Mideast Issues/Global Crisis? 18 Aug 2013: Multipul Sources and DeMarco Banter

ISLAMABAD–In a nation long plagued by military coups, the question of who will replace Pakistan’s all-powerful army chief has taken on new urgency this year as the country tries to shake off the legacy of decades of military dictatorship.

General Ashfaq Kayani, arguably the most powerful man in the nuclear-armed country, is expected to step down after six years in November – presenting Pakistan’s new premier with the toughest of choices yet since coming to power in May.

The army has ruled Pakistan for more than half of its history since independence in 1947. But even during periods of civilian rule, the army has set security and foreign policy.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says he wants to disentangle the military from politics and he has taken over the foreign affairs and defence portfolios in an apparent show of determination to wrest those responsibilities from the army.

But the military is unlikely to relinquish its hold at such a sensitive time. As Western forces prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of next year, Pakistan is striving to prevent old rival India from increasing its influence there.

Illustrating the difficulties Sharif might face in setting foreign policy, his bid to improve ties with India has been undermined by violence between Indian and Pakistani forces in the disputed Kashmir region. While the two armies trade fire and blame, Pakistan’s civilian government can only look on.

Nevertheless, the Pakistani military has meddled less in politics under Kayani, earning him a reputation as a pragmatic leader willing to ease the military’s grip on political affairs and publicly endorse democracy.

Sharif, himself ousted in a military coup in 1999, has a difficult relationship with the army, and picking Kayani’s successor could be the defining moment of his second term.

“It’s not just that Nawaz wants someone he can trust and who he can use to neutralise the army’s political role,” one retired senior military official told Reuters. “The army also wants someone who will be able to work with Nawaz.”

The job has been at the centre of a drawn-out guessing game and officials would not speculate publicly on it. But in private interviews with army officers, politicians and diplomats, several names have emerged as possible contenders.

Those include Lieutenant General Rashad Mahmood, the current chief of general staff, Lieutenant General Tariq Khan, who is considered pragmatic on U.S. relations, and Lieutenant General Haroon Aslam, the most senior official after Kayani.

Some have even floated the idea that Kayani – whose term was extended for three years in 2010 to the discontent of some of the top brass climbing the ranks below him – might end up staying in the job for another three years.

‘No guarantees’

Kayani, a chain-smoking, unsmiling man known for his low-key manner, is dubbed the Quiet General of Pakistani politics. His public statements in support of Pakistan’s transition to democracy have earned him respect in the West.

In a speech just before the May election, Kayani said a bad democracy was better than the worst kind of dictatorship. And yet his words hardly concealed a warning that the army’s support for democracy would not be available forever.

“Everyone says that under Kayani the army is now transformed and we can trust in its democratic credentials. But let’s not jump the gun,” said a source in Sharif’s administration.

“One era of soft military leadership does not make for a lasting legacy. The civilians will have to work hard to make sure everyone knows their limits.”

But even under Kayani some generals have grumbled quietly over the softer approach, and a new army chief might feel pressure to exert his authority over the civilians.

This could set the military on a collision course with Sharif again, like in 1999 when he was overthrown by General Pervez Musharraf and jailed. Just a year earlier, Sharif had picked Musharraf as his new army chief.

“There are no guarantees the current status quo will last beyond Kayani,” said one diplomat in Islamabad.

Criticising the top brass has long been taboo. But that too has changed after the Supreme Court ruled last year that the military must stop interfering in politics, eroding the generals’ untouchable status in the eyes of the public.

The army’s standing also took a hit over a secret 2011 operation by U.S forces to kill Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Ordinary Pakistanis saw it as a violation of sovereignty that the army had failed to prevent.

Technically, Kayani has to come up with a shortlist of three candidates and send it to Sharif for approval. In reality, Sharif may not have much choice but he will at least try to strike a semblance of balance, officials say.

“A super assertive new chief whose first priority is to win back the former glory of his institution and a prime minister who likes being the boss and won’t share the spotlight with anyone. That’s an interesting combination,” said one official close to outgoing President Asif Ali Zardari.

“The new crop of generals are not even remotely as patient as (Kayani) when it comes to the screw-ups of civilian leaders.”

THREE generations of Loews have worked the family’s 63 acres in Amado, Ariz. In the last 20 years, the Loew family harvested thousands of pounds of onions, garlic and pumpkins without incident. So Stewart Loew, 44, who was born and raised on the farm, was surprised when he went to irrigate his fields one night and found himself surrounded by federal agents.

Pointing to the fires about 200 feet away that Mr. Loew lit to keep warm while he irrigated his fields, one of the agents slogged out of the ankle deep water in the irrigation ditch and asked Mr. Loew what he was doing.

“I’m irrigating, dude,” said Mr. Loew, who was in his pajamas. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t ‘dude’ me, I’m a federal officer,” the Border Patrol agent said, and demanded Mr. Loew’s identification.

Since Mr. Loew did not carry his wallet in his pajama pocket, the agents followed him into his house; a local police officer, who knew the Loew family, had already arrived, vouched for Mr. Loew’s identity and assured the federal agents that Mr. Loew posed no threat to the homeland or national security, and the agents left without comment or apology.

This kind of brush with law enforcement would have been unthinkable to previous generations of farmers here. But these run-ins have become increasingly common in the rugged, hilly desert stretch along the southern borderlands where, in the post-9/11 world, everyone — even farmers in pajamas — is a potential threat.

The United States-Mexico border has become a war zone. It is also a transfer station for sophisticated American military technology and weapons. As our country’s foreign wars have begun to wind down, defense contractors look here, on the southern border, to make money.

Lately it has become entirely normal to look up into the Arizona sky and to see Blackhawk helicopters and fixed-wing jets flying by. On a clear day, you can sometimes hear Predator B drones buzzing over the Sonoran border. These drones are equipped with the same kind of “man-hunting” Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (Vader) that flew over the Dashti Margo desert region in Afghanistan.

The Border Patrol is part of Customs and Border Protection, now the federal government’s largest law-enforcement agency. Its presence is a constant factor not only in the lives of Stewart Loew and his neighbors, but also in the lives of those who live in places like San Diego, El Paso, Brownsville, Tex., and other big cities along the southern border that have sizable Latino populations.

The Border Patrol, however, concerns itself far less with counterterrorism than with the agency’s traditional tasks of immigration and drug enforcement. This creates an uneasy mixture of missions. And it results in the deployment of an expensive military apparatus to police and capture immigrants who cross the border in the hopes of finding jobs as maids, janitors or day laborers.

In 2012, a majority of the more than 364,000 people arrested by Border Patrol agents nationwide were migrant workers crossing the border. Agents did not capture or arrest a single international terrorist.

But they have disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of people like Stewart Loew who live and work near the border. There’s a point on Interstate 19, two miles from the Loews’ farm, that buzzes with what borderland residents call the “men in green,” who stop and interrogate everyone who drives past. Border Patrol vehicles scan the off-road areas smugglers and migrants use to circumvent official checkpoints. A mobile control tower with a sophisticated surveillance system mounted on its cabin is visible near the Loews’ farm.

The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Customs and Border Protection, plans to invest billions more in borderland surveillance towers, drones and helicopters if the House adopts the immigration reform bill that the Senate passed in June. Even if it doesn’t pass, there is more than $1 billion in the federal budget for surveillance towers that will likely be clustered around the Arizona desert lands, near Mr. Loew’s farm, where most undocumented migrants cross the border.

The Republican senators Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota added a proposal to the immigration bill that would provide about $40 billion in financing for extra agents and 700 miles of fencing along the United States’ southern boundary, which Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, noted would become “the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Indeed, if the Senate’s bill, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, passes in the House, the Border Patrol will swell to 40,000 agents, making it the size of a small army.

In recent years, we have built up our boundary and immigration policing apparatus with great speed. Founded in 1924, the Border Patrol deployed just over 4,000 agents in 1993. In only 20 years the agency’s ranks have more than quintupled, and if the reform passes it will increase its size tenfold.

The Border Patrol buildup in the aftermath of 9/11 was unparalleled. In the 10-year period following 9/11, the United States spent a staggering $90 billion on border enforcement.

In 2012, the Migration Policy Institute reported that immigration and border enforcement spending totaled almost $18 billion. That is 24 percent more than the $14.4 billion combined budgets in the last fiscal year of the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Add the billions anticipated in the Senate bill, and you have what the trade publication Homeland Security Today calls a “treasure trove” for contractors in the border security industry.

Projected as an approximately $19 billion industry in 2013, defense contractors seem, in the words of one representative from a small surveillance technology company hoping to jump into the border security market, to be “bringing the battlefield to the border.”

In 1999, the anthropologist Josiah Heyman wrote that the Southwest was becoming a “militarized border society, where more and more people either work for the watchers, or are watched by the state.”

There is nowhere else in the country with such extensive and concentrated surveillance technology; nor is there any part of the United States in which people are as clearly divided between the police and the policed.

And the militarized security zone has begun to creep beyond the southern border and to affect those who live near the northern border in places like Spokane, Wash., Detroit and Erie, Pa., where the Border Patrol has significantly increased its ranks.

IN the border zone — 100 miles from the boundary into the interior — the Border Patrol’s authority extends beyond that of other law enforcement agencies. For example, agents have the authority to conduct routine searches at the border even in the absence of reasonable suspicion, probable cause or a warrant.

“The problem with giving the largest federal law enforcement agency, and one that operates with few if any accountability mechanisms, is that it is a recipe for civil liberties abuses, and seriously risks further erosion of Fourth Amendment rights,” says James Duff Lyall, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. Mr. Lyall notes that the areas involved constitute a sizable portion of the country; if you consider land and coastal borders, this 100-mile zone encompasses approximately two-thirds of the United States population.

Agents that operate in the 100-mile zone now regularly board buses and trains and ask passengers for identification. They have — and use — the authority to further question anyone who raises suspicions, especially people who appear to be from another country.

In 2007, for example, a Border Patrol agent in Syracuse, N.Y., asked Silvio Torres-Saillant, a professor of English at Syracuse University, to produce his documents. When Mr. Torres-Saillant, a United States citizen of Hispanic descent, gave the agent his university identification, the agent demanded additional documents. At the Border Patrol’s Rochester, N.Y., station, 2,743 people were arrested on buses, trains and in stations from 2006 to 2009.

Border Patrol agents record the skin complexion of the people they arrest, and most of those arrested were of “medium” complexion and from Latin America, according to a 2011 report, “Justice Derailed: What Raids on New York’s Trains and Buses Reveal About Border Patrol’s Interior Enforcement Practices,” by the New York University School of Law and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

In a much-publicized incident, Border Patrol agents stopped Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, 125 miles south of the border, in New York. When Mr. Leahy asked what authority the agent had to detain him, the agent pointed to his gun and said, “That’s all the authority I need.”

The Immigration and Nationality Act gives Border Patrol agents even greater authority when they operate within 25 miles of the international border. Here agents “have access to private lands, but not dwellings, for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.”

Mr. Loew says agents don’t always comply with the 25-mile exemptions; he points out that his farm in Amado is 30 miles from the border, and that that did not stop agents from entering his property or from surrounding him while he prepared to irrigate his fields.

Three years after Mr. Loew’s brush with federal agents, Border Patrol agents held his 16-year-old son at gunpoint after they mistook the minivan he was driving for another one. Mr. Loew says he wonders if the agents were veterans, since so many Border Patrol recruits seem to be ex-military men; in fact, almost one-third of all agents have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s no wonder that more and more people in the 100-mile zone from across the political spectrum view the Border Patrol as an occupying army.

If immigration reform passes, it will mark another milestone in a transformation that has already resulted in the creation of a war-zone-like area in which agents enjoy special powers to chase down, question and detain people.

Two oversight offices within the Department of Homeland Security have already received hundreds of complaints of rights violations, including beatings and Taser shootings, at the border. In the last three years, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 15 people along the Southwest border. Whether or not the immigration bill passes, the militarization of the border and the disturbance it causes people like Stewart Loew suggest it is time to look seriously into how we might better police the agencies that police the border.

Todd Miller is the author of the forthcoming book “Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security.”