Dialogue: hurdles and pitfalls

A TRACK-2 meeting of opinion leaders representing a cross-section of the Indian and Pakistani intelligentsia held at Kathmandu last week ended on a hopeful note that an India-Pakistan dialogue aimed at normalization of bilateral relations could take place some time in July. But all indications are that such a meeting is unlikely in the foreseeable future.

Chairman of Islamabad’s Institute of Policy Studies, who was among the initiators of the Kathmandu meeting and seemed satisfied with its outcome, did not believe that a breakthrough could really be expected before the end of the year. What perhaps one can look forward to is a slow, step-by-step process, largely because of the uncongenial internal developments in both countries. Indeed, the unpredictable state domestic political situation both in India and Pakistan is always a factor to reckon with in this contest. In India the unity of the 25-party National Democratic Alliance, headed by Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, is seriously threatened by inner dissensions. In Pakistan the crisis over the controversial Legal Framework Order is beginning to look grim and portentious.

The road to peace and stability in South Asia is laden with hurdles and pitfalls — made so by a backlog of a whole lot of contentious issues besides — mutual antagonism and distrust straining their relations. Against this backdrop recriminations exchanged between two sides in recent days can hardly help matters at that stage when ground is to be laid and preliminaries are to be worked out for the bilateral talks.

First, Mr Lal Krishna Advani, India’s deputy prime minister, and then the prime minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee himself, have spoken of the setback suffered by Pakistan in three wars with their country in the past. This was neither prudent nor called for if the objective now is to move forward on the road to peace and normalization.

More regrettably during his visit to the US last week, Mr Advani in an unscheduled meeting with President Bush, articulated India’s reservations about resuming talks with Pakistan. He also accused Pakistan of “not being serious” about putting an end to cross-border terrorism. The outgoing US ambassador to India, who was present at Mr Advani’s meeting with the US National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleeza Rice, also added his own bit by insinuating that Pakistan was not doing enough to stop infiltration by militants from the Pakistani side into the Indian occupied Kashmir.

It is indeed unfortunate that neither India nor Pakistan seem willing to forget the bitterness of their past relationship, even as they profess to embark on a new effort to restore peace in South Asia. The New Delhi correspondent of the Khaleej Times, in a dispatch the other day, spoke of the “slanging match” going on between the two sides which, according to him, has already resulted in a “stand-off” between them. He says that the hostile exchanges have made “the on-going peace process look like a victim of the much familiar casual and frivolous utterances.”

The Indian leaders have been particularly irked by remark by General Pervez Musharraf, in an interview with an Indian TV channel, which on the Indian side has been interpreted as the general suggesting that in the prevailing unsettled conditions in the disputed state of Kashmir, the chances of another “Kargil-like” situation could not be ruled out.

Some of Mr Advani’s statements about Pakistan have drawn sharp criticism from saner elements in India. Some Indian observers have emphatically stated that Mr Advani’s observations such as the one describing Pakistan as “a hotbed of Al Qaeda” could not be expected to promote the prospects of peace. They have said quite plainly: “We do not think it was necessary for Mr Advani to talk in a language that is detrimental to the peace process.

Unnamed foreign policy experts aligned with the Congress party have castigated both India and Pakistan for “creating a mess” while efforts are in hand for starting a peace process. A former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan has been quoted as saying that even if Pakistan was responsible for attempting to settle scores with India, it does not give Mr Advani the right to make “casual utterances” from an international platform, “triggering a new crisis.”

It is also unfortunate that the Russian foreign minister, Mr Igor Ivanov, during his visit to Pakistan and India, even while pledging his government’s support to the move for a dialogue to resolve the Kashmir dispute, ended up saying things which could not have been palatable to Pakistan.

At a joint press conference with the Indian foreign minister in New Delhi he said: “Our support for India’s fight against terrorism is well known. We know Pakistan has taken measures but, like our Indian friends, we say, we need to see more action on the ground rather than statements.” He also said that Moscow would continue to urge Pakistan to put an end to what he called “the flow of Islamic militants from Pakistan-administered Kashmir into the Indian zone.”

Arrogance of power

WOODROW WILSON, the idealistic president of the United States during the First World War, said that the U.S. world role came “by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God that led us into this way”.

Until Vietnam this view was held right across the American political spectrum. America was the God-given example to other nations and was the leading nation on a progressive scale of historical development.

The Vietnam-induced pause in this historical march now seems to be a long time ago. The forward momentum of the exceptional American spirit continues with a union under President George Bush of two powerful schools of American foreign policy: the Wilsonian liberals anxious to extend democracy and the neoconservatives, unilateralist inclined, who believe in power projection and who also think that an aggressive American leadership around the world will work for the good of all societies.

Yet the Americans have always claimed that, unlike their European allies, they were not an imperial or colonial power. Indeed the aid given Britain during World War 2 had to be paid for by London with interest, an American ploy to make sure that a post world war Britain could no longer afford to run an empire. When Britain with France and Israel went to war with Egypt over the Egyptian decision to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956 president Dwight Eisenhower cut off American financial support for the beleaguered British economy on the grounds that Britain shouldn’t any more be indulging in imperial adventures.

The truth is more prosaic: what we see today, with the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives in Washington and the seeming undimmed energy of this administration to make the world to its liking by the projection of its overwhelming military might, is nothing more than the continuity of a long line of imperial yearnings that reach back to the earliest days of the United States.

The country has always been driven by expansionist urges as Farsed Zukaria wrote in a landmark article in “World Policy Journal”. “Ever since the 13 colonies, nestled east of the Allegheny mountains, relentlessly marched west to acquire and control the continent, expansionism and imperialism have been part of the American ideal”.

And these ambitions were not exhausted with the conquest of California. In the 1850s, in the aftermath of the Mexican war, American leaders talked a lot about the need for further expansion. President Franklin Pierce in 1853 said he would “not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansionism”.

American diplomats tried to negotiate the purchase of parts of Mexico, Cuba and Hawaii. Even Canada was a target. John Quincy Adams thought that in the end the U.S. would annex all of North America. For a while the civil war tempered these ambitions. But once over revenge was in the air. Since Britain had aided the south the widespread feeling was that the reunited U.S. should take its Canadian possession to the north. Only the might of the British fleet kept the American debate, led by Abraham Lincoln’s imperial minded secretary of state William Henry Seward, within sensible bounds.

At the end of the nineteenth century president William McKinley used the explosion (undoubtedly accidental) of the battleship Maine as the excuse to conquer Cuba. And then, tasting success, he went on to grab Spanish Puerto Rico and the Philippines, adding Hawaii to the list even though it had nothing to do with Spain. His assistant secretary of the navy, the next president, Theodore Roosevelt, told friends that he thought war brought out the best in the nation and although he would have preferred a war with Germany “I am not particular and I’d even take Spain if nothing better is offered”. He was an unapologetic expansionist and imperialist.

He organized the succession of Panama from Colombia in 1903 declaring publicly “I took Panama” and work on building the canal commenced. Later he quarreled with Canada over the Alaskan/ Canadian border.

The threads of this history have been rewoven by George Bush to deal with new contingencies. But the colours are the same and the purpose of the garment remains unchanged: to make the world a safe place for America with the conviction that this can only be achieved by making the world very much like America. It may be practiced with more aggression under Bush that it was under Bill Clinton, but in fact it is only in degree.

The expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders was a Clintonesque idea. So too was to build up American power in the Caspian Basin and along Russia’s southern border. This impulse would not change with a new president. It will change only when America stumbles, as it might with Iraq. But even then after the disaster of Vietnam it only took until the presidency of Ronald Reagan to right the ship. Now that America is militarily unchallenged the imperial urge can only gather speed. The only small cause for doubt is whether God is really on America’s side. For the answer to that we might have to wait a century or even two. —Copyright Jonathan Power <

When a regime has a lot to hide

THE 1956 Suez crisis US marine lieutenant Daniel Ellsberg was huddled aboard a troopship steaming across the Mediterranean toward the Middle East. The anxious Marines awaited final orders. In his recent book “Secrets: A Memoir of The Pentagon Papers and Vietnam,” Ellsberg recalls that his comrades were itching for a fight, and it didn’t matter whether it was against the Egyptians or any combination of French, British and Israeli forces.

They weren’t fussy. That’s the military mentality, and it’s exactly what highly trained military forces are supposed to do: ache for action but follow orders. If you serve in the military your choices are nearly nil. Indeed, if you work for any large public or private organization your choices aren’t much much greater.

So what do you do when you see your organization going astray and violating its purposes? What happens when your duty conflicts with law or conscience? Well, American right-wingers have a wonderfully convenient answer: for these self-styled superpatriots there is a higher purpose than legality for which they stretch, torture, or deny the truth so long as they are serving a robustly reactionary and imperial agenda. Just look at the careers of former admiral John Poindexter and Elliot Abrams.

In the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, when President Reagan’s ardent minions secretly peddled illegal arms to pariah state Iran in order to fund vicious counter-revolutionary guerrillas in Central America, Poindexter and Abrams committed flagrant felonies when lying about these activities before Congress. Yet these devout hard-liners were pardoned quickly by Bush senior and more recently were installed happily in key government posts by Bush junior.

Senior Congressman Henry Hyde (Republican-Illinois), an adulterer himself who relished impeaching Bill Clinton, displayed remarkable charity when he observed at the time that both Poindexter and Abrams deceived his fellow legislators for the greater good of the country.

Conservatives, who despise “entitlements” (health care, income and housing support, educational aid) for ordinary people, always relish their own “insider” entitlements to feed at the government trough, harass opponents, and try to run the country as they please no matter what the constitution or public opinion says. They usually keep their schemes quiet or else lie about them. No one is more adroit at pirouetting around truth or legality than a Republican Party lawyer, as the non-election of George W. Bush demonstrated anew. And it clearly took all the crude wiles, self-serving fabrications and strong-arm tactics the Bush administration could muster to spur an unjustifiable invasion of Iraq.

Daniel Ellsberg, by contrast, was a dedicated cold warrior and States Department official who, unlike Poindexter and Abrams, also was devoted to what he believed are the bedrock American values of liberty, justice, and rule of law. As the malicious lies propelling the Vietnam war became undeniably clear, Ellsberg took the grave personal risk in 1971 of leaking a vast swath of classified documents — the “Pentagon papers” — proving many decades of deliberate official deception of the American citizenry.

Anyone perusing the Pentagon papers found that CIA analysts accurately recognized Vietnam was a civil war and not a Chinese-directed assault by the North on the South; that Ho Chi Minh was above all a nationalist and a popular one: that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a phony pretext for US escalation; and that the panicky domino theory did not apply to South-east Asia. These were not deemed by authorities to be truths the American people (or anyone else) were entitled to hear.

President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles played up the doctrine of falling dominoes to mobilize domestic support for any deft or daft cold war scheme that his or any subsequent administration devised. The Vietnam generation - or a good part of it — learned the hard way that governments deceive and that they do it not for the common good, as Bush neo-conservatives piously pretend, but usually for self-aggrandizement and for corporate cronies. In the tawdry run-up to the Iraq invasion, Ellsberg was in the forefront of those warning that the intelligence about Iraq had been manipulated.

Facts often are treated by elites as playthings, useful insofar as they meet their needs. So Vietnam left a legacy of healthy distrust — the “credibility gap” was a 1960s term — and much of the American public, despite being swamped with non-stop pro-Bush propaganda, retain a wary attitude to intelligence, the increasingly secret police, and a court-appointed president. Ellsberg told one of us he also was heartened by the whistleblowers who came to the fore

Apart from concocted WMD evidence, we learned from leaks that the CIA and State department were witheringly sceptical about the democratic “domino theory” — the notion that a forcibly democratized Iraqi regime will spread ballot boxes everywhere in the Middle East. Everyone there already knows that you can have any regime you like so long as you do what the US tells you. Yet the most arrogant government founders when revelations about its real motives reach the public realm.

FBI agent Noreen Cowley revealed how ridiculously lax the FBI was regarding the 9/11 bombers, that the round-up of aliens afterward was purely for “PR purposes” and criticized the Bush administration’s implacable rush to war. A British bureaucrat disclosed that the US was spying on UN Security Council members.

Insiders complained that CIA director George Tenet succumbed to White House pressure to exaggerate the Iraq threat. So did the British “intelligence community,” as this bickering, back-stabbing bunch is often called, bow to Blair’s desperation to justify an Anglo-American attack. It’s extremely easy for an astute agency to please its impatient masters. A CIA report on the probability of Saddam’s use of weapons of mass destruction was selectively declassified so as to make the peril seem imminent. When the whole report was declassified it became clear that it judged the odds “very low.”

Suave British spooks, not missing a trick, notoriously resorted to raiding a graduate student paper for incriminating material against Saddam. Some days ago British Home Minister Blunkett apologized for using the student’s theses.

The Bush administration is the most secretive since Reagan who, likewise, had a lot to hide, and should have been impeached for the Iran-Contra follies. Where CIA researchers flag in their ardour to rub out Saddam’s regime, a new intelligence group — the Office of Special Plans — was suddenly conjured to assert Iraqi ties with Al Qaeda and to hallucinate weapons of mass destruction. It was shameless and predictable, but there were no lack of admonitions.

The real shame is that a lot of debunking of the pathetically weak Bush/Blair case was circulating in the alternate press and on the internet but was not examined or heeded. Few citizens need to be courageous whistleblowers like Ellsberg, just paying attention to multiple news outlets can help people keep their governments within tolerable limits of behaviour.

Isn’t it flabbergasting and amusing to read highly educated commentators in the West admitting that they dutifully swallowed every likely story Bush spun, but now they are wildly indignant? Tony Blair is in trouble at home for acting as an echo and amplifier of American propaganda . Unlike Blair, the Bush administration still believes that it can afford to operate at home and abroad as if it hadn’t a clue about the likely consequences of what it is recklessly doing. So far, they have been right, but the long-term consequences of systematic distortion and deception can be devastating.

A key Vietnam intelligence scandal that surfaced years later was a deliberate undercount of the Viet Cong — to show “attrition” was working — such that American strategists were stunned by the fury of the 1968 Tet offensive, which became a turning point in that atrocious war. The deceivers deceived themselves. The US, under Bush, rapidly has alienated or frightened nearly every other nation on earth in performing its cynically executed post-9/11 vendetta. The ultimate Bush objective is to confer absolute power on a mischievous band of neo-conservative ideologues who wed their doctrine of preemptive/preventive war to the self-bestowed right to invent any evidence they please to justify such wars. What will the blowback be?

Isn’t it axiomatic that no intelligence agency can be wholly immune to the lure of telling national leaders what they want to hear. Don’t politicians always say whatever is expedient? So what’s the big deal about the expanding exposure of an obvious flood of lies about Iraq’s alleged possession of innumerable weapons of mass destruction or cozy links to Al Qaeda The uproar over the American and British governments’ diligent deviousness is no surprise. What is surprising, and encouraging, is that the British, and, to a lesser extent (thus far), the American public still care when they are being hoodwinked, and want a reckoning with the perpetrators. .One must be grateful for any sign of democratic spirit anywhere during these dark days.