The Tangled Reality of US/Pakistan Relations

By Mark Urban for The BBC

WASHINGTON – The current crisis in US/Pakistan relations is not the first – but it is the most difficult one since 9/11, and it could easily be aggravated further by the intelligence arising from the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound.

For this reason, Washington insiders are not so sure that diplomatic moves to ease the problem will succeed.

Senator John Kerry has just been in Islamabad asking for “action not words” from the Pakistani authorities. He says he has gained some agreement for practical steps but, apart from gaining the return of remnants of the US helicopter that was destroyed at the compound, has not yet specified what these might be.

This morning he and other members of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations will be holding hearings on Pakistan, including the question of how the billions given in aid could be used more effectively to buy the kind of counter terrorist cooperation that the Americans are after.

Juan Zarate, counter terrorist adviser to President George W Bush, argues that the kind of benchmarks that congressmen have advocated in the past for linking aid to performance on specific actions against militant groups could prove counter-productive in the short term because the Pakistanis consider this “humiliating”.

He poses the further question, “what happens tomorrow if we have to go after Ayman al-Zawahiri?”, referring to the former Al Qaeda number two and presumed leader after Bin Laden’s death.

The question of what leads are thrown up by the intelligence trove from the raided Abottabad compound is now in itself a key factor in whether Mr Kerry and members of President Barack Obama’s administration are able to soothe the relationship. Myriad questions arise from the material seized on flash drives and laptops.

Pakistani officials insist there was no contact between their Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Bin Laden – but what about possible ties with the courier who owned the house and was the key figure in sheltering him?

Will phone numbers leading to ISI officials be found in Bin Laden’s effects? Will there be intelligence that allows the CIA to quickly pinpoint Dr al-Zawahiri or other key figures who might now take control of Al Qaeda?

John McLaughlin, deputy director of the CIA until 2004, argues that even in this current difficult moment for US/Pakistan relations, America will reserve the right to act unilaterally against terrorist targets in Pakistan.

He believes though that ties can slowly be re-built with Pakistan, despite the fact that the raid, mounted without their leaders’ foreknowledge, gave them their “biggest shock for a generation”.

At previous moments of tension between the two countries, accommodations have been found. Intelligence about Al Qaeda suspects has flowed or the army has been sent in to one of the restive tribal areas on the Pakistan border. The US has signed off on new aid payments.

What tends to happen though is that within months, the Americans again accuse the Pakistanis of foot dragging in the fight against militancy, and Islamabad for its part counters with arguments that the US routinely violates its sovereignty.

The tangled reality of the situation is made worse by the fact that Pakistani ministers, mindful of anti-American sentiment in their country, will often not admit publicly to their agreement to drone strikes or other steps. Many people I have spoken to here compare the relationship to a dysfunctional marriage in which both sides need one another but find the reality of daily life increasingly unbearable.

There are those who see ways though in which the two countries might navigate their way through the perfect storm of recrimination and resentment that the Bin Laden operation has produced.

Juan Zarate and some others believe that if the materials seized in the raid produce some nugget of intelligence that leads to the discovery of Dr al-Zawahiri or other key figures, the US may chose to trust the Pakistanis with this knowledge, and make them partners in acting upon it.

If the exploitation of the intelligence went wrong and a leak was suspected the US could use this to place further pressure on Pakistani ministers. But if it all went well, trust might be re-built. The problem is though that there are many within the secret side of US counter terrorism who, because of the way that Osama Bin Laden hid for years where he did, are no longer prepared to take that risk.

2011
05/18
CATEGORY
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Pakistan Army
Pakistanis
President Obama
Taliban
terrorism
US Army
1 comment

Pakistan must stop treating India as ‘biggest enemy’: Nawaz Sharif

As Reported by The Economic Times

As Pakistan’s powerful military held out threats to India, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called for reappraisal of ties with its neighbour to move forward and progress, saying Islamabad must stop treating New Delhi as its “biggest enemy”.

Sharif, who was earlier involved in talks with India when the Kargil crisis erupted, also sought a probe into the 1999 conflict with India.

The former Prime Minister, who is the chief of main opposition PML-N party, is currently on a three-day visit to southern Sindh province where he made the remarks during an interaction with the media in Karachi yesterday.

He called on the government to also conduct an inquiry into the 2006 killing of Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Bugti in a military operation and the carnage in Karachi on May 12, 2007 that killed over 40 people who tried to rally in support of then-deposed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Sharif, whose government was deposed in a military coup led by former President Pervez Musharraf in 1999, reiterated his demand for the budgets of the military and the ISI to be placed before Parliament for scrutiny in line with the practice in other democracies.

He said one of his biggest regrets was not taming the powerful military when he was Prime Minister in the 1990s.

The Parliamentary resolution calling for an independent commission to investigate the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a US raid on May 2 was the first step towards making Parliament a sovereign body, Sharif said.

“We need structural changes and this inquiry has provided an opportunity to move forward and put the country on the right track, correct its direction by putting our house in order, establish the rule of law and bring all institutions under civilian control,” Sharif said.

If the government fixes responsibility for the Abbottabad incident and punishes those found guilty, a message will go out to the world that the people of Pakistan will not brook another embarrassment like the US raid, he said.

Sharif spoke out against the recent alliance forged by the ruling PPP and the PML-Q, both of which are rivals of his PML-N in Punjab and at the centre.

2011
05/17
CATEGORY
Afghanistan
India
Kashmir
Mumbai
Mumbai Attacks
Pakistan
Pakistan Army
Pakistanis
Peace
1 comment

Pakistan’s Nuclear Surge

By Andrew Bast for Newsweek

Even in the best of times, Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program warrants alarm. But these are perilous days. At a moment of unprecedented misgiving between Washington and Islamabad, new evidence suggests that Pakistan’s nuclear program is barreling ahead at a furious clip.

According to new commercial-satellite imagery obtained exclusively by NEWSWEEK, Pakistan is aggressively accelerating construction at the Khushab nuclear site, about 140 miles south of Islamabad. The images, analysts say, prove Pakistan will soon have a fourth operational reactor, greatly expanding plutonium production for its nuclear-weapons program.

“The buildup is remarkable,” says Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security. “And that nobody in the U.S. or in the Pakistani government says anything about this—especially in this day and age—is perplexing.”

Unlike Iran, which has yet to produce highly enriched uranium, or North Korea, which has produced plutonium but still lacks any real weapons capability, Pakistan is significantly ramping up its nuclear-weapons program. Eric Edelman, undersecretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, puts it bluntly: “You’re talking about Pakistan even potentially passing France at some point. That’s extraordinary.”

Pakistani officials say the buildup is a response to the threat from India, which is spending $50 billion over the next five years on its military. “But to say it’s just an issue between just India and Pakistan is divorced from reality,” says former senator Sam Nunn, who co-chairs the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “The U.S. and Soviet Union went through 40 years of the Cold War and came out every time from dangerous situations with lessons learned. Pakistan and India have gone through some dangerous times, and they have learned some lessons. But not all of them. Today, deterrence has fundamentally changed. The whole globe has a stake in this. It’s extremely dangerous.”

It’s dangerous because Pakistan is also stockpiling fissile material, or bomb fuel. Since Islamabad can mine uranium on its own territory and has decades of enrichment know-how—beginning with the work of nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan—the potential for production is significant.
Although the White House declined to comment, a senior U.S. congressional official who works on nuclear issues told NEWSWEEK that intelligence estimates suggest Pakistan has already developed enough fissile material to produce more than 100 warheads and manufacture between eight and 20 weapons a year. “There’s no question,” the official says, “it’s the fastest-growing program in the world.”

What has leaders around the world especially worried is what’s popularly known as “loose nukes”—nuclear weapons or fissile material falling into the wrong hands. “There’s no transparency in how the fissile material is handled or transported,” says Mansoor Ijaz, who has played an active role in back-channel diplomacy between Islamabad and New Delhi. “And the amount—they have significant quantities—is what’s so alarming.”

That Osama bin Laden was found in a Pakistani military community, and that the country is home to such jihadi groups as Lashkar-e-Taiba, only heightens concerns. “We’ve looked the other way from Pakistan’s growing program for 30 years,” says Sharon Squassoni, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. What we’re facing, she says, is “a disaster waiting to happen.”

A Defense Department official told NEWSWEEK that the U.S. government is “confident that Pakistan has taken appropriate steps toward securing its nuclear arsenal.” But beyond palliatives, few in Washington want to openly discuss the nightmare scenario of terrorists getting hold of nuclear material or weapons. “The less that is said publicly, the better,” says Stephen Hadley, national-security adviser to President George W. Bush. “But don’t confuse the lack of public discussion for a lack of concern.”

The bomb lends the Pakistanis a certain diplomatic insouciance. Nukes, after all, are a valuable political tool, ensuring continued economic aid from the United States and Europe. “Pakistan knows it can outstare” the West, says Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy. “It’s confident the West knows that Pakistan’s collapse is too big a price to pay, so the bailout is there in perpetuity. It’s the one thing we’ve been successful at.”

Pakistani leaders defend their weapons program as a strategic necessity: since they can’t match India’s military spending, they have to bridge the gap with nukes. “Regretfully, there are several destabilizing developments that have taken place in recent years,” Khalid Banuri of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, the nuclear arsenal’s guardian, wrote in response to NEWSWEEK questions. Among his country’s concerns, Banuri pointed to India’s military buildup and the U.S.’s -civilian nuclear deal with India.

“Most Pakistanis believe the jihadist scenario is something that the West has created as a bogey,” says Hoodbhoy, “an excuse, so they can screw us, defang, and denuclearize us.”

“Our program is an issue of extreme sensitivity for every man, woman, and child in Pakistan,” says former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, adding that the nukes are “well dispersed and protected in secure locations.” When asked whether the U.S. has a role to play in securing the arsenal, Musharraf said: “A U.S. role to play? A U.S. role in helping? Zero role. No, sir. It is our own production?.?.?.?We have not and cannot now have any intrusion by any element in the U.S.” To guard its “strategic assets,” Pakistan employs two Army divisions—about 18,000 troops—and, as Musharraf drily puts it, “If you want to get into a firefight with the forces guarding our strategic assets, it will be a very sad day.”

For now, the White House appears to have made a tacit tradeoff with Islamabad: for your cooperation in Afghanistan, we’ll leave you to your own nuclear devices. “People bristle at the suggestion, but it follows, doesn’t it?” says Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, formerly the CIA’s chief officer handling terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. “The irony is that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the money we’re giving them to fight terrorism, could inadvertently aggravate the very problem we’re trying to stop. After all, terrorism and nukes is the worst-case scenario.”

With this fourth nuclear facility at Khushab coming online as early as 2013, and the prospect of an accelerated nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. is facing a diplomatic dilemma. “The Pakistanis have gone through a humiliation with the killing of Osama bin Laden,” says Nunn. “That’s never a time to corner somebody. But with both recent and preexisting problems, we are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe. Both sides need to take a deep breath, count to 10, and find a way to cooperate.”

2011
05/16
CATEGORY
Afghanistan
Baitullah Mehsud
India
Mumbai
Mumbai Attacks
Nuclear
Pakistan
Pakistan Army
Pakistani Taliban
Pakistanis
President Obama
Taliban
Tehrik-i-Taliban
terrorism
US Army
1 comment

Florida Men Accused of Aiding Pakistani Taliban

By Gardiner Harris for The New York Times

The F.B.I. on Saturday arrested three Pakistani-Americans, including father and son imams from South Florida mosques, charging them with providing financing and other material support to the Pakistani Taliban.
Related

Three people living in Pakistan were also charged in the indictment, which was made public by Wilfredo A. Ferrer, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida. The F.B.I. said that the indictment grew out of a review of suspicious financial transactions and other evidence and not from an undercover sting operation. The arrests seem to be unrelated to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden a week ago.

The four-count indictment charges that the six sought to aid the Pakistani Taliban’s fight against the Pakistani government and its allies, including the United States, by supporting acts of murder, kidnapping and maiming in Pakistan and elsewhere in order to displace the government and establish strict Islamic law known as Shariah.

“Today, terrorists have lost another funding source to use against innocent people and U.S. interests,” said John V. Gillies, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Miami office.

Five of the six people charged are related. Arrested in the United States were Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, 76, of Miami; and two of his sons, Izhar Khan, 24, of Miami; and Irfan Khan, 37, of North Lauderdale.

Hafiz Khan is the imam at the Miami Mosque, also known as the Flagler Mosque. Izhar Khan is an imam at the Jamaat Al-Mu’mineen Mosque in Margate, Fla. Hafiz and Izhar Khan were arrested Saturday in South Florida, while Irfan Khan was arrested in Los Angeles. All three are originally from Pakistan.

The three people residing in Pakistan who were charged were Amina Khan, Hafiz Khan’s daughter, and Alam Zeb, her son, as well as Ali Rehman, also known as Faisal Ali Rehman. A statement from prosecutors said that the defendants were assisted “by others in the United States and Pakistan.”

The indictment said that the six transferred money to the Pakistani Taliban that was intended to buy guns and sustain militants and their families. Hafiz Khan is also accused of supporting the Pakistani Taliban through a madrasa, or Islamic school, that he founded and controlled in the Swat Valley region of Pakistan. He was charged with using the madrasa to provide shelter and other support for the Pakistani Taliban and sending children from his madrasa to learn to kill Americans in Afghanistan.

The indictment does not charge the mosques with any wrongdoing. The Muslim Communities Association of South Florida announced that that Hafiz Khan had been suspended indefinitely from his mosque.

“Our organizations, together through the Coalition of South Florida Muslim Organizations, has been working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Miami F.B.I. office,” the association said in a statement released Saturday afternoon, “and appreciate the efforts of law enforcement to root out potential sources and supporters of terrorism.”

“We stand together with the U.S. attorney, Wilfredo Ferrer, and the men and women of the F.B.I., and have been and will be cooperating with law enforcement to our fullest ability,” it added.

The F.B.I. news release took pains to describe the charges as reflecting only the actions of the defendants, not of their mosques or Islam. “Let me be clear that this is not an indictment against a particular community or religion,” Mr. Ferrer said. “Instead, today’s indictment charges six individuals for promoting terror and violence through their financial and other support of the Pakistani Taliban. Radical extremists know no boundaries; they come in all shapes and sizes and are not limited by religion, age or geography.”

“The indictment does not charge the mosques themselves with any wrongdoing,” it continued, “and the individual defendants are charged based on their provision of material support to terrorism, not on their religious beliefs or teachings.”

The inclusion of those statements were “well appreciated” by the Muslim community in South Florida, said Asad Ba-Yunus, who is a legal adviser to the Muslim Communities Association of South Florida.

“We have been working with the U.S. attorney’s office over last few months” to improve relations, Mr. Ba-Yunus said, adding that he had spoken with the office Saturday morning before the indictment was announced.

The charges against the Florida men accusing them of supporting the Pakistani Taliban but not actually carrying out operations themselves are the most common types of terrorism prosecutions that United States authorities have pursued since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Of the 50 leading terrorism cases since those attacks, about 70 percent have involved financing or other support to terrorist groups, according to the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law.

The Pakistani Taliban were officially designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department on Aug. 12, 2010.

The Pakistani Taliban are closely allied with Al Qaeda, and is responsible for a series of attacks against Pakistani police and military targets in recent years. Pakistani authorities believe a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban was responsible for the suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan on Friday that killed more than 80 cadets from a government paramilitary force. According to American officials, the Pakistani Taliban have been involved in or claimed responsibility for attacks on United States interests, including an attack on a military base in Khost, Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, and a suicide bombing against the consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan.

American officials say the failed attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square last May was developed and financed by the Pakistani Taliban. The convicted bomb plotter, Faisal Shahzad, contacted the Pakistani Taliban via computer to confer with handlers over what he had done, the government wrote in court papers in September.

Pakistanis for Peace Editor’s Note- As peace loving Americans of Pakistani descent, we are upset to hear that some members of the US Muslim community would want to do the great nation of the Unites States harm. If found guilty, we hope that they are severly punished and a message is sent to anyone else intending to do us harm. We commend the FBI and the Department of Justice in these arrests and in keeping the American homeland safe.

2011
05/15
CATEGORY
Afghanistan
American Muslims
Hate Crime
homegrown terror
Islam
Muslims
Pakistan
Pakistani Taliban
Pakistanis
Taliban
Tehrik-i-Taliban
terrorism
1 comment

Liberty Market, Lahore’s Hub

By Nagwa Malik

Pakistan is a country of historic and cultural importance. Lahore, the heart of this throbbing culture and history, was referred by Max Robinson as the “Pearl of the Punjab” in his article “Rebranding Lahore”. So what is Lahore to the common foreigner? Unfortunately nobody knows because we have an out-dated website of the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation which does nothing to attract tourists. Lahore is claimed to have existed 4,000 years ago and history has established records of its existence go back at least 2,000 years. This city of vibrant culture, with its outlandish monuments and its commercial centers has changed over the years whilst still keeping the essence of the city itself. This change is reflected in the changes brought about in Liberty Market, the commercial hub of Lahore, set in the center area of Gulberg (originally the Gul-Bagh).

How does a commercial center signify the importance of any city, or its cultural out-look? Relatively! Any shopping center is designed according to the social and cultural needs of its citizens. Lahore is a modern city steeped in a history of thousands of years. It is the crown of Pakistan, originally the crown of Northern India. This is reflected in the architecture of its bazaars, and its modern shopping centers and malls. Liberty Market fits the bill of reflecting Lahore’s modern society. It is a half-souq/bazaar half mall in structure, where you have a huge plaza dominating the area, and then you have rabbit paths very much like those in Anarkali, those that twine from within the closed structure and out to the back where a bazaar like scenery hits you with food stalls, the embroiders, the tailors, walk back inside and you’re inside a branded shop. Liberty Market is the middle-class chic center, where you can find anything and everything, from clothes and accessories to shoes and restaurants. You can go there in the middle of the night and still find a place to sit and relax with a cup of chai and a shwarma. You can enjoy your shopping, breaking it with cool slushes from anyone of the cafes. You think of any type of food, from the traditional to the westernised or Arabian snacks and you have them, all in one area.

The facelift planned has come in handy. The parking space planned and worked on is made more secure, and with parking meters set rather quaintly, coupled with assistants to put in the “quarter” for you (only in this case it’s not a quarter). You have less bombardment of traffic-well; actually there is still the tiresome bombardment, but more controlled. This has helped induce discipline in our public which was lacking miserably these past years.
The commotion with the Sri-Lankan team also added to the, albeit negative, fame of Liberty Market. The worst part was best described by Max Robinson in the very article, when he said, “when the news broke about the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, my heart sank. There was Liberty Chowk, a place full of memories of fun, joyful evenings and feeling ever so slightly too full after gorging on chicken handi at Salt ‘n’ Pepper. If only the people watching that horror knew of the feelings and experiences that I and so many others associate with Liberty, the incident would have felt more like an anomaly or a tragedy. But, alas, the good name of Lahore was to be dragged through the mud and added to the list of dangerous terrorist-ridden holes to be avoided at all costs.”

This calls for an emergency upgrading of Liberty Market and of Lahore. This chic market which is one of the most delightful areas in Lahore is now known to the world as an area unsafe for Lahoris, let alone the tourists. Why? Liberty does not need a physical uplift. It does not need alarming blaring announcements over the speakers as each shop announces its sales, it does not need new plazas- it needs marketing. Yes, our market needs marketing and that even to the outer world. A reflection of its citizens, it should be used in overhauling the image of Lahore in particular and of Pakistan in general.

I mean if the few tourists that come to Lahore feel they have entered the “safest” city in the world, and move around Liberty as the “safest and most colourful” modern epic of Lahore, why shouldn’t it be trumpeted? Apart from those classic monuments of the walled city, what have we for the man of average social tastes? We have Liberty Market, more so due to the negative fame it achieved during the rare terrorist incident. Now people hear of Lahore and they associate it with Liberty Market. That can be propagated positively now, to promote tourism, to promote Lahore’s old name of “one of the most peaceful cities in the world”, to promote the Lahore of today, a modern city with its eons of culture and tradition.
If to one Max Robinson, “Cultural differences mean that a holiday in Pakistan will never be exactly like a vacation to India or Thailand. No boozy full moon dance parties or seedy cruises up and down the beaches here. But there is a market out there for cultural tourism. People who want to enjoy all the sights, sounds and smells of a place totally different to home.” What would it mean to many others once we invite them to come over, to pour in? And once they realize they do not have to go all the way to the walled city to see, in their own words, “wonder after wonder” that “thrills them”, but can enjoy the mundane act of shopping in a center like Liberty and still have a unique experience. Heck, it is a unique experience for our own Pakistanis who come to Lahore just to shop here…imagine what it would be to the foreigners who would greet an up-to-date mall-cum-bazaar well within reach, with products that are also well within reach.

2011
05/14
CATEGORY
Pakistan
Pakistanis
3 comments

U.S. Attorney Sends a Message to Wall Street

By Benjamin Weiser and Peter Lattman for The New York Times

Every few days during the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group’s co-founder, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, would quietly enter the courtroom and take a seat in the last row of the gallery.

From that unassuming vantage point, Mr. Bharara watched his colleagues try to persuade a jury to convict the former hedge fund titan of securities fraud and conspiracy.

The consistent presence of Mr. Bharara at the largest insider trading case in a generation — and the office’s resounding victory on Wednesday — signaled that the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan was back as the sheriff of Wall Street.

Over the last decade, the New York attorney general, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, the Manhattan district attorney and even the Justice Department in Washington angled for their share of financial fraud cases, an area traditionally dominated by the Southern District. For example, Eliot Spitzer grabbed headlines when he was New York attorney general by focusing on malfeasance at investment banks.

But Mr. Bharara has not-so-quietly reaffirmed his office’s leading role in pursuing corporate crime with this landmark insider trading case, which relied on aggressive prosecutorial methods and unprecedented tactics. For the first time, federal authorities used wiretaps to listen in on stock traders swapping illegal tips.

“What this case has done,” said Neil M. Barofsky, a former Southern District prosecutor who recently served as the special inspector general for the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, “goes well beyond simply putting a billionaire hedge fund manager behind bars.”

“The case will impact an entire industry,” Mr. Barofsky said. He said that Mr. Bharara “did more than just oversee and support the prosecution — he made sure that the target audience, traders on Wall Street, fully understood the extraordinary lengths that his office will go to discover these crimes, and that justice will be served.”

It has been 21 months since Mr. Bharara, 42, was appointed United States attorney by President Obama.

In that short tenure, his staff has ventured far beyond Wall Street, prosecuting some of the nation’s — and the world’s — most prominent defendants. Among them: Faisal Shahzad in the Times Square bomb plot; agents in a Russian spy ring; Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first Guantánamo Bay detainee to be tried in the civilian system; Viktor Bout, a Russian accused of being an arms trafficker; a Somali man charged with piracy; and four men charged in a plot to bomb synagogues in the Bronx.

Not every case has gone smoothly. In Mr. Ghailani’s trial, the jury acquitted him of more than 280 counts of murder and conspiracy and convicting him of a single count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. Nonetheless, Mr. Ghailani received a life sentence.

Some academics and newspaper columnists have also criticized Mr. Bharara for not filing criminal charges against senior executives at the center of the financial crisis. Last week, when his office filed a civil mortgage-fraud lawsuit against Deutsche Bank, he said there was not enough evidence to justify a criminal complaint.

Mr. Bharara was an infant in 1970 when he came to the United States from India with his parents. He grew up in Eatontown, N.J., and earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia Law School.

After several years in private practice, including a stint at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in New York, Mr. Bharara became a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, handling organized crime, narcotics and securities fraud cases. In 2005, he became chief counsel to Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, leading a Congressional inquiry into the firings of United States attorneys.

Some lawyers have wondered aloud whether Mr. Bharara may have political aspirations like his predecessors, including former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who filled the post in the 1980s. As with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Bharara is a charismatic figure who is comfortable in front of cameras, can talk tough and has a knack for the witty sound bite. At a news conference announcing Mr. Rajaratnam’s arrest, Mr. Bharara riffed off a famous line from the movie “Wall Street.”

“Greed, sometimes, is not good,” he said.

Unlike Mr. Giuliani, whose political ambitions seemed barely hidden while he led the prosecutor’s office, Mr. Bharara has told friends he has no interest in elected office.

“Everything about Preet’s record suggests that he’s a federal prosecutor for all the right reasons,” said Randy Mastro, a lawyer at Gibson Dunn and a former top deputy under Mayor Giuliani. “The best prosecutors are often those who don’t have political ambitions.”

Mr. Mastro, who overlapped for a time with Mr. Bharara at Gibson Dunn, added, “But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be drafted into running.” Ellen Davis, Mr. Bharara’s spokeswoman, said in a statement on Thursday: “Preet loves his job and has no desire to run for public office now or ever.”

Mr. Bharara has not commented publicly on the Rajaratnam verdict, other than a short statement in a news release. But in a series of speeches, he has explained his aggressive approach to corporate crime.

“When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals, we have no choice but to treat them as such,” Mr. Bharara said weeks after revealing the use of wiretaps in building a case against Mr. Rajaratnam. “To use tough tactics in these circumstances is not being heavy-handed; it is being even-handed.” He has taken that approach in other areas of financial crime.

His office secured convictions in two high-profile criminal cases against bank executives accused of stealing proprietary computer code related to high-frequency trading businesses, including a case against a former programmer at Goldman Sachs. More recently, Mr. Bharara’s prosecutors charged the operators of three popular online poker sites with fraud and money laundering.

And Mr. Bharara continues to pursue insider trading cases. Over the last 18 months, his office has charged 47 individuals with insider trading crimes, 36 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted. At a recent news conference, he indicated there was more to come.

“I wish I could say we were just about finished, but sadly we are not.”

2011
05/13
CATEGORY
Desi
India
President Obama
1 comment

The Power of Pakistani Conspiracy Theories

By Ahmed Rashid for The New Republic

Pakistan is not a failed state, or as yet a failing one, even though it may be in a state of chaos or meltdown. Unlike really failed states, it has a powerful army and a corrupt, run-down, but still functioning bureaucracy, judiciary, and police force. Pakistanis perform outstandingly well in the realm of culture: in the arts, television, fashion design, pop music, and of course cricket. What is missing are adequate social services, such as health care, education, population-control programs, and jobs for a population that is nearing 200 million people. Like many Arab countries, Pakistan faces a youth bulge, with an estimated 60 percent of its people under twenty-five years old.

For these young people without adequate education and employment, who have to deal with a corrupt system that offers no panacea to the poor, joining an Islamic extremist group is not at all unusual. It is the norm. For this reason, a replay of an “Arab awakening” in Pakistan would not lead to the dawn of true democracy, but rather to a mass movement whose leadership would swiftly fall into the hands of Islamic extremists, who would then try to overthrow the state.

What Pakistanis desperately need is a new narrative by their leaders—a narrative that does not blame the evergreen troika of India, the United States, and Israel for all of the country’s ills, that breaks the old habit of blaming outsiders and instead looks at itself more honestly and more transparently. Pakistanis as a nation seem incapable of self-analysis, of apportioning blame according to logic and reason rather than emotion.

Along with the causes that I listed above, the wave of intolerance sweeping the country is also due substantially to the conspiracy theories put about by the ruling establishment and their allies in the media. These various hallucinations paint Pakistan as the victim, maligned and wronged at the hands of foreign powers—especially the United States and India. In the imagination of many Pakistanis, the country is regularly used for some geopolitical aim by the Americans and then discarded in favor of India. These sinister outsiders want to subvert, destroy, and undermine Pakistan—but no logical reason is offered as to why. And few will publicly argue that in fact it is the selective state sponsorship of extremism that is destroying the country.

The narrative that has been peddled by the state for much of the past decade is that Pakistan is being undermined by the presence of American forces in Afghanistan, and that if they were to leave the Pakistani Taliban would go home, the suicide bombings would cease, and everything would go back to normal. The ultimate aim of the United States in Afghanistan—so the narrative continues—is to capture Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, even as India is busily dismembering Pakistan by funding Baloch separatists and the Pakistani Taliban. But if that is so, why on earth did the state allow the revival of the Afghan Taliban in 2003, which has only delayed the American withdrawal from Afghanistan? And for those demanding higher military budgets, the most self-serving conspiracy theory is that Pakistan is locked in an interminable conflict with India, which cannot be resolved.

2011
05/13
CATEGORY
Afghanistan
Nuclear
Pakistan
Pakistan Army
Pakistani Taliban
Pakistanis
President Obama
2 comments

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