By Paul Richter in The L A Times, Aug 19
Islamabad: Obama administration officials have pledged to talk to world leaders no matter their views. On Tuesday, they showed the offer extends to Islamists who spend the day denouncing America from the street corners.

U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke met with Liaqat Baloch, a leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami party. About an hour later, as the bearded scholar prepared to depart for an anti-American rally across town, the veteran diplomat said that despite their disagreements, the meeting had begun “a very useful dialogue.”

Pakistan is eager for U.S. aid, but many people are wary of American intentions. Jamaat-i-Islami has only limited leverage in the government, but it is one of the most influential Pakistani Islamist parties, and its anti-American views are widely shared, U.S. officials say. One of Holbrooke’s aides described the conversation as a major outreach effort for the United States, roughly equivalent to talking to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist party that Washington shuns.

On Monday, Holbrooke also ate pastries and exchanged views under a languidly whirling fan in the sitting room of another outspoken Islamist politician, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a leader in the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party. Rehman was instrumental in the Taliban’s early days, U.S. officials say, and denies that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Holbrooke, the U.S. senior representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is on his fifth official visit to the region. He will be in Afghanistan for the country’s elections Thursday.

Under President Obama, the U.S. is reaching out to groups that the Bush administration dealt with little or not at all. Holbrooke met earlier this week with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whom the Bush team kept at a distance because of what they believed were his ties to militant groups.

Baloch spoke warmly to Holbrooke after the meeting. Then he drove off to a party-sponsored demonstration a mile away in an Islamabad market to protest the U.S. presence in the region.

Holbrooke has received a generally warm reception for his proposal earlier this week to put more emphasis in the fast-growing U.S. aid program on Pakistan’s faltering power sector. But the trip has also underscored Pakistani wariness of the United States.

Baloch pressed Holbrooke on one of the most passionate issues of the moment, suspicions that a planned expansion of the U.S. Embassy is aimed at turning the compound into a military base. Baloch has charged that the United States has a secret plan to build a military “cantonment” as a prelude to trying to seize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Suspicions about such a base have generated dozens of news stories in recent days, despite diplomats’ insistence that they are adding 16 acres only to accommodate staff needed to help implement the U.S. aid program, which is to grow fourfold in the next 18 months. A Pakistani journalist challenged Holbrooke in a group interview on Monday to explain why the United States wanted to build “a fortress in the middle of the capital.”

Holbrooke invited Baloch to come to the embassy to examine the blueprints. “We have no secrets on this,” he said.

Baloch told Holbrooke that he welcomed Obama’s declarations that he wants a better relationship with the Muslim world. But he insisted that, with American drone strikes in Pakistan and troops in Afghanistan, “there still is no change in the practice.”

Holbrooke contended that the new administration had changed policy from the Bush days in “dozens” of respects. He said the administration had halted the eradication Afghan poppy crops, tightened rules on Afghan military strikes to avoid civilian casualties, and was increasing economic aid to Pakistan.

But Holbrooke insisted he wouldn’t support a withdrawal from Afghanistan, as Baloch wanted, until the country was no longer at risk of descending into turmoil.

Holbrooke and other U.S. officials contend that Pakistanis’ attitudes about the threat of Islamic extremism are shifting toward Americans’ views. But they also acknowledge that they are keenly concerned about the anti-Americanism that has shown up in recent opinion polls.

“This relationship carries a lot of baggage,” Holbrooke said.

Holbrooke has heard a number of Pakistani officials press for more American aid. The Pakistan foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, expressed his happiness with the new U.S. administration, but also complained that American aid was slow in coming. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-holbrooke19-2009aug19,0,5925960,print.story

Editorial in the Daily Times, Lahore,k Aug 19, 2009
Allama Ali Sher Hyderi — we have taken the spelling of his name from his YouTube videos — was the leader of the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan. He was killed by a rival criminal clan in Khairpur, Sunday night. Public reaction to his assassination in the country in general and Sindh in particular should worry the PPP and the nationalist parties of Sindh, and those who thought that the Sipah was merely a South Punjabi phenomenon.

After the killing of the internationally known Sipah leader Maulana Azam Tariq in 2003, its leadership had fallen on Allama Hyderi of Khairpur in Sindh because under him the province had become the biggest stronghold of the organisation.

There was nothing secret about him. You can listen to him on YouTube under the rubric of Radd-e-Shiat (refutation of the Shia) and read what he had to say about Ahmedis and Ismailis too on ahnaf.com. And people believed in what he said to them.

Expectedly, there has been a violent reaction to his death. It has erupted in Khairpur and spread to Gilgit where one can expect more trouble in the coming days. Impact will also be felt in such cities as are home to big Shia settlements: Dera Ismail Khan, Parachinar, Gilgit, Jhang, Kohat, Hangu, and other far-off places where the writ of the government is weak.

Concern about the rising strength of the Sipah in Jhang, its place of birth, has already been raised in Parliament. MNA Sheikh Waqqas Akram last week complained about the comeback of the Sipah there, in the context of its show of force against the Christians of Gojra in Toba Tek Singh.

In Sindh, the followers of the Sipah have gone around forcing the shops to close. Trains have been stopped in the railway stations of the province and track damaged in a planned manner. Foreseeing the trouble, the administration in many districts has closed down schools for three days and the matriculation exam has been stopped in the middle.

In Karachi, the mobs were out with sticks in hand, breaking everything in sight, including a bus and a car which they later burned. There was heavy fighting and exchange of fire in Judia Bazaar and its adjoining markets in Karachi, pointing to the sensitive areas where the factions have already drawn their battle lines.

A Sipah lawyer-cleric was killed in the city a fortnight ago. Sipah workers “took positions in two domes of the mosque in the area and opened fire on the streets”. Karachi is home to the most powerful madrassas of the faith to which the Sipah belongs.

In faraway Gilgit where a majority Shia population makes the region vulnerable, sectarian clashes occurred in the aftermath of Hyderi’s death, the trouble-makers obviously assuming that the murder was committed by the other side. If the fire spreads, Gilgit will be the one place where most violence can be expected.

The Pakistan Ulema Council has condemned the killing of Allama Ali Sher Hyderi and has announced three days of mourning across the country. It thinks that the murder is a “conspiracy” to restart the sectarian war that Pakistan has been going through in the recent past. Some TV channels also took up the conspiracy theory — usually implicating India — for reasons of self-defence in the days to come when violence at the national level is expected. However, it is wrong to assume that sectarian violence is at a low ebb. It is there in DI Khan and Parachinar and is clearly one-sided against the Shia.

A lot of research is available on Sipah-e-Sahaba because it is the mother of all jihadi organisations fielded by the state of Pakistan as “non-state actors” against India. Living in civil society, these organisations have injected violence into the lives of ordinary citizens.

In the past, the Sipah targeted the Shia and killed them inside mosques and imambargahs and the country shook under the intensity of the sectarian hunger for death. But then, one by one, most of the leaders of the Sipah were killed, including the father of Allama Ali Sher Hyderi; most of the clerics supporting the Sipah have been done to death too. And both sides engaged in this terrible war blame the state of Pakistan and vow revenge against it. www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\08\19\story_19-8-2009_pg3_1