GEORGE W. BUSH has a cat named India. In New Delhi, about thirty activists of the Hindu Right’s political formation, the BJP, stood before the US embassy outraged with this news. “We are not cats,” said one man, “we are lions.”

And lions don’t lie with the lamb, or with the goat.

Which is why the Hindu Right government does not want to make nice with Pakistan, and much prefers the other lions in the region, such as Israel, and the big lion of the planet, the USA.

Bear in mind, however, that this outburst against Bush the Second has little to do with anti-imperialism. While one section of the Hindu Right government demolishes the economic sovereignty of India on behalf of transnational corporations and the dollar (under the auspices of the ministry of disinvestment), another section of the same government offers the nation’s children a chauvinistic version of history in which the great Hindu nation comes off as the next great Universal Empire (under the auspices of what might as well be called the ministry of disinformation). The Hindu Right is the Trojan Horse of capitalist globalization, even as it portrays itself as the conquering lion of the new century.

On missile defence, on globalization, on so many of the contentious issues of the day, the government of India has come out slavishly on the side of the US (even as there is dissension among the generally compliant G-8). This is diametrically opposed to what one expects from the government of India, which had a reputation as a staunch defender of the international Third Way, of peaceful coexistence, of anti-nuclearism, of genuine anti-poverty, etc. Nehru was not Castro, but he was certainly not the Hindu Right.

The fantasy entertained by the Hindu Right government is that an alliance with the world’s lions (USA-Israel) will allow India to sup at High Table, to eat high on the hog. Certainly the expectation is that trade will follow the military tie-up.

For that reason, we see a wholesale sellout by the Hindu Right to US-Israeli foreign/military policy objectives. Hardt and Negri in their new book Empire come to the conclusion that imperialism is perhaps an out of date formulation, that there is no real centre to the current political economic formation. To get to this position, they must, and do, neglect the world of the military (and to a certain extent the role of the dollar — for which, see Peter Gowan’s The Global Gambit, from Verso). And they mistake the contentiousness of past imperialisms.

Imperialisms of the past (English, French, German, Japanese), for example, remained confined to certain zones, and these nation-based formations came into conflict with each other. If the English dominated the rest for a period, it did not mean that they ceased to feel pressure from the other European pretenders. The model, with some variations, works today. The US is paramount not in a total way, but through alliances with sub-imperial powers (Israel in west Asia, Japan-South Korea in east Asia, etc) and with military pacts with lesser powers (the US navy conducts joint exercises, for example in Asia, with Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many others). To neglect the role of the official forces (the military) and the unofficial forces (the paramilitary units) is to miss the way imperialism functions.

The Hindu Right, unlike Hardt and Negri, recognizes the persistence of US imperialism, and Israeli sub-imperialism — and they want a piece of the action in South Asia. It appears that the Hindu Right seeks the franchise for US lackey against what it sees as Islamic fundamentalism and Chinese communism. In exchange for trade arrangements and a seat with the big boys (in the UN Security Council), the Hindu Right government will allow the US to create the biggest aircraft carrier in the Asian region (and render Diego Garcia, and maybe Okinawa, obsolete). After Rajiv Gandhi allowed Gulf war planes to refuel in Mumbai in 1991, the door to this lay open. The Hindu Right stepped right in.

But the entire thing seems odd: the Hindu Right and the Israelis? In the 1930s, the Hindu Right was ecstatic about the advent of Hitler, and one of its founders, V. D. Savarkar was feted in the Nazi press for his enthusiasm at the blitzkrieg.

Another important Hindu Right figure, M. S. Golwalkar, reflected on the Holocaust, and concluded: “Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.” Indeed, this philosophy remains at the heart of the Hindu Right’s ideology, what is known as Hindutva.

But the alliance with Israel is not so strange after all, because at the ideological level, Hindutva is much like Zionism, for both extol the importance of the race-state, and both cast aspersions on the presence of a Muslim minority. An India-born analyst at the Zionist Freeman Centre in Houston, Texas, makes just this connection: “Islamic fascists see Bharat [India] as the soft spot to propagate their irrational creed and foment violence. India tries to placate them. Israel expels them. This is what Bharat should do. If they hate Hindu Rashtra so much they are free to leave for dar-ul-Islam.” [I’m puzzled by the claim that India “placates” anyone, given the rather ruthless actions of the army and police against, for example, the residents of the Kashmir valley].

But the real dangers lie on the official level. Both India and Israel came to life because of the mendacity of a waning English imperialism that conjured up the idea of partition to hastily dispatch its problems in west and south Asia. India was averse to a relationship with Israel mainly because of the injustice done to the Palestinians. From the late 1940s to 1992 there was no substantial relationship (indeed my Indian passport did not allow me to visit South Africa or Israel — both seen as racist states).

This was at the political level. At the military level, something else was at work. In January 1963, a few months after India’s border war with China, the government of India reached out to the Israeli military establishment and opened a dialogue (the story broke in the Hindustan Times on May 15, 1980). Two years later, Israeli cabinet minister Yigal Alon visited India. Mossad and India’s Research Analysis Wing (RAW) shared information and analysis from the late 1970s onwards.

In 1992, India openly embraced Israel’s military establishment. There are several reasons for this shift. First, the Indian military was eager to find a supplier for military hardware to replace the by then defunct Soviet pipeline. Second, the Indian government’s enthusiastic 1991 entry into IMFundamentalism enabled the heresy of a rapid pro-Americanism, and on its back, a pro-Zionism. 1992 also signalled the emergence of the Hindu Right as a leading contender for national office, and its ideology remains far more compatible with that of the US-Israel than that of the left and the center-left.

A few months after the establishment of full diplomatic relations, a six member Israeli defence contingent came to India to discuss arms issues with the Indian ministry of defence. Military preceded the political bureau. India’s first shopping list was loaded with aircraft demands, mainly to replace the ailing MIG-21 and MIG-29 fleet. But by the time the Hindu Right took power in 1998, the list grew much longer and far more complex. It also reveals the sub-imperial ambitions of the Hindu Right over southern Asia.

In May 1998, a few days after the nuclear tests, a delegation from Israeli aircraft industries toured India to sell their pilotless aircraft anti-ship missiles. Components of a missile defence shield, then, have been in the works for India for at least three years. A set of deals has been signed between the arms merchants in India and Israel to buy goods for the air force (MIGs, light combat aircraft, AWACs), navy (aircraft carrier, maritime radar, attack craft), army (Main battle tank, advanced light helicopters), and for the missile branch of the military (the Indian defence contractors want to buy Israeli guidance and launch systems for the Prithvi surface-to-surface missile, and for the sea-to-surface Sagarika system, but there is also evidence that India wants Israeli help with the Akash, a missile system akin to the M-11).

These weapons would put India into contention as the main power not only in South Asia, but perhaps, as the second front against the Chinese (a move that enabled the US to revise its military doctrine to fight only one full-scale war; its proxy powers would take care of the other one, in the new scenario). Furthermore, the missile defence parts of the deals would enable India to fantastically suggest that Pakistan’s nuclear option had been neutralized, and that the parity of 1998 had been negated. India’s eagerness for the missile defence, then, is part of the desire of the Hindu Right to will away the Pakistani tests on the Chagai range.

As the India-Pakistan summit fizzled away on July 17, 2001, the Indian and Israeli defence contractors met in Israel and concluded a $2 billion deal that will upgrade Indian fighter jets, provide India with Barak-type surface-to-surface missiles, and with parts of a missile defence package (unmanned aerial vehicles and radar systems). The boys and their toys had already undermined the political pieties in Agra.

The restless lions of West and South Asia join the tigers of East Asia to encircle China and the predominantly Muslim states of west and Central Asia.

—Courtesy: Z-Net

IN today’s column, followed by the columns in the next couple of weeks, I will deal with the important subject of economic geography — how a country’s location can affect its economic prospects. But location has two meanings. The geographic location — the space a country really occupies. And the location a country can assign itself by the way it conducts its relations with the world outside.

Britain, for instance, is in Europe but it remains strongly attached to America, once its colony. My purpose in writing these columns is to explore how ‘September 11’ may have altered Pakistan’s location in this wider sense. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, has changed the world, including Pakistan. Today, Pakistan is a very different country. It is different because President Pervez Musharraf was prepared to act decisively and courageously to reorient the country’s foreign policy and several aspects of its domestic policies.

With the suddenness that surprised even the West, which had long sought Pakistan’s dissociation from the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the country gave up on what was once its protege. Not only did it abandon the Taliban, it took an active role in their destruction and elimination from Afghanistan. Only two days after the terrorist attacks, Pakistani president changed in a fundamental way his country’s approach towards Afghanistan. The change in policy, he declared, was being introduced in Pakistan’s national interest.

Equally, suddenly, President Musharraf has now turned on Islamic extremists in his own country. In a historic speech to the nation on January 12, he declared war on the organizations that had not only brought terrorism to some of Pakistan’s neighbours. It had also terrorized the people of Pakistan. In clear and unambiguous terms, he launched a new policy toward Islamic extremism in the country. All citizens of Pakistan, no matter how actively and diligently they pursued Islam, will have to function within prescribed legal framework, he declared.

After abandoning the Taliban in Afghanistan and after laying down a new and restrictive law within which extremist organizations could legitimately function in Pakistan, would General Musharraf be prepared to move in one other different direction? Would he allow and encourage Pakistan to “migrate” from South Asia and move towards West Asia? Would he take Pakistan to the place where it now belongs? On January 12, he told his audience that “Kashmir was in Pakistan’s blood.” Would he be prepared to add West Asia to the blood of Pakistan as well?

For the last 55 years Pakistan has conducted its foreign policy to achieve two clearly enunciated objectives. One, to secure Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan. Most Pakistanis have felt that Kashmir was the unfinished business which resulted in the division of British India into two countries — a predominantly Hindu India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan. By bringing Kashmir into Pakistan, the two-nation theory so powerfully enunciated and so brilliantly advocated by Mohammad Ali Jinnah would have arrived at its logical conclusion.

Pakistan had attempted to achieve this aim of its foreign policy by pursuing another objective: to encounter India’s growing influence in the world. For India to formally gain the status of great power — by being included, for instance, in the UN Security Council as a permanent member — it had to be economically strong. It had also to be in peace with its neighbours.

Pakistan, by bleeding India in Kashmir, could continue to deny this ambition to New Delhi. If Pakistan could somehow contain India, it could perhaps also force it to give up control of the state of Kashmir and allow it to be assimilated into Pakistan. The Pakistani strategists calculated that India may ultimately be prepared to use Kashmir as a price to gain entry into the club of superpowers.

But in the Indian mind Kashmir represented something even more important than its quest for a super-state. Kashmir was an important part of what one Indian historian has called the “idea of India.” India’s opposition to the two-nation theory was as passionate as Pakistan’s subscription to it. Indian scholars and statesmen claimed that the break-up of Pakistan in 1971 and the independence gained by its “eastern wing” as the state of Bangladesh, showed that there was, in fact, not much substance in Jinnah’s two-nation theory.

But the advocates of the theory could equally convincingly argue that the departure of Muslim Bengalis had not proven Jinnah wrong. He had argued that the Muslims of British India were socially, culturally and religiously so different from the country’s Hindu majority that the two nations could not live in harmony within the boundaries of one state.

Muslims in what was once the Muslim majority areas of British India now lived not in one country but two. If Kashmir was not allowed to join Pakistan but became independent instead, the British Indian Muslims would be living in three different countries, separate from the Hindu dominated India.

The idea of India, on the other hand, was based on the belief that the citizenship of the state of India was not defined by religion, caste or social class. All Indians were Indians since they inhabited the same geographical space. In pursuit of this idea, India crafted a secular state which was maintained in its original form in spite of the emergence in recent years of a virulent form of Hindu fundamentalism that targeted not only Muslims living in India but other religious communities as well.

The destruction of the Babri mosque in Uttar Pradesh was the work of a group closely associated with the Bhartiya Janata Party, the party which dominates the coalition headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. But the Babri mosque was not the only incident against the non-Hindu communities of India. In 2001, fundamentalist Hindus directed their campaign against the Christian community and the churches in which they worshipped.

Nonetheless, the world images that India and Pakistan created were very different. Pakistani society got increasingly identified with an extreme form of Islam, intolerant towards its own people who did not subscribe to whatever version of the religion was advocated by the most vocal group. And abroad, by championing the cause of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it created the strong impression that it stood for an extreme form of Islam which sought to return to the world that existed 1,400 years ago.

This impression was created precisely at the time when globalization was reducing the real and the virtual distances among different countries and communities. In this increasingly integrated world, Pakistan was being left hopelessly behind.

The first war in Afghanistan — the one fought by the Afghan Mujahideen but assisted by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States — contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of European communism. While most of the world was prepared to take advantage of this breathtaking change, Pakistan remained mired in solving two seemingly unsolvable problems: one, the role of Islam in the way it governed itself; and two, its relations with India. It was the latter, in particular, that consumed so much of Islamabad’s attention and — as it turned out — exhausted the country’s energy, its economy and many of its options.

It was in the pursuit of this approach that Pakistan followed a foreign policy that became increasingly India-centric. It was because of this policy that Pakistan fought three hot wars with India and participated in several “near-wars” with its neighbour. The last of these “near wars” was in the winter of 2001-2002. For Pakistan — presumably also for India — this near-war was a costly business. A fully mobilized army costs money and a weakened Pakistani economy cannot afford to have this confrontation extend over too long a period. For the last several months, the Indian economy has also been under pressure. It cannot also afford to have an army of one million soldiers in a state of deployment.

While Pakistan was so engaged in defining its role in the world of Islam, in devising a political structure that would adequately serve its diverse population, in pulling its economy out of a deep trough, India was more positively occupied. It had gradually begun to lift its sights beyond Pakistan to the dramatically reshaped world following the collapse of European communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It was now looking to play a serious role in global affairs. It was convinced that its size, the mastery by it of new technologies and its impressive rate of economic growth entitled it to play such a role.

Just about the time the world was beginning to acquire a new shape and a new character, the Indian economy began to grow at an unprecedented rate. After a deep economic crisis that nearly bankrupted the economy in the early 1990s, New Delhi, under the capable leadership of two farsighted men — Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh — decided to break with the past and opt for economic modernization. In order to get out of this crisis, India, in 1991, very deliberately and very quickly abandoned Jawharlal Nehru’s socialism in favour of gradually opening its economy to the world outside.

While it did not adopt all the aspects of the policy framework that had been assembled under the title of The Washington Consensus in the mid-1980s, it accepted its basic approach. India recognized that it could grow and economically prosper only if it became a part of the rapidly changing global economic system. To gain full membership into the system required the acceptance of globalization as a process dictating the change in economic relations among the nations of the world.

Indians however are cautious people. They did not move at the pace adopted by several countries of Latin America for whom The Washington Consensus had been crafted in the first place. Most Latin countries threw open their doors quickly as a part of the policy they called the apertura — openness. This brought them a great deal of foreign investment. It also brought to their shores a large number of transnational corporations which picked up the assets the over-burdened public sector was offering at cheap prices. The American, Spanish, French and Dutch financial, manufacturing, and public utility companies came into Latin America and “globalized the region.” But their entry also brought volatility and with volatility came a series of economic crises that nearly wrecked Mexico in 1994-95, Argentina in 1995, Brazil in 1999. In 2001-2002, the Argentinean economy was not nearly but completely destroyed.

But by not completely opening its economy, India has escaped the volatility that has buffeted other major emerging economies. In this it seems to have taken the cue from China, its neighbour to the northeast. This is a subject to which I return next week.

MANY years ago, there was a major train accident in India and Lal Bahadur Shastri who was the railways minister in the union government resigned. By no stretch of the imagination could he have been held responsible but he felt that he had a moral duty to accept responsibility.

He was an honourable man. He could have easily blamed the ISI or some radical Islamic group for the accident. But it was not fashionable in those days to do so. With the advent of a BJP government, in itself a sign of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, the fires of hatred against Pakistan began to be stoked until the present day when nothing violent happens in India without Pakistan being blamed for it.

The latest is the attack on the American Centre in Kolkata. The Indian Home Minister Mr L.K. Advani had wasted no time whatsoever in blaming the ISI for it, a seemingly reflex action. Whoever was responsible, one thing is perfectly clear. It was a security lapse and in the ultimate analysis, it was failure on the part of the home ministry.

Had Mr Advani had the same moral fibre as Lal Bahadur Shastri, he should have resigned. But, of course, he didn’t and won’t because blaming Pakistan for acts of terrorism is a part of a scheming, sinister strategy to have Pakistan declared a terrorist state and Mr Advani is the mastermind of this strategy. Clearly he has a low opinion of the US State Department and Pentagon who have intelligence sources of their own and would have a pretty good idea of India’s game.

It is significant, as it is revealing, that India has refused every offer made for a joint inquiry or a third party investigation. The ostensible excuse for this is that India is a sovereign country, a patently bogus excuse. How is India’s sovereignty compromised by such an inquiry? After all, India is levelling serious allegations against Pakistan, also a sovereign country. In order for guilt to be established, a crime has to be investigated.

It would be a mockery of justice, if the investigation were to be conducted solely by the accuser! India is a member of the international community, of the family of nations. It has certain responsibilities in this regard. One of these is that it can’t go half-cock and start accusing another country of committing acts of terrorism and then backing out of third party investigations. The conclusion is inescapable that such an investigation would embarrass India, if not hold it not to be lying. Or worse still promoting a domestic agenda such as the forthcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh by creating an external bugbear. Those elections must mean a great deal to the BJP that they are willing to put their country at risk in order to protect party interests.

India should be grateful that international television channels were not so active, or players themselves in spreading disinformation, when it was sponsoring the L.T.T.E. and training and arming its members to wage war against the government of Sri Lanka, a war that is still going though India appears to have washed its hands off the L.T.T.E., paying the price of having a prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi assassinated by a suicide bomber belonging to the Tamil Tigers.

The sponsorship of terrorism in South Asia was started by India. India had also sponsored the Sikh militants to offset the political opponents of Indira Gandhi’s government, only to have the monster turn against Frankenstein and Ms Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own Sikh security guards, infuriated after the Indian security forces had stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar on the orders of Ms Indira Gandhi.

In these days, there are television channels and they are being shamelessly used or allowing themselves to be used to relay angry rhetoric or irresponsible accusations. And this includes the BBC which once had a reputation for objectivity and even-handedness.

In a report on al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners being taken to Guantanamo Bay and the mild criticism of inhumane treatment of these prisoners, Ms Nisha Pillai, who is of South Indian origin, was quick to switch to the BBC correspondent in Islamabad to ask whether there had been any reaction from the Pakistan government. Nisha Pillai was duly informed that there was no official Pakistan reaction. Any wonder that people in Pakistan are calling BBC, Bharat Broadcasting Corporation.

In the early seventies, I was in London and was interviewed by BBC (Radio) for a programme called, as I recall, The World in action. It dealt with the political scene in Pakistan and I had criticised Indira Gandhi for meddling in the affairs of Pakistan and for her unconcealed hostility. The programme had been recorded and I asked the producer how much of it would be edited out. “Only your comments on Mrs. Gandhi.” He told me. I was aghast. He explained that the BBC had been kicked out of India during Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency and were anxious to get back. “We don’t want to take any chances,” he had explained. I should have known it but i had rust in the BBC’s much touted independence.

But we can’t keep blaming others. We seem to be on the defensive all the time, reacting to accusations by issuing denials. We need to go on the offensive, not only denying the accusations levelled against us but telling Mr Advani and his ilk that enough is enough and that, not only is he acting in a highly irresponsible manner but he is whipping up a war hysteria and endangering the peace in the region and he should be spending more time in his home ministry, tightening it up so that the real culprits are apprehended and not just the usual suspects. Sometimes, in looking for an external enemy, there is a tendency to overlook the enemy within.

THE American authorities do not contend that the prisoners of war should be treated according to the Third Geneva Convention. What they contend is the status of Taliban of non-Afghan origin captured after their defeat at the hands of the British, American and Northern Alliance troops.

“They are unlawful combatants” says the US defence secretary and hence not entitled to the status of prisoners of war. Playing second fiddle to Rumsfeld, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, added that the prisoners were not good persons but still they were being treated well. To date 110 Taliban fighters have been transported from Afghanistan to the naval base in Cuba, Guantanamo, which the US occupies in defiance of the UN General Assembly resolutions that have repeatedly directed it to restore the base to the Republic of Cuba to whom it belongs.

The question is can the US hold the trial there without the permission of the Republic of Cuba? Yet it is there that the US military authorities are holding the prisoners in six by eight cages covered with metal roof with razor-sharp chain-link sides and concrete floors. This make-shift prison does not provide proper shelter from the winds, rains and cold. What toilet facilities and privacy could be available to the internees in such mouse-trap is anybody’s guess.

These prisoners of indeterminate status would be tried by a bench of their captors under the amended military law which denies them the right to engage a counsel of their choosing at a summary trial most of whose proceedings would be in camera. Since the military regulations have been rewritten after the defeat of Taliban these would doubtless be ex-post facto laws. These are repugnant to the US constitution and Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which prohibits the awarding of a heavier penalty upon the accused than “the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed”.

That this provision has been reiterated in Article 15 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights leaves one in no doubt that the military regulations amended by the military high command of the US providing for harsher penalty would be deemed a blatant violation of human rights. The captors may deny the status of POWs to the prisoners but can they deny that they are human beings and as such entitled to human rights if not the Geneva Convention?

If Washington treats them as dangerous prisoners, is there another law for them than the ordinary penal code which is in force in civilized countries? If they are non-POWs, as the US insists, they are entitled to all the rights and privileges provided by the Human Rights Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights such as the right to be presumed innocent unless proved guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction after a fair and open trial. If the US authorities deny them the benefit of the Third Geneva Convention, they will have to make available to them the benefits of Human Rights Covenant.

As for the US contention that the Taliban fighters are not prisoners of war since most of them did not belong to the armed forces proper of the Emirate of Afghanistan, one has to refer to the relevant provisions of the Third Geneva Convention. Article 4 of the Convention defines prisoners of war as the members of the armed forces and other militias and volunteer corps, including members of the resistance movements belonging to a party to the conflict. But such militias, volunteers and members of the organized resistance movement should be under the command of some one responsible for his men. They should bear a distinctive sign recognizable from a distance and carry arms openly and conduct the operations according to the laws and customs of war.

In the light of this definition the Taliban and Al Qaeda men and Arab and Pakistani volunteers were fighting shoulder to shoulder with Afghans under the banner of the Emirate against the invading US army. They were lawful combatants who fought in defence of their country according to the laws and customs of war. It was the Americans who violated these laws by indiscriminate bombardment of civilian population.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, holds the opinion that the detainees were lawful combatants since they belonged to Taliban and Al Qaeda which were at war with the US. They are therefore, protected by the Geneva Convention of 1949. She demanded that a competent tribunal, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, must determine the prisoners’ legal status. Article 105 of Convention gives a prisoner of war the right to choose a qualified advocate to defend him at the trial and call witnesses.

Though, according to Article 84 of the Convention, a prisoner of war shall be tried only by a military court unless the existing laws of the detaining power provide otherwise, in no circumstances shall a prisoner of war be tried by a court of any kind which does not have the essential guarantee of independence and impartiality as generally recognized. Article 87 prohibits the military courts of the detaining power to impose any penalties on the accused “except those provided for in respect of members of the armed forces of the said power who have committed the same acts”. The American military authorities are going to try the POWs by discriminatory laws which award them a harsher punishment.

Article 19 calls for safe evacuation of prisoners “as soon as possible to camps situated in an area far enough from the combat zone for them to be out of danger”, while Article 20 requires that such “evacuation shall be effected humanely and in conditions similar to those for the forces of the detaining power in their changes of stations”. Article 38 says: “prisoners shall have opportunities for taking physical exercise, including sports and games, and for being out of doors. Sufficient open spaces shall be provided for this purpose in all camps”. Article 71 permits the prisoners to send and receive not less than two letters and four cards every month.

Let us see how the world’s supreme power has been treating the prisoners of war of Afghan, Arab and Pakistani origin. The scores of POWs sent to Cuba had their hands tied in front of them while several had their legs shackled. One wonders whether that is the way the US military personnel are evacuated.

The cold-blooded massacre of 160 Taliban fighters by their captors in the presence of seven or eight American military personnel at Takht Pol and the mass slaughter of POWs at Qila-i-Jangi in November, and the transportation of 43 prisoners in sealed shipping containers in a three-day journey from Kunduz to Shibarghan and their death by suffocation and the mass grave of 112 Taliban prisoners in Parwan with their hands tied behind their backs constitute war crimes and crime against humanity perpetrated by Northern Alliance and the US invading forces. These horrendous acts have prompted an outcry for legal answer ability of the perpetrators.