The life and times of Osama bin Laden

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 12 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

The compound was neither a mansion, nor a fortress; it was a prison. For months, maybe even years, the planet’s most-wanted man hid behind its high, razor-wire topped walls, trying to obscure his presence from spies, satellites and drones. The house had no phone or Internet connections. Garbage was burned in the courtyard. And afraid of being recognized simply by his tall, skinny frame, he could not even venture outdoors.

In the end, the first real contact Osama bin Laden had with the outside world since he fled Afghanistan in December 2001 came when a team of U.S. Navy Seals touched down at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, hiding spot Sunday. Forty minutes later, he was dead—shot through the head in a bedroom, his blood spreading across a shabby oriental carpet.

The 54-year-old’s death came as he had often predicted, from the barrel of an American gun. Perhaps he even welcomed it. “I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God,” bin Laden once told Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a British-based Arabic language newspaper. “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two,” he proclaimed on another occasion. And few, in the West at least, will term it anything but justice. Author of deadly bombings in East Africa and Yemen, the Saudi-born scion of a multi-millionaire construction magnate had been at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list since 1998. Then on Sept. 11, 2001, he dispatched teams of hijackers to fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, murdering 2,933 people. (Forty more died when a fourth plane was brought down in a Pennsylvania field, short of another presumed Washington target.) The fires set that day still burn across the globe.

For a decade now, Osama bin Laden has been the object of our fascination and the repository of our fears. Academics and the press have parsed his hidey-hole communiqués looking for an ideology or explanation. Booksellers’ shelves are crammed with dozens of biographies and oral histories, purporting to deliver the “inside” story of his and al-Qaeda’s rise. Yet the motives, life and now death of a figure destined to go down as one of history’s greatest villains remain muddled.

Some accounts of the bedroom firefight say a woman tried to shield bin Laden with her body. The Americans think it was his wife, although which one, or even how many he had (some sources suggest four, others five) is a mystery. The same for a son reportedly left dead in the compound—one of his 13, or 19, or maybe 23 children. The fate of the terrorist leader’s body, spirited away and said to have been buried at sea, is already the subject of conspiracy theories. Osama’s violent demise may offer “sober satisfaction,” as Stephen Harper put it, but it won’t end the questions. Killing the myth may prove even harder than killing the man.

The date and place of Osama’s birth—March 10, 1957, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—are clear. But not so much the circumstances. As one of the 52, or maybe 54, offspring that Muhammad bin-Awad bin Laden sired with his 22 wives, perhaps that’s understandable. The elder bin Laden emigrated to the kingdom around 1930. A porter in his native Yemen, he found a new calling in construction, building a palace on the cheap for King Abdel Aziz ibn Saud and securing a lifelong patron. Lucrative contracts for roads and bridges followed, as well as prestigious commissions to renovate Islam’s holiest sites in Medina and Mecca. By the time of Osama’s birth, Muhammad was among the country’s wealthiest men. But he remained renowned for his piety—praying at three different mosques each day, never having more than four wives at one time in accordance with religious law, and renovating the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem at cost. He was also a fierce believer in the prevailing Arab cause. In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, Osama once told an interviewer, Muhammad tried to have his company’s 200 bulldozers converted to tanks so he could launch his own invasion.

He had met Osama’s mother, Alia, during a visit to Syria in the mid-1950s. The marriage—his 10th—lasted only a few years and produced just the one child. By some family accounts, Alia was more of a concubine than wife. In others, she was a headstrong and sophisticated woman who demanded a divorce and adopted Western dress when outside the country. What is certain is that Osama adored her. “First comes God and then his mother,” Osama’s half-brother Ahmad Muhammad al-Attas told journalists in the months after 9/11. During his years of exile in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, bin Laden made a point of calling her frequently, even though security officials at home and in the U.S. were surely monitoring the calls.

Osama’s relationship with Muhammad, who died in a September 1967 plane crash, was not as close. One friend claims bin Laden only met his father five times. But he was accepted by his many half-siblings, and given an inheritance—shares in the family firm that were worth somewhere between US$8 million and $250 million, according to widely divergent accounts. Whatever the amount, he didn’t do much with it. Compatriots remember him as a quiet kid, who enjoyed picnics and soccer games, and had one notable passion—horseback riding.

While many of his brothers and sisters travelled and studied abroad, Osama preferred to stay in Saudi Arabia. There have been reports that he once travelled to Sweden as a teen, and Chicago as a young adult, but the only confirmed voyages were annual visits to Syria to see his mother’s family. As a student at the prestigious al-Thager Model School in Jeddah—where the royal family educates its boys—he was considered passably bright. In 1978, he entered King Abdul Aziz University to study economics, management and business administration. Already married and the father of two boys—he had wed his 14-year-old first cousin, Najwa, when he was 17—he didn’t stick at school for long, and was soon back working for the family firm. But what bin Laden did discover during his brief post-secondary career was his first spiritual mentor, a Palestinian firebrand named Abdullah Azzam. A follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam was a deep believer in the concept of jihad. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the religious scholar issued his own fatwa, declaring it every Muslim’s duty to join the struggle.

Soon after, Azzam left Saudi Arabia for the border regions of Pakistan to minister to the mujahedeen. Bin Laden followed. Some sources suggest the two men worked together raising money and setting up training camps for the fighters. Others like Michael Scheur, in his recent biography of the terrorist leader, claim Osama spent five years doing the bidding of Saudi intelligence, using his family’s equipment to build hospitals and cut roads through the border mountains to ease arms deliveries. By the time they officially set up a joint operation in 1984—the Maktab al-Khadamat (services office)—to welcome foreign fighters, bin Laden had become a recognized force in his own right, possessed with the kind of confidence that made men follow. “He was a natural leader,” Khalid al-Batarfi, a friend, told Peter Bergen, the author of The Osama I Know. “He leads by example and by hints more than direct orders. He just sets an example and then expects you to follow and somehow you follow even if you are not 100 per cent convinced.”

In 1986, bin Laden set up al-Masadah (the Lion’s Den), his own training camp for Arab recruits in the mountains. But the man who was teaching others to fight had yet to see action. In the spring of 1987, the base—garrisoned by 50 or so fighters—came under attack from a much larger Soviet force. According to some accounts, the mujahedeen held out for a great victory. In others, they suffered heavy losses and retreated in disarray. For years afterwards, Osama was always pictured holding a Kalashnikov rifle he claimed to have taken away from a Russian he killed in hand-to-hand combat that week. As reports of the battle spread, his prestige grew. In the following weeks, he and other foreign commanders met to form a loose alliance of jihadis, which would ultimately morph into al-Qaeda. It was the beginning of bin Laden’s legend.

The FBI’s wanted poster is scant on details. “Usama” bin Laden is listed as between six foot four and six foot six and “approximately” 160 lb. His languages are Arabic and “probably” Pashtu. (What is not noted is that he also studied English in high school.) There are no known scars and marks. He is left-handed, walks with a cane, and has used the aliases the Sheik, the Prince, the Emir and the Director. But as of the morning of May 2, one hard fact had been added: the label “deceased” under his picture.

The emerging narrative of his death suggests the $25 million reward the United States government has been dangling for his “apprehension or conviction” played no role in the Abbottabad raid. So too the Pakistani authorities, who managed not to respond to a helicopter assault and lengthy gun battle at a compound located just a kilometre away from their chief officer-training school, the Kakul military academy, and nearby several other bases.

Official links to bin Laden have always been a touchy subject. In addition to Saudi support during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, it has long been reported he and his men also received training and arms from the CIA. Certainly he was once—and given his final location, almost assuredly still— friendly with elements of the Pakistani intelligence service.

In 1989, when the 32-year-old returned home to Jeddah after the Russian withdrawal, he was considered a hero. There were talks with Prince Turki Al Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, about overthrowing the Communists in Yemen—although the prince ultimately decided that such a war would be a little too close to home. In August 1990, when Iraq invaded neighbouring Kuwait, bin Laden offered his services and followers to defend the kingdom in the event that Saddam pushed on. He was turned down.

Osama’s rift with the West is often attributed to his anger over the garrisoning of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the first Gulf War, a supposed “desecration” of Islam’s holiest sites. But he had already begun formulating a vision of global jihadism back in Afghanistan, working closely with a new mentor, the Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1991, his anti-government proclamations became too much for the Saudis and he was asked to leave the country. He made his way to Sudan, where a hardline Islamic regime had seized power in 1989. Still, in those days he was hardly considered a global threat. In Khartoum, he operated in the open as a businessman, building roads for the government and importing medical equipment and supplies. It was Zawahiri and his continued attacks on Egyptian targets that drew the most attention. His friend bin Laden was considered to be a sympathizer, and perhaps financier.

At the behest of the Saudi government, friends and family continued to visit Osama in Sudan, trying to convince him to sever ties with his former Afghan comrades. At one point he supposedly mused about resigning from al-Qaeda to pursue life as a watermelon and peanut farmer. But in 1994, the bin Laden family found it necessary to take out advertisements in Saudi newspapers officially disowning Osama. (Although money continued to flow his way, and relatives travelled to see him in Afghanistan as late as January 2001 for the wedding of his son, Mohammed.) The Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship and he replied with an open letter calling for the royal family’s violent overthrow.

It was the actions of Zawahiri’s followers, including a 1995 suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, which killed 17, that eventually got the pair expelled from Sudan. In May 1996, bin Laden chartered a private jet and flew to Kandahar, where he was greeted with open arms by the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Omar.

Al-Qaeda’s early Afghan days were idyllic, according to some. Followers, including Toronto’s Khadr family, congregated at a rough compound near Jalalabad. In their retelling, Osama was more like a sitcom dad than the father of a global terrorist movement. “He’s a normal human being,” Abdurahman Khadr told the CBC in 2004. “He has issues with his wife and his kids. Financial issues, you know. The kids aren’t listening. The kids aren’t doing this and that.” His sister Zaynab recalled a man who loved horseback riding, playing volleyball, and target shooting with the kids. Although he seemed a little strict, even by radical fundamentalist standards. The female bin Ladens “have lots of restrictions, where they go, when they go, where they come, when they come, who visits them and how long they can stay in their house and all that,” Zaynab explained.

Osama also harboured some prejudices against creature comforts, forbidding his family from having running water, electricity, or even using ice. “He is against drinking cold water,” said Abdurahman. “He didn’t want them in any way to be spoiled.” Conspicuous non-consumption was a bit of an obsession for the rich Saudi. In the stifling heat of Khartoum, he refused to install air conditioning. “We want a simple life,” was one of his mantras.

What bin Laden didn’t seem to shy away from was publicity. In the late 1990s, as his fame as a terrorist grew, he gave regular interviews to foreign journalists, and even held a press conference with Zawahiri in 1998 to announce the formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews. A few months later, al-Qaeda staged its first major operation, bombing the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224. President Bill Clinton responded by firing more than 100 cruise missiles at bin Laden’s Afghan camps, but al-Qaeda’s leadership escaped unscathed. The Taliban, already internationally isolated, resisted UN sanctions and blandishments like a $5-million reward, and refused to hand the Saudi over. But they didn’t necessarily enjoy the grandstanding. Even long-time bin Laden deputies like Abu Musab al-Suri (captured in 2005 and sent to a secret Syrian prison) found it all a bit much. “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause,” he wrote in 1999.

It took a good long while for the Americans to figure out that they had missed their chance to kill bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in December 2001. The ferocious assault by Afghan tribal militias, backed by U.S. and British war planes, killed more than 100 al-Qaeda fighters, including 18 commanders. Foreign troops, Canadians among them, returned to the scene several times over the following months, looking in vain for the corpses of Osama and Zawahiri. Eventually the CIA obtained a videotape of Osama hiking through the mountains into Pakistan and realized just how close they had come. It showed a U.S. plane dropping a bomb on the caves. “We were there last night,” remarks bin Laden.

Audio tapes from the al-Qaeda leader would surface occasionally. (By 2010 there were more than 40 authenticated messages.) In October 2004, he appeared in a video, looking disturbingly robust and well-groomed. After George W. Bush won re-election, nothing was heard from bin Laden for more than three years. Many speculated that he had been killed in a drone attack, or died from a medical condition, like his supposed kidney diseases. All the time, the hunt—and the wars that flowed out of it—went on.

The secret U.S. commando organization responsible for the terrorist’s assassination, the Joint Special Operations Command, has a budget of more than $1 billion a year. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to an Afghan campaign that has cost more than $450 billion since 2001, and a loosely related invasion and occupation of Iraq that is closing in on $800 billion. Still, in the afterglow of bin Laden’s killing, which sent euphoric crowds into the streets of Washington, New York and other cities, many will say the expense and effort were worth it.

However, eliminating the face of terror doesn’t rid any of us of the problem. Footage of the Abbottabad compound show a large satellite dish which surely enabled bin Laden to follow the deadly exploits of his followers, clones and imitators around the world.

One can only hope that he found channel surfing much less pleasurable in his final months, as Arabs throughout the Middle East took to the streets to rise up against their dictators. Not in violent jihad, as bin Laden has envisioned, but in largely peaceful protests demanding rights, reform and democracy.

History will record that when revolution finally came to the region it was inspired by a simple Tunisian fruit-seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself ablaze to protest government corruption and indifference—an unwanted man who may end up having far more influence than the world’s foremost fugitive.

Why did it take so long to get Osama?

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Darren McCollester/New York Times/Getty Images

In the end, Osama bin Laden was hardly the righteous martyr he claimed to be. The same terrorist mastermind who murdered thousands of people in a single morning—and urged his followers to “kill Americans wherever they are found,” even if that meant their own demise—was not exactly toughing out the jihad in a dusty cave or secluded mud hut. He was holed up in a Pakistani mansion, in a third-floor bedroom with a king-size mattress, red-and-yellow curtains, and a closet.

John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism adviser, summed it up best: “Here is Osama, living in a million-dollar compound,” he told reporters. “It speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

Snippets continue to emerge about the top-secret mission that finally claimed al-Qaeda’s elusive leader, 10 long years after the 9/11 attacks. The tips from Guantánamo Bay. Months and months of tedious surveillance. The dangerous midnight raid, carried out by an elite unit of Navy Seals—and relayed, blow by blow, to nervous officials back in the White House situation room, including President Barack Obama.

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How did Pakistan not know bin Laden was hiding there?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 10 Comments

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The discovery of Osama bin Laden, not in some desolate cave in a lawless tribal borderland, but ensconced comfortably in a suburban neighbourhood in the heart of Pakistan, has led to a single burning question in Washington: how could the Pakistani government, recipient of billions of dollars of American aid, not know that for possibly five years America’s most wanted fugitive was living in plain sight, a short walk from a military academy, no less?

For years, Pakistan denied knowledge of his whereabouts, even while the Pakistani intelligence services stood accused of tipping off al-Qaeda’s leaders about American efforts to find them. Anybody who thought that Pakistan was protecting bin Laden was “smoking something they shouldn’t be smoking,” Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, told CNN in 2010.

But those suspicions about Islamabad turned to outrage this week. Relations had already been sharply deteriorating, with the U.S. accusing Pakistan of not being serious in fighting terror—and Pakistanis outraged over U.S. drone attacks against suspected Pakistani terrorist targets. Now, with the news that bin Laden had been living openly in Pakistan, there were calls in Washington for Congress to limit an aid program that has allotted US$7.5 billion over five years to help strengthen the Pakistani government and win the support of Pakistan’s people. “I think this tells us once again that unfortunately Pakistan, at times, is playing a double game, and that’s very troubling to me,” said Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee. “We clearly need to keep the pressure on Pakistan, and one way to do that is to put more strings attached to the tremendous amount of military aid that we give the country,” she said.

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How Osama bin Laden was hidden in plain sight

By Adnan R. Khan - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 20 Comments

DigitalGlobe/Getty Images

It was around midnight on Sunday night when Naveed’s house suddenly went black. The 24-year-old student thought little of it—Pakistanis have gotten used to power cuts over the past few years as the country struggles with an energy crisis—but it was an odd time for it. Load shedding, as it’s commonly called here, happens on a schedule, and this blackout was not on schedule.

Out on the quiet streets of the Kakul neighbourhood in Abbottabad, nothing seemed amiss. Nothing ever happened in Kakul, which was part of the reason Naveed had gone to Britain to study: he needed to get away from the boredom of living in a part of the city officially under military control—a cantonment zone—where residents were required to report regularly to the army about who lives where, and intelligence officers regularly harassed people they deemed suspicious. He felt suffocated.

Being back at home, he was again feeling the walls closing in on him, and the darkness only made it worse. Stepping onto the roof of his family home, he breathed in the cool mountain air. The smooth, rolling silhouette of the Himalayan foothills to the east had a calming effect, as it always had, so when he heard the dull thump of helicopter blades, he was taken a little by surprise.

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What's on bin Laden's Hard Drive?

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 1:26 PM - 6 Comments

“The mother lode of intelligence.”

That’s how a U.S. official, speaking anonymously with Politico, described the cache of computers and thumb drives Navy SEALS seized from Osama Bin Laden’s Abbotabad crib. Former State Department official Richard Haas told the Toronto Star that this “intelligence harvest” could be “as important if not more important than the actual killing of bin Laden.”

He may be speaking too soon. Remember—OBL was careful enough to forego both phone lines and an Internet hookup to his compound. Assuming he was still active in al-Qaeda communications over the past few years, he would have had to physically hustle USB keys and hard drives in and out of his bunker. If he was that careful, wouldn’t he take the precaution of encrypting his communications as well?

As The Register speculates, such encryption might nevertheless be cracked by the US military—especially if Bin Laden used al-Qaeda’s homebrew scrambler “Mojahedeen Secrets” (no joke).

As tantalizing as the data seizure may be to the hundreds of intelligence agents poring over the drives right now, all involved may want to temper their expectations. We’ve yet to receive any indication that bin Laden has been doing anything but cowering in recent years, and it’s entirely possible that he’s completely out of the jihadi loop.

Given the recent discovery of pungent weed crops by the Abbotabad compound and reports of frequent munchie-runs by OBL’s cronies, America’s best data-crackers may find nothing on the drives but a copy of Super Smash Brothers PC and a badly dubbed torrent of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Between rock and a hard place

By Adnan R. Khan - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 3 Comments

Photograph by Adnan R. Khan

Something unexpected is about to happen in the underground grotto of the Base Rock Cafe. It’s open mike night at one of Karachi’s only venues for live rock music, and the steady stream of would-be rock stars has been a bit of a disappointment so far. But that’s to be expected. “We don’t judge the bands that sign up for the open mike,” Sameea Zafar, the café’s 29-year-old owner, says apologetically. “We really want an open atmosphere for Pakistani musicians, so anyone can come and give performance a try.”

The lineup on this night has been typical for an open mike: teenagers belting out cover tunes in often tuneless cacophonies, with only sporadic forays into potential musicianship. But when Junaid Akmal, an aspiring comedian and MC for the night, announces the youngest act on the playlist, what they get is something else altogether.

Twelve-year-old Sufyan Ansari approaches the microphone with an acoustic guitar and the swagger of a seasoned performer. No one would guess that this is his first time on stage, his first time, in fact, playing for any audience of any kind. But when he starts strumming, the murmur in the audience gives way to an awed silence. His acoustic renditions of Nirvana songs are dizzyingly emotive, his adolescent voice ringing out clear, near-perfect melodies. At the end of his three-song set, Sufyan leans into the mike and asks tentatively: “Do you want to hear another one?” The crowd explodes with applause.

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Pakistan cozies up to China

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 9:39 AM - 10 Comments

China Daily/REUTERS

Pakistan’s ambassador to China used a recent celebration of his country’s Republic Day to give a rhetoric-filled talk about Beijing-Islamabad relations. If March 23, 1940, was the day the Muslim League decided to establish Pakistan, then the anniversary would be a time to declare that relations with China will define the way forward. “We shall take our bilateral relations to new heights,” Masood Khan proclaimed. “China and Pakistan are the best friends in the world.” The warm words echoed those of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who said during a December visit to Pakistan that the neighbours would “remain brothers forever.” Such events, of course, can be mere exercises in diplomacy. But in Wen’s case, the sentiment seemed sincere; it was backed by $35 billion in economic deals, and he rolled out a proposal to help Pakistan’s rebuilding after last summer’s flooding, even suggesting that 2011 be the “Year of China-Pakistan Friendship.”

If China appears to be paying special attention to Pakistan lately, it may be because it senses a real opportunity. Pakistan’s relations with its most powerful ally, the United States, have been souring for some time, possibly leaving Islamabad open to other overtures. Most recently, in March, Pakistanis protested and burned American flags over the release of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who confessed to killing two men in Lahore. Though he was freed after families of the victims were paid “blood money,” the case further bruised the Washington-Islamabad alliance. Even in the art galleries of Karachi, exhibitions featured critiques of the “fair-weather” friendship. As Michael Krepon wrote on the Arms Control Wonk blog, “U.S.-Pakistan ties are the worst I can recall in almost two decades of visits, and are likely to deteriorate further.”

Fraying ties with one global superpower, however, do not fully explain the vigour of the China friendship. Pakistan has been moving into China’s sphere of influence for decades, and the countries routinely refer to each other as “all-weather” partners. This year will mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. “Even when I was there in 1981, ’82, I could see Chinese military factories going up,” says Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. Now, Pakistan represents a major market for China’s nuclear and military technology. According to SIPRI, a Swedish think tank, over 40 per cent of Chinese arms exports go to Pakistan—the largest share of any country China sells to. New U.S. intelligence assessments concluded that Pakistan has been steadily growing its nuclear arsenal since President Barack Obama came to power in 2008, and it is poised to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth-largest nuclear weapons power. This is largely thanks to the People’s Republic. Cohen says, “No one did not believe that the Chinese role was not critical and remains important.”

China also recently announced that it would forge ahead with plans to build two more nuclear power reactors in Pakistan—despite the crisis in Japan and global concerns over atomic safety. So it helps, of course, that the China-Pakistan union is a relationship devoid of criticism. Like most countries that benefit from China’s deep pockets, says South Asia analyst Teresita C. Schaffer, “the Pakistanis don’t do things we do that embarrass our friends, like hassle visitors about human rights.”

Meanwhile, relations between the two Asian nations balance ever-warmer ties between the U.S. and Pakistan’s arch-rival, India. Since the Sino-Indian war in 1962, Pakistan has viewed China as a regional counterweight to rising India, whose presence has been a source of security concerns following partition in 1947, and three subsequent major wars. “India is bigger and more successful economically,” says Schaffer. “[Pakistan] has always sought to make friends with powerful outsiders, in order to compensate for India’s larger size.”

But the syrupy rhetoric regarding Pakistan’s friendship with China can be deceiving. “China did not help Pakistan in the 1965 war, and did nothing in the 1971 war,” says Christine Fair, assistant professor at Georgetown University. “It took the side of India in the 1999 Kargil war.” China’s trade with India outstrips trade with Pakistan. Fair adds, “Yes, China has been a consistent military provider, but the logic there is to keep Pakistan in the position to distract India.” Other analysts point out that investing in Pakistan’s ports and infrastructure gives China an alternative route for energy sources. Fair concludes, “The Pakistan-China marriage looks like a love marriage but it’s also a marriage of convenience. The only difference is, China doesn’t complain about Pakistan, but we do.”

Still, at a time when it seems everything is going wrong for Islamabad­—rising food prices and inflation paired with a weak currency, a middle class that has virtually disappeared, and a society that is increasingly fragmented—it feels it has a friend in Beijing. Though, as Cohen points out, “Pakistan may not be such a great prize for China. Between ethnic violence and religious quarrels, it’s coming apart at the seams.”

Pakistani minister assassinated

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 1:11 PM - 6 Comments

Pakistan’s Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, the country’s only Christian minister, was shot dead on Wednesday in an ambush in Islamabad. Bhatti, 42, was on his way to work from his mother’s house when gunmen attacked his car, spraying it with bullets. While Bhatti had received a number of death threats before because of his faith, which fundamentalists in Pakistan see as a violation of the country’s blasphemy law, his car did not have a security escort. A Punjab-based branch of the Taliban, Tehrik-i-Taliban Punjab, took responsibility for the attack, and left pamphlets at the scene of the crime. Shahbaz Bhatti is the second Pakistani politician killed this year for his efforts to reform the country’s blasphemy law. In January, Punjab’s governor Salman Taseer was shot by one of his own bodyguards.

BBC News

India and Pakistan renew peace talks

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 1 Comment

Officials from India and Pakistan announced on Thursday they would resume peace talks which have stalled since the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, in which Pakistani militants killed 163 people. Renewed talks were set to happen after the foreign secretaries of both countries met on Sunday. The United States is eager for the two countries to resolve their differences over Kashmir province, so that Pakistan can divert its military capabilities from the Kashmiri border to the Pakistani frontier with Afghanistan to fight the Taliban insurgency. Both nuclear-armed countries nearly went to war over the disputed Kashmir province in 2001, and the peace talks, which began in 2004, were making progress until the Mumbai attacks. India has said that talks could not be a possibility until Pakistan brings the attackers to justice. The renewed talks are expected to address issues of counterterrorism and improving economic relations between the two neighbours.

New York Times

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal keeps growing

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 2:45 PM - 7 Comments

The latest American intelligence assessments on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal have concluded that the South Asian nation has steadily expanded its nuclear might in recent years, with a total number of deployed weapons now ranging from the mid-90s to more than 110. When President Obama took office, his aides were told that the arsenal “was in the mid-to-high 70s,” according to one official. This new estimate puts Pakistan on track to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth largest nuclear weapons power, highlighting Pakistan’s determination to grow its arsenal, mostly to deter its regional rival, India. The growing numbers also challenge an integral element of Obama’s national security strategy: to reduce nuclear stockpiles around the world. Another worry is Pakistan’s production of nuclear materials. Based on the latest estimates of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, an outside group that estimates worldwide nuclear production, Pakistan has now produced enough material for 40 to 100 additional weapons, including a new class of plutonium bombs.

New York Times

Flowing from underground

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 1 Comment

Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images

Step one of 12 for addiction recovery is admitting you have a problem—something a growing number of Pakistanis are doing, despite the fact the country has been “dry” since 1977. Alcoholism is reportedly booming: addiction clinics cite a growing demand for counselling, an Alcoholics Anonymous group has popped up in Karachi, and one prominent addiction counsellor recently told the Guardian that of the 10 million Pakistanis who drink, one million have a problem.

Under Islamic law, the punishment for boozing in “the land of the pure” is 80 lashes. But that doesn’t stop smugglers from bringing vodka across the Chinese border, and whisky in on boats from Europe. The country’s only brewery, set up to serve non-Muslims, flourishes near Rawalpindi. Bootleggers will also deliver right to the home.

There have been efforts to overturn the alcohol ban. As recently as 2007, parliamentarians called on the government to relax the laws, arguing that prohibition was turning more people on to hard drugs, or forcing them underground to drink. For now, though, rising alcoholism and religious fundamentalism will continue to coexist.

Pakistani governor assassinated by bodyguard

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 11:56 AM - 14 Comments

The governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot and killed by a member of his own security force in Islamabad’s Khosar market. A senior member of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, Taseer faced threats from religious fundamentalists following his outspoken petitioning against the country’s blasphemy law and his efforts to have Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, pardoned after being sentenced to death under the law. The suspect in the shooting, Malik Mumtaz Hussein Qadri, was quoted on Pakistan’s Dunya television saying, “Salman Taseer is a blasphemer and this is punishment for a blasphemer.” The assassination of Taseer, one of Pakistan’s most important political figures and a close ally of President Asif Ali Zardari, could have serious consequences. The Pakistani government, already plunged in political crisis, is in the midst of difficult negotiations with opposition parties in an effort to establish a parliamentary majority. Taseer’s killing has the potential to seriously hinder any such progress.

BBC News

In Afghanistan, all roads lead to Pakistan

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 1:15 PM - 14 Comments

Today’s summary of the president’s report on the war strategy is getting tons of press, and while the picture being shown is positive, the truth is that on virtually every measure, the overall situation is very complicated. For every story you read about things getting better, there is one about how they are getting worse somewhere else.

And so even as the coalition is claiming some sort of tactical victory in the South and talking about it turning into permanent gains, a large group of Afghan analysts and observers are arguing that the security situation is worse than ever, and that it is time to sit down and negotiate with the Taliban leadership. This “open letter to Obama” came out last week, and while it hasn’t received a lot of attention, I think it does a useful job of highlighting just why the situation in Afghanistan is so frustrating. Continue…

Poor Pakistan

By Julia Belluz - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 45 Comments

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

When U.S. President Barack Obama touched down in India last week on Air Force One—part of a staggering 40-aircraft, six-armoured-car entourage—his was the biggest trip to India of any U.S. administration. And the scale of Obama’s much-discussed retinue matched the sizable gesture the U.S. made toward India, as the President described the India-U.S. friendship as “one of the defining and indispensible partnerships of the 21st century.” Other presidents have fostered closer ties with India, but Obama stayed in the country longer than he has in any other, and announced America’s backing of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council for India, making it the second nation—after Japan—to earn such a distinction.

But there was an equally significant, though more implicit, action that came with the strengthening ties between the world’s largest democracies. Shirking the long-time habit of U.S. presidents to pair a stop in India with a trip to the country’s archrival, Pakistan (long seen as America’s most important strategic ally in the region), Obama continued on to three other democracies (Indonesia, South Korea, Japan)—without any such nod to Islamabad. Though the U.S. has been working on “de-hyphenating”—or separating—relations with India and Pakistan for about a decade, four of the five previous trips by U.S. presidents to India were either preceded by or followed with stops in Pakistan, mainly to avoid upsetting either of the long-standing rivals in the zero-sum game that characterizes U.S. relations with the two nations.

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A poor sap who doesn't get politics

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 3:46 PM - 24 Comments

Bob Rae writes about the extension of the Afghanistan mission.

It’s called doing what you think is right, talking to the public about it, and worrying less about who gets credit.  There’s something almost pathological about the state of our politics, to say nothing of political commentary, if we can’t have that kind of conversation.

There should continue to be a debate about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and how to deal with the range of failed and fragile states that are emerging across the world.  But enough with the nonsense about who played the partisan game better.

The general tries a comeback

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

Two years after being forced to resign the presidency, Pervez Musharraf wants a second crack at running Pakistan. With the country beset by natural disasters, economic malaise, an increasingly radicalized populace and corruption, Musharraf says the government of President Asif Ali Zardari is incapable of alleviating the “darkness that prevails in Pakistan.” Only he “can lead Pakistan toward light.”

Yet right from the start the former dictator, who originally seized power in a 1999 military coup, showed a lack of political savvy. He unveiled his new civilian political party, the All Pakistan Muslim League, in the gentrified, book-lined National Liberal Club of London, instead of a locale that could reinforce his determination to tackle his nation’s mammoth problems. And after the usual platitudes and boasts of having more than 300,000 Facebook fans, the exiled 67-year-old, who wants to return to his homeland before the 2013 election, revealed few new policies.

In an echo of his old pro-U.S. stance, he did promote a hard line on the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan: no negotiations, no peace. But for all his tough talk, al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban and its allies have operated with impunity out of Pakistan for years, with the government, whether Musharraf’s or Zardari’s, never threatening their bases. And while Musharraf pleads that “people should be patient with Pakistan,” there are signs that its biggest ally, the United States, is getting tired of waiting.

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On the ground in post-flood Pakistan

By Julia Belluz - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 1:35 PM - 0 Comments

World Vision President and CEO Dave Toycen in Sukkur, Pakistan

It’s been seven weeks since monsoon rains submerged one fifth of Pakistan’s landmass, displacing more than 20 million people and leaving 1,700 dead. As the deadline for government-matched funding looms on Oct. 2 (following a recently announced three week extension), Canadians have been slow to respond to this humanitarian crisis. (An Angus Reid poll shows that Canada gave Haiti nearly 10 times more than it has donated to Pakistan.) Military officials south of the border have expressed concern about “donor fatigue,” while some say the lack of lending has opened space for controversial Islamic charities—some banned by the government—to step in.

World Vision president and CEO Dave Toycen just returned from Pakistan where the NGO has been setting up medical clinics and distributing relief items, from clean drinking water and food to tents. He gives Maclean’s his view from the ground and talks about the challenges facing NGOs during the worst crisis in the country’s history.

Q: You just flew in from Pakistan. Where did you visit and what did you see?
A: I did a five-day tour of the capital Islamabad, where World Vision’s national office is, and the Sindh province in the south of Pakistan. The number of people who have been displaced and the breadth of the flooding from the river are really overwhelming. There are literally thousands of people in camps dispersed around the countryside.

Q: Was there a particular moment when you were overwhelmed by what you saw?
A: One of the toughest moments was meeting with a family who was receiving some non-food items—beds, towels, food supplies, cooking utensils. As I was talking to the mother, she said, “There’s nothing you can give me that will replace the loss of my 4-year-old child during the flood.” That was a reminder of the loss of life. You realize that it’s not just about the loss of property but that people have lost loved ones.

Q: There’s also a looming food crisis since the floods hit the breadbasket of the country, and farmers lost some 8.9 million acres of farmland.
A: Yes, one of the features of this disaster is that many of the people who have been affected are tenant farmers and some who own their own land. These tenant farmers work for landowners so their concern now is whether there’s a job for them when they get back to their land.

Q: The Pakistani government has been lambasted for not responding quickly enough to the crisis, particularly when President Zardari was on a European tour as the flooding began. What did you find over there?
A: It depends on which province you’re working in because the governments will vary. Pakistan is heavily provincially focused. In Sindh, the government has been engaged in responding to the disaster, though they would be quick to acknowledge that they don’t have adequate capacity to deal with a disaster of this scale. It’s clear that more needs to be done in preparation for a disaster like this in the future but it’s also extremely difficult for any mechanism to be able to cope with a flood like this, partly because monsoon rains come in such a concentrated fashion.

Q: What are the greatest challenges facing aid agencies like World Vision?
A: It’s natural during one of these disasters to begin from a town or city and work out from there. But this means there are still people in outlying areas who have received little or no substantial aid. As NGOs, we’re also facing staff shortages. It would be difficult to get volunteers at this point because there’s a security issue in Pakistan, and we rely mostly on local people. [World Vision has 105 local staff, and an additional 14 expatriates.] The other issue is that even though the rain has stopped in the north, because of the nature of the rivers, there’s a funnel-effect so you have flooding in the south as a great volume of water moves down the country.

Q: There’s been talk of the Taliban threatening foreign aid agencies. Were there any hindrances to getting your work done on the ground?
A: We’ve been focusing on the humanitarian aspect. We’re doing everything we can to work as quickly as we can. There are some conflict issues but we’re talking about children and mothers who are suffering as a result of the conflict so I think it’s important for us as Canadians to reach out when our aid can be so helpful to people who have lost—in many cases—everything.

Q: How does this situation compare to other disaster-hit regions you’ve visited?
A: Pakistan doesn’t have the high number of deaths we saw in Haiti but the number of people who have been affected by the flooding—who have lost homes, livelihoods, land—is far greater. We’re close to 23 million people affected by the floods. So in terms of the simple raw need for human survival, it’s arguable that the situation is even worse than Haiti.

Q: And yet Canadians and the international community have not been as forthcoming with donations. Why is that?
A: It’s been much more difficult. Pakistan is a long way from here—not a neighbouring country like Haiti—and in some ways, it’s a culture that’s less familiar to people. Also, flooding takes time to have impact so it wasn’t a powerful singular act like the quake in Haiti. There’s also the conflict issue: some Canadians feel if they give money it would be stolen or won’t be used in the right way. But World Vision and other agencies have strict parameters to ensure the aid goes to people who need it.

Q: What is the outlook for Pakistan after this flooding?
A: Once the water has receded, the question is how do we get people back to their farming areas, back to their means of livelihood. Further north, some families are eager to return to their lands now that the water is starting to recede. Plus, this disaster hit in a number of areas just prior to harvest so if they don’t get planting by the end of October, they will miss their next crop as well.

Serving for peace

By Julia Belluz - Friday, September 10, 2010 at 3:04 PM - 0 Comments

Pakistan’s No. 1 tennis player, Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi, is the first of his countrymen to make it to the final of a Grand Slam. Before losing to American identical twins Mike and Bob Bryan, the tennis champ had a chance at winning both the men’s and mixed doubles finals of this year’s U.S. Open. But for Qureshi, there was more riding on his matches than simple sporting rivalry. To him, tennis is about world peace.

The 30-year-old has become something of a goodwill ambassador on and off the courts, drawing international attention for his unlikely alliances. In 2002, the Muslim player partnered with Amir Hadad of Israel for the doubles event at Wimbledon. While they made it to the third round at the prestigious tournament, and won the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian of the Year award for their union, Qureshi was lambasted back home and threatened with expulsion from the Davis Cup by the Pakistan Tennis Federation.

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Spreading the holy word—and fuelling Islamic extremism

By Adnan R. Khan - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 19 Comments

G. Paul Burnett The New York Times/ Getty Images/ Tim Wimborne Reuters

Canada’s Muslim community is reeling again after the arrests of three of its own last week in another alleged homegrown terrorist plot. In particular, the case of the dancing doctor, Khurram Syed Sher, has raised some serious questions, not only for those who practise Islam but for those who make their living from identifying threats to Canada’s security. How does an educated, Canadian-born Muslim and Canadian Idol aspirant with all the apparent hallmarks of moderation allegedly turn to violent jihad?

That question has become central to the discourse on the future of jihad, in Canada and among Muslims around the world. Canadians, who have already witnessed the case of the Toronto 18, are not alone in their concern over the radicalization of young Muslims previously considered immune to violent ideologies. In Pakistan, a spate of attacks over the past year has focused attention on a growing trend of radicalization among educated young people. One attack, in December 2009 near the capital of Islamabad, on a mosque frequented by Pakistani military officers, led to the arrest of a group of middle-class Pakistanis who had studied at some of the top universities in the country, and hailed from families with addresses in the posh, tree-lined laneways of Islamabad. They certainly did not fit the typical militant trope: the madrasa-educated fanatic out to cleanse the world of the infidel.

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Same story, different ending

By Aneela Batool - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 2:50 PM - 17 Comments

NATHAN DENETTE/CP

Three years ago it was 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez who was murdered. Twenty years ago it might have been me. The circumstances were different but we both refused unconditional submission. I survived. Aqsa was killed by her father and brother in a brutal act committed under the guise of family honour.

Aqsa was strangled in 2007 in her family home in Mississauga, Ont. Three years later, in 2010, my husband and I emigrated from Pakistan to Canada. We, too, settled in Mississauga. It was six months after our move, with my daughter just graduating from Grade 8 and looking forward to her first summer in Canada, when I suddenly came upon the terrible story of Aqsa Parvez.

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Land of the generals

By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

MUNISH SHARMA/REUTERS

The feeling that something is not quite right is strongest on the east side of the Grand Trunk Road, the frenetic trans-Pakistani highway. On the east side, the wrong side, sweating shopkeepers languish in the heat of early summer, waiting for the electricity to come back on—a routine they’ve become accustomed to. Pakistan is suffering from its worst energy crisis in recent memory.

Most Pakistanis, meaning the poor, must make do with as little as four hours of precious power a day.

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EXCLUSIVE: The man who trained the Times Square bomber

By Adnan R. Khan - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 3:05 PM - 10 Comments

Getty Images

One week following the attempted bombing of New York’s Times Square, a Maclean’s investigation has learned that the man allegedly behind the latest plot to attack the U.S. had been searching for a militant group in Pakistan to back him for years. Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old Connecticut resident, was captured by U.S. authorities while on a flight about to depart for Dubai, after leaving a crude but powerful bomb in an SUV in the heart of Manhattan’s iconic tourist district. But he had visited Pakistan in mid-June 2006 to receive training at a camp belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, according to one of its senior commanders.

The LeT, a banned militant outfit set up in the late 1980s with the help of Pakistan’s largest spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, was blamed for a vicious attack on Mumbai in November 2008 in which more than 160 Indians were killed and scores more injured. According to the commander at the LeT’s main base of operations in Dulai, a village 25 km south of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, Shahzad was brought to the LeT camp by another member of the organization. “He was an eager recruit,” he recalls. “Very intelligent but also very intense, and driven to make his mark for the sake of Islam.”

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The return of Hitler

By Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 7:10 AM - 165 Comments

Imagno/Getty Images

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler took his own life with a simultaneous bite into a cyanide pill and gunshot to the temple. The day before, he dictated his will from the dank confines of the Führerbunker, a concrete shelter buried some eight metres below the old Reich Chancellery, as Soviet forces encircled Berlin. What exactly happened next is still fiercely contested, but by most accounts, the bodies of Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, were carried upstairs to the garden by SS devotees, doused in gasoline, and burned to pieces—then buried, then later unearthed, and then buried again in an unknown location, or perhaps just scattered to the wind.

Almost 65 years later to the day, the man and the totalitarian regime he established continue to fascinate us. In just the last few years, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler’s poorly written, 700-page magnum opus, “turgid, verbose, shapeless,” to borrow from Winston Churchill, has earned bestseller status in some unlikely markets: India, Turkey and the Palestinian territories. His paintings are fetching record-setting prices, and trade in anything the Third Reich leader touched, or might have touched, is thriving. In some cases, the fascination is trivial, even absurd, such as the “Nazi chic” clothing that has been popular in Asia: T-shirts with Hitler portraits and swastikas. In others, though, it is more pernicious: the 65 years that have passed since Hitler’s death have not dulled the allure of the Führer, or his ideology, for the now-burgeoning extreme right.

Take the lead-up to last Sunday’s national elections in Hungary, which saw the far-right Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Movement for a Better Hungary) rake in 16.7 per cent of the national vote. In just a few years, Jobbik has grown from almost nothing, winning over a disenchanted electorate with its stark anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric. Party officials have been careful to dismiss any direct links to Nazism; anti-Semitism is masked in attacks on Israeli investors and hatred of the Roma is justified with talk of “gypsy crime.” But members of Jobbik’s paramilitary wing, the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard), have not been so cautious. Neither have its supporters, who gathered by the Danube River last week to lash out at “Jewish pigs” and to unite in a common cry against foreigners on Hungarian soil: “They should leave!” Jobbik’s leaders, now at the helm of the opposition, are ready to take their country forward—away from all that “commotion over the Holocaust.”

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When you’re the only hope

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 8:42 PM - 10 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

As a young boy in the far north of Pakistan, Muhammad Abbas would find pieces of scrap wood at the nearby air force facility and, with a little help, fashion them into rudimentary skis. He attached them to his feet with rubber bands. It was cold, he remembers, and there wasn’t much else to do in winter.

Pastime became hobby, hobby became obsession—and 15 years later, Abbas is in Whistler to ski the giant slalom. No more rubber bands: at 24, he is Pakistan’s flag-bearer, its sole representative and the first athlete in his country’s history to qualify for the Winter Olympics. “This boy,” says Zahid Farooq, a now-retired member of the air force who nurtured Abbas as a young skier and remains his coach today, “This boy, a nine-year-old, on his little skis—he could do anything the adults could do, and more. We said, ‘Here is someone to be groomed. Here is our future.’ ”

When these Games began, Abbas walked into B.C. Place as part of a curious fraternity: almost one quarter of the 82 countries at the Vancouver Games are, like Pakistan, represented by a single athlete. Some of these competitors are using what cynics describe as “flags of convenience”—a back door into the Olympics after one fails to make the cut in his homeland.

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