“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, and one who has seen its brutality, its futility and its stupidity.”

— Dwight Eisenhower

IT IS more than a week since the second Gulf war started and it has been a hard period for the Anglo-American forces in Iraq. The fond hope that Saddam Hussein’s regime would crumble in the early days of the war has disappeared in smoke. The Iraqis are putting up stiff resistance and inflicting unexpected casualties on the coalition forces.

Pentagon had hoped that by making a massive show of force — “shock and awe” — in the beginning of the campaign and by targeting top Iraqi leadership it might succeed in bringing down the regime without a prolonged fight. It also hoped that regular Iraqi army would surrender en masse. Neither has happened. Saddam Hussein, his sons and most of his top loyalists are alive and defiant, Iraqi army is by and large intact and its command and control system is still functioning.

The worrying development for the Anglo-American high command is that most of the casualties suffered by their forces so far have been inflicted by the Iraqis through guerilla tactics. The allied forces have now a long and tenuous supply line running from Kuwait which has, consequently, become quite vulnerable.

However, the Iraqi resistance has not been able to disrupt the thrust towards Baghdad where the decisive battle for the control of the capital may have already begun by the time these lines appear in print. Despite some setbacks, the coalition forces have achieved some remarkable successes in the past few days: they have secured key bridges that are carrying troops and armour towards Baghdad; they have captured and secured southern oilfields, preventing all but a few from being set ablaze by the Iraqis; and they have captured Iraq’s only deep-sea port of Umm Qasr which will allow them to bring in supplies, equipment and humanitarian aid more quickly.

The US planners had hoped that the Iraqi resistance would be considerably weakened during the thrust on Baghdad. That does not seem to have happened so far. The real war will centre on the Iraqi capital and the city’s fate will determine the outcome of the campaign.

Washington needs Baghdad intact so that it may wear the mantle of liberator, not of a destroyer. The Anglo-American forces will do their best to secure a quick and relatively bloodless surrender of Baghdad. They cannot afford a long siege, street fighting and heavy civilian casualties. The key issue before the Pentagon is: how to avoid the Stalingrad scenario. If the allied forces fail to force the surrender of Baghdad quickly and relatively bloodlessly, the war will enter a dangerous phase, with civilian and military casualties mounting to unacceptable levels.

If the street fighting and resistance in the port city of Umm Qasr is any indication, Saddam Hussein’s strategy appears to be to turn Baghdad into a modern-day version of Stalingrad. Facing a desperate war of survival, he intends to fight fiercely for his capital.

In one of his radio-television addresses before the start of the war, Saddam Hussein had reminded the United States of its debacle in Vietnam. He seems to be counting on American squeamishness, their over-reliance on technology and the outrage in the Muslim world and the international community over the destruction of Baghdad and unacceptable civilian casualties. His strategy appears to be to wait out a siege on Baghdad until the US is forced to give up and go home.

The current war in Iraq is being fought differently from the first Gulf War of 1991. There has been no lengthy opening air bombardment unlike the 39 days of Desert Storm which destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure. This time round the ground attack has preceded the “shock and awe” bombing; armoured columns have thrust deep into Iraq bypassing major population centres and leaving long tenuous supply lines to amble on. Two Anglo-American divisions are taking on almost a dozen Iraqi divisions which are less well-armed and are without any air cover.

Pentagon’s dilemma seems to be that its overwhelming military might is constrained by sensitive political considerations. The military strategy seems to be focused on one imperative: the Anglo-American forces must be seen as liberators and not occupiers and Iraqi people and infrastructure should be preserved. The military plan has so far unfolded combines a series of objectives: special forces seizing airfields and bridges; naval forces taking oil terminals; armoured thrust securing oilfields; and air power destroying the regime’s symbolic centres of power in Baghdad and disrupting command and control linkages. Whether the coalition forces will be able to avoid heavy military and civilian casualties in the battle for Baghdad remains to be seen.

General Tommy Franks has promised a war “unlike any in history, a campaign of precise munitions on a scale never before seen, and by the application of overwhelming force.” What he did not say openly but what is implicit in his war plan relates to a fundamental change in US war strategy: Pentagon has put aside the paramountcy of “risk aversion” that has dictated US war strategy ever since the Vietnam war. President Clinton called off the operation and withdrew the US troops from Mogadishu when 19 American soldiers lost their lives in the anarchy of Somalia in 1993.

The most important feature of this war is neither precision-guided weaponry nor armour thrust nor large-scale commando operation but a campaign of massive psychological warfare. Until the current Iraqi war, the main objective of “psy-war”used to be to weaken the enemy resistance. But the enormously ambitious aim of the current “psy-war” is to detach the Iraqi armed forces, including Republican Guards, from Saddam Hussein’s regime so that they do not resist the advance of American and British forces.

A big psy-ops campaign has been going on to encourage surrenders and non-resistance through leaflet drops and radio broadcasts. Prominent military and civilian leaders have been targeted by e-mail, cell phone and radio messages asking them to surrender or else. Messages beamed into TV broadcasts warn that any unit that “fights for Saddam” will be bombed very heavily and any officer responsible for the use of chemical or biological weapons will be put on trial as a war criminal.

At this stage it is difficult to say what impact this “psy-war” has had or will have in the coming days. But the fact remains that in the first week of war the number of Iraqi soldiers who have surrendered has not exceeded 4,000. Another objective of this “psy-war” is to convince the rest of the world that what is being done is right. To be fair to the Americans, wars have always had this component. Also, all wars have their audience, but this time the worldwide audience is being targeted with an unusually sophisticated understanding of the medium that will best convey the message The cable news channel has already become an effective weapon.

If the war bogs down on the outskirts of Baghdad, there will be many casualties along the way — truth will be one of them. Both sides will gear up for a massive propaganda campaign to obscure the military and political realities they face. If there is anything resembling popular resistance on the streets of Baghdad, it will not only be a huge political disaster for the Bush administration but also a major military risk for the American and British forces.

HOW to pick up pieces of the debris that the war in Iraq has strewn is the problem facing the humanity. Unquestionably, the image of the UN has been damaged. The world body which is supposed to uphold the independence of countries, however small, has been found wanting. It has been saddening to note that a determined, powerful state can take unilateral action and none can stop it from doing so.

Yet America has lost much more. Strong international denunciation of hostilities has been a stunning blow to its prestige. Here is a country trying to depict itself as a synonym for democracy has been exposed roundly. It has been discovered that Washington is devious, devilish and dictatorial when its perceived interests are involved. President Bush has negated all the traditions of liberty and the general equality of condition which the nation has been proudly building since the days of President George Washington.

It turns out that America deviously got the Security Council pass the resolution on Iraq (1441). The understanding was that it was confined to disarming the country. There was no authorization of the attack. But Washington acted otherwise.

France, Germany and Russia — the three permanent members of the Security Council — more or less said that they were hoodwinked. They have complained that the understanding given to them was that there would be another resolution if and when it came to war. It seems that even the UN secretary-general had the same impression when he recalled from Iraq the UN personnel and weapon inspectors.

However, Bush was never torn by any doubt. He was determined to attack Iraq, with or without the UN backing, from the beginning. The entire exercise by America in the Security Council and otherwise to take everybody along was a charade. The day when the US troops were ordered to go to the Middle East was the day when Bush decided to attack Iraq. This was long before the resolution was passed.

The high moral ground that America tried to occupy in the name of elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was sheer propaganda. No such weapon has been found. In fact, the American troops had started action without waiting for the final report of weapon inspectors, headed by Hans Blix. Even when it came to issuing the ultimatum it was not about the destruction of weapons. Nor was it about terrorism that bred on the Iraqi soil. Bush said that Saddam Hussein and his two sons must leave Iraq. The word, regime, was substituted later to sound impersonal.

Even after days of war, Washington does not feel any need for introspection. It was confident of riding the storm of protests. Public opinion, as the New York Times says, is a parallel superpower. But then the Bush administration does not bother about such things. It wants to serve its own interests, ranging from the control of oil to redrawing the map of the Middle East where Palestine is struggling only to have its entity back.

To cover up aggression, the US still calls the war against Iraq a pre-emptive strike. Nobody buys this argument. America is thousands of miles away from Iraq. Saddam is not even a viable opponent, much less a challenge. So Washington is a bit defensive. The debate is getting switched to legitimacy, not legality. The point made is that Washington may not have strictly followed the UN obligations but it has done what was necessary in view of the situation in Iraq.

Once again the UN is sought to be made relevant. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush’s Man Friday, has talked about the post-war scenario with the UN in the picture. Even US Secretary of State Powell has mentioned Iraq’s reconstruction under the UN charge. It is not yet known how far Washington wants the UN to be associated with Iraq after Saddam’s exit. One statement is that the American forces would control Iraq for two years.

The first thing that Washington has to do is to legitimize what it has done. The question of authorization of war does not arise. France and Russia have made it clear that they will veto any resolution that seeks to justify America’s unilateral action. It will be difficult to unravel the situation in the near future. The question facing the world is how to revive the prestige of the UN when Washington does not want to do anything to make up for the war.

This is a situation where a Jawaharlal Nehru is needed, not an Atal Behari Vajpayee who is willing to strike but afraid to wound. After saying that America’s war on Iraq was “without justification”, New Delhi has fallen silent. It does not want even to condemn America for not only violating the tenets of democracy and human rights but also killing and wounding thousands of innocent Iraqis, including women and children.

Pragmatism, the word used by the Indian prime minister, is a good policy to adopt when the issues do not suppress principles. Here, the question is that of naming the aggressor. Britain and France tried to appropriate the Suez Canal through their joint military action in 1956. But Prime Minister Nehru was able to shake the world’s conscience. So loud and wide was the criticism that both the powers had to withdraw from the Suez in humiliation.

What the Anglo-Saxon powers fail to understand is that the world has arrived at a stage when the attempt of forcible imposition of rule on any country or people will fail. In the present circumstances this will lead to a trend which no country, no people can escape. Resistance in the shape of terrorism of the worst type may emerge.

Washington should have recalled how Hungary during the cold war demonstrated that the desire for national freedom was stronger than any ideology and could not be suppressed. What happened in Hungary was not essentially a conflict between communism and anti-communism. It represented nationalism striving for freedom from foreign control. America has pitted itself against something similar in Iraq. A country, whatever its credentials or strength, has no right to tell the nationals of another country how to rule themselves.

In this context, I was shocked to hear the views of former Pakistan Foreign Minister Gauhar Ayub during a TV programme from Islamabad. He said that a big neighbour like India could do little in terms of military action against Pakistan which had its cantonments on the border and the troops at hand. India was handicapped because it had to bring its men from Ranchi and other far off places to station its force at the border. There was no need of dragging in India when the discussion was on America’s aggression against Iraq.

Gauhar, a political leader in Pakistan, could have suggested that the countries in the region should join hands to develop a viable defence against such powers which might be on the prowl after the war in Iraq. That the military junta in Pakistan is oblivious to such a development is unfortunate. But when a person who has been foreign minister and the speaker of the Pakistan National Assembly indulges in innuendoes like a gossipy old woman, it is a reflection on the political culture in Pakistan. eom

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.

“WIMPS go to Baghdad,” they say in neo-conservative circles in Washington. “Real men go to Tehran.” It sounds tough at dinner parties, and the macho intellectuals who talk like that never worry that genuinely hard men can overhear their silly chatter. But they can, and they are already taking measures to protect themselves. They live in Iran.

Iran’s Islamist government is split between the moderate reformers around President Mohammed Khatemi and the radical mullahs around Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but it is the mullahs who control the army and foreign policy. They are terrified by the imminent arrival of the US army on Iran’s western frontier, only a couple of hours’ drive from the country’s biggest oilfields, especially since President Bush has put Iran on his ‘axis of evil’ hit-list. So the more trouble the United States has in Iraq, the better.

The biggest problem facing an American occupation regime in Iraq is the fact that the Sunni Arab minority, only 17 percent of the population, has dominated the government and the army for generations. The Shia Arabs have been largely excluded from power and are relatively poor, but they are almost two-thirds of the population and in a democratic Iraq they would automatically dominate the government. The problem is that their sympathies lie with their fellow Shias in Iran, and a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad is not exactly what the US had in mind as an outcome to this war.

That prospect, even more than the threat of Kurdish separatism, is why the United States has frozen the exiled Iraqi opposition parties out of the post-war administration of Iraq. In the initial stages the US intends to rule Iraq through its own military government, replacing the top two layers of the existing civil administration with American generals and colonels. Since that administration is overwhelmingly Sunni, the Kurds and the Shia Arabs will be largely frozen out again — and the Shia will be especially unhappy about that.

The first President Bush incited both the Kurds of the northern Iraq and the Shia of the south to revolt against Saddam Hussein at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, but both groups were betrayed when US forces did not support them. The Kurds managed to hold on to most of the traditional Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and have been free from Saddam Hussein’s control for the past dozen years — but the Shia in the south were massacred and utterly crushed.

Thousands of Iraqi Shia fled across the frontier into Iran, where the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq took responsibility for their lives. SCIRI was founded twenty years ago at the height of the Iran-Iraq war under the patronage of the Islamic revolutionary government in Iran. It is led by Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who lives in exile in Tehran, and its purpose is to bring about an Islamic revolution, not a secular democracy, in Iraq.

SCIRI has an extensive underground network of support in the Shia parts of Iraq, and it has all the resources of the Iranian state behind it. The Badr Division, an army of up to 10,000 Shia fighters recruited from Iraqi refugees, has been poised just across the border for years. SCIRI has no intention of allowing the United States to rule Iraq even for a day: it will resist, and it will do so in a distinctively Shia way.

The Iranian revolution of 1978 was in some ways a precursor to the wave of non-violent democratic revolutions that has transformed the world in the past couple of decades, but it had a special Shia twist. — Copyright

AS US coalition planes rock Baghdad with deadly bombs, a new world emerges out of the debris of buildings and casualties of innocent civilians. This is a world where might is right and international law cannot guarantee the peace and sovereignty of any state.

In such a madhouse, it becomes critical for countries like Pakistan to review their status and national strength. When there is disorder, chaos, and uncertainty, the need for strong institutions becomes greater than ever. In this background, let us review where we stand as far as institutional governance of the country is concerned.

Today three organs of the state are in virtual paralysis. In the parliament, normal business cannot be carried out because all opposition members have joined hands to protest against the controversial Legal Framework Order (LFO), which the government quietly incorporated in the official copies of the Constitution without parliament’s approval. On March 8, the entire lawyer community boycotted the higher courts and was in protest against the Musharraf government’s decision to grant three years’ extension to judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts under the LFO, a move which is seen as an attempt to block an independent judge from assuming the chief justice’s office.

The lawyers hoisted black flags on the Supreme Court and High Court buildings. It is unfortunate that after three years of military rule, at the end of which Gen Musharraf had promised a return to true democracy and good governance, the crisis of governance and institutions has become deeper and far more complex.

The first building block for any society is justice. Justice in civilized societies is dispensed through judicial institutions. Therefore, for a healthy and democratic society, effective judicial institutions are a pre-requisite. A case was made against the Nawaz Sharif government that it had assaulted the Supreme Court and threatened its independent functioning. If we look at that period we find that barring that regrettable incident which had its own context, the Supreme Court was functioning quite independently, giving judgments against the government on important matters such as appointment of judges, anti-terrorist courts, military courts, and the 14th Amendment. Through Sajad Ali Shah’s decision on appointment of judges, it was believed that finally a solution had been found for appointment of judges in an independent and transparent manner. This euphoria was short-lived as the Musharraf government made appointments in gross violation of this judgment. [The Supreme Court decision on appointment of National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has also been flouted and the government continues to defy it.] Soon after the military takeover of October 1999 the judiciary was administered oath under the PCO (Provisional Constitution Order). Five senior most and respected judges of the Supreme Court resigned in protest. The PCO took away whatever power was still there with the judiciary to give independent judgments on constitutional matters.

Therefore, even when the Constitution is said to have been restored in the country, the judiciary has not been administered oath under the Constitution and they continue to perform their duties on an oath questionable in form and substance, creating a dichotomy in justice. The three-year extension in service granted to the judges of the Supreme Court and the high courts under the LFO has made the judiciary a co-beneficiary of the LFO, thereby compromising its position to hear any case against the order. A constitutional and judicial crisis has thus arisen with no forum left available to adjudicate on the constitutionality of the LFO.

The judicial manipulation did not end with the courts. On his retirement, Chief Justice Irshad Hasan Khan was appointed Chief Election Commissioner to ensure holding of polls in a certain way. Justice Tariq Mahmood, a member of the Election Commission resigned in protest when the government deprived ECP of its independent role. Today, the entire lawyer community is up in arms against the judicial high handedness of Musharraf government. Never before in the country’s history has lawyer community protested in a manner like it is doing today.

In the military government’s charge-sheet against the Nawaz government it was also alleged that the parliament had been denied its due role and that constitutional amendments were passed within minutes. [Both the 13th and 14th Amendments were passed unanimously with the consent of all political parties. Once there is consensus on the floor of the house on any matter, its passage becomes only matter of procedural compliance. A debate on these amendments could take place if someone had opposed them.]

Now we are in a situation where the government is not willing to concede to parliament its power to approve constitutional amendments. The opposition refuses to accept the government’s position and demands the restoration of the Constitution in its original shape of October 12, 1999. The result is that the treasury benches have taken oath under the LFO plus the Constitution while the opposition parliamentarians have taken oath on the Constitution as it was on October 12, 1999.

Thanks to Gen Musharraf, we do not even have a consensus on our Constitution. In the recent Senate elections, the whole nation saw how the upper house of parliament was constituted. On the eve of election, ISI hosted a dinner for legislators who had vowed to vote for official candidates. The PML-N’s parliamentary leader in the Punjab Assembly was also assigned to the same agency for teaching him a lesson. It is unfortunate that while our national security agency is being questioned in US Senate committee at the behest of the Indian lobby for its alleged drug business in Afghanistan, back home the ISI is being used for the tasks that were once the domain of the much condemned Federal Security Force (FSF).

The tale of the executive branch of the government is no different. Gen Musharraf, who claimed that after transferring power to the elected representatives that he would restrict himself to playing golf, is actively controlling the entire government machinery and policy-making. The national decision-making is in the hands of one individual, who likes to keep it that way. No doubt, it increase Gen Musharraf’s importance enormously but takes away the depth from the country’s strategic decision-making system.

The definition of what is politically correct is no longer allegiance to the Constitution or institutions; it is personal loyalty to Gen Musharraf. If you accept it then you can be exonerated of all acts of moral or financial corruption. The general likes to portray himself as the last defence line against forces of extremism in Pakistan and therefore the only person who can guarantee the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. This logic may win him some extra months in power but ruins the country’s image as a responsible nation. The result is that we face situations where we are pushed about at almost gunpoint.

Hundreds of military personnel have been inducted in all civil departments, whose allegiance is not to the civil government but to the chief of the Army staff. Pakistan faces serious security threats, which warrant that its military remains non-partisan and non-controversial.

Thanks to the doctoring by Gen Naqvi, the civil service of Pakistan is on a low morale and an exoduses of talent from this service has already taken place.

During earlier regimes and martial laws there may have been financial corruption. But no regime in our history has ever dared to engage in such blatant intellectual corruption like the present one. All military governments indulged in horse-trading but no one legalized it; all military governments tamed the judiciary but no one manipulated it like the present one; all military governments engineered elections but not like the last one which broke both the records and the scales of rigging in both referendums and elections.

The damage these acts of our rulers have inflicted on the ethos and psychology of the nation is unimaginable. The people look towards the Supreme Court and parliament for recourse, but do not realize that they are martyrs of Zarb-e-Musharraf, which we are playing since October 12, 1999. The same is the situation with our national institutions: parliament is LFO’s martyr and judiciary is PCO’s martyr; people look at their sessions and sittings and think they are alive. They are not.

We must not make individuals taller than our institutions. Only strong and working institutions can steer us through the turbulence of the coming times. Let the parliament debate and approve amendments in the Constitution. Let the judiciary perform its role under oath to the Constitution, and let the military focus on defending the geographic boundaries of the country for which they are raised and trained. There is no scope for governance by trial and error.

I conclude with passage from a book “Failed States” by Abdullahi Dool, a senior African diplomat: “In 1969, when military took over the running of the country (Somalia), they were inspired by the conviction that this was the time, after failure of the corrupt civilian administrations, for the continent’s ‘boys in military uniform’ to put right their countries’ wrongs and address their nations’ problems...

“They may have been more efficient than their predecessors but their solutions to problems were based on military doctrines occasionally with results akin to salt administered to wounds... In many parts of the world, especially in developing countries, when ‘son of a gun’ becomes a leader, he soon loses sight of what leadership is all about — which is to serve the people. In such countries, no sooner do these types come to power they become obsessed with self-promotion to the degree that the leader personifies everything: the country, the nation, the government, the spiritual leadership, etc.”

The writer is a former MNA and deputy chairman, planning commission under PML-N government.