The anatomy of an impasse

IN THE context of India and Pakistan, there are no lower depths to which their relations can sink. Regrettably, the slide seems unending with the BJP government relentlessly pursuing a dangerous course of heightened animosity towards Pakistan. It shuns any proposal for a bilateral dialogue, refuses to attend the Saarc summit in Pakistan and on the cultural side denies visas to Pakistanis, disallows its cricket team to play in Pakistan and boycotts the SAF games.

At the same time, an increased level of harassment of diplomats in both countries, followed by unsubstantiated allegations made by India, has resulted in the reciprocal recall of the deputy high commissioners from the two capitals. In a region as volatile and conflict-prone as South Asia, the deliberate snapping of the few remaining communication lines confirms that radical elements in the BJP’s ruling elite have failed to achieve their primary objective of destabilizing Pakistan by prolonged deployment of troops and are now complementing the policy by diplomatic and psychological pressure.

Additionally, in sharp contrast to global trends, India is trying to bring about a qualitative and quantitative change in its military capabilities. It has been testing a wide range of missiles and acquiring latest generation of basic weapon systems from Russia, France and the UK. This clearly demonstrates that it is building up a strong military structure to tilt the strategic balance decisively in its favour. All this coincides with the BJP’s deliberate policy of inflaming communal passions and hatred by whipping up anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim sentiments in India. Apparently, this will also serve the party’s narrow political agenda for winning support of the Hindu electorate in the forthcoming elections in nine states, as it did recently in Gujarat.

New Delhi seems determined to pursue the policy of isolating Pakistan with a singlemindedness of purpose, ignoring the world advice, including that of the US, to the contrary. For this purpose, the BJP government has adopted a broad-based policy of containment of Pakistan using military, political and economic means. It expects that over a period of time this will weaken Pakistan’s economy and its political resolve to keep the Kashmir problem alive and undermine its capacity to challenge India’s hegemony in the region.

Currently, New Delhi finds the strategic climate highly favourable for pursuing its long-term goals vis-a-vis the South Asian in general and Pakistan in particular. First, New Delhi and Washington are warming up to each other and building a solid, multi-level relationship in the political, military and economic areas. Second, Israel is now a strategic partner and a source and conduit of weapon systems and technology for India — something that greatly contributes to strengthening India’s political and strategic relationship with the US as well.

Third, relations between India and Russia are very close. Moscow is the major supplier of latest generation of conventional weapons and nuclear and space technology. Fourth, its relations with China are improving even if in the longer term it considers itself as a rival. China is also taking a more neutral position on Kashmir and is wary of Islamic militancy. Fifth, the world seems to have quietly accepted India’s nuclear status, whereas in our case doubts are being planted through the powerful western media to keep us off balance.

Finally, India is taking full advantage of the changed world environment in the wake of Sep 11, 2001, and the unified fight against the threat of international terrorism to malign Pakistan. By drawing on the heightened international concern about terrorism, it cleverly tries to bracket the freedom struggle in Kashmir with terrorism and give it a bad name. By repeating the mantra of “cross-border terrorism” New Delhi tries to shift the entire blame for the impasse in bilateral relations on to Pakistan. In its blind animosity it failed to take advantage when President Musharraf’s crackdown on the extremists and the firm measures he took to stop any cross-border movement by the Mujahideen. Neutral observers confirmed that for at least a few months there was a distinct decline in this activity.

India was also non-receptive to Islamabad’s offer of positioning international observers on both sides of the LoC to ensure against hostile cross-border activity. Even now if both sides are sincere, they can work out a fair solution of this issue and get over the impasse, otherwise accusations and counter-accusations can only result in a major crisis erupting again. In return for a halt to militant support to the Kashmiris, Pakistan is fully justified in expecting the international community, particularly the US to prevail on India to negotiate the status of Kashmir.

Playing on the fears of a frightened world, the BJP government is also projecting an erroneous impression that Pakistan is using its nuclear capability to sustain support for Kashmir. What goes in India’s favour is that the major powers too would not tolerate an active conflict in a nuclearized environment. Constant violence along the LoC in Kashmir and the semi-mobilized state of the armed forces continues to fuel militancy and religious extremism in both countries, pushing them into a narrow lane. There is always the lurking danger that extremist organizations could set off a chain of events that may ultimately lead to a catastrophic nuclear exchange.

In the event of an invasion of Iraq, there is always a danger that India may be emboldened by America’s unilateralist approach. Pursuing an adventurous course, it may be tempted to apply the doctrine of preemption against Pakistan, little realizing that the two situations are very different. Secondly, in a worst-case scenario, if there is a violent reaction in Pakistan to the invasion of Iraq and the government has problems controlling the radical elements behind the upheaval, American foreign policy expert, Mr. Strobe Talbott thinks, this “may inspire India to follow the US preemptive lead and launch its own nuclear war” against Pakistan. This may seem far-fetched but it goes to show how the world perceives the Indo-Pakistan conflict.

The BJP government also sees the present civilian regime in Pakistan as merely an extension of military rule with a civilian facade and would not make any conciliatory move which could indirectly strengthen the Pakistan’s military.

The world is so strongly opposed to Islamic militancy that it is unwilling to differentiate between freedom struggle and terrorism. In any case, mindless targeting of innocent civilians by the militants, however unquestionable their cause, is no more acceptable to the world. By our own moral and humanistic criteria, such acts should be treated as reprehensible. International community is not prepared to accept terror as a “legitimate tool for freedom fighters”. This is as true for America as for Russia, Europe, Japan or China. The unfortunate aspect of militancy is that it gives a free rein to India to use brutal methods to suppress the struggling people of Kashmir, while the international community including the Islamic fraternity, have perforce to remain silent and not openly oppose suppression.

Experience in Afghanistan and in Kashmir has proved beyond doubt that permitting the use of militancy by any organization even tacitly does ultimately recoil to destabilize and harm practically every aspect of life in the country of its origin. Taking cognizance of the domestic fallout of militancy and the changed anti-terror international scenario, there is an urgent need for fundamentally changing our approach to dealing with India. Islamabad’s response is mostly reactive.

The Kashmiris have a strong case in fighting Indian oppression and Pakistan could have helped them more meaningfully in terms of moral and political support. But we spoiled it by allowing the initiative to pass into the hands of a group of militants with their own agenda. We must develop the capacity of structured thinking on these grave issues of national concern. Only concerted strategic planning and effective implementation can put a halt to drifting and blundering. In the interest of the Kashmiri people as much in our own an unequivocal reaffirmation of the political route to problem solving is necessary. Pakistan must downplay militancy and encourage indigenous Kashmiri political forces, especially the APHC, to reassert themselves. The intrusion of militancy has distorted the true character of Kashmir struggle, marginalized the political movement, given an excuse to India to adopt coercive means and the world to condone it. Militancy is also acting as a destabilizer for our own society and doing incalculable damage to Pakistan’s image abroad.

For all purposes, the BJP government which suffers from an exaggerated notion of India’s power status in political and diplomatic terms and to equate itself with China, Russia and other major European powers. The advice of these countries for initiating a dialogue for resolving problems and differences with Pakistan is thus conveniently ignored. America’s current preoccupation with Iraq, combined with New Delhi’s strong relationship with that country, places it in a comfortable position to rebuff international advice, however well meaning it may be. Even if India agrees, in the near future, to engage in dialogue, it is possible that it will only talk but not negotiate and for that to happen many parameters will have to change.

Meanwhile, irrespective of India’s position, Islamabad should strictly adhere to its official policy of supporting the Kashmir freedom struggle politically, morally and diplomatically and effectively curb militancy by the non-state actors. Any deviation from this would further erode the credibility of its foreign policy and damage national interests. There lies a far better chance of winning support for the Kashmir cause by exposing India’s gross human rights violations and ruthless suppression of the genuine aspirations of Kashmiris than through militancy, which any way has run its course and has proved counterproductive.

The writer is a retired Lt-General of the Pakistan Army.

UNDP’s strange choice

FOLLOWING is an open letter addressed to Mr Onder Yucer, Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme, Islamabad, protesting against the inclusion of a man, responsible for complicity in the “honour killing” of his own daughter, in a recent UNDP consultative process relating to “the state and positioning of women in society”. The cruel irony is unmissable:

It is with deep concern that I write to you today concerning the UNDP’s recent inclusion in consultations with civil society a man who was complicit in the murder of his own daughter, Saima Sarwar, shot to death in the office of her lawyer, Ms. Hina Jilani. It is my understanding that the UNDP sought to consult members of civil society on all issues with which the programme concerns itself, including that of the state and positioning of women in society. It is therefore all the more distressing that a man such as Mr Sarwar Khan Mohmand should have been invited to participate in the deliberations of a meeting such as that held on February 6, 2002, at the CRPRID, Islamabad.

I, like all informed Pakistani women, am painfully aware of the injustice of the very fact that men such as Mr Sarwar Khan Mohmand are allowed to get away with murder by our own courts of law. There are many such men in our beloved country who walk with impunity, holding their heads high in the company of men who actually approve of the violence perpetrated against the women in their home, their families, in larger society. In fact, all the more distressing is the fact that there are “enlightened” men and women who will “explain” and “justify” the murder of a woman such as Saima Sarwar with a fragile and timorous argument predicated on even more flimsy and contradictory notions of “honour”.

That young girls and women are victimized and then brutalized in order to restore some notion of honour in the men who commit these crimes is a painful and unacceptable reality, against which we have protested and will continue to vigorously express our outrage. That an international organization, perhaps the most hallowed and credible, should actually consult such a man about the future of its programmes in this country is equally outrageous and unacceptable. That the United Nations Development Programme could possibly be ignorant of this man’s collusion and complicity in the murder of his daughter is of deep concern, one that needs to be voiced and addressed immediately by those who made the decision for the inclusion of Mr Sarwar Khan Mohmand in its consultations with civil society.

I am an ordinary citizen of Pakistan. I have been involved with the lives of women who have suffered exclusion from political and economic decision making.

I have suffered the violence of being a women in a society where women are objectified and commodified and then abused and degraded, merely for the fact of being women.

I have protested on the streets of my beloved city of Lahore. I have been arrested and imprisoned for such protests. I have been attacked by the police, who armed with tear gas canisters and batons, their guns muzzled until the orders are given, have shamelessly participated in the degradation of women who voice protest. The police were following orders — orders which are again based on the flimsy notion of male honour, supported by the oppressive dynamic of dominance and submission which puts order in the House of Patriarchy.

I have been hounded by men on motorbikes for speaking out against brutalization of women in my neighbouring country of Afghanistan, before the ubiquitous blue burqa became the flavour of the day in New York and Los Angeles.

I have received threats to my life for speaking out against the provision by my government of tons of armaments to warlords who proceeded to devastate their own country with the complicity and assistance of the world’s most powerful country which is yet again bent on defying world opinion in its relentless pursuit of aggression and universal hegemony.

I have stood in the General Assembly of the United Nations and spoken of the terrible crimes which have been committed against humanity, particularly women, while the so-called civilized world looked on, often turning away from the truth which stares it in the face. I have been introduced at the Security Council of the United Nations as a woman who has the moral courage to denounce the barbarism of her own people while speaking out against the silence adopted by the world body on issues of supreme importance.

In short, I have not remained silent, and will not do so today, registering my protest along with that of many others who are horrified at the ignorance displayed by the UNDP in its recent consultative meeting. As a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, I am particularly concerned at the kind of questions being raised about the credibility and legitimacy of an organization which has evolved, formulated, and enshrined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women.

Given the current climate of doubt and uncertainty caused by the bulldozing by certain quarters of all conventions and covenants sacred to the civilized world, it is imperative that the United Nations remains the credible institution that it is, leading the world out of a deep pit of despair where a million voices resound with cries for justice, justice, justice.

The writer is the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador from Pakistan.

Looting the forests: OF MICE AND MEN

I HAVE spent long years in Punjab Information, worked with many provincial regimes and chief ministers since 1950 and seen at first hand their attitudes and reactions to publicity and the publication of news pertaining to the government.

Out of that extended and varied experience I want to mention just one. In the early days if a daily of some standing printed one adverse report about a department, the whole government would be in a whirl trying to explain its stand. Contradictions and clarifications would be the order of the day, and efforts made to remove the daily’s misconceptions. We had to work really hard.

Here in Islamabad I still manage to read a number of Urdu and English newspapers every day and have the opportunity to study the working of the federal government in respect of publication of press reports about it. Contradictions and clarifications are still issued, particularly when a senior officer or a minister is hurt by some imputation, but there is no hurry or worry. Adverse reports are taken calmly and casually, and it is nothing like the old days when it seemed that if the government’s point of view was not printed the administration would crumble.

I was talking about this with some old (and now retired) colleagues. One of them who used to have a penchant for graphic colour even in drafting a solemn press note, gave an amusing example of today’s official sangfroid. Said he, “Suppose a leading national daily publishes a headline story that someone in the Housing & Works Ministry had sold the Prime Minister’s Secretariat to a multinational and decamped with the proceeds. Reading the story at breakfast, the Secretary of the ministry will ring up his PS and say, ‘After you have finished with Begum Sahib’s chores, ask the JS concerned to find out what this is all about. These newspapers are most irresponsible. I shall be busy at home till lunch, so don’t bother me’.” We all laughed at this.

The provocation for this piece comes from a news report in Dawn of a few days ago, emanating from Haripur and bearing the caption, “Timber mafia doing roaring business.” I was wondering if the report had caused any anxiety to the Frontier government, and whether it had issued any denial or rejoinder, or whether it had decided to sleep over it. If there had been a clarification or an explanation of some kind it would have appeared in Dawn. Maybe it was not thought prudent to deny a correct allegation.

Let me give you some excerpts from the report. “Timber smuggling is continuing in Haripur without any check, and the small portion that is left of the valuable forest resources appears to be at risk of being totally destroyed.” .... “Five to seven truckloads of timber, illegally cut in the upper reaches of Hazara, are being smuggled out every day.” .... “They are transported to the local and out-city lumber yards owned by influential persons. The beneficiaries include some former and sitting MPAs.” ... “The police and forest officials are said to be in league with the smugglers.” .... “The Division Forest Officer said his few men, and they too unarmed, could not fight and prevent armed smugglers from doing their will.” Etc. etc.

Preventive work can be dangerous. Whenever the President gives away awards on Independence Day there are invariably the widows of three or four forest rangers receiving them on behalf of their husbands killed while preventing illegal felling of trees in the Frontier forests. Which happily means that not all of them are in league with the crooks. It is the same in Azad Kashmir. You will be intrigued to know that both in the NWFP and Azad J&K the most sought after portfolio is that of minister of forests. I don’t have to tell you why.

Apart from smuggling, which is part of the overall deforestation and destruction of natural jungles, what happens is that in the reserved forests a certain number of trees of a certain age become due for felling, and the two governments issue the necessary permits. Considering the prevalence of favouritism and nepotism in this country you can imagine who are the recipients of these permits. The trouble is that there is no one on the spot to make sure that the permit-holders do not cut any other trees. The forest officials, who are not more corrupt than the general level of officers in Pakistan, turn a blind eye to the operation, and if the permit-holding johnnies are unscrupulous gangsters and criminals, these officials wisely remove themselves from the scene. Discretion is the better part of valour.

This is stating the problem as briefly as I can. It is, in fact, a scandal of terrible proportions. Environmentalists may go on shouting themselves hoarse about the vital need of trees and forests, but nobody is bothered by the environment. Long before the environment became fashionable, this business of illegal felling of trees in the Frontier and Azad Kashmir had been going on ever since freedom of corruption dawned on this blessed country. I do not recall any government, any regime, civil or military, federal or provincial, having done anything about it seriously.

In these modern times, every country is supposed to have a certain proportion of its total area under forests. I believe it is something like 20 per cent. Pakistan’s figure in this respect is not more than five per cent, and I believe it is going down owing to depletion. It is a deadly scenario, and if deforestation is not stopped you may see our green mountains denuded of trees in a couple of decades. NGOs in Hazara draw a very bleak picture of what is going on. It must be the same in Dir and Swat and Chitral.

If the NWFP government gets to read this, it might protest and tell Dawn that its Forest Department plants so many million saplings in the two yearly tree plantation campaigns, and has been doing so as far back as memory can travel. But saplings are no replacement for fully grown trees cut down by murderous exploiters.

Of course if it has any sense it will absolve itself of responsibility for the period when it was not in power, instead of telling us how many smugglers were shot during the last, say, 25 years and how many were prosecuted.

Presidents’ day snow job Presidents’ day snow job

SUPPOSE you had a Presidents’ Day sale and nobody came?

This happened last Monday, when the eastern part of the country was hit with one of the worst snowstorms in history.

Presidents’ Day is the nearest thing to Christmas that stores have. As a matter of fact, there wouldn’t be a Christmas holiday season if there wasn’t a Presidents’ Day to mark down all the goods they didn’t sell in December.

The merchants decided that George Washington’s birthday was the perfect holiday. It was in February, and it was patriotic because it honoured the father of our country — so you could take off an extra 15 per cent.

A store’s entire advertising budget went into honouring George. Schools were closed and malls were open until midnight.

This year, the stores put their hearts and souls into their ads. They flooded the newspapers with unbelievable bargains, and went on television telling people what a great president Washington was. As I watched TV, stores such as Hecht’s, Macy’s, J. C. Penney, Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, and Lord & Taylor urged people to come on down to the “biggest Presidents’ Day sale in history.”

But this year, after the ads appeared, men and women in parkas from the local TV stations said, “Don’t go outside today unless you absolutely have to. Stay at home for the next three days.” Obviously, all the work and time that went into Presidents’ Day was for naught.

A meeting of all the store managers was held at Wal-Mart. One of the men from Macy’s said, “I think I’m going to suck gas from the exhaust pipe of my Hummer.”

The man from Nordstrom said, “Why us? Why would snow fall on Presidents’ Day?”

The lady manager from Lord and Taylor said, “Why not us? Whether the stores like it or not, God is still in charge.”

The Wal-Mart man said, “Tell that to the stockholders.”

Then the man from Nordstrom said, “Wait a minute. Who says we have to celebrate George Washington’s birthday?”

The manager from Macy’s replied, “That is what we’re expected to do.”

“But it’s not George Washington’s birthday,” countered the Nordstrom man. “He was born on the 12th of February, and we were celebrating it on the 17th.” “Because that’s the day Bush wants us to do it,” the Hecht’s manager said.

The man from Macy’s added, “Bush was never too good in history when he went to Yale.”

The Wal-Mart man said, “We may be onto something here. Why don’t we say we’re celebrating Lincoln’s birthday and not Washington’s?”

The Hecht’s man said, “Because that would scare away the South. They’re not going to celebrate the birthday of a president who made them lose the war.”

The Nordstrom man said, “Suppose we have a sale for all the presidents of the United States?”

“Even Nixon?” someone asked.

“He was a president, and he could sell snow shovels.”

And so all the stores agreed to make next week Presidents’ Day and rerun all their ads for bargains and discounts “worth 50 per cent less.”

The lady from Lord and Taylor said, “I’m sure Washington wouldn’t care if he knew it would help the economy.” —Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Grim choices before the emerging world order: 18 days that shook the world — II

THE third major development during the eighteen-day period that shook the world was the address by Colin Powell to the Security Council on February 5. In that much anticipated speech, Secretary Powell spelled out the US charge against Iraq. This was a strongly argued case delivered in unemotional terms.

We will have to wait for another detailed account of the type provided by Bob Woodward’s book, “Bush at War” to understand what brought about such a change of heart in the case of Colin Powell.

By moving over to the side of those who had argued for war all along as the only viable means for disarming Iraq, Powell closed the policy divide among President Bush’s senior advisers. His move puzzled many analysts, including Richard Cohen, a regular columnist of The Washington Post. In an open letter to Secretary Powell, Cohen had the following to say: “You, sir, are in a different category altogether. The nation looks to you as the voice of reason — the reluctant warrior, someone who has known war and hates it.

“You were the naysayer in the first Bush administration about the Persian Gulf War. You thought Bill Clinton was wrong about going into Bosnia and then Kosovo. More recently, you were the one who insisted that the United States takes its case to the United Nations. We understand that you are vexed — the United Nations has let you down. The French have been duplicitous. Now even Nato is wobbly. This is not a happy time, and I bet there is truth to the report that when told that President Bush sleeps like a baby, you said you do too — ‘every two hours I wake up screaming.’”

The fact that Powell had moved over to the other side meant that the administration now presented a solid front. Had this divide not been closed, “old” Europe might have acted with greater circumspection. It was now forced into taking a position that was read on the American side of the Atlantic as decisively anti-American. With every passing day, the rift between America and “old” Europe seemed to deepen. At a weekend retreat of Republican party lawmakers on February 8 and 9, Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, told his associates he would like to target two of “France’s most sacred drinks: water and wine.” He instructed his colleagues to determine whether the US Congress should pass legislation that would impose new health standards on imported bottles of Evian water and French wine.

The deepening divide between the US and Europe raised “fears that the post-war security system, which stabilized the world for 50 years, could come unglued if America intervenes alone in Iraq. At the birth of this security system, Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote a memoir titled ‘Present at the Creation’. Can we deal with Iraq and still ensure that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s memoir is not titled ‘Present at the Destruction?’” asked the influential and Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Thomas Friedman, in his weekly column in The New York Times. “The Europeans understood that their tough position could ultimately destroy the very UN structure that is the best vehicle for their managing US power.”

Close to the end of this 18-day period that we believe changed the world, Osama bin Laden surfaced again with a 16-minute audio tape put on the air by the Arab network, Al Jazeera. The voice on the tape, said to be that of the missing Al Qaeda leader, told his followers to rise against the United States since “this crusader war is mainly targeting Muslims, regardless of Saddam and the socialist party” that he leads. Osama bin Laden also invoked the name of God but in his favour. “The fighting should be in the name of God only, not in the name of ideologies, for to seek victory for the ignorant governments that rule all Arab states, including Iraq, all Muslims have to begin jihad against this unjust war.” This was the first message from Osama bin Laden since November 2002 when he praised the spate of terror attacks around the world. Osama included Pakistan with the countries whose regimes he wanted his followers to topple.

“The administration and Al Qaeda both have a purpose for invading Iraq, and both want a regime change,” wrote Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. “Both talk about ‘liberating’ the Arab people, but Osama’s vision is apocalyptic. He wants the Middle East — Israel and the Arab monarchies to go up in flames. By Zionizing our battle with Iraq and promising an anti-American theocracy, he hopes to radicalize recruits for a jihad against an American occupation of Arab land. Osama’s own fanaticism was forged by foreign occupation — the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and American forces stationed in Saudi Arabia. The Bush hawks want to go to war in a non-apocalyptic way, to stabilize the Middle East, not to inflame it. They had a grandiose — if risky — plan to transform Iraq into a model kitchen of democracy, a buffer for Israel that the Palestinians and other Arab autocracies would be pressured to adopt.”

The existence of the tape heightened the level of anxiety in the United States since the government, a few days earlier, had put the nation on high alert. The newly created Department of Homeland Security had raised the level of terrorism alert to “orange” in a five-colour coded system. Orange level, just a shade below red, signified the possibility that terrorists were ready to mount an attack on the United States or on its citizens living and travelling abroad.

Two days before Messrs. Blix and ElBaradei were scheduled to return to the Security Council to deliver their second report on weapons inspection, a panel of arms experts convened by the United Nations confirmed that a missile Iraq had developed exceeded the range limits imposed on the country. The panel’s investigation was based on the information Iraq had provided in the 12,000-page document it had delivered to the weapons inspectors on December 7, 2002. The finding that the missiles had a range of about 180 kilometers was treated as a discovery of a “smoking gun” by the U.S. The Europeans, on the other hand, treated this finding as a vindication of their belief that a well-manned inspections regimen could work. “An exceeding of the range was declared,” said a Russian disarmament specialist. It should be taken “precisely as an example of cooperation by Iraq,” he said.

The two reports presented by Blix and ElBaradei on February 14 fell seriously short of Washington’s expectations. Blix criticized the Iraqis for failing to comply with the UN demands but he credited the regime of Saddam Hussein for several steps taken since January 27 that could yield results. In addition, and to Washington’s surprise, Blix challenged several conclusions presented to the United Nations on February 5 by Powell and said the US administration continued to withhold intelligence information.

The US secretary of state, thrown on the defensive, discarded his prepared remarks to challenge the assessment of the weapons inspectors that Iraqi government promised to cooperate further with the UN. “These are tricks that are being played on us,” Powell told the members of the Security Council. “These are not responsible actions on the part of Iraq. These are continued efforts to deceive, to deny, to divert, to throw us off the path.”

But what in reality was being thrown off the path was the promise of a new world order that seemed to be taking shape after the end of the cold war. As this 18-day period came to an end, the world stood facing a number of grim choices. Of the many statements made in connection with the Security Council session of February 15, perhaps the most thoughtful was the one by Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister. “The end of the cold war has allowed for interaction among states on a fundamentally new basis. Every state can speak with its own voice in defence of its own interests. And yet all countries are now responsible for the problems of the world and are finding new and deeper forms of international cooperation for dealing with them. These developments reflected an emerging multi-polar order,” he wrote in an article carried by the Financial Times on February 14.

But the diversity of which Ivanov wrote so elegantly was being used to construct a new world order which would be highly fragmented, contentious and thus disorderly. It was beginning to take shape at the end of this 18-day period. America will be the central player in this order, not in one game but in several. It is likely to align itself with the smaller nations of continental Europe to keep France and Germany in their place. It will form an even closer association with Israel to deal with the Muslim countries of the Middle East. It will work with India and Taiwan to contain China. The world, in other words, will be reconfigured in ways unimaginable a few months ago. It would serve Pakistan well if policy-makers in Islamabad begin to reflect on these changes and start the task of crafting the country’s response to deal with this new but highly uncertain world.

“The establishment of a modern and equitable world order is a common goal of most nations. It is essential for each country’s prosperity and security. But a new world order will not come about on its own accord. It requires political will to work out the new principles and mechanisms that will underpin a suitable international order,” he continued.

Will the US allow the birth of such an order or will it impose its own will on the world? Ivanov had an answer. “The emerging world order of the 21st century should be built on the principle that unity lies in diversity.”