THE US-British attack on Iraq has led to charged emotions in the United Arab Emirates also, and last Friday something unusual happened in Dubai. The peaceful emirate, which has no tradition of street demonstrations or public protests, was the scene of a march by more than 10,000 people who peacefully, but passionately, expressed their sentiments against the war.

There was an element of spontaneity to the demonstration. At about 7pm, people started coming from different streets and gathered near the Abu Bakr Al Siddique mosque and marched through Muraqqabat Street in the Deira area. According to many participants, they joined the march after responding to SMS messages, phone calls and faxes.

It was a multi-racial procession that included local and other Arabs and also a large number of Asian and European expatriates. Police was present along with an anti-riot squad.

The procession returned to the Abu Bakr Al Siddique Mosque where special prayers were said to end the suffering of the people of Iraqi.

WASHINGTON: Even the increasingly hawkish Washington Post could not help the journalistic equivalent of a wink. “The United States welcomed the kingdom of Tonga the other day as the 49th member of its ‘coalition of the willing’ for the war in Iraq, a club that includes many of the smaller of the 191 member states of the United Nations,” it wrote.

With a population of just over 100,000 — less than 20 per cent of the total population of Washington, D.C. — the South Pacific island chain has no army and no navy, but, never mind that. Many of the 48 nations that now stand “shoulder-to- shoulder” with the United States in its bid to “disarm Iraqi President Saddam Hussein” do not have much in the way of military throw-weight.

Such irreverence aside, the notion that President George W. Bush has assembled a mighty “coalition of the willing” to battle for the disarmament of Iraq and the removal of Saddam has become a standing joke in wartime Washington, no matter how seriously Bush and his top officials seem to take it.

“We’ve got a huge coalition,” Bush responded, somewhat defensively to a question about the lack of support from traditional allies France, Germany, and Turkey.

The first Gulf War, unlike this one, had the authorization of the UN Security Council and the active military participation of 34 countries, but somehow Bush and his top advisers think that they have pulled off an unprecedented diplomatic coup in lining up such military and political heavyweights as Angola, Bulgaria, Honduras, and Palau, whose population stands at about 18,000.

“Nearly 50 nations are committed to ridding Saddam Hussein’s regime of all its deadly, destructive and illegal weapons,” Condelezza Rice asserts with the solemn tone of determination and gravitas that the administration has been expounding for months.

“To put this in perspective, the combined population of coalition countries is approximately 1.23 billion people (not including Tonga’s 105,000), with a combined gross domestic product of approximately $22 trillion. These countries are from every continent on the globe, representing every major race, religion, and ethnicity in the world.”.

Say what?

In fact, as pointed out in a new report by Washington-based ‘Foreign Policy in Focus’, the countries listed by the White House as part of the coalition represent a combined population of less than 20 per cent of the globe, and while every continent is represented, the representation of some continents is, to say the least, rather sparse.

South America, for example, is represented exclusively by Colombia, whose embassy, when contacted by a US newspaper, was not aware it was on the list.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the “coalition of the willing” consists of Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Of those, only El Salvador has offered anything beyond a “statement of support”, namely de- mining and possibly peacekeeping aid.

The countries of the English-speaking Caribbean, which were drafted by Washington as part of another “coalition of the willing” in its 1982 invasion of Grenada, have escaped the list altogether so far.

In Africa, Angola, a major supplier of oil to the US and major supplicant at the World Bank and the IMF, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda have all signed up with “statements of support” and nothing more.

In Asia, Washington counts among the “willing” Afghanistan (whose president is still guarded by US military contractors), Japan, Mongolia, the Philippines, and South Korea, although the South Korean parliament, still furious with Washington’s refusal to sit down with North Korea over its threatening nuclear weapons, has thus far rebuffed efforts by the new government to send engineers and medics to the Gulf.

Most countries on the list are European, and about half a dozen are providing real military support to the estimated 325,000 US troops who have been deployed to Iraq. Of course, Britain is providing 45,000 of its own troops, while Australia — whose diplomatic clout helped enlist half a dozen South Pacific island-states, including Tonga, into the coalition — has sent 2,000 of its soldiers, sailors, and pilots.

As noted by Rice, Poland has contributed some commandos, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have sent several hundred anti-chemical warfare specialists, and a few Danish and Spanish warships are in the area.

Such contributions are noteworthy, but hardly compare with the number and level of participation of the 1991 coalition, which, unlike the new Gulf War, also coughed up some $60 billion to defray Washington’s war expenses.

The administration is also right to point out that a number of Arab countries are co-operating but, with the exception of Kuwait, prefer to keep their names off the official list for fear of angering their publics, which overwhelmingly oppose the war.

That’s another aspect of the list that the administration would prefer not to talk about. As noted by the FPIF, public sentiment for the war in virtually all of the coalition countries is overwhelmingly opposed. Only in the United States and Israel — which is not included on the list for obvious reasons — is public support greater than 50 per cent.

In Turkey, whose parliament rejected US requests to base invading soldiers on its territory, public opinion against the war is greater than 90 per cent.

The FPIF study also found that more than one-third of the countries on the White House list were considered “not free” or only “partially free” on the latest Freedom House Index, which the administration uses to assess whether poor countries qualify for US aid.

Two dozen countries — or virtually half of the “willing” — are considered by Transparency International to have significant levels of corruption, another factor that may have made it easier for the US to enlist statements of support strong enough to make the list.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.

Fateh Mohammad Malik’s new book on Allama Iqbal, Islamic Political thought — a Reconstruction, could not have come at a more appropriate time: The Muslim world is faced with a multiple dilemma. It wants to help Iraq but cannot; the Muslim masses are seething with impotent rage against the naked aggression; their rulers cannot even bleat in feigned anger to appease them in some way. They are trapped between the devil and the deep; the dichotomy between the rulers and the ruled is explosive. The contradiction between Islam and Muslim politics that Iqbal had pointed out has come to the fore. It demands urgent resolution if a greater crisis is to be avoided for those who called themselves the civilized world and happen to be the present day rulers of the world stand totally exposed. The law of the jungle now rules the roost.

Giving reasons for piecing together Iqbal’s political thought from various sources and bringing it out in a fresh volume, Fateh Mohammad Malik says “the world is overtaken by a sentiment of fear and disillusionment today — both in the Muslim and Western worlds. It is important to reopen the lines of communication within the Muslim world and between the Muslim and Western worlds. Reverting to Iqbal’s ideas could provide a good starting point to re-establish such a dialogue. The time has probably come that we look at these ideas afresh.”

Prof Malik has a point there as many now see the infamous ‘clash of civilizations’ actually taking place. The would-be victims, all Muslims, have been identified, and some even dubbed as rogue states that need to be tamed or ‘evil’ that must be eliminated. Given the radical and ground breaking nature of Iqbal’s political ideals, powerful lobbies in the Muslim world were also at work to suppress his thought. His dynamic influence on the contemporary affairs of the Muslims was resented by those whose vested interests were in conflict with his rediscovery of the original spirit of Islam.

In his time Iqbal found the world of Islam at the climax of political decay and intellectual stagnation. Decadence itself had become a source of inspiration for them. Iqbal believed that Islam could still create a new world provided the superb idealism of Islam was emancipated from the “mediaeval fancies of the theologians and legists”. “Spiritually we are living in a prison house of thoughts and emotions which during the course of centuries we have woven round ourselves”, he said. He perceived change as one of the greatest signs of God. He impressed upon the Muslim world that the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam was the eternal that revealed itself in variety and change. A society based on such a conception of reality must reconcile in its life the categories of permanence and change. It must possess eternal principles to regulate its collective life, for the eternal gave us a foothold in the world of perpetual change. But eternal principles when they were understood to exclude all possibilities of change tended to immobilize what was essentially mobile in its nature.

In Iqbal’s view the main cause of degeneration of the Muslim polity was the hold of Muslim kings that they exercised through the “myth-making Mulla” and the “life denying and fact-avoiding mysticism.” Iqbal’s dynamic thought bars all stultifying forces whether they be monarchies or theocracies or dictatorships from any role in Muslim society. Islam has the potential to unleash the progressive and dynamic forces in a society and religion is a liberating force. This is Iqbal’s defining position which is anathema to all power wielders.

The essence of “Tawhid” as a working idea is “equality, solidarity and freedom”. The state, from the Islamic standpoint, is an endeavour to transform these ideal principles into space- time forces. The key purpose of Islam is to create a society that holds all people, irrespective of their religion and nation, in high esteem and respect. There is no aristocracy in Islam. There is no privileged class, no priesthood, no caste system. This principle of equality made early Muslims the greatest political power in the world. Islam worked as a levelling force. It gave the individual a sense of his inner power; it elevated those who were socially low.

Iqbal saw Islam as a liberating influence for the dispossessed masses. It could not be that a religion that devolved power to the powerless would vest political power in the hands of a select minority. For Iqbal it was difficult to reconcile a liberal and progressive moral charter with a selective and conservative political order. This clearly points to Islam’s preference for a democratic polity through the principle of elections. It is interesting to note and may be surprising for some that Iqbal declared Islam to be a “civil society” much before the term gained currency in recent times. But despite having such a democratic and civil disposition, the world of Islam today is a totalitarian landscape from one end of the globe to the other. So much so that the racist Israeli regime is considered to be a lighthouse in the dark ocean of Arabia.

An unbridgeable chasm seems to separate the political ideal and reality of Islam. Of the forty-six or so of Muslim countries, Fateh Mohammad Malik laments, only a handful are democratic in form, and that too, only procedurally. Nowhere in the world is the democratic deficit so huge as in the Muslim world. Had Muslims listened to Iqbal and tried to understand and implement his political interpretation of Islam, the white man would not have had the need today to stage its “shock and awe” show in Iraq to pulverise it to a democratic heap of his liking.

In his new year message broadcast from the Lahore radio station on January the first, 1938, he lamented that “in every corner of the earth, the spirit of freedom and the dignity of man are being trampled underfoot in a way to which not even the darkest period of human history presents a parallel”. He closes his message on the assertion that “only one unity is dependable, and that unity is the brotherhood of man, which is above race, nationality, colour or language. So long as men do not demonstrate by their actions that they believe that the whole world is the family of god, they will never be able to lead a happy and contented life and the beautiful ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity will never materialize.”

Those who heard Senator Farhatullah Baber of the PPP speak on Tuesday in the upper house while taking part in the debate on Iraq war were full of praise for the way Baber put across his views on Pakistan’s foreign policy. There was nothing new in what he said but it was the way he said it that made people sit up and listen to him with rapt attention. His choice of words, his pauses and the arguments he used to present his case against the army and its all pervasive involvement in governance were simply devastating. Even the staunchest PPP detractors were heard commending Baber on speech.

Senator Baber has been a civil servant, a journalist, press secretary to prime minister Benazir Bhutto in her second government and finally her party’s spokesperson. He is, therefore, well known among the country’s press circles. Taking advantage of this, he came up into the press gallery after he had spoken and met individually as many journalists as he could and repeated for the benefit of each in a nutshell what he had said in his speech.

And he also took advantage of the opportunity to record a special complaint of his own against a number of newspapers which, he said, had published the same allegations again and again put out with a lot of media glitz by NAB almost on a monthly basis against Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari but did not use with the same frequency the rebuttals issued by his party every time such an allegation was published. One tended to agree with him. And what is even more inexplicable is the fact that after having won bail in all the cases that he is being tried for, Asif continues to remain behind bars. Perhaps his continued incarceration provides the needed justification to NAB for its existence.

In one way it was the PPP’s day in the Senate on Tuesday as two other senators from the party who participated in the Iraq debate made highly impressive debuts. The first one was Senator Akber Khawaja, a former World Bank man, and the other was Senator Latif Khosa who is a supreme court lawyer. With such speakers in the Senate on the opposition side which also includes Reza Rabbani (PPP), Ishaq Dar of the PML-N and Professors Khurshid and Ghafoor and Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani from the MMA and Waseem Sajjad, S.M. Zafar, Nisar Memon, Shaukat Aziz, Dr Hafeez Sheikh, Khalid Ranjha, Mohammad Ali Durrani and Anwer Bhinder on the treasury benches, the upper house is likely to become intellectually a highly coveted place in due course of time.

But then what is a former intelligence man, Lt-Gen (retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi, doing in such an intellectual company? The odd man out in his uniform days has headed both the MI and ISI one after the other. He, therefore, is privy to all the skeletons in the cupboard of almost all the public figures in this country. In civilized countries such men are sent home permanently and are never allowed to occupy after retirement a position where they could use this knowledge of theirs of men and women of substance for personal promotion. It is almost like being in a position to use insider’s information in the stock market.

One speaker insisted that it was wrong to talk about Pakistan being the next target of the US after Iraq because, according to him, Pakistan was not Iraq. How right he is. Iraq is perhaps one of the richest countries in the oil-rich Arab world. And for the last 15 days it is braving the onslaught of a coalition of 40 countries led by the world’s only super power. On the other hand, Pakistan is still living on the dole of the US and other multi- and -bilateral donors and every time it faced an external aggression in the past it was saved by the UNSC and once when the world body took its own time in getting into position to save us we were rendered asunder.

The heated exchange that took place in the Senate between Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat and some of the Jamaat-i- Islami senators on the issue of Al Qaeda brought into bold relief the ongoing but behind-the-scene tussle between the Patriots and the PML-Q over the latter’s move to get the MMA to join the cabinet. Faisal was clearly baiting the Jamaat senators when he asked them to state in clear-cut terms their position on Al Qaeda.

Worried perhaps that in case the MMA joined the government they would lose their nuisance value and the cabinet portfolios as well, the Patriots seem to be trying desperately to widen the gulf between the MMA and the establishment by engineering a situation where the MMA will be seen to be owning the Al Qaeda which, the Patriots perhaps believe, will cause an establishment, too far gone in its servility to the US, to not let the PML-Q bring the MMA on board.

Following the success of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme in Sialkot, the Punjab government has decided to launch it in six other districts.

The programme was launched in the district by the Punjab government in collaboration with the Unicef, the district government, NGOs and the business community, Sialkot Nazim Mian Naeem Javaid told newsmen here.

A survey conducted by an NGO shows that more than 97 per cent children of 5-7 years of age have been enrolled in Sialkot district’s primary schools under the programme. The dropout rate has decreased to 0.7 per cent from 38 per cent.

The Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) had signed an agreement with the ILO and the Unicef on Feb 10, 1997, at Atlanta, Georgia, USA, to eliminate child labour in soccer ball industry under a phased programme.

The Punjab government had, in collaboration with the Unicef and the SCCI, launched the UPE programme in Sialkot district to enrol 100 per cent children between 5-7 years of age into primary schools.

IS it right that we should be playing cricket while a war rages in Iraq? I have agonised over this and come to the conclusion that we should not allow the war-mongers to disrupt normalcy, wherever possible. It weakens their power to hold the world to ransom.

I am glad that the Sharjah tournament is going ahead though I am disappointed that South Africa has chosen to opt out because of “security concerns.” South African players would no more have been in danger than the players from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

“Security concerns” is too general and too glib. New Zealand used it to avoid playing in Nairobi and was only too keen to accept the advice that was given to it by the US Embassy. In the end, it were New Zealand themselves who paid the price for their timidity. England refused to play in Zimbabwe for political reasons, the same Zimbabwe that has been persuaded to send its team to play in England this summer.

In agreeing to tour England, Zimbabwe has taught a lesson to England that sports should be kept out of politics. England’s main concern, of course, was money. Had Zimbabwe cancelled the tour the ECB would have been out of pocket by several millions pounds. Thus this can be considered as aid in reverse.

Pakistan has been a victim of “security concerns” and the Australians refused to tour Pakistan and the series, both Tests and one-day had to be played at neutral venues. Ironically, the one-day series was played in Nairobi, a venue that New Zealand considered too dangerous.

The Indians have now formally cancelled their tour of Pakistan. One would like to know why the ICC is being so timorous? India is a member of the ICC and if it continues to flout its decisions, surely the ICC is bound to examine whether India should continue to remain a member of ICC. But even more important is the seeming indifference of the Indian cricket public to what is a wholly political decision.

India and Pakistan played each other in the World Cup and the heavens did not fall. India beat Pakistan and there was rejoicing in India and there was disappointment in Pakistan. That’s about all. By not playing cricket against Pakistan, outstanding disputes between the two countries are no nearer being resolved.

It is not Pakistan cricket that is being hurt but Asian cricket. The Asia Cup had the potential of becoming one of cricket’s most prized tournaments, second only to the World Cup. The Asian Test Championship too had got off to a good start and has all but been abandoned.

The World Cup showed how the people of the cricket world could be brought together. All the security measures taken, at great cost, proved to be unnecessary. The final of the World Cup was played when the war against Iraq had started, two contrasting image. We know which was the enduring one and the hopeful. The Indian cricket board must try harder and must put more pressure on its government to resume cricket ties with Pakistan.

The absence of South Africa devalues the Sharjah tournament somewhat but it provides Kenya a chance to show its mettle. And in a way, it provides the new-look Pakistan team a relatively easy passage though it will still be up against Sri Lanka. Given our preoccupation with the war in Iraq, I am not certain how closely the cricket will be followed.

Pakistan’s poor performance in the World Cup has almost been forgotten though occasionally an article appears or a letter in a newspaper. It is just as well. The decision of the PCB to ‘rest’ senior players has been well received though the implication that they were somehow responsible for Pakistan’s grief in the World Cup remains unsubstantiated and is a bit rich.

I have written this before but the average age of the all-conquering Australian team is in the vicinity of 30-years and Australia has brought back Steve Waugh and Justin Langer. By the time that the next World Cup will come around in 2007, almost all of the present Australia team will be replaced.

But Australia is not likely to make the same mistake that had the West Indies. The West Indies sacked their senior players in one fell swoop and it has not been able to re-build. The West Indies have tried several captains including Richie Richardson, Courtney Walsh, Brain Lara and Jimmy Adams, finally settling for Carl Hooper.

Team building or re-building has to be undertaken in phases, on a case by case basis. Rashid Latif’s deputy is Yousuf Youhana. Youhana is an outstanding batsman but surely we do not consider him to be captain material? The opportunity may have been lost to groom a future captain.

There is a school of thought that believes that the best player is not necessarily the best captain. India tried Sachin Tendulkar and the West Indies Brian Lara and in the not-so distant past, England had tried Ian Botham and David Gower.

A captain needs to have some special qualifications. In a team that had Hanif Mohammad, Fazal Mahmood and Imtiaz Ahmed, Pakistan’s captain was Abdul Hafeez Kardar, arguably the best captain that Pakistan has ever had.

I really have no idea which player in the re-built lot is a future Pakistan captain. I had fancied Abdul Razzaq in the role but his own form has taken such a nose-dive that his own place in the team is in doubt. But without seeming to be disrespectful to such a talented cricketer,

I don’t see Youhana as a future captain. Perhaps, it is just well that we keep this on hold, otherwise we might find the prospective candidate being undermined. It’s known to have happened. Perhaps, when the team is selected for the short tour of England in the early summer, this matter will be given some serious consideration. While building a new team, we should be grooming a captain. The two go together.

THE Gulf war, about to enter its third week, offers the broadbrush picture of a badly-armed force, without air cover and the firepower and mobility of armour and artillery, pitted against an incomparably superior force enjoying absolute advantage in all departments. However, despite their absolute superiority, the US-British forces’ advance has considerably slowed down if it has not exactly stalled in the face of the unexpected stiff resistance encountered from the Iraqi militias and the so-called Saddam’s Fidayeen (self-sacrificers).

The theatre commander of the coalition forces, General Tommy Franks, while admitting the slowing down of his forces, would call it a deliberate ‘pause’, a sort of a breather, before the next phase of the onward push towards Baghdad starts.

Explaining his operational plan, Franks called it a ‘mosaic’ of ‘simultaneous’ and ‘sequential’ moves at the time and place of his own choosing. In other words, he will use land, air and special forces under his command all together or each one or two at a time, as the situation demands.

Earlier, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, on the fifth day of the war, admitted that he though the “toughest fighting is (still) ahead of us”.

The course of the Iraq war through the past several days, though wayward and not exactly to the main plan, has been eventually to the advantage of the coalition forces. The sheer weight of firepower, delivered from air and land, has been too heavy for the defenders to make a sustained stand at any given point. The emerging battle picture to date has been one of a steady advance, considerably slowed down by the stiff Iraqi resistance in small pockets in a haphazard and largely uncoordinated pattern.

The war has thoroughly exposed the myth of Saddam’s forces armed to the teeth with conventional and unconventional weapons. As for WMDs, their seizure and destruction forming the core of the coalition’s main plan, not a cannister of VX or a shell of mustard or nerve gas has been found, let alone fired. Of conventional weapons, only two Scuds (surface-to-surface short range missiles) were reported to have been fired from the northern part of Basra into Kuwait, without hitting the target.

In a state of poor maintenance and serviceability through the past several years, their operational status could be hardly combat-worthy. It is to be noted that 70 of Iraq’s intermediate range Al-Samoud missiles were destroyed by UN monitors. The same would appear to be the state of their long-range (25-30 mile range) artillery multibarrel launchers (hardly ever heard of so far) and mortars.

About the most incredible part of the state of Iraqi arms has been the total absence (at least by all media accounts) of airpower. Not a single fighter / bomber or transporter was even scrambled to engage enemy intruders or to bomb enemy targets. It should go without saying, therefore, that through the 12 long years of UN sanctions, Iraq neither had the funds nor a reliable source of arms supply to make good the tremendous losses its armed forces suffered in the Desert Storm. The three months of the intrusive presence of the world’s best weapons experts all across the country, and the unavoidable element of on-the-spot intelligence and espionage that went with it, left Iraq with hardly a chance to stash away its weaponry.

The psychological warfare (psyops) coalition forces had integrated into their operational plan as a fifth column also went almost haywire. Some 25 million leaflets have been dropped from the air across the country urging the Iraqis to rise against Saddam, kill him and topple his regime so far, to no avail.

This is besides the battery of overenthusiastic ‘war correspondents’ with the ‘advancing forces’ giving real time accounts via TV and filing juicy war stories to their new agencies and papers. All that will not deter the suicide bombers, attacking, killing and wounding the enemy forces as part of a popular resistance. General Franks, quite unashamedly however, will call it ‘acts of terrorism.’

One must be wary in predicting what course the war might take in the next few days. It looks like turning into a long haul, even if not at its present level of intensity and expenditure of firepower. Nevertheless, with the kind of inexhaustible firepower at his command, the only thing to deter General Franks in his onward push to Baghdad will be the human casualties suffered.

— The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.