THE summit in Prague to celebrate NATO’s embrace of the Baltic states and the remaining Warsaw Pact nations marked both a triumph of the alliance’s original purposes and an occasion to reflect about the long-term changes wrought by success.

NATO was created more than half a century ago to protect its members against the threat of aggression, specifically a Soviet invasion of western Europe. That threat having disappeared for the foreseeable future, NATO is not so much expanding as transforming itself into a different institution. It has become more akin to a collective security organization like the United Nations than a traditional alliance.

An alliance defines a casus belli, a dividing line and a specific set of obligations; it assumes an unambiguous threat. Collective security organizations define the threat from case to case and negotiate the method of resistance, if any, in light of circumstances. The various Berlin crises of the cold war were dealt with in an alliance mode; the anti-terror campaign launched in September 2001 has been handled as a collective security matter, with our allies acting in their national capacities from case to case. NATO as an institution has not been involved.

This tacit transformation creates two potential fissures within the alliance: between East and West Europe, and between Europe and the United States. NATO expansion would have proceeded much more grudgingly, if at all, had the European nations still believed in a Russian threat or the possibility of a nuclear war over NATO’s new frontiers — in other words, if our European allies had considered the alliance more needed. Moreover, most of western Europe views Russian membership in NATO as only a matter of time. In the meantime, a sort of halfway house has been arranged, giving Russia access to the NATO consultative machinery and weakening the purpose of the alliance for many of its new members.

For the attitude of the nations now entering NATO is that of western Europe’s in NATO’s infancy. Having lived under Russian rule for decades, the new members see in NATO the instrument to prevent a recurrence of aggression or pressure from the East. Unlike some of their partners from western Europe, they do not consider NATO a potential brake on American impetuosity; they seek to strengthen America’s international commitments, not to restrain them.

Similarly, the new international environment alters the relationship between Europe and the United States. So long as there was a uniform perception of threat, Europe had an incentive to keep up its defence expenditures though, even then, its domestic outlays always exceeded its security spending. But in the absence of such a shared perception, European nations increasingly subordinate defence expenditures to domestic priorities; since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a steady decline in European defence spending.

At the same time, the massive American defence effort does not bolster allied cohesion, for it is widely perceived in Europe to be designed to deal with contingencies not related to European interests. Indeed, it magnifies the fear of many in Europe that the world is becoming unipolar while Europe would prefer it to be multipolar.

Recognizing these trends, the Bush administration has abandoned pressures for increasing the overall European defence effort. Instead, it has concentrated on the creation of a relatively small intervention force of 20,000 under the NATO institutional umbrella to confront threats that used to be considered “out of area.”

But the future of NATO depends less on its military structure than on the ability of its members to develop common political purposes. And therein lies reason for profound concern. European media and some political figures continue to present the United States as the land of the death penalty, rapacious capitalism, unilateral diplomacy and a cowboy mentality. The psychological gulf was evident when, in Prague, so staunch an advocate of Atlantic ties as Czech President Vaclav Havel asked for understanding of “the occasional insensitivity, clumsiness or self-importance that may come with this (global) responsibility.” Even the consensus on Iraq at the Prague summit will face a moment of truth when there is a need to define what constitutes a material breach of UN resolutions and what remedies are appropriate.

At the same time, many in the United States see Europe as a region of incipient neutralism, free-riding on American defence capabilities and seeking to protect its security by substituting multilateralism for alliance responsibilities. There is, therefore, a growing insistence on having the United States act as the sole arbiter of the global interest. These attitudes are at the heart of the dispute that goes under the heading of multilateralism vs. unilateralism. The time has come to put that debate into perspective.

The slogans obscure the underlying reality, which is over the relative importance to be given to domestic over foreign policy. Europeans are no more willing than the Americans to subordinate their perception of vital national interests to multilateralism in the abstract — witness their behaviour with respect to the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. But they define their vital interests in more parochial terms and consider global issues as matters that can be used to gain the support of passionate national constituencies. In this way, European multilateralism often merges with new forms of self-righteous moralistic nationalism.

For its part, America defines its national interests in more strategic terms. Europe defers worries about the operation of such new institutions as the International Criminal Court partly because of the lower priority it gives to foreign policy altogether. The United States is concerned with the immediate impact of an institution with a vague charter, unsettled procedures and subject to no system of checks and balances, which can affect the many Americans engaged in global responsibilities.

Hence it contests the ICC’s provisions with the same intensity Europeans devote to Common Agricultural Policy. The difference in the European reaction to the Bush administration’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court compared to its treatment of the policies of the Clinton administration shows that the controversy is more about style than substance.

The Europeans were pacified by the multilateral process of negotiation even though they must have known that what was being negotiated would never be implemented. The Senate, by a vote of 95-0, had made clear its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And President Clinton, in signing the ICC convention three weeks before leaving office, emphasized that he had no intention of submitting the International Criminal Court to the Senate for ratification or of recommending that his successors do so.

Similarly, the furore surrounding the notion of preemption concerns procedure probably far more than substance. Put forward as part of the national strategy of the United States in September, the doctrine involves two issues: its inherent validity and the manner in which it was being introduced. The administration was surely right in pointing out that the defining characteristic of the traditional international system has been fundamentally altered by contemporary ideology and technology. That system assumed that the domestic jurisdiction of states was beyond international challenge; hence the principal threat to international stability was perceived to be the attempt to change frontiers by force of arms. Neither assumption is still valid.

Terrorist threats challenge the social cohesion, and weapons of mass destruction can alter the balance of power and threaten devastation primarily through technological developments within the territory of a sovereign state. In those circumstances, the potential victims cannot wait until the threat has been implemented. Preemption is inherent in the technology and ideology of the 21st century international system. The administration erred in presenting what is an international reality as if it were an American dispensation.

Our allies will not acquiesce in leaving the definition of preemption to an ally, however close and powerful. Nor can it be in America’s interest to encourage every nation to define preemption in purely national terms. But the solution to this dispute is to seek to narrow the gap between substance and procedure to develop together, at least with long-standing allies, some principles of preemption. But to make this work, it is necessary that our allies treat such an effort as having purposes beyond restraining the United States and that they take seriously the need to redefine the threat to environment.

In the end, preemption is not so much a new concept as the application of a norm long recognized in international law: the right of self-defence. What the argument is about is rules for lowering the threshold of when this principle can be applied.

As the alliance shifts its emphasis from the military to the political arena, from defending a geopolitical dividing line to what in NATO parlance used to be called “out of area” conflicts, both sides of the Atlantic need to define for themselves why NATO is still important.

The United States must resist the siren song of basing foreign policy on hegemonic power. Many of the problems affecting world order are not susceptible to solution by military means. History shows that, sooner or later, every powerful country calls into being countervailing forces. And at that point — and I would insist even now — the United States will not be able to sort out every international problem alone without exhausting itself physically and psychologically.— Tribune Media Services International

One spring day a few years ago, as I drove past the elementary school in my neighbourhood, I saw a hundred or so men and women from the town — professors, businessmen, lawyers, housewives and others — armed with their own rakes and shovels, cleaning up the grounds, pruning bushes, preparing flower beds and planting. I went in, parked the car, and asked a few whom I knew why they were doing whatever they were doing.

They reminded me, to my embarrassment, that a couple of weeks earlier the school, short of funds, had appealed to the townspeople to come and help with the work on a voluntary basis and they had responded to the call. This was not once-in-a-lifetime kind of occurrence; such calls and responses were made often.

A few months later, I saw excavating machinery digging a foundation and then pouring concrete. After the foundation had settled in, I saw more than a score of men — masons, carpenters, plumbers, electrician — building a structure and, in less than two months, a beautiful church stood on that site. The workers had all been volunteers, “Jehovah’s Witnesses” (a Christian sect that preaches, among other things, that the Day of Judgment is very near).

All over America, hundreds of thousands of men and women, young and old, work as volunteers in hospitals, nursing homes, centres for senior citizens, shelters and “soup kitchens” for the homeless, libraries, and many other places. There are centres where professional persons, such as lawyers and doctors, provide free service to the indigent a few hours a week.

Related to voluntary service is the giving of money for public purposes. The most renowned of America’s colleges and universities got started, and continue to maintain their excellence, with financial contributions from private persons. So critical is this element to their high academic status that most of them have created “development” divisions within their administrative structures whose sole function is to collect money for their respective institutions from wealthy individuals and corporate bodies. And, they do collect millions every year.

Why does anybody give his money, time and effort for the benefit of others? Some of us are, by nature, warm, friendly, and sympathetic. Others acquire the ethic of helping others from religious instruction or the example of those whom they respect and value. All of this is easier done if these “others” are persons the helper, or would-be helper, knows personally. But the beneficiaries of assistance, to whom we have referred above, are persons whom their benefactor does not know except in the abstract. He has heard that they and the likes of them exist, and that they need help. He may not have attended Harvard University himself, but he knows that its cause and purposes are noble. In both situations he is giving of himself and his resources for the public good.

What is the state of voluntary work and donations in Pakistan? I did not hear of very many Muslims contributing their labour to a community project of any kind before independence. The prosperous among them did establish and maintain orphanages, schools and a small number of colleges. If my remembrance is correct, almost every district town in Punjab had an Islamia high school. The Anjuman-i-Hemayat-i-Islam maintained the well-known Islamia College in Lahore and another organization ran the M.A.O. College in Amritsar. Hindus and Sikhs did more, but we need not relate here the specifics of their contributions to the good of their communities.

Schools and colleges run by charitable organizations within the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities were considered to be inferior to educational institutions funded and operated by the provincial governments. They suffered a chronic shortage of funds, their tuition and hostel fees were relatively low, and the salaries they paid their teachers were also low. Moreover, the teachers did not have security of tenure. Schools and colleges maintained by foreign Christian missionary organization were almost as prestigious as those run by the government. Islamia schools and colleges, and most of those operated by the missionaries were nationalized during Mr Bhutto’s rule. Orphanages and a few social welfare organizations (such as the Edhi Foundation) may now be among the few beneficial activities financed by private Muslim sources. Privatization is now the fashion of the day, and private educational institutions of all kinds and at all levels, have mushroomed. But the motivation behind them is not to serve the needy but to make money for their founders and owners. They are, therefore, not relevant to our concerns here.

At the beginning of our historical experience as Muslims much of the community’s collective work at Madinah was done on a voluntary basis; there was no institutionalized public service that anyone has heard about. Even after the end of the pious caliphate, work related to common needs in the tribal setting was probably distributed among members and done without expectation of wages. One is not sure if this could be called voluntarism in that service for fulfilling common needs was probably required and not left to individual initiative. I have not encountered evidence that voluntarism was common in settled communities at any time in our history.

There were surely holy places — shrines of sufi saints such as Shahbaz Qalandar at Sewan and Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore, or the quarters (“takias”) of dervishes, where the traveller or the needy could receive free food and drink and perhaps even temporary shelter. This is a case of charitable activity, a case of money coming from properties endowed to the shrines being spent to help the needy but it is not a case of individual citizens contributing their money, time, or labour to help others or to advance the common good.

In a presentation based on the report of a National Survey on Individual Giving (1998-99), and published in this paper a couple of years ago (October 13, 2000), Dr Attiya Inayatullah, federal minister for women’s development and social welfare at the time, counted Pakistan among the “most giving nations in the world.” She noted that more than a hundred intermediate organizations provided social services through a network of “grassroots groups” that consisted of tens of thousands of local organizations. Their visibility, however, appeared to be very low, for the public did not know of even the well-established social organizations among them. That might have been another way of saying that these organizations, despite their large number, did not do enough to attract attention or recognition.

Attiya Inayatullah provided some figures, presumably taken from the survey report, which deserve to be noted, if for no other than reason than that they are astonishing. According to her source, 50 per cent of Pakistani individuals gave the equivalent of Rs 770 billion (almost $13 billion) in money, goods, and donated time in 1998. This, she figured, amounted to two per cent of our GNP. Most of it came from zakat given voluntarily (as distinguished from that deducted compulsorily from bank accounts) which more than 90 per cent of men and women gave. Two other noteworthy aspects of this giving: twothirds of it went to individuals, presumably known to the giver, and more than 90 per cent of the balance went to religious organizations and causes.

Attiya Inayatullah’s optimism regarding the future of voluntarism in Pakistan may be unwarranted because her figures, produced by survey research on a religious issue posed to a presumably defensive group of respondents, cannot to be relied upon. One may be certain that few, if any, of the Muslims encountered will tell a pollster that they do not pay zakat. It is common knowledge that many Muslims have filed declarations with their banks (contrary to fact) to the effect that they are Shia — in order to avoid compulsory deduction of zakat from their savings accounts (In this connection, recall that Fiqh-i-Jafariya does not require Muslims to pay zakat to public authorities, and allows them to disburse it to the needy as they deem fit.)

It should be noted also that those who pay zakat or donate money and time to religious organizations and causes have the expectation of a personal gain in mind. They hope to have, in return, a certain amount of God’s blessing (“sawab”) that may come handy as a counter to the burden of their sins on the Day of Judgment. In other words, the import of this enterprise is essentially personal rather than public.

At another level, workers of most of our political parties do a variety of chores as volunteers, Jamaat-i-Islami being one of the few that pay their workers on a regular basis. Some of them subscribe to the party’s ideology (if it has any) or its general political outlook and orientation. Others may entertain a sense of attachment to certain party leaders. But it is true also that there is an expectation of personal rewards on the part of many workers if their party attains power. In other cases a measure of recognition and an accompanying sense of importance in their respective neighbourhoods act as the motivating forces.

In none of these cases is the effort of the same order as that of a professional person (lawyer, accountant, business manager, or even a secretary) who peels onions and potatoes, or chops tomatoes and carrots, in a soup kitchen for the homeless, humours a crying baby or changes his diaper in a shelter for the homeless in a church basement.

A certain amount of voluntary work has probably been done in Pakistan all along even if its examples do not abound. During the first couple of decades following independence, there was the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), led by the late Begum Liaquat Ali Khan for quite a few years. It consisted of the more liberated and modernized begums, who sought to encourage, and perhaps facilitate, women’s participation in the business of life outside the home — professions, public services, and politics. They were instrumental in the establishment of a college or two for women, but any additional efforts they made to achieve their goals, beyond discussing them at their gatherings over tea and releasing occasional statements to the press, remain obscure. In any case, it may be assumed that any work the begums did was done on a voluntary basis. APWA may have been overtaken by other institutions, for little of its activities has been heard lately.

More recently, Pakistani women have established other organizations — for instance, Women’s Action Forum — to protect their rights and help such of them as may be in distress. Some lawyers go to court on their behalf on a gratis basis. A few shelters have surfaced where abandoned or abused women can take refuge. There are groups of prosperous men and women, usually the latter, who have come together on an ad hoc basis, who volunteer time to teach lower class children and support projects for improving the earning skills and capabilities of poor housewives. Some of them also awaken women to their rights as persons, including the right to resist assault and abuse on the part of their husbands. Volunteering is also done on an individual basis. An old friend of mine, who was a secretary to the federal government until he retired some ten years ago, has been teaching English to the eighth grade in a school in Islamabad. There may be others like him who donate time for similar service.

Governments cannot do all that must be done to enable society to go forward. Volunteering is essential to bring about many of the needed improvements. And nowhere near enough of it is forthcoming. Why? I have already stated in some of my earlier articles that the idea of the public interest has not filtered down into the thinking of the great majority of our people. A related aspect of the same shortcoming may be somewhat difficult to deal with, but let us make the effort and then see how it is received.

In societies where education has not spread very much, and intellectual sophistication is limited only to a few, affections and attachments are largely personalized and given to entities (mostly other persons) that can be known through sensory perception-seen, heard, touched, felt. Entities called humanity, country, nation, and public are essentially notional rather than material. They are not something you can hug and kiss; they are in effect concepts or, if you will, abstractions. It is difficult to be dedicated to them for a people who cannot love even God until they have personalized Him in some way.

What is then to be done? Example may help. If members of parliament and assemblies, landed aristocrats, tribal chiefs, notables in business and industry, professional men and women and other influential people — those whom the ordinary people respect and admire and to whom they look up — were to donate money and time for public welfare projects, willing to do even manual work, volunteering might gradually become a part of our way of thinking, incorporated into our political and social ethic.

E-mail:syed.anwar@attbi.com

IT IS one of the ironies of the political system in Pakistan that a party that has captured the largest number of seats in a provincial election cannot form a government. Or, perhaps it would be more correct to say, is not allowed to form a government.

This is something that is peculiar to the Pakistani political system and is based on the axiom that there is no necessary correlation between the will of the people and the MPAs who finally end up mismanaging the affairs of the province.

How else can one describe the strange position in which the PPP finds itself in Sindh ? This is a party that bagged 67 out of a total of 168 seats and eventually ended up as a statistic on a tally sheet. That, at least, was the position until Wednesday night when the MQM, in one fell swoop, ended its support to the King’s party at the centre and decided to sit in the opposition benches in the Sindh assembly — whenever it is summoned.

The PPP saga in Sindh, however, has not been without its share of drama. Shortly after the results of the provincial election in Sindh was announced, Benazir Bhutto breathed a sigh of relief. Even if the PPP had been turfed out of the treasury benches in the centre, surely they would be able to dominate in the affairs of her home province. And so a buoyant Nisar Khuhro, in his dealings with the many peripheral groups that dotted the political landscape, adopted the oleaginous heartiness of the big businessman trying to strike a deal with a smaller one.

When that did not work he graduated to offering sweeteners in the shape of deals, at one time even compromising on the choice of chief minister. Finally, the PPP appeared to be clutching at straws, and many of the party workers were strutting about wearing the look of startled innocence, wondering what could have possibly gone wrong.

The postponement of the Sindh Assembly session to an indefinite date has demonstrated the clout of the Grand National Alliance (GNA). In an agony of outraged propriety Nisar Khuhro has roundly condemned the postponement, both publicly and in the Karachi Press Club on Thursday. But by now it must have dawned on him and his colleagues that they are facing a no-win situation and that the puppeteers in Islamabad who pull the strings that make the marionettes dance, do not want to have anything to do with the PPP. Imagine a candidate for the top slot, who has hardly any support in the province, issuing a threat that if he is not elected, governor’s rule will be imposed in the province. What a mockery of democracy!

Most of the thinking people I have spoken to in Karachi — lawyers, doctors, businessmen and students — are bewildered and visibly annoyed by the state of uncertainty, caused by the intrigues and horse trading of the stalwarts of the GNA, with their banal optimism and tinsel pretentiousness, who are trying to instal Dr Arbab Rahim as chief minister.

Surely, these people argue, the logical thing would have been for the two largest parties, the PPP and the MQM, to have gotten together and formed a government in Sindh. After all, a combined strength of 108 seats would have produced a large and stable alliance which would then have been impervious to the influence of the corrupt and disruptive elements in Islamabad. If one goes through the sepia tints of history, one will find that irrespective of which party was in power in Sindh, there has always been a collective proclivity to destabilize the city of Karachi.

But this was not to be. When I questioned the MQM leaders why they would not tie up with the largest political party in the province, they said it was primarily a question of incompatibility. In their initial negotiations with the PPP, which developed into a whirligig of accusation and evasion, they said they were willing to bury the hatchet, provided they received an apology for the custodial killings that took place when the latter were firmly in control, and for the indiscriminate slaughter that was carried out against their supporters in Pucca Qila, Hyderabad. The massacre of 256 unarmed men, women and children in one day was horrifying even by Balkan standards.

When no apology was forthcoming, the MQM said they were willing to accept a note of regret, or even an admission that a dreadful deed had been done. There was still no gesture from the other side. Only a stony silence. It did, however, cross the minds of the MQM leadership that a party or a coalition which did not have the support of the centre would never be allowed to work, especially in a province like Sindh. As it is, the MQM is not at all comfortable with the way the no-go issue has been handled. It is because of suspected duplicity on the part of the administration that they did not accept a position in the cabinet at the centre and withdrew its support to the Jamali government.

When I questioned the PPP leaders, they said they saw no reason why the largest party in the province should kowtow to the others. It should be the other way around. As it is, they had serious reservations about the MQM’s choice of chief minister.. The Pir of Pagaro, who still wields considerable influence in the province and has 13 seats in the provincial assembly, has apparently come to the PPP’s rescue, and with the support of the NPP and certain MMA elements are now in a position to form a government in Sindh.

Pir Pagara condemned the GNA’s choice of chief minister on the grounds of incompetence. He is purported to have said that if a politician has been unsuccessful as an irrigation minister, how can he perform successfully as a chief minister? However, what is significant is that Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi and his brother did not accompany Farooq Leghari when the latter called on the Pir at Kingri House. Could this, perhaps, indicate a split in the National Alliance, now that there is a possibility that the NPP will support the PPP in Sindh?

The PPP might eventually lead the motley band into the assembly building in Karachi if the establishment does not indulge in any other intrigue, such as trying to wean away PPP MPAs with lucrative offers , or imposing governor’s rule. But things are not quite so stable for the party in other parts of the country.

A section of the PPP Parliamentarians, who have formed a ‘forward block’, has decided to convert itself into a political party under the name of the PPPP Patriots. What is astonishing is that these ten defectors still regard Benazir Bhutto as their leader, and are supposed to be laying the blueprints for her honourable return. All this, in spite of the fact that a show-cause notice had been issued, asking them to explain why they defected in the first place, which has resulted in the suspension of three MNAs from the party.

This latest split in the party has created an untenable situation. What makes matters worse is that six more PPPP MPAs in Punjab have suddenly turned Patriotic. All in all, prior to the defection of the Patriotic Mensheviks, there were eight significant heavyweights who left the PPP fold — Dr Mubashar Hasan, Rafi Raza, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Mustafa Khar, Abdul Hafiz Pirzada (author of the 1973 Constitution) Mumtaz Bhutto, Murtaza Bhutto and Aftab Sherpao.

The fact that action has been taken against only three of the defectors has set a lot of tongues wagging. The opponents of Benazir Bhutto are accusing her of secretly allowing the defectors to join the government. Stories are also circulating that the Patriots are approaching other PPP members with the intention of winning them over to their side.

If they succeed, this would be the largest defection in the history of the party. It is time the chairperson of the PPP got her act together. She still has some loyal supporters, but some of them are experiencing a sense of abandonment. How much longer will the affairs of the party be determined through remote control?