance loans generally pay approximately 30% interest to the banks. I am astounded at this figure. Arshad claims the lives of many microfinance borrowers have been devastated by indebtedness leading many people to commit suicide. Privatization of utilities and civic infrastructure has led to denial of services for the poor who cannot afford to pay. Basic services such as water, sanitation, education, and healthcare are dwindling in supply and increasing in expense. Nonetheless, as we can see in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, states are willing to finance both military development and industrial development even while ignoring basic human development.
Wednesday, 16 March – Peshawar
Dreams of giant cockroaches notwithstanding, I had a good sleep, but Arshad is restless through the night. We will be returning to Islamabad late tonight, so I hope I can keep him awake on the drive home. Otherwise, I’ll have to quickly get used to shifting gears with my left hand and driving on the left side of the road to share in the driving.
The News newspaper I read during breakfast provides some answers to my questions about refugee statistics. According to the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), 1.4 million Afghan war refugees were registered as of 28 February 2011. NADRA also issued 734,725 birth certificates (The article does not specify whether this number is included in the 1.4 million or is additional.) In Peshawar alone there are 865,000 registered refugees with 139,000 in Islamabad and 287,000 in Quetta. These numbers of registered refugees, however, are not likely an accurate reflection of the total numbers of refugees. Unregistered refugees are considered illegal aliens subject to immediate deportation and the government is promising a countrywide crackdown.
However, there is a disincentive for Afghan refugees to register with NADRA, because the Pakistani government states it will force all Afghan refugees to leave Pakistan by 31 December 2012. I cannot imagine how the Pakistani government expects to round up and deport a million and a half Afghans, but this is the promise. We can expect great social upheaval in both Pakistan and Afghanistan if this policy is actually implemented.
We have an early meeting with Dr. Syed Hussain Shaheed a professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Peshawar. Syed has agreed to combine two of his graduate classes for a discussion with me later in the morning.
From a distinctly different liberal academic perspective, Syed, nevertheless, expresses essentially the same observation expressed by our socialist comrades last night – Pakistani people are seeing the Taliban as an anti-imperialist or anti-Western alternative to the occupation of Afghanistan and the covert American led military incursions into Pakistani territory.
Dr. Shaheed tells us about his research which has involved being blindfolded and taken great distances to meet with insurgent leaders. Syed states that as much as he is opposed to the ideology of the Taliban insurgents and their use of violence he can, nonetheless, empathize with the insurgents’ desire to drive the alien militaries out. He concludes a negotiated settlement is imperative, because there is no means for the Western militaries to win this counterinsurgency war.
We discuss what a negotiated settlement might mean. I explain the radical example of Guatemala, where various social movements – women’s groups, Indigenous nations, peasant organizations, religious groups, and labour unions – first forced the government and insurgents to negotiate and then demanded a role in the negotiations. This was the first and only time social movements have played a role on this scale in writing peace accords. Unfortunately, during the later implementation stage of the peace accords their progressive aspects were deliberately and systematically destroyed to serve the interests of the World Bank, international investors, and the Guatemalan business community. Regardless of the ultimate failure to implement most of the progressive aspects of the Guatemalan experiment, the idea that peace should be negotiated by all representatives of society and not just the men with guns is an innovative idea that should be attempted again.
We also discuss the possibility that continued chaos can also work in favour of American interests considering Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.” A state like an old building might more easily be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up to serve new interests as opposed to the more expensive and time-consuming process of renovation. Former Pakistani President/military-dictator Pervez Musharaf wrote, in his 2006 memoir Line of Fire, that prior to invading Afghanistan, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage met with the Director General of the Pakistani ISI. According to Musharaf, Armitage told the ISI chief that, if in response to George Bushs’s infamous ultimatum “you are either with us or against us,” the Pakistanis chose to oppose the U.S., they “should be prepared to be bombed back to the stone age.” This is more than a threat; it is a promise that the U.S. will use whatever force necessary to pursue its interests. During the invasions and occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq, relatively limited force was used. But as Musharaf’s anecdote reveals, in different circumstances and given enough domestic and international support, the U.S. military could unleash unimaginable destructive power unseen since the incendiary bombings of German and Japanese cities that killed millions of civilians even before the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is political constraints rather than physical limitations of the U.S. military, which has prevented this scale of warfare until now. I express my concern that these political constraints may be removed before America’s next war, wherever that next war might be fought.
Before we end our meeting, Dr. Shaheed pledges to do everything he can to help with the Dialogue on the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan that I am planning for this summer in Kabul and Peshawar.
During my later meeting with Dr Shaheed’s graduate students, I gather the impression they are all angry about the effects of the international intervention. Several students, and particularly the women who talk far more than the men, clearly articulate their passionate desires to see the end of the alien occupation of Afghanistan and the cessation of American led covert military operations Pakistan. (As I experienced in Kabul women and men are called girls and boys until they are married regardless of their age, but I’ll, nevertheless, refer to these graduate students in their twenties and thirties as women and men. Arshad also questions whether I should shake the hands of women, but I will continue to do so in the privacy of academic settings.)
After a very interesting discussion with Syed’s students he takes me to a meeting with the Department director Dr. Ijaz Khan and two other faculty members Minhas Marwat and another woman whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. I hear essentially the same assessment of the war from these faculty members, although with significantly more nuanced analyses. We get into an in-depth discussion about Samuel Huntington’s influence on successive American presidential administrations since the 1950s and his Clash of Civilizations thesis and I nearly miss my next appointment.
My next appointment is with Prof. Sarfaz Khan, director of the Area Study Centre (Russia, China and Central Asia) also at the University of Peshawar. Our comrade Afzal Khamosh, who we first met last night, joins us and introduces me to his old friend, Prof. Khan. I have a very interesting conversation with Sarfaz. The professor adamantly argues that the American led forces have had a negative impact on the entire region and should pull out immediately.
Prof. Khan provides me with a number of the “Central Asia” journals published by his centre that are relevant to my research. In one journal article, the professor presents a methodical and logical argument exposing the fallacies in George Bush’s “good versus evil” argument used to justify invading Afghanistan and launching the Global War on Terror. Most importantly Prof. Khan offers his conference facilities and his full support to make the Dialogue on the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan a success this summer.
After meeting with Prof. Khan, Afzal takes us to a meeting with MKP members at the home of a lawyer and member of the party Nizar (I cannot remember his last name).
Nizar expresses his disappointment that there has been so little communication between socialists in Canada and Pakistan. He is looking forward to participating in the events this summer. Nizar asks why Canadian socialists were unable to prevent the Canadian government from going to war alongside the Americans. I explain the long process of activism that took place just to convince various unions and eventually the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) to develop policies opposed to the war. Whatever the reasons, the CLC did not institute its first policy opposed to the war until five years after the Global War on Terror began. Nonetheless, this is a little bit of progress and the CLC policy was surely one indication of Canadian opposition to the war considered when the Stephen Harper government decided to end the combat mission in 2011.
I explain that many workers in Canada oppose the Global War on Terror based on anti-imperialist and humanitarian principles. However, the interests of many Canadian workers are not naturally aligned with the interests of workers and peasants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Indeed, some of the best compensated jobs in Canada are those in the military and security industries researching, designing and manufacturing weapons and logistical systems, as well as providing the many services needed to maintain the war. A hard fact is that while the military industrial complex generates profits for investors it also provides jobs for Canadian workers. The influential industry lobby organization Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI) has grown from 500 to 800 member companies since 2008. The CADSI website boasts that CADSI member companies add $10-billion to the Canadian economy. A recent CBC investigation determined that Canada is now the sixth largest exporter of military products, just barely behind China in the fifth spot. I have archived various local and regional news articles from across Canada; each article describes the benefits that various companies in the military industrial complex bring to the local economy, because they provide jobs. The concrete interest of Canadian workers wanting good jobs contradicts the abstract principles of international solidarity and justice.
Furthermore, Canadian workers, in the global division of labour, form a hierarchical subclass Marx described as an aristocracy of labour. Canadian workers are at the top of the global division of labour and benefit from the cheap goods and services produced offshore where workers are more easily exploited. Although the offshoring of manufacturing and service work causes job losses for large numbers of Canadians, paradoxically, offshoring simultaneously provides cheaper goods and services for those who do have good jobs. Thus, the concrete interest of many employed Canadian workers who want cheap goods and services contradicts the abstract principles of international solidarity and justice. Plus domestic solidarity among Canadian workers is constrained by the perception of competition between unions, different groups of workers, and particularly between employed and unemployed workers. The immediate concrete interests of individual workers and individual unions obscure the long-term benefits of solidaristic organizing domestically and internationally.
Finally, many workers are also petite-bourgeois capital investors either through individual or collective investing. Some union investment funds are of a very large scale, which creates a contradiction between the interests of workers who are also de facto capitalists.
We also discuss the disillusionment among too many anti-war activists who thought that merely protesting in the streets for a few days before the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq would provide enough political pressure to prevent war. We agree that wars are fought for concrete purposes, despite the popular perception that wars occur by accident due to the poor decision-making capacities of political and military leaders. Rather than an accident of poor decision-making, wars are, in fact, a continuation of policy by forceful means (to adapt Clausewitz’s famous dictum).
The geopolitical and economic interests behind the Global War on Terror, shared by all ruling and potential ruling parties in the U.S. and Canada, outweigh the political inconvenience posed by a few Saturday afternoon protests. Even if these protests are attended by millions they do little more than delay a few people from reaching the shopping mall. Until anti-imperialist activists affect production, profits, and the viability of the state, political protests, although symbolically significant, will remain devoid of much real power.
The shutdown of west coast ports by American and Canadian dockworkers, in 2008, during their protests to end the Global War on Terror, provide some positive signs of the potential power of workers to demand an end to war by actually affecting corporate profitability. But such actions have been rare.
Nevertheless, Canadian labour has taken a principled stand to demand an end to combat in Afghanistan. Yet, despite the Canadian government’s promise to withdraw Canadian Forces combat units in 2011, as I explain to my MKP friends, the decision by the Canadian government to send in large numbers of military and police trainers does not demonstrate a significant change in the attitude of the Canadian government toward the former Global War on Terror now known as Overseas Contingency Operations.
There is no clear promise from the Canadian government that the combat operations of Canada’s Special Forces units will cease. Most Canadians are not aware that, since 2006, Canada’s Special Forces have more than doubled in size and their resources have significantly increased. Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) was the highly trained Special Forces unit that invaded Afghanistan, on 7 October 2001, as part of the Operation Enduring Freedom – the U.S. led military operation that was neither sanctioned by the United Nations, nor justified by international law. JTF2 personnel captured some of the first Afghan detainees sent to be tortured in Guantanamo, Bagram, and the dozens of secret locations where large numbers of detainees, possibly in the tens of thousands, continue to be held indefinitely without trial. In 2006, the creation of the Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR) doubled the combat capacity of Canada’s Special Forces. The creation of the Special Operations Aviation Squadron (SOAS), also in 2006, provided dedicated air support for both the JTF2 and CSOR. Civilian authority over these units or the capacity to receive answers about their operations does not extend beyond the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence. The covert operations of the Canadian Special Forces remain hidden from scrutiny by Canadians.
During our earlier meeting, Prof. Sarfaz Khan had invited us to join him for dinner. Afzal Khamosh leads us some distance out of Peshawar to a pretty rural spot on the bank of the Kabul River where we meet the professor. Our destination is a favourite spot of people from Peshawar seeking a break from the dirt, noise and urban havoc of Peshawar. The Kabul River is wide and fast flowing here. The beach we are on is lined with huts where the local fish are served and brightly painted boats each with its captain offering excursions along the river. An aerial tramway overhead provides a scenic ride across the river. Having seen this river where it flows through Kabul as a mere trickle of water horribly polluted by raw sewage and garbage, I’m somewhat reticent to wash my hands in the water or eat the fish dinner we are offered. I put these thoughts out of mind and enjoy the excellent meal and stimulating company.
After dinner Afzal leads us to the nearest junction with the M-1 highway back to Islamabad. When we bid farewell at the junction, Afzal informs us he has just heard news Raymond Davis has been released. Davis was arrested 27 January in Lahore when he shot from his vehicle and killed two men on a motorcycle. Davis claims he shot in self defence when the two attempted to rob him. A third person was killed when struck by the driver of another American vehicle rushing to Davis’ aid as he was being detained by a crowd of people. The American embassy claim Davis is their employee, thus subject to diplomatic immunity. The Pakistani government reacting to intense anger among Pakistanis did not accept the American embassy claim. There is speculation as to what agency, whether the CIA, another U.S. state security agency, or a private military/security contractor actually employs Davis. Regardless, the killing of three Pakistanis by Americans in the streets of Lahore deeply angered Pakistanis already angered by constant U.S. led military incursions across the Pakistani-Afghan border that killed thousands of Pakistani civilians since 2004.
I expect there will be large protests and sure enough as we exit the M-1 in Islamabad a few hours later police have blocked the entrance to the G10 sector where I am staying due to protestors blocking the Kashmir highway. We are forced to take a wide detour around the area.
Thursday, 17 March – Islamabad
The news today is about the unexpected release of Raymond Davis and the resulting protests in urban centres throughout Pakistan. Since I arrived in Pakistan, domestic political news has had to compete with the cricket World Cup, which seems be foremost on many Pakistani’s minds. The daylong cricket matches are on television and the radio everywhere I go. The terrible news that is only getting worse out of Japan as a result of the earthquake and tsunami and the resulting manmade disaster of the nuclear meltdown that threatens Japanese people and others throughout the region competes with the cricket matches. Today, however, the news of Raymond Davis’ release tops the headlines. This display of American power, I think, is perceived by Pakistanis as being symbolic of the arrogance of Americans and the impunity of American power exercised here in Pakistan throughout the history of the state, but especially since 9/11.
One news story not featured in the headlines, but perhaps of greater significance to the ongoing war than the Raymond Davis case, comes from Peshawar. The Khyber Pakhtunkwa government (formerly the North West Frontier Provinces) passed legislation on Wednesday banning all U.S. and NATO fuel supply trucks from passing through Peshawar. The law also prohibits parking fuel tankers on any roadway or near petrol pumps within Khyber Pakhtunkwa. The belated legislation comes after many civilians have been injured during the sabotage of U.S. and NATO fuel supplies enroute to Afghanistan.
One of the graduate students I talked to yesterday at the University of Peshawar told me of his personal experience. While stuck in traffic, a fuel supply truck was attacked and exploded in front of him. He states he was just far enough out of range of the blast to escape injury, but many others stuck in traffic closer to the fuel truck were not so fortunate.
As much as the sabotage of fuel trucks hinders the OEF and ISAF missions, the legislation banning fuel trucks transit through the city could be more problematic. In fact, one well-informed source told me that despite the frequent attacks on U.S./NATO fuel supplies, the actual losses of fuel to sabotage are well below the potential losses that logistics strategists initially projected. The Pakistani and Afghan vehicles, their Pakistani and Afghan drivers, and the innocent civilians killed or injured during attacks on these vehicles are as incidental to the war planners in Washington, London, and Ottawa as they are to the insurgents who attack the trucks. Both sides are equally at fault for civilian losses. It is yet to be seen whether legislators in other key transit hubs such as Quetta might follow the lead of legislators in Peshawar constraining if not entirely cutting off the vital supply of fuel to OEF and ISAF forces.
Arshad is busy with his job at UNESCO today so I am on my own until dinner. Considering the high state of alert due to the reaction to the release of Raymond Davis, I decide to wear my shalwar kameez, a scarf, and hat when I venture out to the market and visit the local internet cafe.
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