Rushing towards apocalypse

SO far, what has US President George W. Bush to show for his angry harangue about the need to mount a full-scale war on Iraq? In the first place, he has on his hands an American nation seriously in doubt, if not deeply divided. The western alliance that won World War II lies in tatters. So does the spirit of the Atlantic Charter.

Not to be ignored is the firm opposition of the Non-Aligned Movement, the second largest family of nations, after the United Nations. As things stand, the United Nations Charter — indeed, the United Nations itself — is under the gravest threat ever. As a spokesman of the entire Roman Catholic Christian family of hundreds of millions of people across the world, the Pope has announced his unqualified rejection of war. In Britain, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has expressed firm rejection of war.

Also achieved by President Bush is the concentration after World War II of what is the most fearsome armed force in and around the Gulf. More than 100,000 troops ready for battle are already in the theatre and many more are on way. Seven aircraft carriers are at hand. Some of the most sophisticated weaponry — aircraft, missiles, laser monitors and so on are in place. The sky over Iraq is bristling with spying and fighting gadgetry and weapons.

In their testimony to the Senate, the three services chiefs of the United States have stated that several hundred thousand troops will have to be deployed, first to fight and destroy Saddam. In the post-war period the US will have to maintain a strong and long-lasting presence to “reshape” Iraq and, presumably, the rest of the region that should mean the whole of the Arab world, or most of it.

In what may be a sop to critics, the Bush administration has said that the US will stay in the region “as long as necessary,” or would leave “as soon as possible.” Isn’t that so nice? The US alone, in its wisdom or in its interest, will decide the necessary length of occupation, and what would actually mean “as soon as possible.”

What comprises the US’s interest? It is only for Washington to determine. What history tells and what the world has come to experience, particularly after World War II, is that there is an inherent incompatibility between the US interests and the interests of the rest of the human family. The United States has left little doubt that at home it is a democracy and abroad the strongest force that spawns and supports dictators and, at some later and convenient date, returns to topple them. Saddam is not the first to have been created and is now slated to be annihilated by its very same almighty creator.

President Bush has said over and over again that if the UN failed to sanction war, he will act without waiting for such formality. It should be manifestly clear to the world that if he proceeded to do anything of the kind, he will have essentially torn up the UN Charter to bits. If the UN is undermined in any way, the United States would be responsible for throwing the world a century back — to the jungle-like situation that existed before World War I. A tragedy more to be feared is impossible to visualize.

Even with the UN presence, the United States has fought 20 wars; the one round the corner would be the 21st waged by it since the end of World War II. The authors of the Atlantic Charter, the allied manifesto for the second great war, had promised that the war would be the “war to end all wars.” How does a civilized human being today feel when yet another war is being promised with such evangelical vehemence?

In the earlier Gulf war, over 700 oil wells were destroyed. More than 60 million barrels of oil was spilled — 10 million barrels directly into the Gulf. If the war is unleashed, as promised by President Bush, around 11 million people will be rendered utterly destitute — without the basic needs of life like food, water and medicine.

And while the war lasts, there would be no way to muster and administer humanitarian help on a big enough scale. Such an operation may cost more than 60 billion dollars. Official Washington sources, reluctant to be named, say that the war President Bush is committed to may cost about 85 billion dollars. May be much more. Saddam Hussein’s must be the costliest scalp in the history of the human race. That’s incredible. But, who knows George W Bush may yet make even this credible.

In the present crisis there is an imminent danger to the life of the United Nations. Already the Security Council presents a fractured look. Of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, armed with the veto power, three have declared themselves dead set against war. At least one of them has declared the intent to veto any resolution that might be seen to be opening and paving the way for war without sufficient justification. After last Wednesday’s vote over the war issue in the British House of Commons, it is more than evident that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s position has been denuded of moral content, if it had ever had any.

It has been noted by observers that the No 2 man in Labour leadership, Chancellor of Exchequer Gordon Brown, has not spoken a word about the burning Iraq issue. This silence is seen as something that may be ominous for Tony Blair, who stands seriously wounded politically and, to a considerable extent, also isolated. One is reminded of Anthony Eden’s disastrous Suez misadventure and his eventual fall. Only the other day Mr Blair witnessed the record-breaking anti-war demonstration in London that was seen as an all-time record, drawing around two million protesters.

France has left no one in any doubt that it means to thwart President Bush’s plunge into war. Germany’s opposition to war is hardly less firm. Russia is refusing to go along with the Bush-rush. Although Secretary of State Colin Powell took the trouble to travel all the way to Beijing to enlist China’s support for war, he failed in his mission.

Going by how the scenario appears to be at the moment, it is indeed very hard to see how the US-UK-Spain war-minded trio is going to secure a clear-cut and categorical permission from the Security Council for military action against Iraq. One veto is enough to nullify a resolution even if it commanded the affirmative vote of the rest of the 14 members in the Council.

Unless President George W Bush is able to produce a miracle, his quest for a UN nod for his war on Iraq seems likely to remain unrealized. What does he do then? He has said he would not be stopped. For him, the war is not dependent on the UN sanction. This seems to be a situation where world leadership should think of requisitioning a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

If the United States goes to war even when the United Nations expressly forbids any such move, the world community will have to think how to deal with such behaviour which is manifestly violative of the international law, world opinion and, above all, the Charter of the United Nations.

Calculating the cost of war

CONGRESS has finally started to ask how much a war with Iraq might cost. The answers would be daunting in good times. In a bad economy, they are a punch to the gut.

Pentagon planners say defeating Saddam Hussein’s regime and occupying Iraq for six months could cost as much as $85 billion. Add the billions more that Turkey has all but extorted in bazaar-like bargaining to let in U.S. troops and the tally will go past $100 billion.

Assume that an occupation will take much longer than six months to stabilize the country, if that can be done at all, and the bill grows further.

The $100-billion figure is twice the cost Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld estimated last month. It is a powerful argument for a continued and determined U.S. effort to enlist as many other nations as possible as allies, at least partly to help pick up the tab.

The price tag also should persuade President Bush to drop his attempt to make the 2001 tax cut permanent and to forget about the lifetime savings accounts and retirement savings accounts that would remove billions more dollars in taxes down the road.

War costs are always estimates and are subject to many variables. A sergeant’s monthly base pay can be $2,236 here or in Baghdad, but each of the artillery shells he fires in combat runs up the price.

It is also uncertain how many troops will be required to fight and for how long. Nor can we know the precise length of an occupation and the number of soldiers required.

Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army’s top officer and former commander of the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that several hundred thousand soldiers could be required to fight a war and an equal number to occupy Iraq after the fighting.

The 1991 Gulf War, with twice as many soldiers as are expected to be used this time, cost $61 billion, and U.S. allies absorbed most of the expense. That won’t happen this time; Arab nations are less enthusiastic and less wealthy now than then; so is Japan. France, Germany or other countries lined up against the United States might step in with help for reconstruction, but not for war.—Los Angeles Times

Campuses without politics

SUPPORTING the Model University Ordinance of 2002 in this newspaper (February 8 and 9), a former vice-chancellor of the University of Karachi opposed the elective element in the faculty’s participation in the executive, administrative and academic bodies of universities. Further, he would minimize this element in the constitution of student unions.

The Universities Act of 1974, he reminds us, provided for student and faculty representation in these bodies on an elective basis. He believes that, as a result, instruction and learning became a secondary object of teachers and students. Their unions linked with political parties, the campuses became the “hotbeds” of regional, religious and ethnic strife. Academic standards declined. Both administrators and professors came under severe political pressures and the universities lost their autonomy.

All of this did happen, but it is not right to say that it happened because the law in 1974 had allowed elections. Students (not all, but many) had been politicized since before independence. Their unions came under the influence of external political forces-initially the Jamaat-i-Islami and the PML -as early as the 1950s, when the Islami Jamiat Tulaba, an affiliate of the JI, emerged on university campuses and won successive student union elections. Strife and violence between rival student groups surfaced at about the same time.

In the first half of 1968 students created political turmoil-and in some instances ousted governments — in France, Turkey, South Korea, and several other places. Student unions were banned in Pakistan at that time. Some of us could see that as soon as the students returned to the campuses in September, they would launch an agitation for the restoration of their unions. And, this is precisely what they did.

Their movement started at the Punjab University in Lahore, spread to campuses across the country, and then merged with a larger revolt against Ayub Khan’s rule. Students, along with peasants and workers, became the object of the late Mr Bhutto’s solicitude and strategy. It should be emphasized, once again, that these developments surfaced before, not after, the Act of 1974.

In the proposed scheme of things a body of 15 to 20 members will replace the existing senate in the universities and act as a board of governors. These members will, presumably, be appointed by the chancellor (usually the provincial governor), who will most likely act on the advice of the education secretary. The names of those to be appointed will be picked from a list submitted by a nominating committee. It is not clear where this committee will originate. The new senate or board will have no elected members.

A syndicate, the university’s executive organ, will consist of numerous ex-officio members (vice-chancellor, registrar, treasurer, controller of examinations, deans of faculties, a few principals of affiliated colleges). It will also include three professors, but we don’t know who will appoint them. Once again, no elected members here.

An academic council will settle pedagogic issues, presumably such as departments and programmes of study, degree requirements, syllabuses, nature and standards of examinations, undertaking and guidance of student research, and operations of the departmental boards of studies. It will include, in addition to those who serve ex officio, five professors, two college principals, and five representatives of teaching departments and institutes in the university. None of these persons will be elected to their positions; they will be appointed by the senate-itself an appointed body — on the vice-chancellor’s recommendation.

This framework does not recognize the faculty’s right to representation in the principal organs of the university’s governance. Any faculty member included in them may have been picked for his wisdom and/or knowledge of academic affairs, but he/she cannot be regarded as a faculty representative because the faculty has not chosen him/her.

At this point, if I may be allowed a bit of digression, I should like to relate an episode. I heard once that in the fall of 1950 a small group of professors at Columbia University went to see General Dwight D. Eisenhower who was then serving as its president. As his secretary showed them into his office, he rose to meet them and, with his usual good-natured smile, assured them that the “university” valued their views. On hearing this, one of his visitors looked him in the eye and said: “Mr President, we the professors are the university.”

An exaggeration, was it? Perhaps, but then only a slight one. A place devoted to the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge, functioning without administrators, can be imagined, but a university without professors is entirely inconceivable. The proposition that persons without whose presence an institution cannot even be conceived are not, by a right inherent in the centrality of their function to the institution’s mission, entitled to a say in its governance, and to participation in the maintenance of its good order, would appear to be preposterous. Why then do apparently sensible men want to extinguish this right? They will protest that they do want the faculty’s wisdom and professional expertise to bear on the conduct of the university’s affairs. But they want its administrative bodies and officers to identify where in faculty ranks the right kind of wisdom resides. They fear that if this task is left to the professors themselves-by allowing them to elect their representatives-they will botch it up by permitting extraneous political forces to influence their choices.

It seems that the new university ordinance says nothing about student unions. The sceptics — including the former vice-chancellor referred to earlier — would revive them if they were to be elected indirectly by departmental associations, and not by the entire body of students.

Why the aversion to the flow into campuses of political formations and opinions at work in larger society? It is feared that links with these forces will detract faculty and students from their appointed missions. The business of teachers, it is said, is to teach, and that of students is to learn. Politics is none of their business.

On the face of it, the argument sounds reasonable. Further reflection may, however, cause doubts. The business of physicians is to heal the sick, that of electricians to instal and repair electrical cables and appliances, and that of mechanics to make and fiddle with machines. But we have not heard it posited for more than a hundred years that working people are not entitled to have their respective professional or craft unions.

In democratic societies all citizens have the right to participate in politics, and on reaching a certain age they have the right to vote, which is very much a political act. Most of our students attain the age of eighteen in their third year at college, and General Musharraf has given all of them the right to vote and thus made them full citizens.

It may be argued that while faculty and students may participate in politics, they must do their politicking outside the campus, not on campus. Persons in various workplaces do not allow their political affiliations to influence their work; nor do they canvass their political preferences among their fellow employees. In this train of thought faculty and students should do the same. Sounds good. Professors should not let their political attachments colour their teaching and evaluation of students, and the latter should not attempt to force their political preferences on teachers and administrators.

Do students have the right to project their political ideologies and affiliations to fellow students outside the classroom? It is hard to see how one can say they don’t. The real objection to the intrusion of politics on campuses is not that it is evil per se, but that our particular brand of it is coercive, abusive, and violent. We object to gangsterism, not to politics.

The way out of this mess is, first, to limit the concerns of student unions to education-related issues and, second, to persuade the leaders of political parties in the country to forbid highhandedness and violence on the part of their affiliates on campuses. Is this asking for the moon? Let us give it a try before giving in to despair. In any case, banning politics will not do; it will then simply go underground and become ever more troublesome. Our mission must be to civilize politics, not to outlaw it.

The apprehension that an elected body entitled to speak for professors on professional issues or their right to elect a few representatives to the university’s statutory bodies (senate, syndicate, academic council) will politicize them, open them to political machinations and mischief from outside, and thus impair the quality of their teaching and research is entirely without basis. If some professors do actually interact with colleagues and students in a manner unbecoming their station, that is because they have been touched by the moral decay prevalent in larger society. It has nothing to do with their right to elect officers in their professional organizations and representatives on their university’s governing and regulatory bodies.

The bias against elections on campuses is merely a spillover from the bias against democratic politics common among administrators. The culture of democracy brings forth individuals who, instead of simply obeying orders, will ask questions, propose different ways of achieving professed goals, suggest new goals, and make a variety of demands. All of this makes life uncomfortable for rulers and their agents. It requires more work, patience, perseverance, and respect for the dissident on the part of administrators. It also calls for the painful exercise of innovative thinking, which those steeped in the bureaucratic mode dread more than anything else.

Yet, they must overcome this dread, and come to terms with the requirements of our democratic age, which cannot be wished, or even legislated, away. Administering a university is admittedly a difficult job, harder than running most other organizations, for it houses men of learning who, standing on their own ground and in the context of their institution’s mission, are-intellectually — the average administrator’s superiors.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

E-mail: syed.anwar@attbi.com

Killers strike again

EVERY incident of targeted or mass killing is followed by expressions of grief and never-again assurances by those whose duty it is to prevent such occurrences. Here is a sample of what some ministers and leaders had to say on the murder of nine Shias at the entrance to a house of worship in a suburb of Karachi a fortnight ago:

The terrorists will not be allowed to raise their heads again (as if they had ever bowed out) — Chaudhry Shujaat, the chief power broker; they will all be crushed with an iron hand — Sheikh Rashid, information minister, who must speak on all subjects except his own; the provincial government has been directed to make foolproof arrangements to prevent recrudescence of such mayhem during the Moharram mourning — Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat (all that he can do is to ask for reports); it is a conspiracy against the religious parties — Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani, president of a religious electoral alliance (MMA) which made big gains in October 10 election but his own party none.

Lastly, the man who is solely in charge of law and order, Sindh Chief Minister Mahar, has put every police official on notice to restore law and order in 90 days or else... Seen not to act, the inspector-general of police, without waiting for the chief minister’s ultimatum to expire, has suspended the SHO and DSP of the area where the murders took place.

The ministers and other leaders know well that their commiserations would neither assuage the anguish of the bereaved nor frighten the gunmen. They indeed were not, for four more sectarian murders quickly followed, all in Karachi, but the ministers did not even repeat the ritual for they were all engrossed in the Senate election sleaze. The killers, of course, escaped.

The chief minister’s determination to put an end to killings and serious crime would have instilled some confidence in the people and alerted the police as well were he to vow to quit himself at the end of 90 days. If lawlessness has indeed become intractable, he should be the first to quit for his failure to contain it.

While suspending the area police officials, the inspector-general should have known that no other officials would have been able to prevent this kind of macabre happening nor would their successors if the killers struck again. The IG’s action, like the avowals of the ministers, is thus intended more to appease the people than to pull up his own force.

The ministers see a foreign hand behind these murders as they did on such tragic occasions in the past. It might serve to lighten their burden of personal guilt or official responsibility but the problem which lies at the root of the mayhem continues to fester. For once our political and religious leaders should be frank enough to concede that it is not the foreign agents but our own indoctrinated zealots who murder the dissenters or adherents of what they consider to be heretical schools of thought.

They kill at home for their own salvation, and in quest of martyrdom when they go out to fight the infidels in foreign lands. Mercenaries also join in to inflate their ranks. These are the two faces of the same doctrine — the two sides of the same coin. The troublesome heretics at home deserve the same fate as the oppressing non-believers elsewhere.

The problem thus has to be tackled where it arises and not when it culminates in bloodshed. Trying to catch and punish the culprits has long been a futile exercise and will increasingly so remain. Commenting editorially on the Alfalah massacre, Dawn disclosed that 200 people were killed in 194 incidents in Karachi alone but only four were convicted over ten years. The countrywide picture would be grimmer.

The dogma which leads to intolerance of dissent is nurtured in mosques and madrassahs and later given a violent twist in public life in pursuit of political ends. The attempts by the government and civil society to make the mosques and madrassahs centres of learning and tolerance have been half-hearted and unsuccessful. Bigotry has mushroomed as have such institutions’ numbers.

The latest and most elaborate of the plans to change the environs of the madrassahs from parochial to liberal was announced by President Musharraf with great gusto when he was at the height of his power. He undertook to broaden the base of their education by adding to their syllabi the subjects secular and scientific. Scared by the resistance the move encountered, he scaled the plan down to mere registration. Even that did not happen. His relentless zeal which disfigured the country’s political and administrative scene withered when confronted by the clerics, as had his first ambition to reverse the tide of obscurantism and make Pakistan into another Turkey.

Changing his strategy, Musharraf then gratefully acknowledged the service the 8,000 odd madrassahs rendered to the community by imparting lessons and providing lodgings free of cost to half a million poor children and promised to provide computers and other modern teaching aids to them. There is little possibility of that coming about when many of the government’s own schools do not have even blackboards and jute mats for the squatting students. Musharraf’s plan to cleanse society of illicit weapons floundered as had his madrassah reforms. The weapons recovered, mostly given up voluntarily, were few and old, not worthy even of publicity stunts. Last to surrender would have been the militants. Religious fanatics, armed with unlicensed weapons and cruising in stolen or smuggled vehicles, thus continue to strike at will at any of the numerous places that the dissenting ones frequent at all hours. The police, as organized at present, are unable to stop them from attacking or catch them while fleeing. They operate with impunity.

Reliance on the police, or even the army, to put an end to religious or sectarian violence in general or, more precisely, targeted killings is wholly misplaced. The causes which give rise to it have to be addressed by the state and society together. The atmosphere is now conducive for this broad approach because the men of religion, so far a discontented and turbulent element on the fringes both of the state and society, are now full participants in both. The charge that, by and large, they had opposed the creation of Pakistan is also now lost in the mist of time. The secular (or the modernist) and the religious (or the orthodox) components of society now have to find a middle ground for coexistence leading to collaboration in governance.

The secularists should no longer insist that religion has nothing to do with the business of the state though its founder indeed had so imagined. On their part the religionists should not aim at making Pakistan a Taliban-like theocracy. In fact, a vast majority of the people already occupy the middle ground between the two extremities. If the Islamists have the support of 11 per cent of the population (that is the percentage of the votes polled by the MMA alliance in the last general election), the modernists who want religion out of public life altogether may be even fewer.

The time has thus arrived for both sections — the orthodox and the liberal — to work together to create a tolerant and peaceful society by isolating the extremists in their midst. The responsibility of the Islamist section would be greater for the killers operate on their fringes.

As a representative of Pakistan’s dominant liberal yet religious ethos Zafarullah Khan Jamali, from his position of power and influence, should take the lead in evolving a national consensus against persecution of anyone in any form for his religious beliefs or pursuits. Such a moral sanction by the community may work where the law and might of the state have not. This effort may be long-drawn but there is no alternative to it.

Meanwhile, the scattered manpower and other resources of the police need to be consolidated at fewer points to prevent not sectarian killing alone but all crime. The central feature of such a reorganization should be intelligence, fast communication and hot pursuit directed by a senior and trained commanders. The present police station meets none of these criteria, and its only spying arm (called special branch) has become a dumping ground for those who fall out of favour.