Shades of Powell’s visit

THE upshot of Colin Powell’s pronouncements in Islamabad was that the US will not dump Pakistan on the conclusion of its Afghan operation. In an obvious attempt to dispel the misgiving that the US was in the habit of leaving its allies high and dry once they had rendered the service for which they were drafted, the US secretary of state termed cooperation with Pakistan as the beginning of a long-term and durable relationship.

Observers are of the view that the Americans were more than satisfied with President Musharraf’s handling of the volatile situation and wished to help him consolidate his position, even though there have been some carping among US security analysts about the wisdom of ‘trusting Pakistan’. Colin Powell was forthright in praise for Islamabad’s role as a coalition partner and, at least on the face of it, supportive of its concerns regarding the fallout of the military operation in Afghanistan.

A comprehensive economic package is reportedly being worked out in Washington to help Pakistan’s ailing economy recover, more so to compensate it for the losses incurred since the beginning of the Afghan crisis. There has also been speculation about the resumption of the US military aid to Pakistan. Incidentally Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar got a little carried away to foretell that Powell would make the grand gesture of goodwill and friendship towards Pakistan by announcing the much hoped-for relief from its debt burden. That it did not happen calls for some restraint on expressions of over-optimism about the US benevolence.

Nevertheless the Americans seem quite prepared to reward Pakistan for turning away from the Taliban at the high risk of encountering resistance from within the organs of state power. It was obviously not a ‘push-button’ scenario to switch sides in Afghanistan and the Americans are aware of the risk Islamabad has taken in making a virtue of necessity. Little wonder, Colin Powell was willing to endorse the Pakistani prescription for a viable political alternative in Afghanistan.

At the joint press conference President Musharraf said, “We have agreed that durable peace in Afghanistan would only be possible through the establishment of a broad-based, multi-ethnic government representing the demographic contours of the country, chosen freely by Afghans without foreign interference.” Colin Powell was amenable to letting the moderate Taliban join the new government along with the Northern Alliance and other elements so as to meet the Pakistani concern regarding the composition and the orientation of the future Afghan political set-up.

Who these ‘moderate’ Taliban are has yet to be seen, albeit the assumption is that significant defections will take place in the Taliban camp and those who defy Mulla Omar’s writ to switch over may have a stronger Pakistani connection than others. In any case, the bottom line of Powell’s assurance to Pakistan is that the US will not back up a coalition of forces to take over power in Kabul which is not acceptable to Pakistan.

From the Pakistan’s point of view the most reassuring statement made by Colin Powell was his reference to Kashmir as the issue ‘central’ to Pakistan-India relations. He went a step further than President Bill Clinton who had acknowledged Kashmir as a major issue of discord in the region by underscoring the need for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the dispute acceptable to the people of Kashmir. The secretary of state’s accent on the centrality of the Kashmir question in Pakistan-India relations was seen as a rebuff to New Delhi’s campaign for indicting Pakistan as a sponsor of terrorism in Kashmir. The message had the expected effect on New Delhi. To no one’s surprise his Indian counterpart was not in the reception line at the airport when Colin Powell arrived in New Delhi.

The Indian media was so offensive to Colin Powell that Jaswant Singh felt called upon to intervene and tell the noisy crowd of hecklers to disagree but not to be disagreeable to the visiting secretary of state. Colin Powell stood his ground defending Pakistan’s role in the coalition and refused to be drawn into the controversy regarding the nature of militant resistance to Indian occupation in Kashmir.

Having underscored the priorities on the US agenda for combating terrorism, Colin Powell sought to reassure the Indians that they were not being marginalized. The US and India were natural allies, he said, as he reaffirmed the US resolve to fight terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, including the one against India. Opinions were divided among the Indian analysts regarding the significance of the implicit recognition of New Delhi’s stance on ‘terrorism’. Some of them hope that the Americans will turn their attention to what the Indians call terrorist outfits operating in occupied Kashmir with Pakistan’s help once they have accomplished their mission in Afghanistan. But others are sceptical about the chances of the US joining hands with India in fighting out the Kashmiri militants.

Although the Vajpayee government seems confident of its standing with Washington, apprehension among the opinion leaders in India is that so long as the Kashmiri militant groups do not pose a direct threat to the US interests, the Americans are likely to turn a blind eye to their presence and activities in Indian held Kashmir. Also, given the importance the US now attaches to Pakistan’s cooperation with the coalition, it may be easier for Islamabad to convince the Americans about the need to address the causes of militancy in Kashmir rather than equating it with terrorism.

Interestingly enough, Powell’s itinerary in New Delhi included the signing of an accord on mutual assistance for combating terrorism. The Indian media presented it as a means of sharing with the Americans useful intelligence and information regarding the activities of Islamic fundamentalist outfits. However, the real consolation prize for the Indians was an invitation from President Bush to Prime Minister Vajpayee to visit Washington on November 9 during Vajpayee’s trip to New York to attend the UN General Assembly session.

The Indians had apparently built a strong case for drawing the US attention to their own agenda. Following the blast in Srinagar Assembly building they demanded extradition of Jaish-e-Mohammad leader Maulvi Azhar Masood whom they held responsible for the ‘terrorist attack’. A parallel was drawn between the October 1 Srinagar incident and the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. And soon came the warning that New Delhi reserved the right to strike at ‘terrorist training camps’ in Azad Kashmir, or cross the LoC in hot pursuit of the ‘terrorists’. Ironically, this was for the first time that the Indians accepted responsibility for violating the LoC, rather than blaming Pakistan for provoking the armed clash.

However, the justification given out for the attack across the LoC in the Rawalakot sector and across the Working Boundary in the Sialkot sector revealed the Indian game plan. The punitive measure, the Indians claimed, was taken to stop the ‘infiltrators’ from crossing over.

Needless to say, the Indians have been trying to emulate the US model, demanding the handing over of the ‘terrorists’ named by them and threatening to raid ‘training camps’ where they say the terrorists are being groomed. However, the catch in what the Indians consider ‘desirable’ and what for them is ‘attainable’ is the hard reality that India is no superpower and it cannot get away with the US-style retaliation.

The basic purpose of the drill has been to put across the message to the Americans that they should intervene to help India settle scores with Pakistan on Kashmir. It was a well-timed campaign to coincide with Colin Powell’s visit, raising the temperature from belligerency to confrontation. From all accounts, the US secretary of state was not impressed by New Delhi’s flexing of muscles. On the contrary, he urged the need for restraint and talks between India and Pakistan. The Kashmir question, he told the Indians, should be resolved through negotiations.

Notwithstanding the provocative and aggressive Indian posture and Vajpayee’s refusal to hold talks with Pakistan, it is highly unlikely that New Delhi would resort to brinkmanship and opt for a course of military confrontation with Pakistan. The Indians can ill-afford to ignore what Colin Powell must have told them: Don’t make trouble for Pakistan at a time when Washington needs its support and cooperation for its Afghan mission. The Americans may have a long-term strategic interest in forging a partnership with India, but at this particular juncture any Indian move which conflicts with the handling of the Afghan situation would be disliked by Washington.

To curry favour with the Americans is not an exclusive privilege of Pakistan’s ruling elite. It is at present high on the BJP-led government’s agenda and Vajpayee would be amenable to US proddings and suggestions as long as he believes that US endorsement is crucial for India to realize its global aspirations.

To expect that Colin Powell would undertake a mediatory mission on Kashmir was rather optimistic. He did not have the time or the inclination to pay attention to any issue other than what he thought was necessary to facilitate the US campaign against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

Putin’s assertive role

PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin’s announcement of Russian support for US military operations against Afghanistan represents a significant step by his government toward cooperation with the West — larger, even, than it might appear at first to many Americans.

To make that pledge, the Russian president had to override strong objections from his generals to the establishment of a US military presence in Central Asia, which are still regarded by Moscow as part of its rightful sphere of influence. It could be argued that Putin had little choice — US forces would have deployed around Afghanistan with or without his agreement.

Still, the Russian leader moved farther than he ever has before toward accepting what, in Moscow, is still a controversial notion: that Russia’s best future lies in integrating with the liberal democracies and open economies of the West, and sharing in their wealth and security cooperation rather than trying to establish a competing centre of power. At the same time, Putin’s recent speeches in Moscow and in Berlin show that his vision of a Russian-Western partnership is still far from what the United States could consider acceptable. While denouncing the attack on the United States and international terrorism, he blamed the failure to prevent it on the world’s dependence on the “old security structures” of the cold war — such as NATO.

He called for a “comprehensive, purposeful and well-coordinated struggle against terrorism,” but insisted it could only take place if it were conducted under an international security system restructured to give Russia more influence.—The Washington Post

Jai Bangla to Zia Bangla

EVEN if history repeats itself, it is nowhere so true as in Bangladesh. One of the two women, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, alternately come to head the country’s government and indulge in the same rhetoric, make the same promises and weave the same dreams. This time it is Khaleda Zia’s turn. Her Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has won a majority in the 300-member house.

When in power, Hasina had appealed to Khaleda to return to the Jatiya Sangsad (parliament) which the latter had boycotted. Now Khaleda, the prime minister, has requested Hasina to join the new parliament. “We can resolve problems through discussions,” Khaleda had said. More or less, Hasina had used the same words while she pleaded for cooperation.

In her response, Hasina has gone a step further. She has even refused to take oath, along with her Awami League’s 63 elected members. Khaleda had at least joined the parliament, although she had stayed away from it. On her part, Hasina wants fresh elections, a demand which the election commission has rejected. Indeed, people have made their choice. The verdict in favour of Khaleda Zia is so massive that it is churlish to deny it. Some rigging may have been there.

This time the violence — 200 people were killed during the election campaign — may also have influenced the outcome to some extent. Still, there is no doubting Khaleda’s majority. It is apparent what gave her the advantage was Hasina’s non-performance, the incumbency factor. Even the whipping boy, India, was mentioned very little during the electioneering.

Khaleda played the religious card and sustained the posture when she recited a verse from the Quran when she took oath of office as MP. Her equivocal stand on the Taliban too paid her dividends in the election. But her poll alliance with the Jamaat-i-Islami made it clear that she wanted to look more Islamic than her opponent in a country which is predominantly Muslim. She may amend the Constitution to facilitate the introduction of Islamic Shariat as the basis for legislation.

It will, however, be a tragedy if Bangladesh goes that way. Despite being a Muslim majority state, it is a pluralistic society with one million Hindus. Even culturally the society is open and liberal because of the composite nature of the Bengali language as well as society.

Khaleda may still tilt towards fundamentalism to placate the extremists on her side. But she would be sowing the same kind of seeds which Zulfikar Ali Bhutto did when he came to power in Pakistan in 1971. He had declared the Ahmedis non-Muslim. The seed bore fruit in the shape of nettle, the Taliban. An anti-Hindu campaign has already started in Bangladesh and many terrorized Hindus have crossed over to India in the past few days.

During my visit to Bangladesh some eight months ago I could see fundamentalism gaining ground. Mosques and madrassahs were coming up at every conceivable place. Fanaticism had claimed the lives of three communists a few days before. The intelligentsia is aware of the danger. Still, they feel helpless. The question they ask themselves is whether there is a way out of the situation in which they are trapped. The answer is: to inject a bigger dose of liberalism into the body politic. It means Khaleda must join issue with the fundamentalists. Can she do it when she has cobbled together a coalition with their help? With the avowed hostility of the opposition, Khaleda’s options are few.

Still, this is the time for Khaleda to establish her credentials. She has assured the minority communities to perform their religious rites without fear. The Hindus fear the blandishments of her ally, the Jamaat. There is little difference between terrorists and fundamentalists.

She should know that the one thing that went against the Awami League was the charge of harbouring terrorists, godfathers like Zainul Hazari of Feni.

Khaleda has also to erase her anti-India image. She has been guarded in her speeches and wants to improve relations with India. I recall when I met her in Dhaka early this year she argued with me that her pronouncements were misunderstood by New Delhi. “Let me come to power. I shall prove that I have no hostility against your country,” she told me. One BNP leader, present at the meeting, said that rhetoric should not be confused with policy.

That may be true. But her reservations on the Ganga water treaty and the Chittagong Hill Tract accord — the two outstanding things to Hasina’s credit — indicate as if she has a vested interest in maintaining support in the anti-India segment of the population. She may be wary of taking such steps which suggest that she is getting closer to India.

For example, New Delhi wants access to its north-eastern states through Bangladesh. Khaleda may not readily agree to that. On the other hand, she may be more amenable than Hasina and agree to sell natural gas to India. The BNP leadership has reportedly said that it would favourably think about selling gas.

New Delhi is a bit disappointed at Hasina’s defeat because she was seen as piloting Bangladesh to a liberal and accommodative course. Her uncompromising stand against fundamentalists had won her a lot of appreciation in India. Of course, her plus point is that she is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, father of the nation, who fostered close relations with India.

Times have changed. New Delhi has to change its policy of likes and dislikes. It must let the BNP feel that India wants to have as firm relations with the party as it had with the Awami League. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has done well to invite Khaleda to India. It would have been still better if a special envoy had been sent to Dhaka to meet the new prime minister.

The economic ties should have precedence. We helped Bangladesh liberate itself. Subsequently, we washed our hands of the country lest we should look too friendly. How was Bangladesh, with a basketful of troubles, supposed to come up? Soon after its birth, there was a joint high-powered committee to draft plans for it which would dovetail into India’s development programmes. Nothing came of it because the Pakistan-trained bureaucracy in Dhaka and the mindset in Delhi did not allow anything to germinate even on favourable ground soon after the end of Islamabad’s rule.

There is no doubt that the liberals in Bangladesh would have preferred Hasina to Khaleda because they fear that the old atmosphere of anti-liberation and communalism may revisit them with the return of the BNP. “I want one more term,” Hasina once told me. “Then I will be sure that liberal democracy in my country is on a firm footing.”

What she probably meant, among other things, was that the sentence against the killers of Mujib would have been carried out by that time because their final appeals were still pending before the courts. For some reasons, it was taken for granted that they would be released if the BNP came to power. If this happens, the complicity of Khaleda’s supporters in the bloody events of those days will stand proved.

Hasina’s hostility to Khaleda is understandable but not to her policy. One does not have to remind her of the unilateral promise she made, when in power, that her party in the opposition would not resort to strikes, bandhs or boycotts because such things had an adverse effects on Bangladesh. She must live up to her promise. Otherwise, she would be blamed for not letting the government go on with its business.

Sometimes I fear that history may say that the travails of Bangladesh were because of the hostility between the two women who, in the process of destroying each other, nearly destroyed their country.

Stars, stripes and gripes

THE pro-Taliban protest marches in Pakistan and other Muslim countries — exaggerated though they may be when viewed through the selective prism of the CNN and even the relatively sober BBC — are part of a fascinating phenomenon in historical terms. The close association in the popular consciousness between Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism may now appear to be almost a natural phenomenon, but it wasn’t always thus.

As recently as 25 years ago, it would have been difficult to come across in any Muslim state a right-wing extremist prepared to condemn or even challenge Uncle Sam’s proclivities in any part of the world. Nor was Washington, in return, inclined to take a hard line against obscurantists.

In fact, in many cases there was an ideological symbiosis between the two: they not only had a common foe in “godless” communism but also shared an aversion to social democracy.

The Jamaat-i-Islami wouldn’t have dreamed of setting fire to an American flag in the 1960s, and in the decade that followed the US had no qualms about lending strong moral and economic support to the Pakistan National Alliance, which counted Nizam-i-Mustafa among its primary goals.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was something of a watershed in this context. The victorious mullahs who dominated the popular revolt were less than impressed by the fact that the secular but absolutist Reza Shah Pahlavi was Washington’s favourite client in that part of Asia — and that’s how the phrase “marg barg Amrika” became the favourite graffiti in a land previously awash with petrodollars.

The Carter administration was quick to demonize the Khomeinites, yet the Iranian experience did nothing to deter it from forging a tight relationship with the Mujahideen combating the secular Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, although there is no way that the US could not have been aware of the religious fundamentalism as well as the fratricidal tendencies of its favourite “freedom fighters”.

There is, of course, a logical explanation for Washington’s stance. The fate of Afghanistan was never its concern: it sought only to humiliate and undermine the Soviet Union. Its obsession with communism led the US to support and sustain an extensive range of extreme right-wing organizations and movements, from obscurantist parties in West Asia to neo-fascist dictatorships in Latin America.

This cynicism was directly or indirectly responsible for millions of deaths and untold misery. Yet most US officials, past and present, consider it to have been a small price to pay for the eventual demise of the Soviet Union and the genesis of an ostensibly unipolar world. Joining battle on the various fronts of the cold war invariably involved little American sacrifice.

The main exception to this rule was, of course, Vietnam; even there, at least 60 Vietnamese were killed for every American life lost, largely because the US military’s preferred method of spreading democracy was carpet bombing and the fiery extermination of entire villages in order to “save” them from infection by communism. (It is worth remembering that, notwithstanding the phenomenal disproportion in terms of casualties as well as firepower, the Vietnamese won.)

At any rate, once the State Department and the Pentagon ceased to view communism as a credible threat to American interests, the US began unceremoniously dumping previous partners whose extreme conservatism no longer served a desirable political purpose, and could in fact be construed as an impediment to the sole superpower’s post-communist agenda: untrammelled (and largely non-reciprocal) access to the world’s markets.

This trend coincided with — and may well have contributed to — the growing attraction of radical Islam to the dispossessed in the Middle East and Asia.

The Afghan experience was in many ways crucial to this development: the US had encouraged fanatics from Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries to join the Mujahideen; the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan led to these jihadis returning to their homelands with a sense of invincibility.

The US is evidently well aware that the degree of animosity it arouses in the Muslim world is in no small part due to its deeply biased role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is certainly no coincidence that the Madrid conference that led to the Oslo accords was convened in the aftermath of the war against Iraq, or that the apparent support for Palestinian statehood has emerged during the war against Afghanistan.

The toll taken by 10 years of sanctions on Iraq is also profoundly disturbing, and the grievous harm cannot be undone by the renewal of large-scale hostilities against Baghdad — a goal that appears to be favoured by some of the fanatics in the Bush administration.

Beyond these obvious instances of American waywardness, however, the jihadi case against the US tends to lapse into the sort of banalities favoured by evangelical preachers of the Jerry Falwell ilk. Mr Falwell has been quoted as saying, for example, that the wound inflicted on the US on September 11 could be construed as divine retribution for its sins — such as the right to abortion.

Arrant nonsense of this variety feeds into the mentality that prompted President Bush to proclaim that his nation had been attacked because it constituted a beacon of freedom. It is particularly ironic, in view of that claim, that Americans are now faced with the circumscription of constitutionally guaranteed rights. A heightened concern for security is one thing; construing criticism of Mr Bush or of the US response to the September 11 outrage as unpatriotic is rather different.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, it is reported that suspicious looks were directed at anyone who dared to be seen on the streets without the Stars and the Stripes.

This variant of extremism readily feeds upon lack of knowledge of the outside world that is endemic in the US. It is appalling but not terribly surprising that an American Sikh became the first fatality in a racialist backlash following the Manhattan disaster, just because some idiot found his headgear and facial hair vaguely reminiscent of the popular image of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

Meanwhile, the opinion page editor of The Wall Street Journal has suggested in all seriousness that the Middle East is out of control and ought, along with Afghanistan, to be colonized by the US under United Nations auspices. Such monumental ignorance in the upper echelons of the American intelligentsia is as frightening as the impulses that drive Al Qaeda.

It is unfortunate that Pakistan has become involved in what the US describes as retaliation against the terrorists and those who harbour them, although it actually translates into a traditionally hegemonistic endeavour. Had the American aim been to capture bin Laden and his collaborators, the air raids against Afghanistan could actually be construed as a cowardly action.

But overall US aims in this region remain nebulous. It must be conceded, however, that General Pervez Musharraf had little alternative but to accede to whatever was demanded of him by Washington.

It was disingenuous of him to suggest that the reshuffle in the military hierarchy was unrelated to recent developments — just as it was inordinately obsequious of him to say in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year that every Pakistani had supported Mr Bush in last year’s presidential tussle in the US. Ideally, Islamabad should have been able to resist American pressure without casting in its lot with the indefensible regime in Kabul.

But that would have required a record of opposition to Taliban excesses. And a representative government.

Placed in the proper perspective, opposition to the US is too precious an objective to be surrendered to fanatics of any ilk. With its propensity to terrorize entire populations, the Bush administration has far more in common with Al Qaeda than it does with the ideals of a liberal-democratic civilization.

Just as it is possible to pity the people of Afghanistan without lending support to the decidedly demented Taliban, it is possible to empathize with those directly affected by the atrocities of September 11 without identifying with the US version of the struggle against terrorism.

Evil is by no means exclusively Mr bin Laden’s preserve. If truth be told, Mr Bush and Mr bin Laden have far more in common than either of them would be willing to admit.