ONE opens The New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved to the Gulf area.

Preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue and continue without either public approval or dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalized indifference has greeted the administration’s war-mongering and its strangely ineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a war; in the case of North Korea, it offers that country economic and energy aid. What a difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for North Korea, an equally grim, and cruel dictatorship.

In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar. For almost a year American politicians, regional experts, administration officials and journalists have repeated the charges that have become standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of this chorus pre-dates September 11, as I have shown in my books Orientalism and Covering Islam. To today’s practically unanimous chorus has been added the authority of the United Nations Human Development Report on the Arab world which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the rest of the world in democracy, knowledge, and women’s rights.

Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that Islam needs reform and that the Arab educational system is a disaster — in effect, a school for religious fanatics and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams and their wealthy followers (like Osama bin Laden) but also by governments which are the supposed allies of the United States. The only “good” Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture and society without reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired American formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of print.

We lack democracy, they say, we haven’t challenged Islam enough, we need to do more about driving away the spectre of Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what we, and our American instructors, say about the Arabs and Islam — vague re-cycled Orientalist cliches of the kind repeated by a tireless mediocrity like Bernard Lewis — is true. The rest isn’t realistic or pragmatic enough. “We” need to join modernity, modernity in effect being western, globalized, free marketed, democratic — whatever those words might be taken to mean.

The clash of civilizations that George Bush and his minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for a pre-emptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building, regime change and forcible modernization ‘a l’americaine. Never mind the bombs and the ravages of the sanctions which are unmentioned. This will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his men and replace them with a re-drawn map of the whole region. New Sykes Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps.

Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying situation in Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no force capable of stopping Sharon and Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we ban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an entire people continues.

As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement that the entire village of Al-Daba’ in the Qalqilya area of the West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60-ton American-made Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunums of agricultural land, a mosque, and an elementary school for 132 children. The United Nations stands by, looking on as its resolutions are flouted on an hourly basis. Typically, alas, George Bush identifies with Sharon, not with the 16-year Palestinian kid who is used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking, and presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned for ten years the first time, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His faithful lieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press, suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or less. Remarkably, though, the great mass of this heroic people seems willing to go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going hungry, dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice of their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have done.

In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the utter passivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The American government and its servants issue statement after statement of purpose, they move troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively can barely muster a bland refusal (at most they say, no, you cannot use military bases in our territory) only to reverse themselves a few days later.

Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness?

The largest power in history is about to launch and is unremittingly reiterating its intention to launch a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy the Baathist regime but to redesign the entire region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its plans are to redraw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and many borders in the process.

No one can be shielded from the cataclysm when it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete certainty). And yet, there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral in response. After all, millions of people will be affected. America contemptuously plans for their future without consulting them. Do we reserve such racist derision?

This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a region of almost 300 million Arabs wait passively for the blows to fall without attempting a collective roar of resistance and a loud proclamation of an alternative view. Has the Arab will completely dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last words to pronounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of history, to a civilization about to be crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that, despite its drawbacks and weaknesses, goes on functioning?

Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the business of living despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab leaders and the United States simply ignore when they fling empty gestures at the so-called “Arab street” invented by mediocre Orientalists.

But who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab governments — no, most of the Arab countries without exception — sit back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up, threatens and ships out more soldiers and F-16s to deliver the punch. The silence is deafening.

Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what?

This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it’s a matter of what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology, modernization and certainly globalization are not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with great vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into that, and bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political, moral and religious leaders can only just denounce a little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors, they make plans somehow to ride out the storm.

They think of survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land, the water, the air and the lives dependent on each other for existence? No one seems to be in charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression in English that very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable helplessness, our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when our strength is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little left even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for extinction.

Hasn’t the time come for us collectively to demand and try to formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although God knows that we can do with quite a bit of that.

Surely it can’t be a return to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let us live in peace — another cringing crawling inaudible plea for mercy. Will no one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our future that isn’t based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening.— Copyright Edward W. Said, 2003.

IN HIS first address to the newly constituted Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, on August 11, 1947, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah said: “The first duty of a government is to maintain law and order.”

Fiftyfive years later, in 2003, the newly appointed chief ministers of Sindh and Punjab have also accorded first priority to “law and order.” In the current milieu where the acquisition and retention of power at all costs is the first priority, one does not know whether and for how long law and order will be the first priority of the chief ministers of the two major provinces where three-fourths of our population lives. Since one should never lose hope, let us hope that our young chief ministers mean what they publicly say. If they mean it, they should try to find out as to why we have reached this sorry stage.

Soon after independence, it became a fashion with us to deride everything associated with the British. We condemned the British parliamentary form of democracy and tried, for decades, the “basic” and the not-so-basic forms of fancied democracy till we finally discovered that it was the British model which suited us the most. We, therefore, tried it again, but soon dubbed it “sham democracy.” We then proclaimed that, in the 21st century, we would introduce “genuine democracy.”

We are today basking in the warm sunshine of “genuine democracy.” We condemned the British concept of justice and jurisprudence and experimented with other legal codes and procedures with results which are there before us.

In the same frenzy, we rejected the British legacy of the law-and-order administration with such ferocity and frequency that those who considered the maintenance of law and order as the first priority of a government were dubbed old fogies or imperialist lackeys.

We resolved to introduce what we proudly proclaimed to be the “development model” of administration which was the buzzword of yesterday, just as “good governance” and “district governments” are the cliches of today.

Let us hope that we have, at long last, realized that there can be no development without an order based on just laws, framed with the free consent of the people.

Just as a professional army, selected on merit, is a national imperative to keep peace on the national frontiers, a professional civil service, selected on merit, is a national need for enforcing law and maintaining order within the national frontiers. A “lashkar” composed of untrained government functionaries or ‘nazims’ is no substitute for a professional civil service. This is so obvious, and yet it is not obvious to many who matter.

As such, when our young and inexperienced chief ministers and others issue policy statements assigning law and order their first priority, one wonders if they have thought through the process which would enable them to keep their word. When men in uniform become makers and unmakers of constitutions and men in other uniforms become custodians of law, without the effective control of a civilian authority, history tells us that there can be order without law, or law without order, but not law and order, one supplementing the other.

It would be relevant to mention here what one of Pakistan’s most eminent judges said on this subject. He was none other than Mr A.R. Cornelius. On December 11, 1985, this late and respected Chief Justice of Pakistan, a far greater critic of the civil service of Pakistan than retired General Tanvir Naqvi, former chief of the National Reconstruction Bureau, could ever be, and himself a member of this service, said in a scholarly address at the Pakistan Administrative Staff College, Lahore: “We inherited from the British era a well established administration, running with a smoothness almost approaching perfection.”

The administration which this eminent jurist talked about so fondly was created, and sustained, by the British on a carefully conceived three-tier package of “salary-status and security.” It was also on this package that the British created, and sustained, the army in British India.

During the last 55 years, we have stripped the civil administration of its century-old service traditions as well as of its working conditions.

Of the three-tier package, we first chipped off the salaries; then reduced the status; thereafter we did away with security; and finally, on August 14, 2001, abolished the system itself. Our state is now either a garrison state or a police state.

If we still want to fight the losing battle of re-establishing law and order in this functional anarchy called Pakistan, we must start by asking ourselves as to what went wrong and where. A little introspection would show that the quickest, cheapest, easiest and the most effective course of action is crystal clear.

Paradoxical though it may seem the best way for this frontline state to advance on the law and order front is to retreat. In order to progress, we must regress. We must first undo what we did to ourselves on August 14, 2001, and then go back and stand firmly where we stood on that glorious morning of August 14, 1947.

This walking back will be a quantum leap. It needs a vision which can look not only into the future but also at the past. It needs courage to admit and learn from one’s mistakes. Above all, it needs a statesman — one who is man enough to place the state before and above self, to retrace the steps and resume the journey onward.

The writer is a former federal additional secretary.

THERE is a disturbing trend amongst some Indian intellectuals and politicians to concoct a view of Pakistan which has no roots in reality.

Whereas we Pakistanis are lucky that there are people like Khushwant Singh, M J Akbar, Kuldip Nayyar and Raj Mohan Gandhi around in India who have always spoken the truth about Pakistan, they are sadly few and far between the multitudes of Sumeet Gangulys and Narendra Modis. These anti-Pakistan intellectuals and politicians have a sinister agenda: berate Pakistan, its people and its historical antecedents and in comparison make look India better.

There are three notions that are established about Pakistan which transcend party, ideology, and ethnic lines in India. These are: 1) Partition was the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind, caused by Muslims; 2) Pakistan is based on a narrow exclusivist ideology; and 3) Pakistan ‘solved’ its minority problem by ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Sikhs in 1947, with the remaining minorities living in miserable conditions.

It should be worthwhile to examine these statements closely and put them to a test of facts.

The first man to talk of Hindus and Muslims as separate nations was V.D. Savarkar who coined the word ‘Hindutva’ in a book with the same title in 1923. Other Hindu leaders who accepted the two-nation theory were Dr Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, founder of the Benares Hindu University, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhai Parmanand and Swami Shraddhanand. Eminent Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay also supported the notion.” (Khushwant Singh, Hindutva Manufactured, The Hindustan Times, June 29, 2002)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in his famous interview with Louis Fischer admitted that the cause of the Muslim League’s separatism lay in the rise of the Hindu ideology which made Muslim leaders in the Congress uncomfortable. Yet this alone is not the justification for partition. The point is the drawing and re-drawing of borders needs no justification except the general will of a people.

South Asia was never one people, and it will never be one people. Instead the ethnic, religious, cultural, social and caste-based divisions go deep into the fabric of South Asian society and this can be its greatest strength. Therefore, the redrawing of a border or the creation of Pakistan was in no way a contradiction of South Asian contiguity which had existed despite the divisions amongst its diverse peoples. The unity of the world lies in constant decentralization of authority, till effective governance and equality are finally achieved, and the true meaning of liberty is realized.

Is Pakistan really based on a narrow exclusivist ideology? “Mr Jinnah had sent word to my father... to persuade me to stay on in Lahore. The indication was clear; he wanted to consider me as a judge of the High Court.” (Khushwant Singh, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, an autobiography). The Pakistan Movement’s premise was the right of self-determination for a population which formed the majority in the north west and north-east of the subcontinent but was an overall a minority. A nation arising out a struggle for minority rights cannot have a raison d’ etre which is exclusivist. This defeats the purpose of its creation in the first place.

In a sweeping statement Indian pseudo-intellectuals love to declare that Pakistan is a country based on a religious identity. Now the phenomenon of religion as ethnicity is not without precedent. The division of Ottoman Turkey, Ireland, the Balkans, and of course the creation of Israel all point to the existence of the use of religious identity as a nationalism. After all what makes linguistic or regional nationalism more kosher than a common faith? There is nothing wrong with it as a principle, but it is the misuse of this principle that is the problem.

Some in India unfairly claim that Jinnah envisaged no role for the minorities in Pakistan. Jinnah’s pronouncements with regards to minorities are crystal clear and his personal efforts to protect the Hindus of Karachi and Sindh during the disturbances on both sides have been lauded by many a Hindu writer including the first Indian high commissioner, Sri Prikasa, and the veteran journalist M. S. Sharma.

One can consult the book “Peep into Pakistan” for a detailed account. The primary documents that have been since revealed also show that the League leadership, and particularly Jinnah, did not envisage an exchange of populations. In fact he had tried really hard to persuade non-Muslims in Pakistan to stay on. Khushwant Singh points out that Jinnah’s appointment of Jogindranath Mandal as the first law minister of Pakistan seems to confirm this view. Jinnah also established a 10% special quota of jobs for non-Muslim minorities.

What of “ethnic cleansing” in 1947 and the treatment of minorities now? Khushwant Singh and Kuldip Nayyar, like other writers who have written about partition, hold that ‘neither Nehru nor Jinnah’ envisaged the brutal exchange of populations. This is certainly the view that one gets from the Jinnah papers. And yet the exchange of populations happened, and then came the terrible communal bloodbath on both sides. Some 5.5 million Muslims were ethnically cleansed from East Punjab and areas neighbouring Pakistan, and some 3.5 million Hindus from West Punjab and Sindh then packed up and left for India. Both Pakistan and India however had large sections of Hindu and Muslim minorities in other parts of the country. East Pakistan for example had 15% Hindus who organized themselves under the able leadership of Chattopadhaya, the leader of the Pakistan Congress Party.

Undeniably the religious minorities in India have complete legal parity according to the secular constitution of that country, much more so than in Pakistan where they are not allowed to run for the highest office in the land. However this does not mean that the common folk amongst them are happier in India than in Pakistan. In fact some will argue that Pakistan has never had the kind of mass killings as one sees in Gujarat and other communally troubled parts of India.

In Pakistan, incidents of violence against non-Muslims are the product of problems of a more global nature as the recent church bombings indicate. Generally, non-muslims in Pakistan are left to go about their business. The Sunni Muslim majority is more interested in persecuting the Shia minority or the Ahmadiya community. Non-muslims are amongst the most talented and the most patriotic Pakistanis.

There’s Justice Bhagwan Das of the Supreme Court. One of Pakistan’s best fashion designer is a Hindu (Deepak Parwani). The owners of one of the largest hotel chains are Parsis. One of the best batsmen in Pakistan’s cricket team is a Christian (Youhanna).

However, not all is well with the minorities. Institutionalized discrimination against non-muslims needs to be done away with immediately, not because of international pressure, but because the very premise of our nation state, our ideology safeguards minority rights and ensures their equal status as citizens in Pakistan. The point is that our doing so should not be seen as a departure from an imagined exclusivist principle, but rather a return to our true ideology, that of equality, fraternity and justice on which Pakistan was created.

THE Bush administration is arm-twisting Turkey’s new government to allow the US to deploy up to 80,000 of its troops in eastern Anatolia. Their mission will be the invasion of northern Iraq.

Turkey’s government, led by Justice and Development Party chairman Recep Erdogan and prime minister, Abdullah Gul, is caught in a savage dilemma. Ninety per cent of Turkey’s 67 million citizens strongly oppose any attack on Iraq.

Erdogan’s moderate Islamic party recently won a landslide election victory because of public anger over the devastated economy, corruption, resentment against the heavy-handed role of the intrusive Turkish military, which has long been the real ‘deep power’ behind a thin facade of democratic government, and opposition to war against Iraq. Erdogan, the most popular and promising Turkish leader in decades, has gotten off to a commendable start by trying to settle the thorny Cyprus problem by backing the current, sensible UN peace plan, and normalizing relations with old foe, Greece.

But US pressure on Turkey, NATO’s faithful eastern bastion, keeps mounting. Bankrupt Turkey is being offered $18 billion in new aid, on top of $16 billion given over the past two years, plus $400 million to build new military bases in Turkey, cut-rate aircraft, and new weapons systems. The Bush administration is warning Turkey it will no longer have America’s support in its efforts to enter the EU if Ankara does not cooperate. Pentagon number two Paul Wolfowitz and State Department heavyweight Marc Grossman, both partisans of Israel, are heading efforts to enlist Turkey in the impending war.

Turkey’s fiercely anti-Islamic and pro-Israel generals, who command Nato’s second largest armed forces — 515,000 very tough troops — would be expected to support war against Iraq. They are closely linked to Israel’s far right Likud Party by ideology and a web of covert business dealings.

But the cautious chief of staff, Gen. Hilmi Ozok, is keeping a low profile and deferring to the civilian government. The generals are nervous over Iraq and fear public wrath if they openly try to browbeat the first genuinely popular government in memory. The EU has warned Turkey’s generals they must refrain from pressuring the elected government or lose any chance to join Europe.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Arab neighbours are furious at Ankara for its close strategic alliance with Israel. Iraq and Syria accuse Turkey of diverting half the upstream water of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. If Turkey aids any invasion of Iraq, its commercial and political interests in the Arab world will suffer.

But Turkey is also being drawn towards Iraq by two powerful impulses. First, Turkey has no oil. The heavy cost of importing oil has undermined the country’s feeble economy. Two of Iraq’s great oilfields — around Mosul and Kirkuk — lie within 150 km of Turkey’s eastern border. Turkey has long dreamed of recovering these oil deposits, which imperial Britain snatched away from the dying Ottoman Empire in the 1920s by creating the artificial, London-run kingdom of Iraq. Recently, Turkey’s foreign minister, Yasar Yakis, called for his nation to seize Mosul and Kirkuk if Iraq was invaded. Prime Minister Gul immediately contradicted him, but the cat was out of the bag.

Mosul and Kirkuk are the crux of secret negotiations to bring Turkey into the war. Washington has so far offered Turkey partial control and exploitation rights of these fields, and high transit fees for Iraq oil exports. The US has also offered Russia and France drilling rights in northern Iraq if they support the war. In short, division of the spoils.

The second impulse: the intractable Kurdish problem. Turkey is dead set against the creation of any independent Kurdish state — or states — in northern Iraq, and remains deeply troubled by the two mini-Kurdish statelets created by the US in 1991. Ankara has just suppressed a long, bloody rebellion in eastern Anatolia by its own Kurds, who comprise 20 per cent of Turkey’s population, and fears, with reason, a pan-Kurdish movement in Iraq will reignite Kurdish nationalism in Turkey.

Some 10,000 Turkish troops are already in northern Iraq. Washington has promised Ankara US troops will prevent Iraq’s Kurds from declaring an independent state — a cynical position for a nation that hails self-determination as a right of man. Washington has also promised its Arab clients that Iraq will not be divided. Washington is thus eager to have US troops based in eastern Turkey, from where they will occupy Mosul and Kirkuk, thus putting the oil under American control and pre-empting Turkey from annexing northern Iraq.

Erdogan is trying to weave his way through this minefield. If he refuses to obey US demands, Washington could pull his loans, just as it threatened Pakistan with economic death in September, 2001, if it did not cooperate with the invasion of Afghanistan. Arms deliveries could be cut off, and the moderate Islamic A.K. party even branded terrorists. The same generals who had Erdogan jailed for two years just for reciting a 19th century poem deemed too Islamic could stage another coup. Yet if Erdogan caves in and joins the war against Iraq, his people may disown him and his party as stooges of the generals and their American patrons.

Turkey is stalling, saying it will wait for the Security Council to rule on Iraq before making a final decision. Washington is most displeased. Ankara is holding up the US-Israeli-British war against Iraq.—Copyright Eric S. Margolis, 2003.