| January 19, 2003 | Sunday | Ziqa'ad 15, 1423 |
Bush’s Iraq safari
The farce staged repeatedly
IT would be foolhardy to make a value judgment on President George Bush’s repeated vows to impose a full-scale war on Iraq. For how could an analyst, with his own limited knowledge of military affairs and practically none whatsoever of the Pentagon’s and the State Department’s top secret planning, claim more than the combined wisdom of America’s top civil and military planners? Furthermore, in matters of peace and war the least one can and should do is to allow his imagination as little rope as possible. This is important, if only to make sure that he does not let go off both the ends of the rope.
WHEN Foreign Minister Mian Khurshid Kasuri arrives at United States he should be under no illusions about his mission nor should he be misled to believe that the Americans would oblige him by removing Pakistan’s name from the list of countries whose nationals are required to register under the new US laws.
While some newspapers reports, whether wrong or misconstrued, have suggested that Secretary of State Colin Powell would perhaps appease Pakistan’s newly-installed political government’s top diplomat by acquiescing in his request to give Pakistanis a break, but US officials’ statements suggest otherwise.
There is no reward waiting for Pakistanis for their country’s cooperation with the United States in its war against terror. As the American officials insist:”We have to protect ourselves from those who wish to harm us.”
Although none of the Sept-11 hijackers were Pakistanis, the fact remains that Pakistan was regarded as a conduit for the Al Qaeda suspects and the likes. Hence the Americans feel that anyone wishing to reside in the US or is considering coming here has to be scrutinized.
Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Jehangir Ashraf Qazi, has rightly acknowledged that the new INS rules are here to stay. But he has suggested that the US should be able to relax some strict guidelines for the Pakistanis who have committed minor violations of visa regulations — not criminal acts — so that the process can move forward and most Pakistanis are able to register.
As of now, the over 100,000 Pakistanis as touted by the National Council of Pakistanis or some 20,000 as figured by the US Immigration department, are staying away from the registration process fearing deportations or worse jail time in the United States. Many just want to leave in order to come back another day.
At various immigration centres, which one visited last week, many Pakistanis stood outside to see what others had to say about the process. Many others felt that they would surely be deported and were undecided whether it would be better just to leave.
The predicament in which many illegal or partially legal Pakistanis find themselves is ultimately not their fault completely.
For years, not only Pakistanis but nationals from other countries have lived and worked here illegally with the hope that some day the American government would declare an amnesty, and they would be able to avail of the opportunity to legalise their stay. But from the looks, it is not likely to happen soon.
The US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) believes that over 300,000 people, who were ordered to be deported, were still living illegally in the United States.
Not only has Pakistan protested the cumbersome and intrusive registration process, the Indonesian and Bangladeshi governments have also expressed their indignation.
In fact the Indonesian government has advised its citizens to put off all non-essential travel to the United States after the country’s foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, dismissed the new regulations as ‘arbitrary, hard to understand.
Bangladesh said:”The registration requirement was an affront to its credentials as a moderate Muslim democracy that is committed to the global effort against terrorism.”
US Human rights groups have also condemned the registration requirement as racial profiling, and said the process had created a climate of fear after some who turned up to register were detained on the charge of visa violations.
However, the Bush administration insists that the new laws are designed to protect their citizens from people ‘who wish to harm’ US. There is no endemic discrimination against Muslims, they insist, but the facts speak otherwise.
The US reaction to Sept-11 attacks has produced an anti-Muslim backlash which continues to simmer in the back drop.
The McCarthyism of the 50’s, which eroded the basic freedoms of Americans, has returned with a vengeance.
The same discriminatory laws are embedded in the Patriot Act. The freedoms which made America envy of the world are being eroded with a purpose to rid the country of Muslims.
However, there is nothing to stop one being curious about certain things, out and beyond the normal span of one’s own comprehension and incompatible with even ordinary common sense. For instance, what beats one completely as far as President Bush’s resounding war vows are concerned, is what are those all about? Whether it’s the conquest of Iraq itself and the mass massacre (collateral damage!) of its civilian population that must inevitably go with it. Or is it simply to get rid of a single individual called Saddam Hussein and ‘strip’ him of any weapons of mass destruction by force if necessary...?
As for the outright conquest of Iraq, it would not only violate America’s own code of ethics and morality but also its own publicly stated military posture. In an incisive article ‘How America Does It’ one of its best-known scholars, Josef Joffe wrote: “It (America) irks and dominates, but it does not conquer. It tries to call the shots and bend the rules, but it does not go to war for land and glory. Indeed, the last time the United States actually grabbed territory was a hundred years ago, when it relieved Spain of Cuba and the Philippines... (Foreign Affairs, 75th Anniversary Issue, September / October 1997).
If Joffe’s formulation does, in any way, reflect America’s basic military philosophy, outright conquest would be ruled out without much debate. However, if this is what happens to be Bush’s real aim then it would take the world back to the era prior to the Treaty Westphalia of 1648 recognizing the right of smaller states to stay as independent and sovereign entities within their own territories.
Conversely, if America’s military (strategic) objective is to get rid of Saddam, concentrating over a hundred thousand men together with an armada of warships and warplanes would make little sense.
What if in the meantime, the individual concerned either dies a natural death or gets bumped off in a coup or resigns of his own free will to leave the invading force without an enemy, looking silly in the face. Should such a contingency ever materialize, (and it may well do) how will the US president convince the US taxpayers and frontline soldiers of the wisdom of his extreme measures? That would indeed be the most ludicrous and awkward situation for the US to face.
If Saddam ever invokes his extreme option of quitting power, it need not mean quitting Baghdad at the same time. Well over two decades of absolute power; a fierce eight-year long war with neighbouring Iran; a short and suicidal one with the rest of the world under US command and a UNSC mandate (1990-1991), must have hardened the man enough to face death with a straight face.
These are but some of the hypotheses that may never materialize. Nevertheless, hypotheses, favourable and unfavourable, make woof and warp of strategy: and it just can’t be that the Pentagon planners may not have taken them into account.
“No one starts a war or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so without being clear in mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.” So wrote Clausewitz in his On War, one of the classics military thinking.
On Jan 13, Saudi Arabia warned that waging war against Iraq would be ‘a loss to all parties’. America would not be a winner even if an assured victor in a narrow military sense. Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz expressed his country’s ‘deep concern towards developments in Iraq, reaffirming the kingdom’s keenness to preserve Iraq’s unity and national integrity’.
As regards the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), — nuclear, biological and chemical — the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection experts have not found any ‘smoking guns’, that is real live munitions so far. That would hardly satisfy President Bush and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, however. The lurking fear remains that Saddam had them hidden in ‘dark corners and caves!’ What argument could be effective against such dark musings?
CIA Director George Tenet even told the Congress that Saddam would be ‘likely to use any biological, chemical or nuclear weapons he had in response to an invasion’.
And he might just as well when pushed over to the wall. The question is, what is he waiting for? What’s there to stop him from deploying and launching his WMDs now to preempt the US’s nuclear onslaught? That would only be compatible with the Bush doctrine of a preemptive strike as when and where the initiator or the aggressor might so choose at his own discretion.
The Bush Doctrine would allow nuclear weapons employed against ‘targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack’ similar to the US concentrated bombardment of the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan, supposedly hiding Osama, Mulla Umar and the surviving Taliban leadership.
What happens between now and 27th January after UNMOVIC Chief Hans Blix is scheduled to make his first report to the Security Council about the findings of their WMD hunt in Iraq may not be hard to guess. It would, in all likelihood, be the continuation of the existing tense stand-off. The D-day tentatively set for late February would, however, remain subject to sudden changes depending on the unpredictable course events might take.
BYELECTIONS were held on Wednesday (Jan 15) to fill the vacant seats in assemblies. The seats have been filled, but the gulf between the government and opposition parties has widened. The reason is that opposition parties think the bypolls were rigged. As expected, the government rejected the charges as absurd, ludicrous.
Both sides are sticking to their respective positions, and the ARD launched a protest campaign from Friday. Now, those defeated will continue to grumble and the winners will enjoy the privileges and perks.
It is a great tragedy that the electoral process has been unable to regain its lost credibility even in decades. The allegations being made by opposition parties are the same which were made back in 1977 and in all subsequent elections.
In 1977, the then opposition, the Pakistan National Alliance, refused to accept the results, saying the polls were rigged. The government refuted the allegations as unfounded. Within no time the entire country was in the grip of a protest campaign.
Talks between the government and the PNA were going on when Gen Zia imposed martial law. He promised that he would hold free elections in 90 days.
But, he actually held the elections after eight long years —- and that too after a mass movement left no option for him to wriggle out. Before these elections, he held a referendum to make himself president for five years. Few accepted his referendum and fewer the non-party elections, boycotted by the then Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD).
The opposition argued that under the Constitution there was no room for elections without parties.
In 1988, Gen Zia dismissed the Junejo government. Elections held after the general’s death brought Ms Bhutto into power at the centre and Mian Nawaz Sharif in Punjab. Opposition parties first tabled a no-confidence motion against Ms Bhutto and after its failure by a thin margin used other methods to destabilize her government. The Punjab government funds were used for political intrigues against the federal government.
In 1990, fresh elections were held and Mian Nawaz Sharif came to power. Results of these elections were challenged by his opponents, and protests were started. Interestingly, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, who had held the election as caretaker prime minister, had also joined hands with the opposition —- alleging that the polls were rigged.
The country went through another electoral process in 1993. This time, Ms Bhutto became prime minister, with Mian Nawaz Sharif playing the role of the opposition leader. Alleging that the electoral process lacked transparency, he launched a movement against her.
The situation led to fresh polls in 1997, which were swept by Mian Nawaz Sharif. Now it was Ms Bhutto’s turn to challenge the credibility of the electoral process. She did. The opposition’s campaign against Mr Sharif was still going on when the government was overthrown by Gen Musharraf —- though for a different reason.
The April 30 referendum and the October 10 general elections are also not acceptable to opposition parties. And less than 100 days after the elections, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan is again demanding an interim government to hold fresh elections.
The question is, why has the electoral process lost its credibility? And whether there is at all any need for elections to choose a new set of rulers, only to be rejected by those who cannot make to the assemblies. Why results of the elections held under the supervision of the judiciary and the armed forces are not accepted. Is there no institution whose integrity is above board?
No stability can be expected till the system is first set right.
Four members of the exiled Sharif family suddenly returned to Lahore last week, providing the PML-N leaders with an opportunity to claim that the remaining 14 members still in the kingdom would also come as surprisingly.
However, an official spokesman immediately clarified that the members of the Abbas Sharif family had come with the government’s permission to attend some family marriages and would be flying back in a week.
The guests from the kingdom are not allowed to make political statements during their stay in Pakistan.
The Sharifs have come to Pakistan at a time when leaders of the breakaway PPP faction, who joined hands with the PML-Q and got important ministries, are claiming that they would bring their leader Benazir Bhutto back home.
Ms Bhutto had left the country only a week before being convicted by an accountability court in 1999. A number of cases are pending against her and she is not returning home as she will be arrested the day she sets foot in Pakistan.
Informed sources say that some people had requested Gen Musharraf to soften his attitude towards her, but he refused. It is said that the general may review his thinking provided Ms Bhutto hands over the party leadership to somebody else.
Efforts to make a deal with Gen Musharraf had been started when Barrister Sultan Mahmood was the AJK prime minister. He had held talks with the relevant government circles, but failed. It is said that the Kashmiri leader was told that Ms Bhutto would have to pay the government $1 billion to get some relief. The former prime minister is not willing to open the purse, and the general is not prepared to review his policy.
There are indications that now the government is thinking of starting proceedings to bring back Ms Bhutto’s alleged money deposited with Swiss banks. All aspects of the matter are being examined before taking necessary steps in this regard.
Ironically, three important leaders —- Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto and Altaf Hussain —- are abroad. While Mr Sharif had left the country under an agreement, the remaining two are not willing to trust the judicial system and risk coming back.
There is a minister in the Punjab cabinet who had wanted to become ‘patwari’ only six months back.
He had applied for his dream job, but was not given.
Patwari is a very junior position in the government setup, but he is more important than thousands of others on the higher ladders. He is an institution in himself. And his income is much more than those occupying lucrative posts.
Let’s pray the minister in question does not use his office as a patwari.
How competent and honest are our planners in preparing cost estimates of important national projects was exposed by Gen Pervez Musharraf during his Saturday address to the members of the Punjab cabinet.
He said the Right Bank Outfall Drain, an important project for Sindh, was estimated to cost Rs126 billion. Another institution looked into the details of the project and said it could be completed with Rs75 billion. Then, the president said, the military experts had a second look at the project and concluded that it could be executed for as less as Rs14 billion, yes Rs14 billion only.
Look at the difference in the original estimate and the one given by the military experts —- Rs 112 billion.
The president did not say what action had been taken against those who had given such an inflated estimate. Certainly, these people must be planning more such projects for the uplift of the resource-starved country.—ONLOOKER