AFGHANISTAN and Austria differ drastically in every way but one. They both were neutral ‘front line’ states during the long cold war. Afghanistan, a weak border state, prudently leaned toward a watchful Soviet Union. Austria, while under post-war Soviet rule, miraculously refashioned itself from a firm fascist supporter to “Hitler’s first victim,” and wangled a 1955 agreement swapping a Soviet pullout for a pledge to stay militarily neutral.

Its capital Vienna remained a lively espionage playground — celebrated in films like ‘The Third Man’ — but that fate was far better than occupation. Of course, Austria might have benefited from more conscientious denazification — witness Joerg Haider’s barely veiled fascist presence in government — but at the time so too could East and West Germany.

Bruno Kreisky, former chancellor of Austria (1970-1983), told one of us a pertinent story some years ago. As a junior member of the Austrian delegation, he attended the historic signing of the 1955 treaty. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev took him aside and asked how he sized up the eager Austrian government-in-waiting. When Kreisky observed that this broad coalition included many hidebound conservatives, Khrushchev nodded sympathetically and remarked that he had plenty of his own kind of conservatives to contend with. He turned and patted Molotov, who was nearby, and said that his esteemed foreign minister was among the hardliners who vigorously opposed this treaty. Molotov apparently was a good sport. Austria went its own way, almost unhindered.

In Afghanistan a different and darker story unfolded. Very little that its leaders attempted went unhindered by conservatives abroad (or fundamentalists at home) playing the Great Game. Afghanistan’s recent misfortunes stem from its being sandwiched between encroaching British and Russian empires. They were beaten back but only after slicing off many slabs of territory and relegating the remainder to the useful role of a buffer zone. After the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1921 got rid of British control, King Amanullah Khan pursued ambitions to modernize his backward country along the lines of the secular Turkish model of Kemal Ataturk. The British saw no advantage in this.

So while the Afghan monarch visited England in 1928, British raj agents spread rumours among puritanical Afghan tribes that their queen danced at depraved parties in infidel London. This grave moral turpitude — along with schemes to secularize local dress and customs — were grounds for dumping Amanullah and his wicked reforms a year later. Zahir Shah, who later took the throne, was popular but no modernizer, or at least not before the 1960s. Yet his rule helped create a budding national awareness, with Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Pakhtoons beginning slowly to rise above purely tribal identities. An Afghan identity was formed. Still, the question of what to do about a notional ‘Pashtunistan’ aroused lasting enmities with the British and, after 1947, with Pakistan. Durand Line is a reminder of it.

America gradually assumed the British role in the region but their rebuffs on arms sales nudged Afghanistan toward the soviets. In 1973 Mohammed Daud abolished the monarchy, but the fragile national unity fell apart under his wayward rule. America’s regional allies Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan and the Shah of Iran tried to entice Daud away from the Soviets who understandably were nervous about such antics in border states. This was not liked by the left in Kabul. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (Afghan Communist Party), which had many military adherents, toppled Daud in 1978 and installed Taraki who embarked on a land reform campaign.

A fierce internal party struggle led to the victory of the extremist Khalq (“people”) faction led by Hafizullah Amin who, for all his rhetorical dogmatism, was given to highestbidder opportunism. Amin cozied up to the US which, with the Saudis, was busy arming wild-eyed fundamentalists along the Pakistan border. Frightened Soviet hardliners won a heated politburo debate, assassinated Amin, installed Babrak Karmal, and very unwisely invaded in December 1979. A full-scale jihad started with deeply conservative American administrations spurring it on, even though this dangerous course meant destruction of a secularizing state which made genuine advances in gender and social policy. Who says American policymakers dislike burqas and beards?

After the Soviet withdrawal, a no-holds-barred struggle among jihadis started even as they continued fighting Najibullah’s government (which took over in 1986) in Kabul. Exemplifying the supremely chameleon warrior code, which western observers today marvel at, is Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who switched from the Soviets to the mujahideen, to Gulbadin Hekmatyar, to the Northern Alliance. (The Taliban lately appear to have taken Dostum as a role model). Dostum’s defection from Najibullah in March 1992 put paid to the People’s Democratic party and signalled the fall of Kabul. On becoming prime minister-designate in 1992, Hekmatyar fought a hideous civil war against other mujahideen and their supporters, killing thousands of civilians in Kabul alone.

Russia, India and Iran backed the motley crew now known as the Northern Alliance while Pakistan and the US, after its favoured agent Hekmatyar was defeated, turned to Taliban fanatics as their successful candidates for power. Unfortunately, the Taliban’s utterly abominable human rights record in no way distinguished them from the Northern Alliance’s own tender mercies. In the American intervention, the Taliban — true to Afghani form — have been bribed, as much as bombed, away.

What does it all add up to? Americans, for all their ballyhooed smart weaponry, killed about four thousand civilians, which is hardly calculated to make them local heroes, no matter what CNN tells the American public. Collusion in slaughtering hundreds of prisoners in the fortress-prison of Qalai Janghi did not enhance America’s image, nor has its highhanded treatment of captives at Guantanamo. America could well afford to take the moral high ground, yet Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apparently revels in sounding no better than a local warlord.

A Northern Alliance victory, as the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women sharply reminds us, was nothing to celebrate either. The US failed to cobble together a Pakhtoon leadership before the Taliban fled Kabul, which resulted in the Northern Alliance jumping in along with its key sponsors Russia and Iran — an outcome that America (and Pakistan) had tried hard to avoid. The western powers tried to rectify this problem in Bonn where about two-thirds of Hamid Karzai’s cabinet (18 of 30) remain Northern Alliance members.

The West played this latest gory round of the Great Game to diminish Soviet influence, for which the high price was paid mainly in Afghan lives and American dollars, which ever fewer of the rich fork out. The Yanks will not relinquish Central Asian bases any quicker than in Saudi Arabia. The US regional hegemony is under way. Conservative political factions have got what they wanted. Yet, for all that, Russia has returned and even Iran is deeply involved in Afghan affairs again, but it is a different Iran and its politics is not friendly towards the US.

Osama bin Ladin is unsnarled. The Northern Alliance’s poppy fields are in full bloom. America and its allies haggle over paying for the reconstruction of the country that their ‘realist’ policies helped destroy. When a generous purse is absolutely essential, US conservatives resist giving so much as the price of a single Stealth Bomber ($2.2 billion apiece). How many dragon’s teeth were sown with the cluster canisters that the bombers spread over an already devastated land?

Will the future pipeline deals serve mostly indigenous needs or the oil companies? Even if the promised economic aid and political reforms are delivered, which is extremely unlikely, it is difficult to imagine that these relatively meager measures will wield any genuine influence on the minds of battered, starved and alienated Afghans. Are we back to where we had started?

THERE has been so much bad publicity about accounting firms that I decided to check it out with my old friend Arthur Anglethorpe, who has one of the biggest bean counting firms in Houston.

When I was ushered into his palatial office, there was a giant blaze going in his fireplace.

“My, it’s cozy,” I said.

“We always have a fire in our offices — you can’t believe how cold it gets in Houston.”

As we were visiting, lawyers kept coming in and throwing paper on the fire. Arthur explained that paper burns much better than wood.

I said, “You screwed up keeping the books for Hidden Valley Gas and Power Co.”

“All we did was put the decimal point in the wrong place. Instead of the company making three billion dollars, it lost three billion. Any accounting firm could make that kind of mistake.”

“Didn’t you realize you bankrupted Hidden Valley?”

“Our computer had a glitch in it. By the time we fixed it, the company went down the toilet.”

“They also say your accounting practices cost thousands of people their pensions.”

“We weren’t working for those people. We were working for the guys who ran Hidden Valley and made off with a bundle. That is what accounting firms are for.”

One of the lawyers feeding the fire said, “Sir, we’ve burned all the records that had to do with Hidden Valley’s gas and oil business. Can we burn records that have to do with the other Hidden investments that went sour?”

“Why not? But we don’t want to do anything illegal. You can cook the books, but put more salt and pepper in them. The bankrupt stockholders tasted something sour with the last batch of books.”

I told Arthur, “You run a tight ship.”

“The integrity of our firm is at stake. Besides, if we do get into a jam, we have a lot of friends in Washington who will say we had nothing to do with the debacle.”

“What did Hidden Valley do wrong?”

“It turned stock options into gold.”

“And where did Anglethorpe fit in?” “All right. I will explain it. How much is two plus two?”

“Four,” I said.

“Right. Now how much is two billion dollars plus two billion dollars?”

I was on a roll and I said, “Four billion.”

He scoffed and said, “You can make two billion dollars anything your clients want it to be. That’s what our accounting firm does.”

“What happens if the government finds out you cooked the books?”

“Then we’ll plead guilty, pay a fifty-dollar fine, and say we admit to doing nothing wrong.”

Arthur continued, “Why doesn’t the press get off our backs?”

“I guess because they’re following the money, and it leads to executives at Hidden Valley.”

“That’s because the media are trying to destroy the capitalist system as we now know it.” —Dawn/Tribune Media Services

GEN Pervez Musharraf on assuming power in October, 1999, declared that his role model was Kemal Ataturk of Turkey. The statement provoked an adverse reaction in the religious circles in Pakistan. Almost immediately after that, the general made peace with them when he backtracked on his intention of amending the draconion blasphemy laws.

In his recent interview with the American magazine Newsweek, he has declared that he admires Ataturk but Pakistan is a much more Muslim minded society than Turkey. He has, therefore, now amended his earlier statement, and has moved to a safer ground by saying: “My role model is Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, who envisaged a modern secular Muslim state.”

This time a national English daily took exception to the general’s statement asserting that the Quaid-i-Azam would not have relished Pakistan evolving into a secular country. As a result, a ‘clarification’ was promptly issued by a spokesman of the president saying that the word ‘secular’ in the report of the president’s interview is that of the Newsweek’s correspondent and not of the president!

Leaving aside the question whether the president used the word secular or not, let us recall what he obviously had in mind. There can be little doubt that what he was thinking of was the Quaid’s views on the kind of polity Pakistan should evolve as expressed in his inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947.

This address was actually meant to be a manifesto for the new-born state and contained a forthright and unambiguous declaration of secularism. He exhorted the Muslims of Pakistan to build an ethos of cooperation with the minorities of the country so that every Pakistani “is first, second and last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges and opportunities.”

He then went on to declare: “You may belong to any religion, caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” Finally, he asserted: “You will find that in course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual but in the political sense, as citizens of the state.”

Could there be a more positive assertion of the principle of the separation of religion and state, a more vehement exhortation to the Muslims, as a majority community, to build Pakistan as a secular state? In fact, secularism in this address of the Quaid’s is presented to Pakistanis “as an ideal which they are required to keep in front of them and religion as a matter of “personal faith” that has to be eschewed in the business of the state.

The Quaid’s position on secularism is apparent from his address quoted above and is well known. What is, perhaps, not so well known is the position of Allama Iqbal, the exponent of the Pakistan idea. Iqbal stated his position some twenty years before Pakistan was born. He did so in respect of the country, which was at that time considered as the citadel of Islam, Turkey, and which became a secular state in his lifetime and has since continued to stay secular.

In his collection of lectures, “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”, there is a lecture entitled “The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam” in which Iqbal describes “how the power of Jihad is manifested in the thought and activity” of Turkey. He begins with an examination of the two main lines of thought in Turkey, as represented by the National Party and the Religious Reforms Party.

The point of supreme interest with the Nationalist Party was the state and not religion. The state was the essential factor in national life, which determined the character and function of all other factors. The party, therefore, accentuated “the separation of Church and State”.

This indeed is the crucial point on which a lot of shibboleth has been dinned into our ears by the conventional interpreters of Islam. Let us see what Iqbal has to say about the view favouring separation of religion and state:

“Now, the structure of Islam as a religio-political system, no doubt, does permit such a view, though personally I think it is a mistake to suppose that the idea of state is more dominant and rules all other ideas embodied in the system of Islam.”

It is to be noted that Iqbal’s objection related only to the more dominant role that the Turkish Nationalist Party assigned to the state. But he accepted its secularist view of “the separation of Church and State”, and, in fact, declared it permissible from the Islamic point of view.

Having made the statement, Iqbal proceeds to elaborate on it as follows: “In Islam the spiritual and the temporal are not two distinct domains, and the nature of an act, however secular in its import, is determined by the attitude of mind with which the agent does it. It is the invisible mental background of the act which ultimately determines its character”

In other words, Islam is primarily a moral and a spiritual order, which is supposed to govern the conduct of Muslims in the mundane affairs of life, through the attitude of the mind or invisible mental background. Iqbal goes on to explain it further by saying: “The state, from the Islamic standpoint, is an endeavour to transform these ideal principles into space-time forces, an aspiration to realize them, in a definite human organization. It is in this sense alone that the state in Islam is a theocracy, not in the sense that it is headed by a representative of God on earth who can always screen his despotic will behind his supposed infallibility. The ultimate Reality, according to the Quran, is spiritual and its life consists in its temporal activity. The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material, the secular. All that is secular is, therefore, sacred in the roots of its being. There is no such thing as a profane world. All this immensity of matter constitutes as scope for the self-realization of spirit. All is holy ground. As the Prophet so beautifully puts it, ‘The whole of this earth is a mosque’.”

After expressing the view that the state, according to Islam, is only an effort to realize the spiritual goal in a human organization, Iqbal goes a step further and declares: “But in this sense all state, not based on mere domination and aiming at the realization of ideal principles, is theocratic.” What Iqbal wants to emphasize here is that the state has to be a transformation of a moral and spiritual order (not necessarily Islamic) and not merely an instrument of domination.

Iqbal then turns to an examination of the approach of the Religious Reforms Party of Turkey, and after quoting the view of the Grand Vizier, he observes:

“You will see that following a line of thought more in tune with the spirit of Islam, he reached practically the same conclusion as the Nationalist Party, that is to say, the freedom of Ijtihad with a view to rebuild the law of shariat in the light of modern thought and experience.”

Finally, Iqbal deals with the all-important subject of how the Grand National Assembly of Turkey exercised this power of Ijtihad in regard to the appointment of Khalifa, which, according to Sunni law, is absolutely indispensable.

“The first question that arises in this connection is this: should the Caliphate be vested in single persons? Turkey’s Ijtihad is that, according to the spirit of Islam, the Caliphate or the Imamate can be vested in a body of persons, or an elected assembly — personally I believe the Turkish view is perfectly sound. It is hardly necessary to argue this point. The republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that are set free in the World of Islam.”

Turkey’s Ijtihad in vesting the Khilafat in the elected assembly was the boldest and the most revolutionary measure in the history of Islam. We have seen that Iqbal wholeheartedly endorsed it. He did so because the fact of the matter is that Islam does not prescribe any specific system of polity which falls under the temporal affairs of life.

As such, we can adopt any form of political and economic system which suits our conditions in the present-day world. Of course, it has to be consistent with the spirit of Islam, because we are a Muslim nation and, as Iqbal says, in Islam the spiritual and the temporal are not two distinct domains. Polity is neither a part of the fundamentals, nor one of the pillars of Islam which are immutable and which we, as Muslims, have been enjoined upon to believe in and practise.

In short, Iqbal saw no conflict between Islam and secularism. In his view the two could co-exist as in Turkey.

He approved Turkey’s emergence as a Muslim secular state. Some of our people have become allergic to the word secular because it has been given a bad odour under a persistent and deliberate campaign carried out during Gen Zia-ul-Haq’s rule, by wrongly translating it into Urdu as La-deen.

But secular as we know means pertaining to this material world and its affairs. We have seen what Iqbal thinks of it: “All that is secular is sacred in the roots of its being.” So let us not be dismayed, let us sanctify the word secular as Iqbal did and give it a place of honour in our political lexicon.