When Musharraf came calling

IT IS of some significance that President Pervez Musharraf made it to the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post during his three-day visit to Washington from June 23 to 26. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, preceded General Musharraf by a couple of days. He and several members of his cabinet had a long working session with President George W. Bush and his senior colleagues. That event was not front page news for the American newspapers. If Lula’s visit was covered at all it was buried deep in the economic pages of the newspapers.

The importance attached to the Musharraf visit reflected America’s deep and continuing preoccupation with terrorism and the difficulties it was facing in handling nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The triumphal mood that followed the fall of Baghdad on April 9 had given way to some serious doubts. The United States continued to lose its soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In both countries resentment of the local population against occupation by America was increasing.

While there was a government in place in Afghanistan, its writ did not run much beyond Kabul. The formation of a government in Iraq led by the Iraqis seemed a distant prospect. The much heralded summit attended by President Bush and Prime Ministers Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon of Palestine and Israel had not resulted in a reduction in violence. The world of Islam, in other words, had become more, not less, restive after the demise of the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The Americans were also becoming increasingly concerned about the continuing attempts by several proponents of radical Islam to influence young Muslim minds across the globe. The extent of this concern was revealed in a hearing held by the US Senate on the subject on June 26, the last day of President Musharraf’s visit to Washington. “The problem we are [facing] today is the state-sponsored doctrine and funding of an extremist ideology that provides the recruiting grounds, support infrastructure and monetary lifeblood to today’s international terrorists,” said Senator Jon Kyle who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee’s terrorism panel.

“We are not at war with a faith, nor with any particular sect,” said U.S. Treasury Department general counsel at the hearing. “Islam’s severe and uncompromising Wahhabi movement is a very important factor to be taken into account when discussing terrorist financing.”

For a number of months preceding General Musharraf’s visit to Washington, Americans had been openly airing their concerns about the flow of finance from Saudi Arabia to various organizations, including schools and mosques, scattered around the world. Alex Alexie, an expert on extremist movements and a fellow at the conservative Centre for Security Policy, estimated that the Saudi government had spent $70 billion between 1975 and 2002 on projects around the world, many of them in the sector of education. He and other conservative analysts were especially concerned about the activities of such Saudi charities as al-Haramain which yearly prints and distributes 13 million Islamic books, dispatches 3,000 proselytizers and funds 1,100 schools and mosques, some of them in Pakistan.

These were then the types of concerns widely shared by analysts and policymakers when the Pakistani president arrived in Washington. General Musharraf adopted a comprehensive response to these worries. He emphasized that Pakistan was a central player in America’s war on international terrorism. His country was involved in countering three different manifestations of this scourge. The first of these, of course, was Al Qaeda, which aimed at causing widespread economic disruption in all places of importance to America. The second aspect of this phenomenon was the Taliban, a movement that had emerged from the madrassahs in the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

While the Taliban-dominated regime in Afghanistan had been roundly beaten by America in the winter of 2001, there were remnants of the movement that continued to challenge the government of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. They also posed a threat to economic and political stability in Pakistan’s northern areas.

The third manifestation of terrorism was sectarian violence in Pakistan. Much of this was supported by foreign interests and centred around the centuries-old conflict between the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam. Although General Musharraf did not link the sectarian conflict in Pakistan directly with the internal conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, he implied that the problems in these two countries could exacerbate Pakistan’s sectarian situation. After all, Afghanistan had a large Shia minority and Iraq had a large majority of the same sect.

Given all these problems, President Musharraf underscored why Pakistan occupied such a central place in the conflict that dominated the opening years of the 21st century. It was the second largest Muslim country, after Indonesia. With about 140 million people, Pakistan accounted for one-seventh of the total Muslim population. That the country was founded to provide a safe haven for the Muslim population of what was once British India gave Pakistan a special place in the world of Islam. The fact that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, wished to create a strong, modern and democratic political entity that would be a responsible player in the community of nations gave special meaning to the idea of Pakistan. That was the idea Musharraf wished to implement, and to succeed he and his country needed both the support and understanding of the American people.

In pleading for a better understanding, General Musharraf endorsed the widespread view that Muslims around the world felt targeted. The Americans have fought two wars in the world of Islam. Not only that, they are also concentrating on the several communities of Muslim expatriates in the United States in America’s war against international terrorism. He repeatedly asked for greater understanding of the situation in the Islamic world.

What did President Musharraf achieve during this visit to the United States? His most important accomplishment was to bring into focus the environment in which he and his country were attempting to move forward. The West, particularly America, is looking for a model of political and economic modernization that would work in the Muslim world. It won’t find such a model in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both countries have been slow at nation-building in spite of the fairly heavy investment of capital and human resources by Washington and its allies. Such a model could be found, on the other hand, in General Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan.

This assertion will be strongly contested, particularly by the editorial writers and columnists in the West’s liberal media. For instance, The Washington Post in an editorial on June 30 lamented that President George W. Bush, by offering a three billion dollar package of economic and military assistance, stretched over a period of five years, was rewarding an untrustworthy ally. “That is a huge boost for a man who overthrew Pakistan’s last elected civilian government in a military coup, presided over his country’s delivery of nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, directed its last military offensive against India and broke his promises to restore democracy and crack down on extremist Islamic groups. It’s fair to ask what the Bush administration will get in exchange” wrote the newspaper.

What Washington and the West are likely to get in exchange is a large Muslim country that would have pulled back from the edge of an abyss to which it had been taken in part by America’s previous engagement in Afghanistan. That story has been told many times, most recently in a book about Congressman Charlie Wilson, who helped pump billions of dollars of American and Saudi assistance into the fight by the Afghan mujahidden against the Soviet Union’s occupation of their country. To recall that story and to suggest that a number of difficult problems General Musharraf is facing can be traced back to that period is not to minimize the involvement of some of Pakistan’s past leaders and its premier intelligence agency, the ISI, in this sorry tale. General Ziaul Haq, Pakistan’s third military ruler, and the ISI supported the emergence of Islamic radicalism in that part of the world.

What General Musharraf, Pakistan’s fourth military president, is responsible for is pulling back Pakistan from the place to which it was sent by a succession of regimes. Such an endeavour will cover many fronts and will need the West’s full understanding and cooperation. Musharraf’s Pakistan is proceeding on a number of fronts. Of these three are of particular importance.

The first, of course, is economic revival. This year, ending June 30, the economy grew by 5.1 per cent, a rate 50 per cent higher than that of the previous year. This was a broad-based recovery — manufacturing output increased by nearly eight per cent and agriculture by over four per cent. Exports increased by 20 per cent while much of the world with which the country trades was still wrestling with a serious economic slowdown.

This recovery could be sustained over the next several years as Pakistan begins to pull out of the crises into which it had been plunged by the mismanagement of four popularly elected governments that held office for eleven years between 1988 and 1999.

Economic growth and inflows of large amounts of foreign private capital since “nine-eleven” has created a fiscal space which the government could use to increase resources going into education. It is the neglect of education by the public sector over a period of two decades that created the environment in which the Islamic madrassahs could flourish. Some of these madrassahs were — and some continue to be — the breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism. They need to be absorbed into the educational mainstream to blunt their damaging influence. This will need both government resolve and resources. Musharraf’s administration is moving in this area. Some say that it is doing so very gingerly but the Americans should know from their own experience that it is not easy to separate religious extremism from a privately funded educational system.

General Musharraf is also engaged in the difficult task of promoting a political system that would be more representative than the one presided over in the past by a string of political administrations. To take one example: the proportion of women in the current national legislature is ten times greater than the average for the assemblies chosen in the four elections held in the 1990s.

In an address in Washington during his recent visit, General Musharraf said that his “neeyat” is good, using an Urdu word that, he said, was difficult to translate but meant “intentions.” We should perhaps accept that claim and give him the benefit of the doubt.

Settling for peanuts at Camp David

THE Camp David talks between President Bush and General Musharraf, despite all the hype built around it, took place on June 24 and passed off as another routine event. There was nothing spectacular that happened at this summit — if it could be called a summit at all.

A lot of the hope centring around the possibility of hefty US aid for Pakistan in lieu of its stout support and exemplary services rendered in the course of the US-led war on terror did not quite materialize. The Kashmir dispute with India was referred to by President Bush only very briefly and somewhat casually for the sake of form during his talk with the press. In fact, that was hardly the way Pakistan’s ‘core’ issue deserved to be treated — unless there was more to it than was visible to the naked eye.

After all, there has always been a great deal of hush-hush about the conduct of our relationship with America over several decades as was also the case with the run-up to the latest round of talks at camp David.

With hindsight one cannot help saying that there was far too much of pre-talks secrecy and a thick air of mystery as if some major disclosures were about to be made. The 3.1 billion dollar aid package for Pakistan announced by President Bush is over-tied and largely conditional and its time-span is long enough to make the amount even smaller than it looks.

Half of the aid amount is under caveat for defence-related expenditures and only the other half is meant for civilian spendings which are also linked to policy parameters regarding the containment of fundamentalist forces, their armed training centres in Pakistan and also covers aspects of their activities such as the role of the madrassah system of education run by them in controlling thought processes of the people. The supply of F-16 warplanes urgently needed and specifically requested by Pakistan as part of its defence needs was summarily turned down as if it was an irrelevant demand altogether.

The long and short of it is that nothing very substantial came out of the meeting at Camp David and therefore there is widespread national disappointment over the outcome. The only significant meeting point between the two sides seems to be the resolve to continue waging the war on terror in which Pakistan has been participating since the 9/11 happenings.

But with the sort of public opinion that has emerged over the Camp David outcome in the country one can hardly be very optimistic about the state of Pakistan-US relationship in the months and years ahead. General Musharraf will indeed be quite concerned that, despite his best efforts, he has not been able to pull off the sort of deal he would have liked to have — one a lot closer to the wish list he carried with him there. His propaganda machine is not going to be of much help to him even though it has already gone back to its old habit of overkill, claiming great success at Camp David even though the results may have been pretty average at best.

All is not lost, however. There are still options available for getting out of a tricky situation. The area of opportunity for the country is to play the Indian card.

Only the other day, when Vajpayee and the Chinese leadership met in Beijing, they were in fact playing each other as trump cards for mutual benefit. If China can think of the India card and the Indians are playing the China card one does not see why Pakistan cannot play the India card to its advantage. Politics is a fairly fluid business and the Indians are now at a point where they are in a position to give economic support to Pakistan and indeed willing to do so.

One must not forget that there has always been between Pakistan and India a built-in sort of love-hate relationship and the time has come when the love component of the relationship deserves to be given a try. As they say, in international relations there are no permanent enemies or permanent fiends — only permanent interests.

Out of the indifferent results out of Camp David talks General Musharraf can turn these to greater advantage if he, in consultation with China, goes in for a modus vivendi with India.

This could take the form of enlarged bilateral trade and the consequent prosperity in the entire region.

The developing relations between China and India is no incidental development. It is a well thought-out move aimed at regional interdependence and making the region emerge stronger as a consequence. This is the challenge of our times. China’s initiative in these regional moves has made it a lot easier for Pakistan to make the first move of opening up with India. We must learn from Europe which has galvanized its strength through a process of gradual unification while retaining the continent’s pluralistic character.

There are mature and sensible people in India who can be counted on to see the wisdom of — and respond to — such moves. There are people like Vajpayee and Kuldip Nayar and countless others who not only think that Pakistan and India must cooperate for co-prosperity of the subcontinent but also recognize that the political moment for this has arrived.

America with all its abundant resources cannot foot every country’s bills. It is therefore in our own interest to explore the wider world for opportunities and resources for the betterment for our people. For a long time we have banked on a single source of help and assurance — the United States. These definitely are no longer times to recklessly stick to a single option. If we do not change our attitudes in the conduct of our international relations we would then have to be content with the peanuts offered at Camp David.

A fond memory, an unfond misery

ONE is expected to speak well of the dead. I would have spoken well of Mukhtar Zaman had he been hale and hearty for he was that kind of a person. I was saddened that he passed away last week, another close friend gone, leaving us to mourn as much for ourselves as for him.

I had first met him at Zelin’s Coffee House. I. H. Burney had brought him, both were reporters for APP and I was a jack-of-all trades with the Times of Karachi. Mukhtar Zaman was not a regular at Zelin’s as was Burney, M. B. Khalid and my brother Abo but he was, in spirit, a member of the group that met for lunch, Karachi’s angry, young journalists who believed so passionately in the Quaid-i-Azam’s Pakistan and who felt enraged that the country was beginning to lose its moorings. Because he worked for the APP, Mukhtar Zaman was not even able to let off steam as some of the others could, chancing their arm against the vigilance of the Press Information Department.

I really got to know him when he and I were both members of the journalists’ delegation that went to the People’s Republic of China in 1956. I had gone ahead and was at the Beijing airport to receive the delegation. It was too my first meeting with Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Indeed, Faiz Saab took Mukhtar Zaman and me under his wing and the three of us spent a good deal of our spare-time together, long discussions and walks and no disagreements on the basics but variations on a theme, all very lively and very pleasant. It could get lonely too, China, after all, was a far-away place and it is in such social adversity that close friendships are formed.

On our way back to Pakistan, Mukhtar Zaman and I spent a few days in Hong Kong and we had stayed at The Shamrock Hotel which was on Nathan Road on the Kowloon side and after the austerity of China, we let our hair down and we had ourselves a ball. We had taken the ferry and gone to Macau which was an outpost of Portugal, as well known for its gambling casinos as Monte Carlo.

As often happens, times move on and Mukhtar Zaman and I went our separate ways and I left journalism for the ‘greener’ pastures of PIA. Out of sight was not out of mind and whenever we met it was with the same warmth as of yore. Mukhtar Zaman and I belonged to the same generation and we wore our idealism on our sleeve. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!” Wordsworth had written about the French Revolution. But these sentiments apply to personal friendships as well and Wordsworth’s lines come to me as I remember a good man and an even better friend. God bless.

But one must come down from the sublime, not to the ridiculous but to harsh reality and pitiless regularity of power-failures, a form of punishment meted out to people whose only crime appears to be that they live in this premier city of Pakistan. Power break-downs are not unusual in Karachi. In fact, they have been a standard feature of our lives.

By the normal laws of progress, these failures and break-downs should have got less frequent. On the contrary, they have increased and durations have become longer and last week saw Karachi’s worst power outage ever. In the sweltering heat, people went through a living hell and many came out into the streets and their angry voices turned into protests and demonstrations, an impotent fury expressed by burning tyres and pelting stones.

Clearly, the situation has the hallmark of an emergency and that’s the way it should be dealt. The KESC has come out with a press release which provides neither comfort nor light! But there is an obvious infrastructure collapse and patch-work repairs and ad hoc mending is not the answer. Whether it is the local government or the provincial or the federal, someone has to wake up to the fact that electricity is a basic necessity and must get the highest priority, if it means a huge outlay of funds, these funds must be provided without any bureaucratic ado.

The demonstrations must be seen, not merely as straws in the wind but as early warnings of a deep resentment. “Why do only people of low-income area suffer such crises?” asks Aurangzeb Khan, the Nazim of Baldia town. This is not exactly true. All areas of Karachi are affected. But there is a long list of grievances, of spectacular social failures and because the have-nots heavily outnumber the haves, there is something of a class-struggle in the articulation of the grievances.

I think the time has come to take a hard look at what we call governance. There has to be a direct connection between governance and the lives of the people, it is the overwhelming majority who must be the beneficiaries, it is the quality of their lives that has to be improved. It is no longer acceptable that more and more people are living below the poverty-line, that the middle class is all but vanishing.

So much time and energy is expended on weighty political matters like a vote of no-confidence in the speaker of the National Assembly that we are unable to see the forest for the trees. It is a matter of supreme indifference, people don’t give two hoots when they are without electricity for days at a time or when they find that there is no employment. A man came to see me who had educated his son at great personal cost and suffering. His son had passed his Matric. Could I find him a job?

Multiply this thousands of times over. The more educated unemployed there are, the more social tension there will be. Somewhere on the agenda of those who claim to be leaders should be a list of priorities. They need to take a hard look. And roll up their sleeves and start earning their keep. Says a Spanish proverb: “Beware the fury of a patient man.”

Peacekeeping in Liberia

THE Bush administration is coming under considerable international pressure to contribute to a United Nations-backed intervention in the West African state of Liberia — and understandably so. Founded by freed US slaves, Liberia has been a close US ally for most of its history, and now it is living through one of the worst moments in those 150 years.

Its warlord president, Charles Taylor, is holed up in the capital city, Monrovia, besieged by rebel armies. Mr Taylor agreed to step down peacefully as part of a cease-fire agreement last month but then reversed himself; the result has been heavy fighting in the capital that has left hundreds dead.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for an international peacekeeping force to prevent further bloodshed, and he has implored the United States to lead it. Britain and France have publicly backed the idea, and several West African nations have offered to contribute 3,000 troops if they are matched with 2,000 Americans. Both sides in Liberia say they would welcome a US-led force. Faced with such unanimity, the Bush administration should strongly consider acting.

Administration officials so far are noncommittal. Secretary of Defence Donald H. Rumsfeld said that while options for Liberia had been discussed, President Bush had not made a decision. Pentagon officials are understandably concerned about another deployment of troops at a time US forces are stretched thin in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But advocates answer that even a small and short-term US deployment could do a disproportionate amount of good. In neighbouring Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, limited interventions by French and British forces succeeded in stopping similar (and related) civil warfare among rival “armies” sometimes made up of little more than children. In this case, foreign intervention would offer the hope not just of rescuing Liberia’s 3 million people but of ending much of the turmoil in the region. That’s because much of it has been due to Mr. Taylor, who has sponsored rebel groups in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast, more than earning his recent indictment as a war criminal by a U.N. tribunal. Mr. Bush last week demanded that Mr. Taylor resign to make way for an interim government; if American troops were deployed in Monrovia, he could be obliged to do so — and to face his indictment. Once that happened, U.S. forces could be replaced by the West Africans.

Though Al Qaeda may have benefited from some of the illegal diamond traffic fostered by Mr. Taylor, West Africa falls outside the battlegrounds of the war on terrorism. Some in the administration would argue that U.S. forces no longer can be spared for peacekeeping or humanitarian missions.

Still, Liberia may stand at a crucial turning point: Without foreign intervention, renewed warfare and a humanitarian catastrophe appear likely — and any intervention will be far less likely to succeed without American troops.

At a time when many people around the world are questioning U.S. foreign policy, Liberia offers an opportunity for the United States to show that it is still prepared to use its power for more than narrow self-daffiness. In Monrovia, long-suffering civilians have been gathering outside the American Embassy to plead for help. President Bush ought to heed their appeals. —The Washington Post

Know thine friend

GIVE George Bush 100 out of 100 for charity if not clarity. When sections of the untamed world sneered that his “Coalition of the Willing” against Saddam Hussein was actually a “Coalition of the Billing” Bush refused to see the joke. He always knew that willing and billing were closely related.

What is a single alphabet between friends? George Bush is also a far better businessman in the White House than he was in the private sector. He knows that the real spelling of ‘payback’ is ‘dollars’. When the bills come, Bush pays up. No one has been more regular about sending the invoices than general-president (or is it the other way around now in the age of uniform-democracy?) Pervez Musharraf. Not only that, he lands up personally at the House to collect the cheque. No point in letting lesser minions grab the photo-ops at Camp David.

This makes him a little different from his undeclared role-model, General Ziaul Haq. The two may not share ideology but they share a similar survival plan. General Zia was also a huge embarrassment to democracy-loving America until Afghanistan bailed him out of such tedious morality. General Zia seized power in 1977 from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and then sat out a difficult period of sanctions and stink-in-the-air status until the Soviets marched into Kabul. General Zia immediately became a front-line ally of America, all was forgotten, and money began to pour like a good monsoon in Mumbai and arms began to drop like a hailstone shower in Haryana.

General Musharraf was a bete noire to democracy-snobs when a diverted plane diverted his destiny in 1999. He sweated a bit but hung around till the saviour of successful Pak dictators, Afghanistan, re-entered the geopolitical stratosphere. For more than two decades now Afghanistan has alternated between being a key battle zone for America and an unwanted basket case. After 9/11 the country returned to the American map of the world. General Musharraf took the call from Washington and the dollars began to flow.

In the last two years (actually a bit less) America’s assistance to Pakistan has been upwards of $20 billion, give or take a few million. Not all of it has been in the form of the outright reward of three billion dollars given on June 24. A year ago, Bush wrote off one billion dollars in debt at a New York press conference while the general stood gratefully at his side, wearing a much more elegant tie. This was the appetizer. The big meal came quietly when America forced the IMF and other donors to give Pakistan two billion dollars in loans at marginal interest, and then helped Pakistan reschedule $12.5 billion of debt to the Paris Club. Just to make sure that the latest three billion dollars was not wasted on economic development, Bush allotted half of the three billion to “defensive weapons systems”. Has anyone heard of “offensive weapons systems”? The American companies which will take that money have never been making a single offensive weapon. So there.

The most defensive of these systems is going to be the avionics of F-16s. Bush solemnly assured India that Pakistan would not get any new F-16s. These planes are a particular bugbear because they can deliver nuclear bombs. But what Pakistan can do with the money is upgrade its existing fleet till they become virtually new. Only the shell will be old, and perhaps some friendly third country will upgrade this too when no one is looking.

Pakistan has got $20 billion of aid without finding Osama bin Laden on its own soil. Imagine what the payback will be when Osama is found. Osama in chains should be a great gift from Pervez to George (I bet they are on first name terms by now) when the general goes for his summer holidays in June and July next year, first stop Washington. General Musharraf could get a meal at the Texas ranch if he had Osama in his baggage. It would be just the kind of gift to lift George’s spirits in an election year. What might be the payback for four more years in power when the payback for two years of support raked in $20 billion? Double that? General Musharraf could well create an economic boom in Pakistan without a Pakistani economy. It pays to be a friend of George.

Such visions must have encouraged those in Delhi who wanted to send a division of the Rashtriya Rifles to police turbulent Iraq on behalf of the United States. So far, fortunately, caution has proved stronger than greed.

Once upon a time the Qatar television news channel Al Jazeera could count on only one superstar source for world scoops, Osama bin Laden. Now it has two: Osama and Saddam. How good can it get for Al Jazeera? How embarrassing can it get for the White House? There is something extraordinary going on which beggars belief. How on earth could Saddam have disappeared from under the nose of the Americans and still be available to a news channel? Is the television channel more powerful than the CIA and Pentagon put together? Nor is it Saddam alone. His dangerous sons are equally untraceable.

Does Saddam have the kind of support among the people that we never suspected? It cannot be. Saddam is no Ho Chi Minh. He was a known tyrant, and no one knew his tyranny better than the Iraqi people. The two most public faces of his regime, Tareq Aziz and Mohammad Al-Sahaf have surfaced. The former is under American confinement, and the latter, the old information minister, was found to be so uninformed that the Americans let him go. (You can learn all that he did not tell the Americans from his forthcoming autobiography.)

Bush must be under serious pressure. The daily body count is rising, and is in danger of becoming routine news. The smirk has weakened on Donald Rumsfeld’s face, although it will never disappear. The toll is now more than one a day, and the pace of incidents and attacks is sharpening. The children of middle class America are dying. Most of them are reservists, called up to fight a war that they thought would be a walkover. As many have died after victory as died during the war. At some point middle class America will ask for a cost-benefit analysis. If this question is raised in an election year, Bush could be in trouble. He is not in trouble yet, but politics can get ominously different in a matter of days.

The campaign for the 2004 presidential election has already begun, and the only candidate to catch some sort of fire is the Democrat Howard Dean. Dean is angry about Bush’s pro-rich tax cuts, but he is hopping mad about Iraq. The Iraq war gets him louder cheers than even the tax cuts. Comparisons are already being made with George McGovern, the peace candidate of the Vietnam era. McGovern was too liberal to get elected, but his campaign did persuade Richard Nixon to get out of Vietnam.

George Bush does not have that luxury. America cannot retreat from the war on terrorism as it retreated from Vietnam. Vietnam never struck inside America; but terrorism did, and terrorism could strike again. Vietnam was under siege in the sixties; America is under siege now. Which brings us to the crucial question: has George Bush chosen the right allies in his war against terrorism? America had the wrong friends during Vietnam. It paid a heavy price for supporting friends and puppets that had lost credibility with their own people, who were a burden rather than an asset. When defending democracy became synonymous with defending the corrupt and anti-democratic regimes of Saigon, the American war lost its moral focus and became illegitimate. The realization was slow and painful. The message is clear.

America cannot fight a war against terrorism in alliance with regimes whose minds are not clear about terrorism. America is once again risking defeat because of friends rather than the enemy.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.

Guerilla attacks in Iraq

THE killings of nearly two dozen US troops since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat over, bear the marks of classic guerilla operations: small-scale, limited attacks by irregulars against orthodox civil and military forces.

In February, weeks before combat began, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, told the Senate that postwar Iraqi peacekeeping and humanitarian operations probably would require about 200,000 troops. Rumsfeld disputed the figure, and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, called it “wildly inaccurate.” Today, the Pentagon has about 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq; Britain has about 12,000. Shinseki, who retired in June and was often at loggerheads with Rumsfeld, appears prescient.

That’s unsurprising given Shinseki’s earlier command of NATO’s Bosnian peacekeeping force. But will Bush administration officials, having snubbed Shinseki and others in the Pentagon, listen now to the generals who have been ordered to determine if more US troops are needed in Iraq?

Rumsfeld said Washington had asked other nations for help and many had responded. But their numbers are small. The United States should seek NATO help. France and Germany, key members, have provided peacekeepers for Afghanistan and supported the US war on terror. It’s time for both sides to move past their earlier disputes at the United Nations over Iraq policy.

Rumsfeld could help by dropping his “old Europe/new Europe” line, which he repeated as recently as three weeks ago. It’s as silly as his claim that what’s happening now in Iraq is similar to the untidy formation of the American democracy after the Revolutionary War.

Iraq’s civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, is travelling the country and assuring residents that the United States will stay as long as needed. That’s reassuring, and so is his recognition that other nations must provide money for Iraq’s reconstruction.—Los Angeles Times