Jobs & political expediency

AFTER announcing rather a token financial relief to the very poor, which has been received coldly, the federal cabinet has now decided to relieve thousands of people of their jobs. Consequently, between 10,000 and 12,000 employees of the federal government, who were declared surplus two years ago, are to be relieved of their jobs by the end of June.

In sharp contrast, military officers who are retiring are being re-employed against civilian posts as heads of corporations or autonomous bodies much to the disadvantage of civilian employees. An allocation for providing some jobs has been made in the budget, says the finance adviser to the prime minister without specifying the amount.

All this is happening at a time when the private sector is not expanding, certainly not fast enough, to provide more employment. Small and medium enterprises are also not coming up quickly enough to absorb the 1.5 million new entrants in the job market every year. And neither is the micro-finance facility expanding fast enough to provide self-employment. In any case, given our economic and social context, such new schemes need time to establish safeguards against abuse and misuse.

Of course, in a developing country the government cannot undertake to provide jobs to everyone, particularly when the population is very large and the number of unemployed huge. But massive and prolonged unemployment can cause an increase in crimes and a steady rise in unemployment can cause many young people to commit suicide. Both problems currently afflict Pakistan presently.

The unemployment problem is aggravated by the fall in migration for employment abroad due to the tense global situation and because of difficulties in getting foreign visas. And the possibility of an American attack on Iraq makes the outlook grimmer.

The federal cabinet has now decided to recruit persons for posts in grades 11 to 16 directly instead of through the Federal Public Service Commission in a reversal of the military government’s policy. This has been done as a matter of “political expediency”, says Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad. He says the FPSC would take one year to make recruitments, and the elected leaders cannot wait that long.

How many jobs are to be filled in this manner? No one knows. The prime minister has asked the various government divisions to let him know the number of vacancies. How will the people be recruited? How will the sacrifice of merit at the altar of political expediency be avoided? The only answer given is that merit will not be sacrificed. It is not necessary that the FPSC should take one year to fill all vacancies, more so in grades 11 to 16. It could be asked to devise a procedure to fill vacancies quicker. But evidently the cabinet has small patience for such procedures.

Many such jobs are to be provided in the educational and health sectors, and a large number of these lie in the provincial domain. So the provincial governments will have to be brought into the picture in full, and they have their own ideas in this regard.

If the federal budgetary revenues were expanding fast, reflecting improvements in the micro-economic sector, the government could have provided for more jobs. But the budgetary picture is not improving markedly despite the overall improvement in large sectors of the economy led by the macro-economic sector. Hence, the small relief package announced by Prime Minister Jamali and the limited recruitment moves.

Now, the development schemes for MNAs, where each member of parliament will receive Rs 5 million for the second half of 2002-3, are to be approved soon. The MNAs have been asked to submit their schemes by February 28 and schemes for next year by April. But these are to be restricted to electricity, gas and communications, which one presumes means carrying gas and power to their constituencies. What happens if some of their constituencies have already power and gas? Needless duplication should be avoided.

The same facility is to be provided to the 100 Senators after their election and half the allocation for the MPAs. The total may exceed Rs 9 billion compared to Rs 5 billion earmarked for the relief package initially. One can only hope the money will be well spent and not wasted or squandered. Monitors are to be appointed in the provinces prevent waste of the legislators’ development funds, and it is important that the whole scheme should be well conceived and made truly purposeful.

When it comes to directly providing jobs in government, the scheme has been abused in the past. Some of the MNAs and MPAs in the days of the first PPP government and thereafter appointed relatives to some of the posts and lucratively sold the other jobs. And those who bought the jobs then indulged in outright corruption to make many times the money they had initially paid for.

The government ought, therefore, to devote greater attention to the promotion of small and medium enterprises and providing far more micro-credit to the self-employed as has been done successfully in Bangladesh. Plenty of World Bank and Asian Development Bank funds are available for that purpose and the government should make the best of that. If we utilize these funds well and show positive results, more money may become available. And if misused, a part of the already sanctioned funds may be withheld.

One of the peculiar features of the economic revival in parts of Europe, according to commentators, is that it is a jobless revival. The Euro currency area has an unemployment rate of 8.5 per cent. The US has an unemployment rate of 6 per cent, Germany 10.3 per cent and France 8.9 per cent despite the strong Euro.

Where economic revival is taking place, it is often happening on the basis of cutting down the number of employees, increasing productivity per worker, and boosting profits. As a result, unemployment remains high even while economic revival is visible.

The information technology sector in Pakistan does not contribute to a high increase in employment. Small outfits are able to thrive with the help of a few employees. Quality and not quantity matters here.

Look at our textile sector. Where 35 to 40 persons were employed per loom, there is just about one worker now. The outlay is more on machines rather than on men, who are of course far better paid than before. So there is emphasis in the developing countries on employment-promoting investment. But the West makes machinery which needs fewer workers, to reduce the wage bill. It is the service industry that provides employment. The service sector thrives only when agriculture and industry make headway and there is more money in the hands of people to spend on services.

If foreign-owned fast-food outlets replace our tikka shops and local restaurants, that is not expansion of the services sector, but merely that local outfits are being replaced with foreign establishments.

The West has a problem of shortage of labour because of the slow rate of growth of its population. But we have a steadily expanding population and so we have to create far more jobs than those countries. And that means promoting far more investment, creating more jobs and higher productivity. And finally what matters is not political expediency of our rulers, but to keep the national interest supreme, to follow merit in all sectors of government and to employ good governance tactics.

Catch me if you can

BY rights, I should be for this war. I am instinctively pro-American, if not pro-Bush. I care enough about the security of Israel to back the removal of a regime which rained missiles down on that country little more than a decade ago. I am not against military interventions per se and believe that US power can sometimes be a force for good in the world: that’s why I supported the Kosovo campaign of 1999.

Even my prejudices draw me to the pro-war side. When I see Tony Blair alongside Jacques Chirac, I find myself drawn to Blair’s brand of conviction politics — his willingness to defend an unpopular cause — rather than to Chirac’s self-interested calculation which, you just know, will see France sink its nose into the Iraqi trough the instant there’s a sniff of oil profits to be had.

So I should be a natural recruit to the pro-war camp. The trouble is, most of the pro-war arguments remain so painfully thin. First, Blair says we have to get Saddam before he gets us. But the evidence of Iraqi aggression beyond its borders has been slim to non-existent for more than 12 years: the US and its allies have confined the Iraqi dictator to his cage.

On February 5 Colin Powell tried to firm up the second, related argument, that Saddam may not strike at us himself, but he is arming the fanatics of Al Qaeda to do so. This pairing of Saddam and Osama is like a love match between the Pope and Kylie — one of those relationships that is theoretically possible but remains unproven and unlikely. Maybe more convincing evidence will change our minds; until then, sceptics can wonder why Washington waited till now to reveal it.

But if those arguments don’t convince, there are a couple more which should fare better. The first is the humanitarian case, which says that Iraqis lead miserable lives and are desperate to be freed from a murderous tyrant. That cannot be in dispute, but much that flows from it is. Will the price of this “liberation” be too high, in the form, first, of mass Iraqi casualties and, second, a long-run occupation by a foreign power? Are we eroding yet further the notion of state sovereignty, by not merely intervening in a contested province of a country — as Nato did in Kosovo — but changing fundamentally the make-up of the country itself? Perhaps these objections could be overcome if humanitarianism was the driving motive of the coming war on Iraq, as it was in the Balkans. But it is not.

Still, respectable defences of the coming conflict do not run out there. The most plausible argument, championed by US liberals, centres on the beneficial effect for the wider Middle East of a new, democratic Iraq. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has written that the prospect of Iraq as a “progressive model” for the region is the only “morally and strategically justifiable reason to support this war. The Bush team dare not invade Iraq simply to install a more friendly dictator to pump us oil. And it dare not simply disarm Iraq and then walk away from the nation-building task.”

Here then is the ground where moderates hovering over the pro- or anti-war line need to be persuaded. If Friedman is right, then perhaps an attack on Iraq is legitimate. But, with a heavy heart, I fear he is wrong.

For one thing, it does not take a knee-jerk European leftie to cite the US track record as reason to doubt Friedman’s Quiet American optimism. With Afghanistan only the most recent example, the US has repeatedly “walked away” after the fireworks are over — usually leaving Europeans and others to clear up the mess. In Somalia a decade ago, 18 US casualties were enough to send the Americans packing, while “nation-building” became a swear word. As for the US installing “a more friendly dictator,” that has long been Washington’s preferred modus operandi, from the Middle East to Latin America. It is almost a foreign policy doctrine: he may be a sonofabitch, but at least he’s our sonofabitch. To assume that Iraq will be different is to make a historical leap of faith.

But, OK. Let’s put history aside and believe that, this time, the US will be different. Let’s say it really will try to establish Iraq as a democracy. Can that be done down the barrel of a gun? Is there not something in the very nature of self-government that suggests it cannot be imposed from outside, and certainly not by force on a country with no history of democracy?

Defenders of the war offer the Japan of 1945 as the textbook example. There a nation, crushed in war, transitioned peacefully from rule-by-emperor to parliamentary democracy: Baghdad could do the same. But historians of the period say the differences are too many to count — starting with the moral legitimacy the US occupation of Japan had in the eyes of both the world and even Japanese opinion. No such global consensus exists on Iraq.

Besides, the liberal dream of a remade, post-Saddam Middle East assumes that there is no other way to do it. It makes war the first resort rather than the last. In fact, if the US and its allies were so keen to spread democracy through the Arab world, there are countless moves they could make. The US gives aid to a whole clutch of unelected regimes: it could start tying that cash to democratic performance. It could turn to Egypt and say: “This year’s cheque for two billion dollars is conditional on a free press and an independent judiciary. Next year, no money unless you hold real elections.” Why not use that method to make Egypt the “progressive model for the whole region”?

Which leaves us with David Owen’s hope, aired on these pages the other day, that a war in the Gulf might lead to peace in the Middle East. Unfortunately, that hope seems to rest on two shaky premises. First, it suggests that Israel is holding on to the occupied territories as some sort of strategic buffer, to protect it against foreign threat. If the threat from Iraq is gone, runs the argument, then Israel won’t need the buffer and will give it up. But, as the Scuds of 1991 proved, the West Bank does not work as a barrier. Thanks to missile technology, Tel Aviv is within reach of enemy fire even when Israel holds onto the occupied territories. No, security is not the chief reason why the Israeli right wants to keep hold of those lands — it’s a more complex brew than that — so a change in Iraq won’t bring a breakthrough on that score.

The second, wobbly premise is its misreading of Washington. The first Bush administration was filled with “realists” who understood the need for a Palestinian-Israeli accord and were ready to pressure Israel to get it. But today’s Bush team is not made up of James Bakers: if it were they could have demanded peace moves now, without going to war. Instead, the administration includes several men of Likud sympathies, whose likeliest reaction to victory in Baghdad is not going to be a request to Israel to give up land — but rather a determination to make the Arabs understand the new reality.

So, much as I might like to cross sides, I’m afraid I can’t. I still don’t believe in this war. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

Can culture be universal?

THE interplay of the various cultures of the world, their interaction and how they overlap, making it impossible sometimes to draw the dividing line between them, has always been a fascinating subject.

Now its tones and overtones are also contributing to the common modern belief about the world being a global village. Of course a universal culture for the entire globe is far away, and may never materialise.

An accident some years ago connected with the Sphinx near Cairo has given rise to a new controversy about the cultural possessions of countries such as monuments and antiquities. The controversy is whether the proper maintenance, repair and upkeep of an antiquity is the exclusive responsibility of the country owning it or a collective responsibility of the entire civilized world interested in culture.

The accident was that two large chunks of limestone had fallen off the right shoulder of the Sphinx, the 66-foot high and 230 feet long man-cum-lion recumbent statue built in approximately 2600 BC. The accident claimed one human victim — the director of Egypt’s antiquities who lost his job because of it. Behind the dismissal was a dispute between him and the minister concerned. He wanted Egyptian workers to repair the damage, while the minister was all for associating foreign experts in the job.

I read a report from Cairo some days ago that the damage of ten years ago had been repaired to everyone’s satisfaction. However, as if to revive an old controversy, one foreign expert did express the view that Egypt’s antiquities belong to the whole world, “because they are so ancient and so beautiful”, and that damage to any of them was a universal loss and not that of Egypt alone. I wish somebody would say the same about our neglected historical monuments!

It sometimes happens that a monument or a cultural relic has no emotional appeal for the people of the country where it is located. We have an example in Pakistan. Moenjodaro and Gandhara are disowned by some of us simply because they have nothing to do with Muslims. Although it is worthwhile remembering that most of us (those few whose ancestors did not come from Central Asia of the Middle East) are the descendants of those non-Muslims.

For such people these ruins and priceless antiquities may be just a meaningless collection of brick and mortar furnishing them no pride and no inspiration. On the other hand there is no doubt that to the rest of the civilized world their value is beyond computation. According to these outsiders, their mere location in Pakistan should be a matter of gratification and self-esteem for us.

Egyptians suffer from no such inhibition. Muslims form 90 per cent of the population of Egypt. For them, too, the pyramids, the Sphinx, the temples of Luxor and Abu Simbal and other magnificent edifices should have no emotional appeal. But it is not so. Without detracting from their devotion to Islam, the Muslims of that country take pride in their pre-Islamic past and do not regard the people of the time of the pharaohs as different from themselves. In their view, Islam is a part of their total cultural wealth and they see no reason to distance themselves from their ancient heritage.

But when Moenjodaro and Gandhara are talked about, foreign lovers of antiquities would be justified in saying that Pakistanis are not bothered about what happens to them. Therefore it is good that UNESCO has taken upon itself the task of ensuring their protection because they are of such great archaeological and anthropological value to world cultural experts.

The concept that I have mentioned above is very broad and laudable. In fact it should be the precursor of a wider and more universal view of matters in which more than one country, and sometimes the whole world, is interested. Another fitting example in this context is the Taj Mahal. It lies in a country that is unfriendly towards us but we consider that monument almost as a shrine and a part of our heritage.

Let me add that the most ardent desire of every Pakistani is to see the Taj Mahal. Indians also want to see it, but for a different reason. For them it is just a beautiful building which hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world come to see every year. For us it is the finest example of the architecture left by the Mughals who are the symbol of Muslim rule in the subcontinent.

Not only this. The Taj has another aspect. The majority community in India may be emotionally indifferent towards it but some sort of complex and collective jealousy pervades its attitude towards the mausoleum. Some bigoted Hindus have tried to show that it is in fact a Hindu building. The claim is too absurd for comment but it serves to highlight the sharp cleavage in the psyches of the Hindus and Muslims and underlines the influence of faith on the cultural thoughts and practices of people.

The present state of the progress and development of man is not due to the efforts of the West alone, which, admittedly, is technologically and materially the most advanced. The sum of human civilisation is the result of contributions from all corners of the globe, howsoever backward the peoples of these remote places may seem to be today.

That is why the so-called advanced people of the West can never be forgiven for what they did in the past to the indigenously developed cultures of the countries they invaded and looted. The Inca civilisation of Central America is the most glaring example. Not a trace, except some stone structures, was left of it by Spanish marauders moved by a misplaced religious zeal. I can never forget a painting in which Spanish soldiers are killing Inca princes while a priest holding a large crucifix goads them on.

On a lower plane hardly anything remains of the distinctive way of life of the original inhabitants of the United States called Red Indians. In Australia the aborigines are crying that whatever the state of their community life, the conquering whites had no moral right to impose their own religion and the European way of life on them.

The concept that culture and its manifestations — antiquities above all — are a common heritage of entire mankind deserves to be adopted international, for it can bring about tolerance and a feeling of universal brotherhood. These are attributes that are most needed in this strife-torn world.

Crisis brewing in Afghanistan

Shielded from public attention by the mounting crises in Iraq and North Korea, Afghanistan slipped into the new year without having achieved the stability it desperately needs for a sustained recovery — but also without plunging into chaos.

That it has avoided famine, civil war and the resurgence of serious military challenges to US forces during the past 12 months is something of an accomplishment, if only in a negative sense; so is the survival of its liberal and Western-oriented president, Hamid Karzai.

Mr Karzai, increasingly popular around the country, has become more aggressive in trying to extend the rule of his government outside of Kabul, and lately he has made some incremental progress. A few second-rank thieves and thugs have been expelled from positions of power in the provinces, a new national currency has been introduced, a landmark highway reconstruction project is finally under way, and a burst of new reconstruction activity is lined up for the spring.

But Mr Karzai and his Afghan and Western allies are still in a precarious position, one that in the next year could as easily tip toward anarchy as toward the self-reinforcing cycle of economic revitalization and governmental reconstruction that is hoped for. Warlords still control much of the countryside, as well as most of the national customs revenue that Mr. Karzai’s government is entitled to; one of them, Ismail Khan, ruler of the western city of Herat, may be more responsive to the mullas of Iran than to the nominal authorities in Kabul.

Opium production is booming. US officials concede that seven of Afghanistan’s 33 provinces are still not secure enough for aid and reconstruction operations. Attempts to ambush US troops are increasing, and there are reports of a new enemy alliance, made up of former Taliban forces and those of another extremist faction, that may be operating training camps and preparing for concerted military operations.

Which way Afghanistan goes this year will likely depend in large part on how the United States handles two crucial continuing tasks: shoring up security with its military forces and channelling sufficient aid to restart the national economy. Though it hasn’t gotten much attention, there has been a major increase in US and allied troop deployments over the last year. There are now some 9,500 US troops in the country, along with 5,000 from allied nations; the number of Americans has more than doubled since a year ago.

In addition, the Pentagon — which stubbornly resisted Mr Karzai’s pleas for a nationwide international peacekeeping force — has begun to move toward creating a functional equivalent. Eight or more regional clusters of civilian and military forces are planned for deployment near important provincial centres in the coming months; they will combine technical help for reconstruction with a force that will be small but credible, given the backup of US air power. A war with Iraq or a further escalation of the crisis in Korea could test the Pentagon’s ability to sustain this operation and could increase Afghan resistance to it; yet it will be vital to see it through.

The other crucial struggle will play out in Congress in the coming weeks. Late last year legislation was enacted providing for $3.3 billion in new US aid to Afghanistan over the next four years. At an annual rate, that would about match the $850 million that has been invested in aid and reconstruction since the Afghan campaign began. Yet nowhere near that amount has been appropriated for the current fiscal year: Legislation passed by the Senate currently calls for only $157 million in new aid, while the House version budgets $295 million.

The Bush administration and the congressional leadership need to follow through on the funding commitments they have made, beginning with the current year. If aid to Afghanistan is postponed or choked off in the coming months, there may be no reconstruction to fund in the future.—The Washington Post

Blessed are the peacemakers

BY the end of this week the world will have a better idea of how soon hostilities are likely to erupt on the Iraqi front. Hans Blix’s statement to the UN Security Council on Saturday is widely construed as crucial. Even the mildest hint of Iraqi procrastination amid a welter of evidence of Baghdad’s compliance with UN demands will probably suffice as a trigger for the US and Britain.

But what if the Swedish diplomat is not obliging enough to offer such a hint? Would that interfere with Anglo-American war plans? No. The Bush and Blair administrations have made it amply clear that their minds are already made up. And they are disinclined to put their brave soldiers through the inconvenience and discomfort of summertime turkey-shoots. They’d much rather make sure that most of the killing is done well before the Gulf gets too hot.

There are two reasons why they haven’t blundered in thus far, and neither of them has anything to do with the weapons inspections. The first is that the US and Britain would prefer their aggression to bear the UN stamp of approval. Secondly, they are concerned about the surge in preemptive popular protests against the war. George W. Bush probably recalls that Daddy was humiliated in 1992 by an upstart from Arkansas despite unprecedentedly high approval ratings (whereas Bush Junior’s have lately been spiralling downwards) during the first Gulf War. And Tony Blair knows that the Labour Party could subject him to the treatment that the Tories meted out to Margaret Thatcher once it became painfully obvious that she had “lost touch with reality”.

Both these reasons lay behind US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s multimedia presentation to the Security Council a week ago. Powell has in recent weeks been thrust into the role of chief US spokesman on behalf of the war effort precisely because he was previously perceived as something of a dove in an unprecedentedly hawkish White House. It was presumed that his pronouncements would carry considerably more weight than any banalities uttered by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Vice-President Dick Cheney, both of whom display greater psychopathic tendencies than any of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

Unfortunately for Powell, he comes across not as a dove driven to hawkishness but as a hawk who has cast off his erstwhile disguise. As such, his performance last Wednesday did not unduly impress any sceptics. There was at least one Straw that Powell did not have to clutch at — Jack, the British foreign secretary, was obsequiously eager to endorse every utterance of his American counterpart. But other permanent members of the Security Council proved to be a lot less gullible, and the BBC’s correspondent noted that Powell visibly squirmed in his seat when the Russian foreign minister noted that American allegations would have to be studied by experts in Moscow. China was at least equally non-committal, while the French foreign minister commented, sensibly, that a reasonable case had been made for tripling the number of inspectors in Iraq.

The council’s non-permanent members were almost united in their support for continued inspections. This was clearly not the reaction that the US had anticipated, and there have lately been indications that the “coalition of the willing” — the US, Britain and Australia, plus a swag of Nato membership aspirants in Eastern Europe — will revert to Plan A by claiming that another Security Council resolution isn’t required as a pretext for war.

Given that a war is more or less inevitable, from the UN’s point of view it would be better for it to be waged without Security Council sanction. The US and Britain claim that failure by the UN to give its imprimatur to the hostilities would render the world body irrelevant. The truth is that the UN, which was set up to preserve peace rather than endorse aggression, would become the object of universal ridicule were it to go along with Anglo-American designs. It must be hoped that China, Russia and France will keep this in mind if a second resolution ever comes to a vote in the council.

The cumulative impact of Powell’s compendium of information and allegations, old and new, most of them unsourced, was to betray the US administration’s degree of desperation. At best, he succeeded in reinforcing the impression that Saddam is not to be trusted. But we knew that already. If anything, it would be surprising if Iraqi apparatchiks were being completely forthright with the inspectors. It would be even more surprising were it to turn out that Baghdad is not concealing any stocks whatsoever of what are classified by the US as weapons of mass destruction. In order to make even a semi-successful case for war, it would be necessary to prove that Iraq poses an imminent threat to the US. That proved to be beyond Powell’s capacity.

Even US and British intelligence agencies have been appalled by the White House and Downing Street’s attempts to establish that some sort of a nexus exists between Iraq and Al Qaeda, on the basis of evidence so vague and circumstantial that even a biased jury would be inclined to dismiss it as wishful thinking. Neither the Abu Musab Al Zarqawi nor the Ansar Al Islam strand of investigation appears to have yielded anything particularly fruitful from the American point of view. And as far as the Ansar camp — which exists purportedly in an area where Saddam’s writ does not operate — is concerned, the question inevitably arises: If it is indeed a proxy Al Qaeda training site, why has the US made no effort to dismantle it?

It is highly unlikely that anything Powell said — or for that matter subsequent pronouncements by Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld and Straw — will cut any ice with the millions of people who intend to participate next weekend in mass anti-war rallies. Organizers in key western cities expect the mobilizations to be the largest show of force thus far by peace campaigners. In contrast, it is worth noting that there have been no demonstrations in support of war.

“There’s never been a time that I can think of,” Noam Chomsky points out, “when there’s been such massive opposition to a war before it was even started.” It is equally significant that the anti-war coalitions in various countries straddle the ideological spectrum, ranging from religious and conservative organizations to Trotskyites. It is probably true that many of the Islamic groups involved in the movement would have displayed scant interest in the proceedings had the intended target of aggression not been a Muslim nation. Nonetheless, their willingness to share a platform with atheists, Christians and Jews is a positive sign and could translate into a mind-broadening experience.

A few decades ago, it was customary in the West for anti-nuclear activists to be derided as “Moscow’s dupes”, and a parallel effort to dismiss anti-war protesters as Baghdad’s dupes has been under way for the past year or so. Unfortunately for the British and US governments, the propaganda has singularly failed to arrest the momentum for peace. After all, the vast majority of those opposed to a military strike against Iraq have no illusions about Saddam. They do not condone his tyranny, and most of them would have little objection to a regime change in Baghdad. They are utterly unconvinced, however, that the use of massive force by the world’s sole superpower is the ideal means of achieving such an outcome.

They are motivated by the recognition that tens — perhaps even hundreds — of thousands of Iraqi civilians will perish in a military onslaught. They are aware that upward of a million deaths, more than half of them those of infants and children, have already been caused by 12 years of evidently meaningless sanctions. They do not wish another monumental crime against humanity weighing upon their consciences. What’s more, they are able to see through the falsehoods, hypocrisy and hubris emanating from Washington, London and Canberra. In Australia the US ambassador has had the gall to interfere in the domestic political debate over the deployment of troops to the Gulf by advising the opposition Labour Party to desist from ridiculing Bush and condemning Prime Minister John Howard’s efforts to outdo Blair in kowtowing to Bush and the demons that surround the US president. This approach won’t surprise Pakistanis, for we have grown accustomed over the decades to US envoys behaving like imperial proconsuls.

Bush, Blair and Howard, all of them church-going Christians, must be disconcerted by the fact that, barring fanatics of Jerry Falwell’s ilk, virtually all factions of Christianity are united in their opposition to the coming war. But they are driven apparently by an irresistible urge to commit mass murder, believing that even God can’t stand in their way.

The war may have begun by the time Worldview returns after a two-week break, and the only hope one can cling to is that blinkered patriotism will not supplant the longing for peace in the western popular imagination.

The clouds of war are invariably bereft of a silver lining, but it is at least possible that an unintended consequence of the Bush clique’s empire-building ambitions may ultimately be a gentler, kinder future — a world in which children will no longer ask “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” but will be rather more inclined to raise questions along the lines of: “What did you do for peace, Mummy?”

E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com