Meanwhile in Pakistan: 11 Killed in Drone Attack

A Pakistani official says 11 people in northwest Pakistan have been killed by a missile fired from a US drone aircraft. Six others were wounded.

UPDATED: The Latest on the Long March in Pakistan

UPDATE (8:30 p.m. GMT): Some of those detained by Pakistani security forces, including Munir Malik, have now been released.

Meanwhile, there is some intriguing political manoeuvring between the Zardari Government and the US. In a pointed signal that Washington was keeping its options open, US Ambassador Anne Patterson met with Nawaz Sharif on Thursday. Then US envoy Richard Holbrooke joined Patterson and President Zardari in a 20-minute phone conversation and "expressed concern over the political turmoil and arrest of political and lawyers....[The] US wanted continuity of democracy in Pakistan so that war against terrorism could be taken to its logical end." Holbrooke urged Zardari to "show restraint" in his handling of the political opposition.

The Long March, organised by lawyers to protest against the policies of the Zardari Government and its interference with the judiciary, began this afternoon in several Pakistan cities. It started in Lahore just over a half-hour after its start time of 12 noon, with 500 lawyers moving toward the High Court. They were soon joined by another 500 peoples, including some with the flags of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and Jamaat-i-Islami, the oldest religious party in Pakistan.

Later in the afternoon, another group of about 2000 protestors began moving from Karachi to Islamabad. The march was led by the lawyers’ movement, including former Supreme Court Bar Association president Munir A. Malik and Sindh High Court Bar Association President Rasheed A. Rizvi, but also includes students and party members from PML (N), Jamaat-i-Islami, and Labour.

Malik, Rizvi, and several other march leaders were detained just over an hour later, and other arrests followed. The total detained is now estimated at 100, and police have baton-charged the marchers. Others have had their bus and car keys confiscated, stranding them at Karachi Toll Plaza.

Pakistan: On Eve of Political Showdown, Hundreds Arrested

From this morning's The Times of London:

Pakistan has arrested hundreds of opposition political activists in an overnight sweep before a planned protest rally, as a looming political showdown presents the most serious challenge yet to the year-old government [of President Asif Ali Zardari, pictured at left).

The story continues:

Most of those arrested belong to the popular Pakistan Muslim League (N) led by Nawaz Sharif, the former Prime Minister, and Tehrik-e-Insaf, the party led by Imran Khan, the former cricket captain.

A senior politician in the Pakistan Muslim League (N), Raja Zafarul Haq, was placed under house arrest and this morning police were hunting for Imran Khan. Scores of other MPs and lawyers have gone into hiding to avoid detention.

A ban has been placed on public gatherings across the country and heavy contingents of police and paramilitary troops sealed off the capital Islamabad where opposition parties and lawyers plan to stage a sit-in outside the parliament building on Friday.

United Nations: US Tortured, Britain Followed

Related Post: The BBC and the UN Report on Torture - Shhhh, Don’t Tell Anyone
Related Post: Text - UN Report on Counter-Terrorism, Human Rights, and Torture

The United Nations report released yesterday is clear and concise: Britain was complicit with a US-created system which violated basic human rights and condoned the torture of detainees.

The Special Rapporteur remains deeply troubled that the United States has created a comprehensive system of extraordinary renditions, prolonged and secret detention, and practices that violate the prohibition against torture and other forms of ill-treatment. This system required an international web of exchange of information and has created a corrupted body of information which was shared systematically with partners in the war on terror through intelligence cooperation, thereby corrupting the institutional culture of the legal and institutional systems of recipient States.

The report continues:

While this system was devised and put in place by the United States, it was only possible through collaboration from many other States. There exist consistent, credible reports suggesting that at least until May 2007 a number of States facilitated extraordinary renditions in various ways. States such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Georgia, Indonesia, Kenya, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Pakistan and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have provided intelligence or have conducted the initial seizure of an individual before he was transferred to (mostly unacknowledged) detention centres in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Thailand, Uzbekistan, or to one of the CIA covert detention centres, often referred to as “black sites”. In many cases, the receiving States reportedly engaged in torture and other forms of ill-treatment of these detainees.

Two specific cases are cited by the Special Rapporteur: "Evidence proves that Australian, British and United States intelligence personnel have themselves interviewed detainees who were held incommunicado by the Pakistani [intelligence service] ISI in so-called safe houses, where they were being tortured. Many countries (Bahrain, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan) have sent interrogators to Guantanamo Bay as
well."

This is not "enhanced interrogation". Not "aggressive questioning". Not any other euphemism. Torture.

This isn't breaking news. Allegations of British participation in interrogation of tortured prisoners have been about for several years. Only last month, Human Rights Watch documented at least 10 cases at Guantanamo Bay where British residents were interrogated, after beatings and other techniques violating human rights, by UK intelligence services. Representatives of Binyam Mohamed, recently released from the US base in Cuba, have provided further details.

So why is this report special? Simply because it doesn't come from an organisation like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International which are dismissed by Government authorities as politically biased. It comes from the UN, the international body to which the US and UK belong. (No doubt various media outlets, if this story gets traction, will offer the image of the United Nations as hostile to the American and British Governments, but the UN still has an international legal standing that has to be recognised.)

More importantly, this statement exposes the lie (and the liars) at the heart of the British Government. The UK was far from alone in propping up the US-sanctioned torture. It was the Blair Government, however, that stood side-by-side for years alongside the US proclaiming that they were protecting human rights in the War on Terror, indeed extending those rights by taking that war from Afghanistan to Iraq. It was Tony Blair who lay down the doctrine for moral intervention in 1999:

No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer.

Ten years later, it is Blair's successors who have upheld "the values of liberty, the rule, [and] human rights" through evasion, deceit, and denial. Nine days ago, Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith declared:

We will continue to ensure that our co-operation with other countries and partners does not undermine the very principles and values that are the best long-term guarantee of our future security. Central to those values is an abhorrence of torture, and the determination that when allegations of torture are made they are properly investigated. That has been, and will remain, the government's approach.

Maybe it's best, given this economy with the truth, to return to the UN report:

[The Special Rapporteur is] worried by the increasing use of State secrecy provisions and public interest immunities for instance by Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the United Kingdom or the United States to conceal illegal acts from oversight bodies or judicial authorities, or to protect itself from criticism, embarrassment and - most importantly - liability.

Mr Obama's War: Playing for Time in Afghanistan

Related Post: Transcript of President Obama’s Interview with New York Times

President Obama gave a 35-minute exclusive interview to The New York Times on Friday. On the economy, it's an essential read. On foreign policy, the Times made a complete hash of its exclusive.

Despite Obama's attention to the economic crisis, the Times headlined, "Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of the Taliban", declaring:

President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.

That is quite a scoop. Although Secretary of Defense Robert Gates raised the possibilities of such talks, it has not arisen as part of the possible Obama strategy, especially amidst the attention to the sharp increase in US troops in Afghanistan.

Only problem? It's not close to what Obama said. Here's the exchange:

Q. Do you see a time when you might be willing to reach out to more moderate elements of the Taliban, to try to peel them away, towards reconciliation?

A. I don’t want to pre-judge the review that’s currently taking place. If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region. But the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex. You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, so figuring all that out is going to be a much more of a challenge.

So it was the Times, not Obama, that broached the possibility of engagement with the Taliban. And the President stonewalled: yes, there had been talks with former foes in Iraq but this approach could not be simply applied to Afghanistan.

Obama's clear signal, which the Times reporters missed, was that his investment was in the review being headed by US envoy Richard Holbrooke and Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution. As we've noted, that review followed Obama's refusal to accept fully the approach --- based on three earlier reviews --- proposed by the US military.

The President may have seized the political initiative in Washington, but in Kabul the immediate issue is President Hamid Karzai's bid to hold onto power. The Obama Administration has made a public commitment to a review which includes Afghan and Pakistani participation. And possibly most importantly, the first priority for Obama and his advisors right now is Pakistan. Obama told the Times reporters:

At the heart of a new Afghanistan policy is going to be a smarter Pakistan policy. As long as you’ve got safe havens in these border regions that the Pakistani government can’t control or reach, in effective ways, we’re going to continue to see vulnerability on the afghan side of the border. And so it’s very important for us to reach out to the Pakistani government, and work with them more effectively.

The explanation for the misleading headline in the Times is an easy one. Helene Cooper, one of the two reporters writing up the interview, has a "Week in Review" piece in today's paper, "Dreaming of Splitting the Taliban". The article is based on the opinions of think-tank experts and a "European diplomat", but it has no input from an Administration official. No problem: Cooper just stuck the theme of his Week in Review analysis on top of the Obama interview, twisting the President into the inside source for the piece.

Even if the concept of talking to the moderate Taliban is one that should be supported, that's lazy journalism. So toss aside the Times fluff, keep your eyes for the moment on Pakistan, and wait --- possibly until the NATO summit at the start of April --- for a real story on an Obama strategy in Afghanistan.