Pioneers of mass destruction

EACH year, August 6 and 9 serve as a sobering reminder of how it all began. Hiroshima wasn’t, by a long stretch, the first wartime massacre of what are nowadays referred to generically as non-combatants; innocents have periodically been slaughtered en masse in many parts of the world since the dawn of recorded history. Yet Hiroshima was dramatically different from all preceding acts of war, because much of the city was levelled with just one blow, which claimed up to 140,000 lives.

Far more dramatically and decisively than the terrorist action of September 11, 2001, the terrorist act of August 6, 1945, changed the world forever. Not so much by expediting Japan’s surrender, which was anyhow inevitable, as by setting the course for the post-war conduct of international relations. The almost equally destructive targeting of Nagasaki three days later could not conceivably have served any military purpose, except in terms of flaunting the new-found capabilities of the US armed forces.

Nagasaki’s nemesis was a more sophisticated device than the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima; the latter was such a unique concoction that, 58 years on, scientists are still investigating its effects. In a sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a pair of horrific experiments. They still serve, according to the University of Utah’s Tore Straum, “as the world’s primary basis for estimating radiation-induced cancer risk in humans”.

However, the first use of atomic weapons wasn’t simply experimental. Most historians now acknowledge that its chief purpose was to intimidate the Soviet Union, which had already been chosen by the Truman administration, while still formally an ally of the United States, as the next bugbear.

Not surprisingly, the appalling evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sealed the USSR’s determination to manufacture atomic weapons of its own. Some Americans, including a few atomic scientists, tended to share Moscow’s view that the world would be a safer place were American military might to be balanced by that of the Red Army. Washington, however, held that whereas its own growing atomic arsenal was a guarantor of freedom and peace, it would be nothing short of catastrophic were the godless communists able to acquire the same power.

It may have been possible to forestall the looming nuclear arms race had the US destroyed its atomic weapons and pledged not to manufacture any more, provided all other states desisted from pursuing that dangerous path. Far from contemplating anything of the kind, it kept upping the ante. The USSR was never quite able to keep pace, but that didn’t prevent American Cold Warriors from using the purported imminence of a Soviet attack as an excuse for building up vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. By the time Dwight Eisenhower sounded his warning against the military-industrial complex, it may already have been too late to do very much about it.

Of course, Eisenhower wasn’t exactly an outsider vis-a-vis the complex. He flashed his cold war credentials on many an occasion, not least when turning down a last-minute clemency appeal on behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a pair of communists who became the first American civilians to be sentenced to death for espionage. They had been accused of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. “By immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war,” noted Eisenhower, “the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.”

It is now broadly agreed that Ethel was almost certainly innocent of the charges against her, and while Julius probably did pass on information to Soviet contacts, it contained no crucial revelations about the Manhattan Project. What is interesting about Eisenhower’s reaction to the appeal is the implication that a Soviet atomic weapon would automatically mean war. That, evidently, was the scenario sketched by the Rumsfelds, Cheneys and Wolfowitzes of the 1950s. With the US in the throes of McCarthyist anti-communist fervour, it rapidly acquired the status of received wisdom — much like the far more recent lies about Saddam Hussein’s destructive capabilities and hostile intent towards America.

When, despite protests across the US and in many parts of the world, the Rosenbergs were strapped into electric chairs and murdered by the state, their two sons were aged 10 and six. Fifty years on, the younger of the two, Robert Meeropol, finds that his nation “is on a political course that is alarmingly similar to the McCarthy period. The prime motivating factor for the average American, according to what the media and the polls tell us, is fear .... If you were to go through the USA Patriot Act and plug in the word “communist’ where the word ‘terrorist’ appears, you would have an act that looks very much like the [anti-communist] McCarran Act.”

There is plenty of scope for analogies between the cold war hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the madness unleashed by the events of September 11, 2001. But it is at least equally pertinent to point out that America’s pioneering role in the realm of mass destruction did not end with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It has not used nuclear weapons in the interim, although on occasion the temptation has been strong. Richard Nixon, for example, was dissuaded by his advisers from nuking North Vietnam — not so much out of moral qualms as fear of the Soviet Union and China’s capacity to retaliate.

Yet Vietnam was for at least a decade subjected to a different sort of WMD. According to new research published in the journal Nature last April, the US sprayed far greater quantities of dioxin over the south-east Asian nation than it has ever acknowledged.

Washington claimed that Agent Orange was used only for defoliation, its ostensible military purpose being to deny Vietnamese soldiers the advantage of jungle cover. It was also intended to destroy crops, but would be harmless to human beings, the US army maintained. However, it was deliberately used in concentrations hugely greater than those approved for domestic use in the US (until 1971, when the herbicide was banned altogether), and in vast quantities (at least 50 million litres altogether).

Nearly 30 years after the US defeat in the Vietnam, large swathes of the country remain contaminated. But even worse than the residual toxicity of the soil has been the human toll. An estimated 500,000 Vietnamese are believed to have died as a result of poisoning. Another 650,000 are affected in one way or another, suffering from bizarre deformities, chronic diseases, or both.

The majority of the victims are no longer those who were directly showered with Agent Orange but their children and, increasingly, grandchildren. And there is no guarantee that a fourth generation won’t suffer. Over the past 10 years, the US government has spent $350 million on trying to account for the 2,000 or so American personnel still listed as missing in action in Indochina. Not a cent has gone towards compensating or curing those whose lives have been poisoned by Agent Orange.

Notwithstanding scientific evidence — much of it unearthed by American scientists — Washington remains in denial. One of the most damning discoveries has been that the strain of Agent Orange sprayed over Vietnam was laced with the super-toxin TCCD, 80 grammes of which, if dissolved in the water supply of New York, could kill the city’s entire population. According to a report in The Guardian last March, the US dumped 170kg of TCCD in Vietnam.

Last year, an environmental conference at Yale University concluded, after reviewing recent research, that the US had conducted “the largest chemical warfare campaign in history” in Vietnam. In comparison, the effects of the depleted uranium it has used more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan are somewhat less dramatic. But the usage does provide yet another illustration of America’s reluctance to learn from past horrors. In both Vietnam and the Gulf, US troops too have suffered as a consequence of Washington’s toxic policies, albeit on a much smaller scale than their adversaries.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (so to speak), the US has lately embarked on a course that could lead to the use of miniature nuclear bombs in conflicts — presumably “pre-emptive” wars of the Iraq variety, since it’s hard to imagine any nation declaring war on the US. Meanwhile, the main premise of non-proliferation, namely that disarmament by the major powers would gradually lead to a nuclear weapons-free world, has withered beyond repair. A dozen years after the cold war ended, the US has made it clear that it has no intention of relinquishing the nuclear option. Ever.

It has plans to develop new weapons, as well as delivery systems that can reach any part of the world from the continental US. And then, of course, there’s the missile defence shield.

But then, if the world today is arguably a more dangerous place than it has been at any point in the nearly six decades since the end of World War II, should anyone be surprised that the principal culprit is the nation responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com

Of dignity and solidarity

IN EARLY May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie’s parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter’s murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60-ton behemoth especially designed for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven.

Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter’s body. They had immediately sought out their US Senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn’t materialize.

As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply backed off. An American citizen wilfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family.

But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman’s action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before.

Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern showed her by all the Palestinians she encounters who welcome her as one of their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects on even the smallest child.

She understands the fate of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government’s insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her, “ You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it.” What shines through all the letters she wrote home and which were subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same.

We have heard so much recently about the roadmap and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of the US and Israel. It is this extraordinary fact which is the reason for the existence of a roadmap and all the numerous so-called peace plans before them, not at all because the US and Israel and the international community have been convinced for humanitarian reasons that the killing and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing, which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings and all its mistakes, we miss everything.

Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project, and so-called solutions have perennially been proposed that minimize, rather than solve, the problem. The official Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word “occupation” or not or whether or not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals nor ever to admit that their rights were scandalously violated all along by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority of American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace.

Moreover, the roadmap says nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie’s work in Gaza recognized, however, was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national community, and not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there, but is recognized the world over. In the past six months I have lectured in four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people which is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.

Whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate recognition and an expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its behalf. It is an extraordinary thing that Palestine was a central issue this year during the Porto Alegre anti-globalization meetings as well as during the Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of the world-wide political spectrum.

Just because our fellow citizens in this country (US) are fed an atrociously biased diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media, when the occupation is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks, the apartheid wall 25 feet high, five feet thick, and 350 kilometers long that Israel is building is never even shown on CNN and the networks (or so much as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the roadmap), and the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming, house demolitions, agricultural destruction, and death imposed on Palestinian civilians are never shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that they are, one shouldn’t be surprised that Americans have a very low opinion of Arabs and Palestinians.

After all, please remember that all the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian. Look at the pusillanimity of the media during the build-up to an illegal and unjust war against Iraq, and look at how little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society done by the sanctions, and how relatively few accounts there were of the immense world-wide outpouring of opinion against the war.

Hardly a single journalist except Helen Thomas has taken the administration to task for the outrageous lies and confected “facts” that were spun out about Iraq as an imminent military threat to the US before the war, just as now the same government propagandists, whose cynically invented and manipulated “facts” about WMD are now more or less forgotten or shrugged off as irrelevant, are let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable situation for the people of Iraq that the US has now single-handedly and irresponsibly created there. However else one blames Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant, which he was, he had provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place.

It is no wonder, then, with the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians or criticizing the US government and being called “anti-American” for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation, that the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture, history and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, has cowed far too many of us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times, unmodernized, and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda.

No one would deny that most Arab countries today are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to the ruthless forms of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as the New York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally controlled, and that there is no freedom of opinion, no civil institutions, no functioning social movements for and by the people.

Press laws notwithstanding, you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a communist party newspaper as well as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies are given credit for; the satellite channels are bursting with diverse opinions in a dizzying variety; civil institutions are, on many levels having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates, and research institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must be done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are on the way.

In Palestine alone there are over a 1,000 NGOs and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort made to vilify, stop or mutilate it on a daily basis. Under the worst possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor has it crumbled completely.

Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offence to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn’t worked at all, and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must help them understand this, not by suicide bombs, but by rational argument, mass civil disobedience, organized protest, here and everywhere.

The point I am trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in particular in more comparative and critical ways than superficial and dismissive books like Lewis’s What Went Wrong and Paul Wolfowitz’s ignorant statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world even begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a real society with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents in it that can’t be easily caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism.

The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one expresses solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated, frustrating discouragement, and crippling divisiveness.— Copyright Edward W. Said, 2003.

Battle against the bottle

THE announcement of a function in Islamabad in connection with World Breastfeeding Week drew our attention to the evils of bottle-feeding of infants and advantages of mother’s milk. However, even the newspapers didn’t point to the anomaly that the government mounts huge campaigns in favour of mother’s milk but, at the same time, allows unlimited import of milk substitutes.

But then, government’s actions are full of paradoxes and anomalies. It permits advertisement of cigarette brands (weren’t these to be stopped?) but forces the tobacco companies to print the words on every packet, “Smoking is injurious to health.” The very fact that the Ministry of Health is quoted as saying this absolves the cigarette manufacturers of any share in the warning.

A battle royal has been going on throughout the world between those who advocate breast-feeding and the international manufacturers of milk substitutes for infants. But the battle is surprisingly devoid of acrimony since no hot words are exchanged. In fact, you’ll find that the infant formula manufacturers are also all for breast-feeding. You will certainly ask, “Then what is the fight about?”

The World Breastfeeding Week is observed every year under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (Who). There is a new theme every time but the stress remains on the means to be adopted to eliminate advertising and the harmful effects of marketing practices by manufacturers of infant bottle feeds.

This is no child’s play. I was frightened out of my wits by the disclosure made by the Who and Unicef that every day as many as four thousand infants and young children die because they were not breast-fed. Just imagine, four thousand deaths every day! I usually avoid taking up grim issues in this column. But this bit of information was more than serious — a tragedy of gargantuan proportions — and I could not ignore it.

I mean to say, we are all for breast-feeding nowadays, but this information knocked me down with its element of horror. Four thousand deaths of little children every day! The first question that comes to mind is: why are the manufacturers of milk substitutes so anxious to create conditions for these deaths? Surely they are not child-haters. What do they get out of it?

Apparently they don’t believe their products are harmful and can cause such deaths which they blame on neglect. After all, they say, they don’t manufacture poison. But the fact remains (and this is what they gloss over) that if you deprive an infant of breast-feeding with its natural protection cover, you render a newly-born prone to numerous ailments that may lead to death.

Most of these fatalities occur in Third World countries with backward, uneducated female populations which are caught by the charm of beautiful advertising by infant formula makers and the local propaganda that modern women in Europe and America don’t breast-feed their children. This, of course, stands contradicted now.

You must have seen calendars and posters on the walls of hospital wards and shops and clinics with simply the most endearing pictures of pretty babies and a company brand or logo of an infant milk substitute with no words of inducement. Clever marketing experts even use the picture of a breast-feeding mother to promote their products.

I wonder how much our federal ministry of health and the provincial health departments are reacting to this battle between protagonists of breast-feeding and manufacturers of so-called supplements for feeding infants. Is it merely lip service to a cause sponsored by two UN bodies — Who and Unicef — or are they really doing something positive? The way they get involved in medicine supplies and drug pricing, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were just silent spectators or even hand-in-glove with the manufacturers.

However, let me not cavil at the attempts of poor health bureaucrats to make big money on the side. Let us see how the Who-Unicef combine decided to fight its battle with the manufacturers of milk substitutes. Some years ago it drew up an International Code of Marketing for Breast-Milk Substitutes and is anxious that all countries of the world should make the producers observe this code.

I am interested to find out how far Pakistan had contributed to making the enforcement of the code a success. So far as the rest of the world is concerned, the South American country Guatemala had taken the lead. Seven other countries (Pakistan is not one of them, but India is) have introduced the whole code as national legislation. Thirty other countries have incorporated some of the code’s provisions into existing legislation. Pakistan has confined its efforts to publicity, and that too mainly through non-official agencies. (If I am not correctly informed I am willing to clarify the true position). I suppose we have better things to do than running after milk bottles.

The companies have invented catchy slogans and attractive images and resorted to free samples and supplies of all kinds of appealing gifts to persuade mothers and health workers that while “breast is the best,” bottle-feeding is almost as good as breast-feeding. Today, as benefits of breast-feeding are being re-discovered, parents and health workers all over the world are realising the tragic consequences of allowing commercial interests to interfere with infant feeding practices. I have no means of knowing how much Pakistan’s efforts have done to publicise the matter in its correct perspective. The breastfeeding week is celebrated with a seminar here and a symposium there. If you look at the photographs of these functions you will find few concerned women attending, and the chief speaker is always a man, a so-called VIP. Even so, if all this helps to enlighten only a few thousand women, it will be no mean achievement.

A I pondered over this issue, memory went back to the forties when our women (or rather, our ladies) decided that breast-feeding was not good for their figures. Today the tide has turned, but the lower middle class mother, still trying to imitate the “ladies,” prefers to avoid breast-feeding. It is she and her class who need to be targeted.

Anyway, I can’t get over the figure of four thousand deaths every day. May God protect Third World countries like Pakistan from the curse of the feeding bottle.

A challenge for the envoys

AT the envoys’ conference in Islamabad last week, the president asked the ambassadors to project Pakistan as a pivotal state in South Asia. It is to be shown as being engaged in the task of shaping a tolerant society seeking peace with its neighbours and making strides in the economic sphere. Such a positive image would help Islamabad’s standing in foreign affairs and facilitate the achievement of its foreign policy goals and attracting foreign investment.

But what needs to be clearly understood by our policy makers is that foreign policy is an extension of the state of domestic affairs of a country. It cannot be built on shadows and must have its roots in substance. Hence, it is not possible to project an image which does not actually correspond to reality. If Pakistan is to be shown as a tolerant, friendly, democratic and progressive society it will have in fact to become tolerant, peace-loving, democratic and economically stable. In today’s communication age, when technology has scaled incredible heights, information can no longer be suppressed or coloured at will. No political entity can pretend to be a model state when it is really not one.

Does Pakistan fit the description given by President Musharraf? It would be naive to believe that it does and try to present ours as a tolerant and democratic society. Indeed, if there is anything that Pakistan lacks sorely, it is the capacity to accept diversity and plurality in beliefs, culture, customs and opinions. It is not the national characteristic of our people to accept the fact that everyone is not identical and that a person has the right to have his own beliefs and socio-cultural mores so long as he does not hurt the public interest thereby. Most Pakistanis tend to be self-righteous and presumptuous, though, mercifully, not everyone would go to the extent of using force to impose his views on others and try to ‘reform’ them.

But these prejudices are ingrained in the people’s psyche and are reinforced by the education system in the country, the media and the political culture cultivated by successive governments in Islamabad. As a result, some extremist forces give vent to their disapproval of diversity by maligning and harassing those who do not conform. Though such elements are in a minority, they are pretty influential high-profile. Moreover, the frequent incidents of karo kari, violence against women and attacks on mosques, imambargahs and churches indicate the power the extremists and obscurantists wield and the inability of the government to rein them in.

The presence of the militants and extremists in our midst give the country a bad name and make the job of the ambassadors posted abroad very tough. How can they project Pakistan as a paragon of tolerance when the media — both domestic and foreign — are reporting daily incidents of violence?

An equally daunting challenge would be to show Pakistan as a democratic polity. The country continues to be in limbo as the military leadership which seized power in 1999 remains in office and the parties have not reached a consensus on the LFO, which was devised to change the constitution and the political system and to enable the president to continue at the helm. Besides, how much credibility can be attached to the referendum which supposedly provides the legal underpinning for General Musharraf’s presidency and to the October elections which have given the country its present set of assemblies?

The envoys have also been instructed to project Pakistan as a state desiring friendship with its neighbours in the region. True, it is now more than evident that the people of Pakistan are tired of the state of no-war no-peace with India — often bordering on hostility — in which they have been living for the past several years. They want peace with India and whenever they have been permitted, the people have tried to create bonds of friendship with those in the neighbouring country.

But can the same be said about the policy line adopted by the government in Islamabad? True, it has always declared that it stands for peace and friendship with its neighbours. But statements and proclamations of intentions alone are not enough. They have to be followed by actions, which unfortunately have not been forthcoming in sufficient measure. Be it Afghanistan or India, Pakistan’s conflicts with them are far from resolved and one can hardly say that Islamabad has gone that extra mile which would qualify it to be regarded as a friendship-seeking neighbour.

As for projecting Pakistan as a “success story”, to use the president’s words, it would be a pretty hard job for the Foreign Office to perform. The president spoke of the macroeconomic indicators which point to the country becoming a hub of economic activity. This unfortunately is not quite visible. While economic growth has not shown a remarkable increase — it was 5.1 per cent in the last fiscal year — poverty has increased and is now nearly 33 per cent with nearly 95 million people living on an income of less than two dollars a day.

Poverty has brought crime in its wake. This has a direct bearing on investment and economic activity. The absence of security and safety proves to be the biggest deterrent to economic progress. When considered together with other factors that are key determinants of the investment climate of a country, Pakistan can hardly claim to be a success story. Low literacy and poor education make for a labour force with poor productivity. Fluctuations in the prices of fuel and power, combined with frequent changes in economic policy, do not encourage industrial growth for they create instability in the cost of production which no entrepreneur would welcome.

So the government would do well to concentrate on putting its own house in order rather than focusing on an image-polishing job. From the start, the governments in office in Pakistan have held foreign policy as their first priority. They have focused on external relations in an attempt to enhance the country’s international stature, forgetting that a country’s image can be no better than its domestic profile.

In their keenness to project Pakistan as a major power, policy makers have invariably ignored the domestic stability and economic viability of the country. Thus Pakistan entered the military pacts with the West much against popular opinion in the country. The alliance with the US brought in its wake dependence on foreign aid and the concomitant curse of a spiralling debt burden. Similarly, the involvement in the Afghan war brought the drug and heroin culture which has ravaged the country.

At the root of this mindset of our policy makers is the compulsion to seek a countervailing factor to the predominance of India in the subcontinent. Admittedly, India and Pakistan did not start off on a happy note in 1947. But subsequently we proved to be the losers as we failed to achieve national integration, political stability, economic progress with social justice and human resource development.

Our attempt to use foreign policy as a tool to outmanoeuvre India while domestic issues went by default has not really paid off. The fact is that the link between the foreign policy and a country’s domestic state is inextricable. Both interact on one another. But domestic policy comes first since it provides the basis for external relations. Post-war Germany and Japan concentrated on their political structures and economic systems to rebuild their ravaged countries. Only after they had emerged as economic giants did they venture to seek a political role for themselves.

It is time we put aside the competitive nature of our relationship with New Delhi, which creates the compulsion for us to seek a high-profile foreign policy. Pakistan needs to clean the Augean stables at home first.