THE US has unleashed its naked and unprovoked aggression against Iraq. No wars are strictly legitimate; however, this particular war stands bereft of any element of moral or political legitimacy. The UN had pointedly refused to sanction the resort to war. That it has been unable to prevail in the face of the US juggernaut does not minimize the importance of its stand. The UN and several world leaders have earned the respect of the people of the world and found a majestic place in history. The US may be feared but it commands little respect. Their leaders and their quisling allies stand condemned for their criminal action and will remain so in the eyes of history.

While US actions are deplorable, the state of the Muslim world is pathetic. It is noteworthy that the battle to protect Iraq and to deny the US international legitimacy for its aggression was led not by any Muslim country, but by non-Muslim France, Russia, Germany and China. By contrast, Muslim states have continued to dither. Qatar and Kuwait have provided hospitality to US troops and the approval by the Turkish parliament for US troops to use Turkish air space to bomb Iraq is indicative of dominos in the Muslim world to fall in the days to come.

The situation is reminiscent of a common scene from a National Geographic television programme. A lone tiger chases a hundred-plus strong herd of buffaloes, downs one of the unfortunate ones, and settles down for a sumptuous meal, with the rest of the herd continuing to shuffle their feet nervously and helplessly only a few score yards away. If the herd were to choose to stand together and counter-attack, it would be able to gore the tiger to death instead. But that is not how wildlife is ordained. The affairs of humankind are not ordained likewise; yet, the condition of Muslim states today appears to be similar to that of the buffaloes. They are likely to stand by and cower nervously and helplessly as the United States devours one of them, each one hoping and praying that they would be spared.

The Muslim elite, particularly the religious elite, is attempting to portray the unfolding scenario as the West’s assault on Islam. This is a mistaken notion and is likely to dissipate the energies of the Muslim world in the wrong direction. Essentially, the issue is not one of religion at all but of strategic economic and political interests.

The US does not have any inherent problem with Islam as a religion and its policy positions and actions are not at all formulated in religious terms. It had no problem with Christianity, when it shed Christian blood in Chile and Nicaragua. It had no problem with Buddhism when it shed Buddhist blood in Japan and Vietnam. It has shed Muslim blood in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine but, on the other hand, has also saved the Muslims of Bosnia from further bloodshed at the hands of the Christian Serbs.

The US has proceeded to commit aggression against Muslim Iraq without UN authorization, but there is a history of aggressive actions without UN approval against non-Muslim Vietnam, Panama and Grenada. The fact is that the US has shown no hesitation about violating international law whenever it suited its interests. With respect to Iraq and Palestine, it must be said that all Iraqis and Palestinians are not Muslims. George Habash, the most militant of the Palestinian leaders, was a Christian and so is Tariq Aziz, the most well known Iraqi leader after Saddam Hussein. Yet it has to be admitted, however, that US actions to date have ensured that the battle ground is being drawn along ‘West versus the Muslim world’ lines and its actions in the weeks ahead is likely to reinforce the polarization along those lines in the future. Rationality will be sacrificed and raw emotions will prevail.

That the United States wants to occupy Iraq for its oil is now certain. It has unleashed its firepower on a terrifying scale. The large-scale show of force is militarily unnecessary, but politically essential to reduce to submission all potential challengers to US authority. After all, Japan’s military might had been exhausted by mid-1945, but the use of nuclear weapons was as much an attempt to cut short the war as to send a message to the rest of the world that a new master had arrived on the world stage. That the message cost hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian lives was of no concern to US policy-makers and has never been so since then.

In fact, the pursuit of US interests has justified human destruction on any scale. It licensed the indiscriminate US bombardment of Vietnam with napalm and chemical bombs. It warranted the destruction of Cambodia, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia and the mass deaths that it entailed. And, in the words of a woman US cabinet member, it even made the deaths of a million children in Iraq “worthwhile.” The mortalities are brushed aside as mere ‘collateral damage.’

The proclivity of the US leadership and its capitalist elite to sacrifice human life at the altar of its interests can be traced to its early days. Its cruelty evidenced in the annihilation of the Red Indians is well documented. One aspect of this cruelty stands apart. Red Indian women were killed for their breast skin, which was used to make pouches. Breast pouches commanded a handsome price in those days, as it was considered fashionable among the elite to possess one. Subsequently, US capitalists perfected a military-supported market structure, where African communities were decimated as men and women were hunted and herded like animals and shipped to the US to serve as slave labour.

And for almost a century, the US economy thrived upon the sweat and blood of African slaves. The scale of human misery was unprecedented, as men and women were chained and whipped. Women slaves were used as concubines and their children were sold to different masters; thus tearing mother and child and brother and sister apart. Neither the Red Indians nor the Africans were Muslims.

The proclivity of the present-day US leadership and its capitalist elite to engage in human destruction to serve its self-interest is even greater today; thanks to the vastly enhanced firepower that it now commands. And for all their outward sophistication, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice quartet truly represents the moral equivalence of the breast-pouch makers and slave traders of yore. It should not be expected to have any moral qualms about engaging in any course of action to achieve its ends.

The United States of George Bush is prepared to bury the United Nations in the same way that Hitler’s Germany buried the League of Nations. Worse still, the US is even prepared to subvert the system of international law in the pursuit of its goals. Even truth is unlikely to be spared, as the US manipulates its domestic and international media to suppress and distort the news that does not serve its interests.

The emerging scenario can easily be visualized. Given US superiority, the war is certain to be short and decisive. A US-controlled administration is like to be set up in Baghdad. OPEC is likely to become irrelevant as the US Department of Energy dictates oil production levels and prices. Low and stable oil prices is likely to boost US and oil-consuming economies at the expense of oil-producing states. Washington is likely to turn the tables and use the oil weapon against the oil-producing countries. It is likely to use low oil prices as a means to subvert the economies of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The defeat of the Muslim world is likely to be complete.

However, the onus of responsibility lies as much on the Muslim states as on the United States. After all, the United States has been acting in pursuit of its self-interest, howsoever reprehensibly. The question is: have the Muslim states been acting in pursuit of their national self-interest? The unfortunate answer appears to be in the negative.

By and large, the response of the Muslim governments to the US aggression has been insipid. The Arab summit collapsed amidst internal bickering and name-calling and the Organization of Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement adopted hollow resolutions. Muslim leaders and generals have all been paper tigers subsisting on bombast. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser thundered threats at Israel, but humbled himself in less than a week. General “Tiger” Niazi roared that Indian tanks will pass over his dead body, but meekly handed over his arms and his medals over to the victorious Indian general. Saddam Hussein called the 1991 war with the US the ‘mother of all battles’, but failed to give a fight and was forced to accept a humiliating inspections regime.

The fact of the matter is that nearly all Muslim states are iniquitous and unjust societies, with governments that are monarchies or military dictatorships with a narrow power base among the traditional military, landed, business, and religious elite. With the rare exception of a handful of countries, say Malaysia, almost all Muslim states are ruled by repressive regimes and are at war with their own peoples. They have built up their military forces that are fit for ceremonial parades and for conquering their own people. They desperately need US support to survive and to save them from the people. This perhaps explains how the US is always able to so easily manipulate Muslim governments to serve its purposes.

These elites have built palaces and palatial houses and mosques and mausoleums instead of universities and centres of learning. They have kept their people in hovels, locked in illiteracy and ignorance. That the Muslim world is today no match for the scientific and technological prowess of the US is not at all surprising. If the Muslim world is to find a dignified place for itself in the world order, it will first have to establish a domestic order that ensures a dignified place for its citizens. This will require the establishment of social welfare states with truly democratic regimes. And this will, per force, necessitate the sweeping away of the traditional military, landed, business, and religious elite that are today tied to US apron strings.

DOCTRINE, it is said, never survives the battlefield unscathed. The strikes aimed at killing Saddam Hussein probably cannot be counted as a true example of that proposition, since the theory of precision weapons does lay down that they are only as good as the intelligence which provides the target, coupled with the speed with which fire is brought to bear.

But they certainly represent the first of the tests of the American and British armed forces, their governments and their doctrines of war at every level, which this conflict will bring. Such doctrines go all the way from the smallest unit in the desert to the command staffs, and beyond them to governments pondering, as they will as soon as the violence ends, what will be the best course, whether military or non-military, in conflicts to come.

President Bush’s ultimatum cited the new national security strategy, first outlined in January 2002, to the effect that, in an age when weapons of mass destruction are increasingly available, waiting to act after the enemy has “struck first is not self-defence, it’s suicide”. Critics have pointed out that the new doctrine blurs the distinction between pre-emption, which implies an imminent threat, and prevention, which implies more distant dangers.

The doctrine, as so far advanced, also tends to stress military rather than non-military solutions, and unilateral rather than multilateral decisions about the seriousness of threats. Although it does not neglect containment and deterrence, it pushes them down the list. Taken to the extreme, it would seem to allow one country, the US, to attack others at will if it deems them to represent a future rather than a present threat — and it might also encourage other countries to take pre-emptive action of the same kind in their neighbourhoods.

The administration repudiates such sweeping interpretations and seems genuinely convinced that this is a big idea which justifies the Iraq war and will be a key to action for years to come. Much of the rest of the world disagrees, either on the general principle, or on its application to Iraq, deeming the doctrine cover for other motives. In the most immediate sense that doctrine will be tested as it becomes clear what Iraq does possess in the way of weapons of mass destruction.

For the doctrine to be justified to any extent, there must be evidence that Iraq does have substantial stocks, and, equally important, that evidence must not take the form either of the effective use of such weapons against our troops or their transfer to terrorists who could use them in our home countries. The stocks, and any information on serious continuing weapons programmes, would show a degree of real threat, which would go some way to justifying the doctrine in principle. Even if the stocks are very substantial, that would not prove, of course, that the Iraqi regime planned to use them or could not have been deterred by means short of war. But it might nevertheless change the minds of many people across the world.

The completion of the military campaign without such weapons — assuming they exist in some quantity — being effectively used or transferred, would justify the doctrine at the level of execution. It would in other words show that the US had developed the military means to deal with an enemy, or at least this particular enemy, without its action leading to disaster rather than disarmament. To develop the capacity to paralyse an enemy and the speed and flexibility to get in sufficiently close to inhibit the use of weapons of mass destruction has been a preoccupation of reformers inside and outside the American services throughout the ‘90s.

Major-General Robert Scales (author of ‘Yellow Smoke’, a new book on such requirements) stresses the weight of firepower, and the speed and especially the cunning of manoeuvre. The British military theorist of the ‘30s, Basil Liddell Hart, who advocated the “indirect approach”, slicing through the enemy to cut up his nervous system, is an inspiration for such officers. What Scales calls the “new American style of war” has to be both fast and indirect, for the consequences otherwise could be horrendous.

Such wars now demand not just victory but the right kind of victory. The forces entering Iraq, including the British ones, which are widely praised by military reformers here, have some of these qualities, but far from all of them. “They are halfway between the dinosaurs and the next stage of evolution,” according to a senior army officer involved in joint strategic planning. That they will win is not in doubt, but whether they are sufficiently evolved to do the job in the clever way men like Scales recommend is another matter.

The broadest test of doctrine will come after the war. Even assuming that it has passed the lesser tests in Iraq, the question will be whether it is useable or acceptable in other situations. Bush’s linking of Iran and North Korea with Iraq has led to fears that the US might contemplate pre-emptive wars against them. Some see an endless progression of such wars, stretching into the future, whenever the US sees, or thinks it sees, a danger of proliferation or of weapons being transferred to terrorists.

But there is a uniqueness about the Iraqi case which makes such a sequence less than automatic. First, Iraq is ruled by a particularly evil regime and one which has defied UN resolutions, neither of which is true of Iran, while, with North Korea, there is an element of haplessness to an admittedly dire regime. Second, both North Korea and Iran could soon have much more in the way of weapons of mass destruction than Iraq has, making attacks on either a far more serious proposition.

There is much to suggest that other forms of pressure would be not just preferable to a military solution, but that a military solution would be too risky for any American government, including this one, to contemplate. That said, the Bush administration clearly hopes that victory in Iraq will make Iran and North Korea readier to bend to American concerns.

Principles of pre-emption and prevention, in the broader and indisputably justifiable sense of dealing with threats in their early stages, were the subject of much attention during the last decade. In humanitarian intervention, in preparing for crop failures, refugee flows, and natural disasters, in environmental protection, or in military planning, they are hardly objectionable.

Military pre-emptive doctrine will survive Iraq, in particular if its contradictions are cleared up and if the rules for intervention are subject to genuine multilateral discussion. But in the particular form that the Bush administration has proposed it, this may prove to be a one-war doctrine, even if that war goes very well, a doctrine tailored for Iraq and only distantly relevant to other situations.—Dawn/Guardian Service.

IN Time Square in New York, people were hugging each other as they heard their commander-in-chief and president, George Bush Jr. announce the start of military action in Iraq. He spoke with devotional gravity, a much favoured style, as opposed to, say, Mark Anthony’s rabble-rousing oratory.

I have no doubt that people in Tel Aviv too would have been hugging each other. I’m not so sure about Piccadilly Circus in London, though Tony Blair in Downing Street may have raised a glass in good cheer. The logic of the war is simple. George Bush wants to turn Iraq into a heaven of freedom. Who can argue with such a lofty goal, indeed a devout mission? The Iraqi people may object but who are they to stand in the way of an ordained force?

Too bad the United States (and Tony Blair and that Johnny- come-lately, the prime minister of Spain) could not cobble a moral majority at the United Nations but there exists a coalition of the willing, at least count of 30 countries which includes Afghanistan, Albania, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, countries that most Americans would find impossible to locate on a world map. Others too will join up, I have no doubt.

A quarter of a million combat troops, supported by aircraft and naval ships make up the first wave of assault on Iraq. Their numbers can be increased, if needed. Wow! Truly the mighty have might on their side. As in Afghanistan, no one doubts that the war will be won. What about the peace? It depends on what we mean by peace. There is talk of rebuilding Iraq as there was talk about rebuilding Afghanistan.

So far all that has happened in Afghanistan is that there has been a regime change though the writ of the new regime does not run beyond Kabul and the warlords are back in business, if they ever went out of business. Actually the war in Afghanistan was not meant to be a war at all. Afghanistan just got in the way of those hunting for Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan itself became collateral damage.

Imagine having to bomb Chicago in order to get Al Capone. Al Capone was betrayed by his girl friend and the FBI was able to nab him. In the case of Osama bin Laden, a war had to be declared against terror and Osama is still at large and seems to conveniently pop up and then disappear.

Tony Blair was being credited with persuading George Bush Jr. to take the UN-route and acquire some sort of legitimacy for war in Iraq. But this route was damned from the onset. The United Nations Security Council was expected to merely rubber-stamp its approval. The proceedings were meant to be a charade. Someone in the British Foreign Office had not done his homework.

In the United States, consent can be manufactured, hysteria can be easily whipped up. Take the case of Manuel Noreiga. He worked for the CIA. He was “our kind of a son of a bitch.” By any definition he was a minor thug. He fell foul of his masters and was suddenly transformed into a monster. He posed an imminent danger through narco-trafficing. He had to be sorted out.

This time too the cause was just and Panama was invaded and Noreiga was ‘captured’. The world had been saved, yet again. Tony Blair seriously misread the British mood which cannot be manipulated as easily. The last ditch effort to revive the Middle East peace process by providing roadmaps was greeted by howls of derision.

George Bush Jr. announced it without any enthusiasm at all leaving no one in doubt that it was not meant to be taken seriously. Tony Blair, on the other hand, all but leapt out of his bath-tub like Archimedes and shouted Eureka. It would have been pathetic had it not been so cynical. Tony Blair probably sees himself as a latter-day Churchill. The first casualty of end of World War-2 was Churchill. He was booted out by the British public in the General Elections.

Writing in the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting makes an appraisal of Tony Blair: “There is a brief moment now before our attention shifts to the agonizing witness to war for some questions as to who exactly is this man who has led us into such a catastrophic cul-de-sac. How could a man of his apparent intelligence have made such a misjudgment? How could have that nice man got us into such a messy war?

“There is little consensus: What counts as reckless to some is astonishing courage to others; what is vainglorious posturing to some is far-sighted statesmanship to others. But what all agree is that he is not the man they believed him to be. Above all, we had him down as wanting to please everyone, the consensual politician, approval seeking, dependent on fickle opinion polls. Instead, we are witnessing a political tightrope act of gob-smacking brinkmanship: how could we have so misjudged the man.”

As for John Howard, Australia’s prime minister, it is not clear whether he is simply following Tony Blair, cricket playing cousins, or he has an independent line to George Bush Jr. He has needed no blandishment, no arm-twisting to commit Australian troops to the war in Iraq. A highly respected social commentator Hugh Mackay, has a pretty low opinion of John Howard and he writes, scathingly: “Having so resolutely ignored the mind and mood of the Australian people, you seem destined to go down is history as the prime minister who made us feel ashamed of being Australians.”

We will follow the war on television, already the war correspondents in battle-fatigues are bringing the war into our homes. Unfortunately, unlike cigarettes, which come with a health warning, these reports are meant to be factual though not necessarily truthful. Not only are these reports heavily censored but a spin is put on them: that the coalition armies are not invading Iraq but liberating it.

There will be no mention that this is an illegal war being waged without the consent of the United Nations and in defiance of international public opinion. When the war will be won, then may be the time to ask: what has been won. Meanwhile, a search for a new enemy, a new monster will have begun. T.S. Eliot was wrong: the world will end with a bang and not a whimper, as he had believed.

IN this space two weeks ago, I suggested that a new world order is emerging which it seems will be built on three pillars: non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; America’s resolve to defend its interests by striking pre-emptively even if it is unable to obtain the support of other countries; and an aggressive campaign to have all countries accept that popular democracy is the only effective way of providing good governance to the citizens. How does Pakistan fare if these are to be the defining attributes of a new global system?

We must recognize that we face a number of risks in finding a place for ourselves in this new environment. We are a declared nuclear power with reasonably sized arsenal of what have come to be called weapons of mass destruction. We have a segment of the population, whose numbers are probably increasing, who do not accept today’s and tomorrow’s global order. Some of them are Islamic fundamentalists committed to imposing their beliefs on others, both inside and outside the country, certainly in some of the countries around our neighbourhood and even those that are a little bit beyond. And we are in the process of evolving a political system that the West has still to accept as fully democratic.

In all three areas we have to demonstrate that we have the conviction, the determination and the political path that is not only correct but would lead us quickly into the core of the global community. This journey should not be undertaken in fear of retribution — not because any other road will be the road to perdition. It has to be taken because it is in our national interest to do so. How should we proceed?

Let me first deal with the obligations imposed on Pakistan having become a recognized nuclear power. When in May 1998 Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif decided to explode a series of nuclear devices to match those tested a few weeks earlier by India, Pakistan had to live with a series of stiff economic sanctions. Unlike Iraq, which is still suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction and North Korea which has admitted that it is in active pursuit of such weapons, Pakistan’s advance in the nuclear area was grudgingly accepted. But that acceptance came with some obligations. It was understood that the Pakistani authorities would not allow the security of the weapons they had developed to be compromised in any way.

There was also an assumption that the country’s nuclear arsenal would be used as a deterrent but not for tactical purposes. That assumption was put to the test in the winter of 2001-02 when war seemed imminent between Pakistan and India. There were veiled threats from the Pakistani leadership that in a moment of extreme desperation when the country’s survival seemed at stake, Islamabad had the right to use all the devices available to it to protect itself.

As the terrorist threat to the United States did not ease with the demise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and as fears mounted that some remnants of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups may be in search for the means for bringing about mass destruction, Washington became less willing to be tolerant of any further spread of nuclear weapons. That the greater threat to the security of America was the possibility of terrorists acquiring the know-how to make nuclear bombs was recognized formally in the national security strategy document made public by the White House in September 2002. The US now reserved for itself the right to strike pre-emptively in case it feared that a threat existed to its security.

It is in this uneasy environment that Islamabad has to handle its nuclear capability. The 2001-02 near-war with India appears to have persuaded the West, including Washington, that a much weaker Pakistan is justified to keep its nuclear arsenal to counter the much greater conventional military strength of India. But, at the same time, Islamabad will have to demonstrate on a continuous basis that it has the ability to protect its arsenal and there is no prospect at all of the weapons it possesses of falling into wrong hands.

The challenge Pakistan faces as a fresh entrant to the nuclear club is posed by the fact that it is a Muslim country. The nervousness produced by a large Muslim nation such as Pakistan going nuclear is compounded by the story Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told in his posthumously published work, ‘If I am assassinated.’ In that book, written from his death cell in Rawalpindi’s jail, Bhutto claimed that his decision to provide Pakistan with the expertise to produce nuclear weapons was motivated by his desire to provide the world of Islam with such a weapon. Following his disclosure, Pakistan’s bomb became the Islamic bomb.

Pakistan’s position as an owner of a nuclear arsenal of some size became even more problematic as its neighbour, Iran, another Muslim country, began to systematically leak information that it had created the capability of enriching uranium. This is the route Pakistan had taken earlier to develop nuclear bombs. Iran chose well the time to go public with that information. It was done while Washington was preparing to launch a war against Iraq in the belief that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Iran’s policy-makers seemed to have come to the conclusion that if their quest for nuclear arms was conducted in a relatively open and non-secretive environment and since it had never used the weapons of mass destruction in any situation, including in its long and bloody war against Iraq, its programme may not lead to an open confrontation with the United States.

According to several analysts, Iran had also drawn some lessons from the way America had responded to the challenge posed by North Korea. “A clerical consensus has developed: if Saddam Hussein had had the bomb, the mullahs agreed, America would not have kicked him out of Kuwait. Thus, if Iran could develop an atomic bomb, it would not have to worry about the Americans one day doing to it what they had just done to Iraq,” wrote Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based conservative think-tank with strong ties with the administration of President George W. Bush.

Iran had started on its programme to develop nuclear capability about the time Pakistan had begun its efforts. The programme was derailed in 1979 by the Islamic revolution. After Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980, many Islamic clerics who had regarded the Shah’s programme as waste of money began to reconsider. But it was America’s easy eviction of Iraq from Kuwait that finally turned the debate and appeared to have accelerated Iran’s quest for nuclear arms. If it succeeds in this mission it will pose a challenge for Pakistan not because another neighbour would have equipped itself with nuclear weapons but because another Muslim country had now acquired this capability.

The second pillar on which the new world order is being constructed to which Pakistan has to be responsive is the West’s determination to circumscribe, if not totally eliminate, the activities of such stateless organization as Al Qaeda. America is prepared to act pre-emptively to achieve that objective. The decision taken by General Pervez Musharraf to openly and aggressively side with America within a few days of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, had received a great deal of applause from Washington and its western allies.

However, the West discovered that democracy cannot always be trusted to produce the results it likes. The Pakistani elections of October 2002 led to the emergence of the MMA as a powerful political force opposed to America’s expanding influence, particularly in the Muslim world. The MMA’s political prominence also created the impression that Pakistan’s resolve may have weakened and that it may not be pursuing the remnants of Al Qaeda with the kind of determination expected of it by America.

These doubts were put to rest, albeit not completely, by the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on March 1 from his safe house in Rawalpindi. Reports had begun to appear in the American press within a couple of weeks of Mohammed’s capture that the Al Qaeda was rapidly disintegrating as a force that seriously threatened America’s security.

According to Peter J. Gross, a member of the US House of Representatives, a former CIA case officer and now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “The tide has turned in terms of Al Qaeda. We’re at the top of the hill.” The materials recovered from Mohammed’s house included computers, telephones and paper records that provided the American intelligence agencies with valuable leads.

Mustafa Ahmad Al-Hawsawi, a 34-year old Saudi citizen and one of the men captured with Khalid Mohammed, had knowledge of sleeper cells in the United States and how they were being funded. According to FBI Director, Robert Mueller, Al-Hawsawi is “a big cog in the machine that moves Al Qaeda money around the world” and the information gathered from him will lead to a number of organizations that have mobilized funds from the various Muslim diasporas in the West and funnelled them into stateless terrorist organizations in various Muslim countries.A number of Muslim charities in the United States have already been targeted, including the Chicago-based Benevolence International Foundation, one of the biggest Islamic charities in America.

All this has implications for Pakistan, a populous Muslim country with three large diasporas in the Middle East, Britain and North America and with a very large flow of remittances from these communities back to the homeland.

The State Bank of Pakistan has done an impressive job in moving these remittances from informal to formal channels. In doing so, it has been able to add impressively to the build-up of foreign reserves to support the economy.

It is critical for the future of Pakistan’s economic and financial development that Islamabad develops a regulatory system which clearly demonstrates that our financial system is run on the basis of sound and internationally accepted standards and is not subject to misuse by the people determined to inflict harm on the governments and the people they despise.

The third pillar of the international order being born as these words are written is the requirement that political systems in all countries, developed and developing, Islamic and non-Islamic will be run on democratic lines.

It is the strong belief in the western world that democracies do not countenance terrorism since terror as a weapon is wielded only by those who choose to operate outside the legal framework of the country in which they reside. Democracies do not allow this kind of behaviour.

In sum, the international system will have a number of clearly defined principles world’s nations will be expected to follow. This is particularly the case for the countries in the Muslim world from where a series of devastating terrorist attacks were recently launched.