From an NY Times piece on tax collection (or lack thereof) in Pakistan: 

Out of more than 170 million Pakistanis, fewer than 2 percent pay income tax, making Pakistan’s revenue from taxes among the lowest in the world, a notch below Sierra Leone’s as a ratio of tax to gross domestic product.

This might sound like paradise to some, but as a Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, taxes are the price that we pay for civilization. A government's ability to collect revenue is a good proxy for judging the writ, legitimacy, and competence of a state. Pakistan looks to be failing in all three.

From the Guardian's William Dalrymple:

Since then the nature of Karzai's plans have become clearer: it has emerged that the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, has secretly been visiting Karzai; on Monday General Kayani, the head of the Pakistani army, will arrive in Kabul, presumably to confirm whatever deal has been agreed. It seems the Pakistanis are encouraging an accommodation between Karzai and the ISI-sponsored jihadi network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, which would give over much of the Pashtun south to Haqqani but preserve Karzai in power in Kabul. The US has been party to none of this, and administration officials are apparently surprised and alarmed…

Most sober observers recognize that any endgame to the Afghan conflict requires pinching our noses and accommodating large elements of the Taliban. But it seems that Karzai would prefer to do this on Pakistan's terms, not on America's terms. This is quite rational--Pakistan, unlike America, will always be next door, and the whole question is rendered moot if the ISI is as close to the Taliban as many people are currently reporting. But does Pakistan actually have control over the Taliban and their jihadist fellow-travelers? The worsening security situation in Pakistan suggests not, and this is in many ways the more important point.

At TED, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy talks about how the Taliban turn Pakistani children into bombs ready for detonation. Half of the video consists of excerpts from a documentary, The Taliban Generation, which aired last year as part of (British) Channel 4's venerable Dispatches series. In the other section, Obaid-Chinoy gives a five-step breakdown on how to make a suicide bomber. PBOM's summary below.

Step 1: Get a child. Go to large, rural, families, offer an Islamic education with food and shelter. Give the father a stipend if necessary. Then take the son to a medrassah hundreds of miles away. The father will be too poor to get him back, and the child will be too far away to run home.

Step 2: Put on the blinders. The child’s only source of information from here on will be the holy Quran. Fortunately, the Quran is in Arabic, and these kids don’t know Arabic, so you can control the entire message for them. Beat the kid if he tries to read anything else.

Step 3: Make the kid hate his life. Beat him. Only feed him twice a day with a meal of bread and water. No playing games, just 8 hours straight of reading and reciting the Quran. 

Step 4: Make the kid love the afterlife. Have older members of the Taliban, the fighters, come by and make an impression. Teach the kid about the glories of martyrdom, the lakes of milk and honey, the boundless virgins, how he will become a hero in his neighborhood. Maybe teach him to use an AK-47.

Step 5: Show Islam under the siege of the infidels. Bombard the child with endless videos of men, women, and children dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the Muslim world. The kid is now ready to "serve Islam"—that is, to blow himself and probably other innocent Pakistanis into pieces, in order to advance the Taliban's terror agenda.

Mullah Baradar is the Taliban number 2, and was arrested by the Pakistani ISI in January. It was a bizarre episode, because Mullah Baradar was the reported lynchpin in Karzai's efforts to secure a peace deal with Taliban. Well, check out the indispensable Ahmed Rashid for this tidbit on Baradar's arrest:

When Karzai visited Islamabad on March 10 to find out why his interlocutor Mullah Baradar was arrested, he was, according to Afghan officials, bluntly told by Pakistan's generals that the Americans are bound to leave and that if he wanted Pakistani help resolving issues with the Taliban, he would first have to close Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad. Pakistani officials deny threatening Karzai and insist that they want a peaceful and stable Afghanistan once the Americans leave. But other sources have confirmed that such ultimatums were delivered.

The ISI playing hardball? Couldn't be...

Swat After the Offensive (CSM)
Nine months after Pakistan’s military cleared the Swat Valley of a brutal Taliban occupation, the region has made steady gains in improving security and rebuilding infrastructure. But its progress remains vulnerable, threatened by sporadic militant attacks, stilted economic recovery, and growing frustration among residents at the strong military presence.

Al Qaeda the Media Organization (New America Foundation)
Al-Qaeda Central, the organization led by Osama bin Laden and likely based somewhere in Pakistan, is today primarily a media phenomenon. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, it has not succeeded in carrying out a similarly ambitious operation, although it has been effective at spreading its message globally over the Internet. But it now faces a triple communications challenge: staying prominent in an ever more competitive online environment, explaining how its current entanglement in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus makes sense in the global jihadist narrative, and trying to change increasingly negative views of suicide bombing and al-Qaeda itself in the Arab-Muslim world.

Islamo Erotica(?) (Daily Beast)
While the Koran does not specifically ban nude art, the almost universal opinion of religious leaders is that Islam forbids it. However, a handful of Muslim artists have been daring to depict nudity.

Zakaria on Obama's Pakistan Win:

There has been a spate of good news coming out of that complicated country, which has long promised to take action against Islamic militants but rarely done so. (The reason: Pakistan has used many of these same militants to destabilize its traditional foe, India, and to gain influence in Afghanistan.) Over the past few months, the Pakistani military has engaged in serious and successful operations in the militant havens of Swat, Malakand, South Waziristan, and Bajaur. Some of these areas are badlands where no Pakistani government has been able to establish its writ, so the achievement is all the more important. The Pakistanis have also ramped up their intelligence sharing with the U.S. This latter process led to the arrest a month ago of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy leader of the Afghan Taliban, among other Taliban figures.

'Temporary Marriage' and the Economy of Pleasure (in Iran)

During the past few years, the ninth government [Ahmadinejad's first administration, 2005-9] and the seventh and eighth parliaments have turned the revival of this custom and its promotion as "temporary marriage" into one of the foundations of their sexual politics. The government and the parliament went so far as to ratify the new family law bill despite women's strong opposition. This bill gives legal justification to conditional polygamy, including multiple [permanent] wives and sigheh. It no longer even requires permission from the first wife.

The NYTimes on Corruption in Iraq

Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions — involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery — made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program.

Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former minister in Afghanistan's Taliban government and the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, published his memoirs this winter. He was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2005.

His writings contain lots of juicy tidbits about the relationship between Pakistan's notorious ISI intelligence services and the Taliban. Money quote from Steve Coll's commentary:

While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.”

Read the Telegraph's review here.

This is big news, and causes a pause to reconsider how half-assed the original invasion of Afghanistan was. I personally was surprised that Mullah Baradar was found in Karachi, not in the tribal regions. Karachi is Pakistan's biggest city and financial center. Juan Cole's analysis:

Obama's drone attacks on the Taliban leadership forced Mullah Baradar and some other commanders to relocate to the southern port city of Karachi, hundreds of miles from the action in the tribal areas of the northwest. He is said to attempted to restructure the military command of the Taliban in fall of 2009, but met a good deal of resistance. The episode is said to have resulted in poor morale in the Old Taliban. 

My own suspicion is that Mullah Baradar was behind the violence against Shiites in Karachi this winter. Provoking Sunni-Shiite violence so as to destabilize Pakistan's financial and industrial hub would be a typical al-Qaeda tactic. The bombings succeeded in provoking major riots and property damage. But when you hurt stock prices and harm government revenues, you rather draw the attention to yourself of the country's elite and their security forces, since you have mightily inconvenienced them. As long as the Old Taliban were mainly bothering the government of Hamid Karzai over the border in Pakistan, the ISI might have been able to turn a blind eye to them. But if they were going to cause billions of dollars of damage to Karachi, which they did this winter, that is intolerable.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that Mullah Baradar's capture will destroy the Old Taliban. And even if that organization is weakened, there are at least three other major insurgent groups only loosely connected to them, which have the operational autonomy and resources to go on fighting.

Certainly, we shouldn't jump to any conclusions that this will precipitate the collapse of the Taliban. However, the same was said about killing Zarqawi and the durability of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Combined with the surge and proposals for buying off middle and lower ranking insurgents, this does start resembling the Iraq case. If the recent events also signal a change in Pakistan's posture-- then, perhaps, this could be the beginning of the end.

Update: Members of the Taliban moved to Karachi to get out of the range of drone attacks. Karachi has 3 million Pashtuns, mostly living in ghettos where the Taliban can blend in.

According to reports, the Pakistani Taliban leader, who claimed responsibility for the December 30th suicide attack on a CIA base in Pakistan, died from wounds caused by a drone attack on January 14th. 

Hakimullah took over from Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed by a drone attack last August. Perhaps being the leader of the Pakistani Taliban will become less of a prized job. Such turnover at the top also causes internal struggles and paranoia of infiltration. 

Controversial drone attacks have both increased in number and effectiveness since Obama took over the presidency last year. 

Now, I'd like to know, why can't we get Bin Laden already?

Many people view the current struggle against Islamic extremism as a battle for hearts and minds. Within this framework, only a reform from within Islam can defeat fundamentalism. If this is true, then the Muslim moderates have to stand up. But when will that happen? This is a common refrain of Thomas Friedman, and it was the question posed recently by Paul Drescher, in response to my post What the Taliban Stand For. The argument goes something like this:

On a global scale, Muslims bomb mosques every year. They strap detonators to their belt for suicide missions that they know will kill innocent women and children. Although they carry out these actions in the name of Islam, the Quran forbids both suicide and the slaughter of women and children. Most victims of this nihilistic barbarism are other Muslims. Such savagery will only end when the umma (Muslim community) condemns this blasphemy with the same zeal that it protested the Danish cartoons…

It’s a seductive argument, but it’s misplaced. Extremism doesn’t flourish because moderates are too quiet. It flourishes because it is more relevant to a given context.

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