PRESIDENT Musharraf’s address to the nation on January 12 had a large audience in all parts of the world. The armed forces of the India and Pakistan were confronting each other in a dangerous standoff and the risk of a conflict that could turn nuclear appeared to be very real. This situation had followed the massing of Indian forces in a threatening posture after the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building on December 13.

The menacing military moves made by India represented a carefully crafted policy to take the maximum advantage of the war declared against terrorism by the US after the outrage of September 11 last year. Prior to that, a head of government-level dialogue had been initiated at Agra between India and Pakistan in July; the process was set to be resumed in New York on September 25. The attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington transformed the situation, and President Bush sought to set up a worldwide coalition against terrorism.

The target identified for the war against terrorism was Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, together with the Taliban regime that had provided them with sanctuary in Afghanistan. The attitude of Pakistan became critical because of its geographical situation. The US, which had announced that those not supporting it in its war on terrorism would be deemed to be supporting terrorism, made an urgent call for facilities from Pakistan that were crucial to its operations. President Musharraf felt that this was not a time for half measures and took the bold decision to join the coalition and to offer “unstinted” cooperation. This was done as a matter of principle, since Pakistan had itself been a victim of terrorism.

India had expected that Pakistan would be singled out for its alleged support to terrorism, and even sought to have it declared a terrorist state. Instead, Pakistan emerged as a frontline state in the war against terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan, and was rewarded with economic assistance that could allow its economy to take off. The terrorist attacks against India in Srinagar on October 1 and in Delhi on December 13, look suspect because they fitted into Indian scheme of implicating Pakistan in terrorism, and only served to damage the image of Pakistan.

That is why while condemning them, Pakistan demanded an impartial inquiry, which India turned down. Even an offer of assistance by the US in investigating the December 13 attack was rejected by India, though that would have conferred greater credibility on Indian allegations of complicity of Pakistan-based terrorist groups.

India proceeded to deploy its armed forces in massive strength close to the border with Pakistan, while its electronic media unleashed a hostile propaganda campaign against this country. There was a deliberate attempt to create war hysteria, with commentators breathing fire and spitting venom against Pakistan’s alleged record of terrorism and went so far as to suggest that the problem lay in the very existence of Pakistan.

The shifting of Indian forces deployed in other parts of the country to strengthen the concentrations along the Pakistan border was publicized, and warlike statements became the order of the day. Provocations along the LoC in Kashmir increased, while Indian diplomacy launched a campaign to vilify Pakistan and to create justification for military action.

As international concern grew over the rising tensions in South Asia, pressure mounted mainly on Pakistan, asking it to take action against jihadist groups and even to hand over the elements identified by India for complicity in terrorist acts. Though western leaders appreciated Pakistan’s role in the war against terrorism, they tended to be supportive of India’s stand, and sought more drastic action against terrorist organizations identified by the US and India. The efforts made by Pakistan to draw attention to escalating state terrorism by India in Kashmir did not appear to register as effectively as India’s vilification campaign against Pakistan.

President Musharraf and his government worked actively to promote appreciation of Pakistan’s reasonable and moderate stance in the face of India’s military build-up and threats. The president remained in touch with world leaders, and used his visit to New York and other countries for contacts at the highest level. He also paid a state visit to China in late December, and again passed through China on his way to the SAARC summit in Kathmandu in the first week of January. Notwithstanding India’s frosty attitude at the summit, he sought opportunities to interact with Prime Minister Vajpayee. Thus the drive by India to create a war psychosis was to some extent countered, with widely appreciated moves in favour of a peaceful dialogue.

The pressure on Pakistan to do more to meet India’s demands continued and even British Prime Minister Tony Blair adopted a stance that was more favourable to India. President Musharraf decided that the time had come to remove all ambiguities concerning Pakistan’s stance on terrorism, religious extremism, and even on the type of society Pakistan was going to have.

The president’s address to the nation on January 12 was one of the most forthright and comprehensive statements of policy in the country’s history. He declared that Pakistan would not permit terrorism in any form or manifestation. This was an unequivocal commitment that was translated into action by the banning of five extremist religious and sectarian organizations and the arrest of hundreds of their activists. This led the US president to comment that Pakistan had upheld its status as a frontline state in the fight against international terrorism.

Apart from banning all lashkars and sipahs, President Musharraf ordered a revamping of the whole madrassah system, requiring all madaris to be registered by March 23 and their curricula to be modernized. He left no doubt about his commitment to creating a progressive and tolerant society, based on the teachings of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), and the ideals of the Quaid-i-Azam and Allama Iqbal.

While launching a reordering of national priorities, the president declared that the moral and political support to the Kashmir cause would continue. He made an appeal to the international community, the US in particular, to play its role in resolving the Kashmir issue, and in ending state terrorism which India was practising in Kashmir. The human rights organizations also had to take note of the flagrant violations going on in the occupied territory. Lastly, he declared that no Pakistanis would be handed over to India for trial.

India’s official response was articulated by Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, who extended a cautious welcome to the speech, and recognized the need for some time for the implementation of the measures announced on Jan 12. However, he voiced disappointment at the decision not to hand over persons accused of terrorist acts. He also indicated readiness to discuss all problems, including Kashmir, within a fixed time frame , once progress had been made in the elimination of terrorist activities in Kashmir.

While he sounded a positive note, quoting Prime Minister Vajpayee that India would take two steps if Pakistan took one towards better relations, Defence Minister George Fernandes stuck to a hardline position by declaring that India would not withdraw its forces from their frontline positions until “cross-border terrorism” had completely ceased.

Even the position taken by the Indian foreign minister had some negative features, including rejection of any role by the UN or for third-party mediation on Kashmir. Interior Minister L.K.Advani, who was visiting the US at that time at the head of a strong delegation sounded a moderate note in his interviews on the American television but struck a different note while addressing a press conference at the Indian embassy. He received special attention as the prime-minister-in-waiting but his past image is that of a Hindu extremist who used the notorious rath yatra of 1992 to stir up communal passions that resulted in widespread rioting and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

The Indian press commented favourably on President Musharraf’s speech of January 12 and called for reciprocal gestures by India. Malayam Singh Yadav, the leader of the Samajwadi Party, called upon the Indian government to respond to the action taken by Pakistan against terrorist groups by outlawing such extremist Hindu outfits as Shiv Sena and Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

The primary purpose of the January 12 address was to help cool down tensions heightened by the massing of Indian armed forces against Pakistan. US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who visited the subcontinent soon after the speech, called on India to withdraw its forces to their peace-time positions, echoing the call made by Pakistan for a de-escalation along the border. The stand taken by India, that such withdrawals would follow the end of”cross-border terrorism” shows that it has no intention of creating an atmosphere conducive to a peaceful dialogue.

The international community can judge how far President Musharraf has gone to reduce tensions, and to safeguard peace. The ball is now in India’s court. The BJP-led government has some anti-terrorist steps of its own to ponder, specially with extremist Hindu groups threatening to go ahead with the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, in defiance of India’s Supreme Court ruling. The withdrawal of India’s armed forces to their peacetime positions is being demanded by all segments of world opinion. The great powers, and the US in particular, must exercise their influence not only to safeguard peace, but also in favour of an early dialogue on Kashmir and other bilateral problems.

PRESIDENT Pervez Musharraf’s much anticipated speech of January 12 may indeed signal the start of a new phase in Pakistan’s history. Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, after his meeting with General Musharraf in Islamabad in early January, had predicted that the Pakistani president was working on a historic speech. Most comments by the western press on the speech seem to suggest that President Musharraf may indeed have given such an address.

That the speech may have created history is not only because it signalled the start of a campaign to rescue Pakistan from the grip of those who wanted their extremist version of Islam to become the guiding philosophy for the still evolving state in Pakistan. The actions that he promised may also set the stage for reclaiming the ungovernable space within the Pakistani state that had been claimed by dozens—-if not hundreds—-of Islamic groups. These groups followed their own law—-if they followed any law at all. They had their own philosophy of governance, their own educational system, and their own ideas about economic management. And many of them had their own armies—-the dreaded lashkars. Thus armed, they had begun to follow their own foreign policy. It was their involvement in the affairs of other countries that plunged Pakistan into a deep diplomatic crisis which could have generated into a military confrontation with India. President Musharraf’s speech may have saved the situation. But will he also succeed in rebuilding the Pakistani state?

Before we answer that question, let us see what went wrong with the Pakistani state in the first place. At the time of independence in 1947 Pakistan, unlike India, did not inherit a functioning state. It inherited a number of reasonably well developed institutions which should have been assembled within a constitutional framework. That did not happen. Consequently, Pakistan today is in a deep crisis produced by a crumbling state. A crumbling state can lead to a failed state. That is precisely what happened across the border in Afghanistan. Pakistan seemed to be moving in the same direction. Will the course be reversed?

The answer to this question depends in part on how a functioning state is defined. How Pakistan’s failure to develop a functioning state is interpreted by those who must craft policies for the future? How should the people of Pakistan and those who lead them deal with the consequences of the failure to acquire a state that works? And, how should a system be fashioned that can engage all the diverse segments of society and promote the welfare of society?

A functioning state is a mechanism that brings together the various instruments of governance in a way that produces social and political harmony. It takes a great deal of time, enterprise and dedication to move to that stage of political development. Few countries in the developing world have managed to reach that condition. India may be one of them; Brazil, another. Even Argentina, one of Latin America’s most developed societies, continues to experience crises with a depressing regularity.

In the absence of harmony among different institutions of governance, the task of economic development becomes difficult if not impossible. That a deep economic recession has persisted in Pakistan for a while is partly the consequence of a crumbling state. Economic strategies alone will not work. To get Pakistan to move forward will require simultaneous actions on a number of different fronts including the careful building of the institutions that make up a functioning state.

The instruments required for good governance must work to support one another. If one part of the state seeks to dominate the other parts—-as has happened on several occasions in Pakistan’s history—-there should be available some kind of a mechanism for restoring an equilibrium. The Americans call this approach to statecraft “checks and balances.” It was precisely this part of the American system that brought to an end the mess created by voting irregularities committed in the state of Florida during the last presidential elections.

After all the legal avenues available for resolving the problem had been travelled and a dead-end had been reached, the American Supreme Court intervened and placed George W. Bush in the White House. This was an extraordinary convulsion in the American political history but it did not affect the functioning of the system and the state. There was an instrument available to the people—-in this case the Supreme Court—-which could bring the system back to equilibrium.

Of the many instruments of governance that must work in harmony to produce a functioning state, the most obvious ones are the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. To these we should also add the civil bureaucracy, the military and the legal system. Of these six instruments, the only one that was not reasonably well developed at the time of Pakistan’s independence was the legislative branch of government.

Pakistan inherited a sound legal system watched over by a well organized and trained judiciary. It had a strong civil service that had once provided the “steel frame” around which the British had built the structure of their Indian empire. The executive branch of the government—-called the “vice-regal system” by an analyst who wrote an important study of Pakistan’s creation many years ago—-was also designed in the image of the British administration in India. This way of managing the affairs of the country was preferred to the systems that would have required some sharing of power and authority.

The Pakistani military was assembled out of the remains of the British Indian Army. Initially led by British officers, the military structure was quickly indigenized and, equally quickly, developed its own ethos and objectives. Initially, the military saw its principal objective the defence of Pakistan’s borders. Subsequently, dismayed at the poor quality of governance to which the people were subjected for long periods of time, the military leadership began to include nation-building in their set of objectives. Later, under Zia-ul-Haq, the military began to look at itself as a prompter of Islamic ideology, a role on the basis of which it helped the Afghan mujahideen fight the Soviet Union’s invasion of their country.

There was the need to pull together these diverse institutions of government into a functioning state. That could have been done only by a legislature representing all segments of an extraordinarily diverse society. That did not happen for such a legislation did not exist at the time Pakistan became independent. That may have happened had constitution-making been guided by a strong hand. That was done in India by that country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who came up with what an Indian historian in a recent work has called “the idea of India.”

This role could have been played by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father. Unfortunately for the country he created, Jinnah was a very sick man by the time of Pakistan’s birth. He was dead less than thirteen months after Pakistan came into existence. Those who followed Jinnah into office did not have his stature, his vision, and his commitment to produce a functioning state.

Pakistan’s 54-year political history is punctuated with a series of disequilibria in which one part of the governing structure sought to get ahead of all the other. It was the powerful civil bureaucracy that beat out all competition initially. For about six years—-from 1948, following Jinnah’s death, to 1954—-the civil bureaucracy was in charge without any checks or balances placed on its power. For the following four years, from 1954 to 1958, two powerful individuals—-first governor-general Ghulam Muhammad and later President Iskander Mirza — held the reins of power. Ayub Khan’s coup d’etat of October 1958, initiated the period of military dominance.

To date, Pakistan has been led by four military presidents. Each of them in his own way attempted to give the country a political structure to ensure his continuing dominance. Only time will tell whether President Musharraf’s tenure will be markedly different from those of his three military predecessors.

Interspersed between the rule by these military men were the tenures of three politicians—-Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, and Mian Nawaz Sharif—-who continued the “vice-regal” tradition established very early in the country’s history. They sought to retain power by a combination of populist policies and by dominating all other institutions of governance. As could have been expected—-and, as they should have foreseen—-the equilibrium they disturbed was restored by the institutions they attempted to overpower.

On five occasions—-once in the case of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and twice in the case of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif—-tenures of popularly elected prime ministers were cut short by the military’s intervention. But the military did not act alone. Each time it had the support of the civil service and each time the judiciary found a way of giving legitimacy to the action by an individual — or a set of individuals — who had deposed elected prime ministers.

This continuous tussle among the various institutions of governance had a disastrous effect on the shape and structure of the Pakistani state. The states under the kind of pressure Pakistan had to bear go through four stages—-a functioning state, a crumbling state, a dysfunctional state, and a failed state. Pakistan never had a truly functioning state. The various attempts to create one—-the most notable among them were the experiments launched by President Ayub Khan in the early sixties and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ten years later in the early seventies—-came to nothing. Both times the unresolved conflict among the various institutions of governance led to failure. Pakistan gradually moved into the phase of a crumbling state.

For sometimes rapid economic growth helped to camouflage the crumbling of the state. A rate of growth of some 6 per cent a year—-more than twice the rate of population increase—- produces an illusion of progress which was certainly the case in the eighties in Pakistan when large inflows of external capital kept the economy moving forward. Once the external flows ceased —-as they did in the nineties—-a poorly functioning and crumbling state acted as a tremendous burden on the economy. The economy began to rapidly deteriorate.

Pakistan was on the way to becoming a dysfunctional state when the military intervened once again. This happened on October 12, 1999 when General Musharraf and his colleagues dismissed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and took over the control of the country. The new government initially focused its attention on reversing the economic slide and reviving the economy. It left aside the equally important job of nation building. Not much effort was devoted to reverse the process of the state’s crumbling.

Religious institutions of various kinds—-organizations that managed madrassahs, organizations that provided welfare, organizations that trained and recruited young men for various jihads around the world, organizations that sought to force the acceptance of their version of Islam—-continued to encroach upon the space created by the crumbling institutions of the state. Their hold on society began to increase and, in response, the state began to move towards the dysfunctional phase. General Pervez Musharraf has now decided to act. Will he succeed in saving the Pakistani state?

CANADIAN Prime Minister Jean Chretien has carried out a major reorganization of the federal cabinet that sends mixed signals about the future course of Canadian foreign policy.

Minister of foreign affairs John Manley has been promoted to the position of deputy prime minister and security czar, with the responsibility of co-ordinating security policy between different ministries. He will also oversee the working of public sector corporations, and will be in charge of political matters relating to the influential province of Ontario. These responsibilities are expected to give Manley the kind of profile that he will need to run for the leadership of the federal Liberal Party, should Prime Minister Jean Chretien decide to step down early next year.

Although he is no longer the minister of foreign affairs, John Manley asked the prime minister to let him leave for India and Pakistan. His insistence on making this trip is an indication of the change that has come about in the Canadian perception of the importance of both India and Pakistan in world affairs. Only a few months ago, both countries stood heavily sanctioned as a consequence of the nuclear explosions that they had carried out in 1998.

After the military takeover in 1999, additional sanctions were slammed on Pakistan. The Canadian attitude towards India began to soften almost a year ago, in view of the recognition of its importance as an emerging market, but the change towards Pakistan occurred only recently as President General Pervez Musharraf agreed to support the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

However, it is notable that under Manley’s stewardship, Canada did not take an initiative to launch a multilateral effort under the aegis of the United Nations to seek the resolution of the dangerous confrontation that has developed between India and Pakistan since December 2001. Here is a crisis that has the potential to lead to the loss of millions of lives, but the UN has not acted to do anything about it. The Security Council has not even met to consider the situation. We are all compelled to hope that the sole superpower will succeed in “managing” the crisis.

Deputy Prime Minister John Manley belongs to the right wing of the federal Liberal Party. He is devoted to the promotion of Canada’s political and economic links with the United States. After the terrorist attacks of September 11 in New York, Manley firmly stressed Canadian readiness to participate in retaliatory military operations. He was given the responsibility for the formulation of a new security policy for Canada in co-ordination with concerned Canadian agencies and the US government.

Manley came up with a multibillion-dollar plan that satisfied the US concerns, but was widely criticized within Canada. Critics said that the actions taken by the government to co-ordinate its immigration and refugee policy and visa requirements with the US compromised Canadian sovereignty. They also pointed out that the government could have used some of this money in projects to combat child poverty, to build affordable housing for the increasing number of homeless people, and to help Canadian farmers facing the impact of drought and falling prices of agricultural products.

When Canadian participation in military operations in Kandahar under the direct military command of the US was announced recently it appeared that Manley had taken an important step towards changing the direction of Canadian foreign policy.

Canada’s role as a middle power, that had become institutionalized since the late 1950s, had mostly limited Canadian military involvement to humanitarian intervention, under a multilateral framework provided by international institutions. John Manley’s predecessor as minister of foreign affairs Lloyd Axworthy had emphasized that human security, and peace-building would be Canada’s major foreign policy objectives. Under his stewardship, Canada had campaigned for the establishment of the international criminal court despite stiff resistance from the US, and had co-operated actively with non-governmental organizations in the campaign to ban the use of landmines.

During the late 1990s, Canadian parliamentarians engaged in extensive consultations with the public on foreign policy issues and had endorsed Lloyd Axworthy’s policy orientation. A report issued by the House of Commons standing committee on foreign affairs in December 1998 called on Canada to work towards the goal of achieving universal nuclear disarmament.

In June 1998, along with other middle powers, including Sweden, Ireland, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, Canada called upon all nuclear-weapon states to take practical steps for the elimination of nuclear weapons. But as a member of NATO, Canada’s scope for manoeuvre was limited, and it failed in its effort to persuade the NATO to review its policy of reliance on nuclear weapons, and also failed to dissuade the US from unilaterally abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

As the United States forges ahead with plans to develop the National Missile Defence (NMD) system, it is likely to intensify pressure on Canada to co-operate in its deployment in the North American region. Given this context, does the Canadian decision to participate in military operations in Kandahar under US command indicate that Canada has abandoned the aspiration to play the role of a middle power and agreed to seek much closer integration of its foreign policy with the United States?

We will know the answer to this question in the near future. Robust resistance to this kind of change could come from within the parliamentary caucus of the federal Liberal Party, among whose members there are many people who feel that Canada should try to follow an independent foreign policy.

Bill Graham, who is replacing John Manley as the minister of foreign affairs belongs to this group, and had chaired the parliamentary committee that had produced the report calling for universal nuclear disarmament. He is also a fair-minded expert in international law, who takes his commitment to human rights seriously. Graham could be expected to at least speak up against the violation of the civil and political rights of the Palestinians and the Kashmiris.

When the federal cabinet meets John Manley will be away in South Asia, but Bill Graham will be present. He will have the chance to tell his cabinet colleagues what he thinks about the US decision to refuse to offer the people captured in Afghanistan the protections that they are entitled to under the Geneva Conventions. Graham could also be expected to tell his colleagues that Canada would have egg on its face if its soldiers got implicated in acts that are illegal in international law.

Resistance to deputy prime minister John Manley’s agenda could also be expected from the vibrant community of dissidents in Canada. Canadian nationalists, progressive trade unions, and the movements around the issues of social justice, peace, human rights, and the preservation of ecology could offer stiff resistance to Prime Minister Chretien and Deputy Prime Minister Manley, if they continue to offer uncritical support to the United States.

MY book As Time Goes By has just come out and as luck would have it, it could not have been more timely. The book reminisces about by my life and times as a student at the University of Southern California and about the United States of America as it was then.

They were happy and carefree days but more significantly, as a foreign student (and a Muslim) far from being viewed with the darkest suspicion, I and other foreign students were greeted with the greatest respect and honoured guests. We received much affection and kindness and when I left, I left behind scores of friends. Two major events had occurred while I was there, the Korean War called “police action,” a bit of semantic falsification and McCarthyism, both straws in the wind.

The Korean War was an early sign that the United States saw itself both as a missionary and a thanedar, speaking softly and carrying a big stick. McCarthyism revealed a certain insecurity in the American psyche, if not a fascist streak and I had seen it as a kind of temporary insanity.

McCarthy cast a wide net but left the foreign students alone and none of us were hauled to star-chambers to be asked whether we were now or had ever been members of the communist party or were sympathisers or fellow-travellers or crypto-communists or pinkos. Indeed, I had openly spoken against McCarthyism. McCarthy had defined a communist as anybody who gave aid and comfort to the communists.

By his own definition, I had written in a newspaper article, McCarthy was a communist because he had achieved what the Soviet Union would never be able to achieve, he had made the American constitution a subversive document. McCarthy notwithstanding, there was a certain innocence about America, and in my book, I give it a thumbs up.

I wouldn’t want to be a foreign student in America in these times, certainly not with my Muslim name. I wouldn’t want to be put under surveillance, put on a watch-list of the FBI and become an untouchable, shunned by neighbours and living in fear of some happy-go-lucky, super-patriotic vigilantes who may decide to fight the war against terrorism by bashing my brains out with a baseball bat.

September 11 brought the best out of America. Unfortunately, it also brought out the worst, a collective panic-attack. The world had agreed with President Bush that the war against terrorism was a just cause but there was a danger in the either or of being with the United States or being against it.

There were many who felt that the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan and the action of Afghan warlords in the summary execution of members or suspected members of Taliban brought both friend and foe to the same moral depths. Though the Taliban have been defeated and an Interim Government, cobbled by the United States, installed, the bombing still continues.

But, by far, the most disturbing (and a grave violation of human rights) has been the transportation of Al Qaeda and Taliban ‘prisoners’ to Guantanamo Bay which is being converted into a modern day Andaman Islands (Kala Pani) or Devil’s Island where the French had sent Dreyfus who spent several years there until Emile Zola’s relentless campaign to free him (because he was innocent) succeeded.

The Al Qaeda and Taliban ‘prisoners’ were flown to Cuba, hooded, fettered and sedated. General Richard B Meyers who is the US Chief of the Joint Staff justified this by saying that they (the ‘prisoners’) were “so dangerous that they would gnaw through the hydraulic cables” on their transport plane to bring it down. If animals were to be treated in this way, it would have brought angry protests from the Society To Prevent Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

Peter Beaumont writing in The observer of London does not conceal his outrage: “The reality is what is happening to the prisoners of Afghanistan is a scandal of international proportions. Brutalized, often tortured, these men who have been stripped of their most basic rights under international and US laws, rights, guaranteed at the International Tribunal in The Hague even for the alleged architects of the genocide in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

In a deft stroke, the administration of George W. Bush has dropped a ‘daisycutter’ not only on the Geneva Convention, designed to protect the rights of prisoners of war, but also America’s own constitutional guarantees for defendants.”

But the Americans insist that they are not prisoners of war. Who then are they? The Americans say that they are ‘unlawful combatants.’ Does this mean that they are outside the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution which insists that in all criminal prosecutions, inalienable rights apply. Even serial killers have their legal rights.

The US constitution is not like the Pakistan Constitution which can be held in abeyance or suspended. But most of all, it must not be forgotten that Nazi war criminals were given a fair trial at Nuremburg and these were murderers who had sent millions to their death.

The war against terrorism is turning into something else, into a war of revenge. It is this war of revenge that the United States must win. America must go back to being a free and open society, governed by the rule of law and the rule of law is based on the presumption of innocence. As of now, we have no information about what crimes these Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners may have committed.

Nor have we any idea about how long they will remain in their cages that have barbed-wire around them. A US Defence Department spokesperson said that the ‘prisoners’ were getting human treatment. I wonder what they would have been made to go through if the treatment was inhumane!