(The new army chief will have to deal with five major problems) The new army chief Gen Raheel Sharif has been called ¿professional–, ¿laid back–, ¿quiet–, ¿politically safe– and ¿low profile–. Most observers, politicians and ex-servicemen tend to believe, or argue that his professional credentials discount any military adventurism. In the first place, it is a combination of professional and political considerations that elevates a soldier to the three-star status. Secondly, most of generals hardly open their mouth in public ´ unless their position so demands. The first challenge staring Gen Sharif in the face is whether and how to divorce the so-called Kayani doctrine. Former army chief Gen (r) Ashfaq Kayani personified experience in various key capacities, the last three being director general of military operations, director general of ISI, chief of army staff. Nobody can lecture me on the pitfalls of the army involvement in political governance and that is why I had explained to President Asif Ali Zardari and his coalition partners immediately after the February 2008 elections that for any anti-terror war and improvement in the security situation, the civilians will have to take the ownership of the process and the army will follow. 'Let us not involve the army in the political governance again because once it moves in it has its own SOPs (standard operation procedures),' he had said in January 2009. And he stuck to it until his departure ´ including the tantrums that Premier Gilani had thrown at him at the height of the infamous Memogate (¿We cannot allow a state within a state,– Gilani had said). One would hope that Gen Sharif keeps the army as far away from politics as possible. Kayani also instituted new compensation and incentives schemes for soldiers who died or were hurt in the line of the duty. On several occasions, Kayani defended these measures (including the yearly Martyrs Day at the GHQ) as essential to lift the sagging morale of his troops in the...

'It is surprising that he would be so missed in death when he was so despised in life,' a British friend based in New York said about Hakimullah Mehsud. This friend ´ quite sympathetic to Pakistan sufferings in the last decade or so ´ and many diplomats in Islamabad are amazed at the reactions to the killing of the chief of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in a drone strike last Friday. Drones are illegal, they say, but equally bad are the militants that they hunt down. The US would not deploy drones if Pakistan would act against those militants, and there are no signs at all that Islamabad or Rawalpindi are moving in that direction. Many are already amazed that in order to target Gen (r) Pervez Musharraf, we are ready to vindicate the two brothers who ran Lal Masjid ´ despite the fact that they had illegally constructed the entire extension of the complex, held Islamabad hostage for over six months, and attempted to enforce vigilante justice by ransacking video rental stores and rounding up policemen and Chinese citizens ´ at the behest of people sympathetic to Pakistani auxiliaries of Al Qaeda. In July 2007, before the law-enforcement operation against them, politicians and the media were criticizing the president for not moving against the rebel cleric. But when the army acted, they began a vicious anti-Musharraf campaign accusing him of killing 'hundreds of innocent students'. The same people ´ driven by political expediency and with little regard for the rule of law ´ are vindicating Hakimullah Mehsud. Let us analyze the American action against Hakimullah and the Pakistani reaction in its historical perspective. Firstly, the military often implied that the CIA deliberately avoided hitting those militants with drones that were targeting Pakistani soldiers and Pakistani interests. With the August 2009 elimination of Baitullah Meshud, the CIA disproved that notion. It then continued to remove any doubts by killing Irfan Mehsud in September 2009, the dreaded...

Pakistan anti-drone stance must be backed by action against militants When UN rapporteur on human rights and countering extremism Ben Emmerson visited Pakistan in March this year, the government of President Asif Ali Zardari asked him to stay away from media attention. He was here to investigate 24 cases of innocent victims of drone attacks. He quietly met with some victim families and government officials, and looked at data put together by the Centre for Research and Security Studies after research in FATA, and particularly in Waziristan. Before leaving Pakistan, he underlined in a statement that US drone strikes violate Pakistan sovereignty and should be stopped immediately. Emmerson said Pakistan needed to be given an opportunity to establish peace in the country, in reference to the 46 strikes inside Pakistan during 2012 that some militants cite to justify their terror campaign. The CIA carried out 72 drone strikes in 2011 and 122 in 2010. This year, the number has gone down to about 23 so far. An attack on a Jirga in North Waziristan that killed about 40 innocent people in 2011, and the killing of 83 civilians in a January 2006 attack on a madrassa in Damadola, were amongst the cases documented by the CRSS. Incident like these drew attention to the killing of innocent civilians in drone attacking. Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch, and several UN forums cautioned against the use of the predators to hunt down Al Qaeda linked non´state actors, saying it sets a dangerous precedent. This argument often resonated in our private conversations at the United Nations in New York too, where diplomats from leading European nations wondered why their own countries desperately wanted the drone technology. Christof Heyns, another UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings (summary or arbitrary executions), had also objected to the American use of drones, which he said clearly undermined international laws. Some of the drone strikes 'may even constitute...