INTEREST among people, including high-ups of Sargodha, to preserve cultural heritage seems to be fast disappearing.

Politicians in the area have regrettably ignored the role they were assigned only to get their personal motives fulfilled.

These leaders allegedly took no notice of encroachments on the space allocated for parks and government buildings and grabbed state land against nominal prices with the help of bureaucrats, causing heavy loss to the public exchequer.

Four ex-parliamentarians from Sargodha are at present in custody of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

Various politicians allegedly got open spaces declared “katchi abadis” and secured allotment orders. Sargodha’s former commissioner Chaudhry Nazir Ahmad ordered construction of a circuit house on a six-acre tract which was also occupied by the tycoons. He had also saved several acres adjacent to Model Town by getting the Divisional Public School constructed.

The leaders also left no stone unturned to grab valuable state property when the government planned to convert bureaucrats’ palatial houses into small flats and to put the land and buildings to open auction. However, their dreams could not be materialized as the military coup intervened.

Stretching over an area of over 12.5 acres, a 100-year-old building, which was the residence of commissioner before devolution plan, is lying vacant. It was suggested a few months back to convert the commissioner house into a residential colony for the government employees. This time district Nazim Amjad Ali Noon came with the suggestion to convert it into a museum and lawns with old trees and a jogger’s track.

The Nazim told Dawn that despite severe opposition, he did not budge an inch from his stance. He said he had negotiated with the PAF authorities who promised to contribute items of historical significance. Various different organizations had, he said, assured him that the place would attract hordes of people.

Devolution of power plan, the Nazim added, would bring happiness and prosperity.

He maintained that a CT scan machine would be installed in the Sargodha DHQ Hospital to cater to the needs of patients. The machine will not be shifted to any other place since it is the property of the district government, he added.

Mr Ahmad continued he would try to focus on new projects. Every effort to ensure the construction of a sports stadium of international standard is being underway, he added.

He said he had planned to give the DHQ Hospital a status of model hospital while all the rural and basic health centres would be made functional. A university will be set up in the city to ensure quality education for the students in various parts of the division. The project will be launched on self-help basis, he added.

The Nazim promised that a citrus research centre would be set up in Sargodha very soon.

ELEVEN days of relentless and incessant bombings and what has the United States achieved in Afghanistan in military terms. Nothing. The bombings have dug huge craters and turn into rubble airports and military bases, besides destroying houses and killing innocent civilians, the military situation on the ground, however, remains largely unchanged.

What were the twin US objectives in Afghanistan? One, to knock out Mulla Mohammad Omar, the Taliban supreme leader who has refused to see reason and save his unfortunate nation from suffering further mayhem and bloodshed and, second and more importantly, to eliminate Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization. Has the United States achieved its two objectives. No. Mulla Omar is staying put and so is Osama.

There has hardly been any change on the ground. The frontlines remain intact and there are no signs or indications anywhere in Afghanistan to suggest that the Taliban are losing ground. In fact, in recent days, despite what the international electronic media based in Punjsher would want the world to believe, the Taliban, surprisingly, have not only been able to keep the frontlines intact, they have also been able to counter and beat back opposition offensives to the north of the country.

The Uzbek warlord, who is now one of the main recipients of the Russo-American largesse, has failed to dislodge the Taliban from the north, notably from Mazar-i-Sharif, his once-upon-time stronghold. One report puts the Russian military and technical support to the Northern Alliance, mainly Dostum, at $40 million to $45 million to be paid by the Pentagon. This massive military hardware assistance, however, has not translated into reality either of the two US objectives in Afghanistan.

The notions that the Taliban would crumble even before the launch of US strikes and that there would be desertions and defections and mass uprising against the regime after the attacks have all proved wrong. On the contrary, the Taliban have not only been able to hold on to the territory under their control without much change in the situation on the ground but also win over some support and sympathy from people who suffered the most in terms of casualties and damage, particular in Nangrahar, Kandahar.

Nobody knows this better than the Western and Pakistani journalists who saw people in the Kodam village taking out shovels and stones to show their anger towards the American bombings. The Taliban, surprisingly, have been able to endure the bombing raids without having to suffer any major casualty. All this does not augur well for the people of Afghanistan, who have become a victim of an unyielding stubborn supreme leader, nor does it mean good for an equally unrelenting superpower.

How long can the US go on bombing the same targets over and over again? Washington must be asking itself this question now, how long can it continue to bomb Afghanistan? Soon, even the hawkish among the hawks in the Bush administration would start calculating the cost of the whole military operation. What can save the United States from being sucked into the Afghan quagmire is a political solution that brings to an end not only the Taliban but also puts in place an administration that is acceptable to the majority of the Afghans and is durable and credible.

Military developments, however, seem to have overtaken and outpaced political developments in Afghanistan. Some of the former Mujahideen commanders, including those now affiliated with the Taliban, who have agreed or accepted money for a price have failed to make any impact. They, like the other Afghans, are waiting to see which way the wind blows before deciding on whose ship to board. The combination has just not clicked and rightly perhaps, they now blame the US strikes for having thrown a spanner in their work. In any case, they do not want to act now and look like American stooges in the eyes of the fellow Afghans.

The so-called Rome process is moving at snail’s pace to offer any hope of a quick end to the puzzle as to the future government of Afghanistan. The 89-year-old former king Zahir Shah is taking time as if there is no urgency on his part. What he needs to understand is that it’s been twenty-eight years since his people had last seen him or even heard him (the last time he spoke was very recently).

He has to be among his people for them to be able to see him and hear him, sitting thousands of miles of away, far away from the tragedy that is happening in Afghanistan, will not convince the people to rally on his side. It is not that they love the Taliban but it is that there is nothing on the ground to assure them of a better future. There is a need for doubling the speed of the political process for three reasons.

One, in the absence of a viable alternative, the collapse of the Taliban would lead to chaos, turmoil and a political void that may further lead to bloodshed and balkanization of Afghanistan.

Two, a possible collapse of the Taliban frontlines north of Kabul in the event of US bombings will undoubtedly tempt the Northern Alliance to enter and seize the capital. This, surely, would spell disaster, for the Pukhtuns in the east and south of Afghanistan will not take things lying down.

Three, rising civilian casualties have solidified the Taliban, that is not only within Afghanistan but a hitherto worried Mulla Omar who until before the US strikes had spoken of retreating to the mountains and fighting back if his regime collapsed, has been further emboldened by the support he and Osama have received from demonstrators in other Islamic countries.

Moreover, even for Pakistan things may get out of hands, particularly in the tribal areas, if the bombings continue and civilians are killed in Afghanistan. So it is also in Pakistan’s interest to see a peaceful and early transition from the Taliban to a representative government in Afghanistan. Ramazan is only a month away before which to decide matters.

Bombings obviously is not the solution, there is need now for giving further impetus to the ongoing behind-the-scene political brokering in Islamabad and Peshawar.

SIR Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is a Nobel laureate at last. He had been working for it since bagging Booker and many other prizes, moving ever so cautiously and cleverly with an eye focused on the selectors’ proclivities and dominant political trends, very much like examinees who concentrate on the last ten years’ question papers. He knew that a Pablo Neruda was a once in a lifetime thing that the Nobel Committee threw in to revive its credibility. A revolutionary stance could be a risky gamble.

Chances were better if you could manage to appear ambivalent and could conceal your tilt in mock cynicism of sorts that set you at liberty to deride and ridicule your target without appearing to be an adversary. It also helped you in hiding your ignorance. For someone raised in the Caribbean from among coolies shipped from India it was additionally important to distance oneself from those roots by styling as some kind of a brown Sahib. But an image of this sort was difficult to hold in the West Indies. The Blacks couldn’t care less.

The Caribbean is a colonial settlement where the African immigrants have naturalized due to the virgin nature of their human condition, their simplicity and adaptability. The brown Asian away from his complex cultural moorings has difficulty finding a suitable soil in this nascent land to adapt to culturally, religiously and spiritually.

For Naipaul the Trinidad of his birth is no place to grow. A man without a culture of his own, he moves to England where again though the ground for intellectual development is fertile, the ambience for cultural growth is peculiarly fictitious as even Caribbeans of African origin, who merge easily in Western society, are treated with contempt by both immigrant Asians as well as Whites. An Indian from Trinidad would be an aberration in this clime. Naipaul’s bitterness is, therefore, understandable.

The yearning to belong and return which is at the core of the settlers’ syndrome (as is seen among people of the sub-continent who have migrated to North America and Europe in the recent past) gets more gnarled when Naipaul looks at his relationship with his ancestral home. A jealous animosity like that of step-children then imbues his response. Every defilement of whatever he considers to be his and which he thinks he has lost assuages the hurt of alienation, a theme he returns to again and again in his writings. He pokes the tender spots with the reformist rage of a repentant sinner.

This is what his journeys in the East are all about. In both ‘Among the Believers’ and ‘Beyond Belief’ he is setting out to find fault with what he is going to see, not to explore and understand things he has no direct knowledge of. His hostility to the Muslim faith is of little consequence and should not be made much of as he does not understand even Hinduism, the religion of his ancestors, and even less India, where two great civilizations have interacted for centuries and evolved a cultural sensibility that one can have no idea of without the knowledge of its poetry and music, without the knowledge of Ghalib, Meer, Iqbal and Faiz. All that Sir Vidiadhar has read is Nirad Chaudhry’s stories of Bengal in English. And I am not absolutely sure if he might have read them with any great interest or sympathy.

When he came to Rawalpindi on his ‘Among the Believers’ trip, I remember he visited the Pakistan Arts Council and was shown around by Agha Babur, its director at that time. The man was utterly self absorbed. He paid virtually no attention to the exhibition of paintings by a young artist, Hameed Saghar, that was that week’s feature event. His visit was a perfunctory thing that he was probably doing to fill a page or two of his travelogue. And he was seeing all that he had already visualized. The late Dr Eqbal Ahmad was probably right when he said Naipaul was haunted by “imagined and created ghosts.” They are not real. So are his obsessions that he plays acts to advantage for an audience keen on counting the dark daubs his pen splashes on common foes.

The Nobel prize is being increasingly perceived as politically motivated. From Boris Pasternak to Gao Xingjian, last year’s Nobel winner, quite a few who have been honoured are somehow those who appear to belittle whatever does not fit well in the preferred scheme of things. Naipaul has nothing sublime to offer, no great thought or passion. But unlike Rushdi, he is amply readable. He is a grandson of South Asia and our own son-in-law, being the acerbic Nadira’s doting husband. We have reason to rejoice in his success.