THE Americans don’t celebrate Labour Day on May 1, as does the rest of the world. There is an irony in this and also an indication of America’s tendency to go alone on most matters, not just in picking dates for holidays. For most of the world May 1 symbolizes the advance the workers made in getting their rights protected. It was on that date that a group of workers in Chicago came out into the streets of that city to protest at the way their employers were treating them. In the melee that followed, several demonstrators lost their lives.

But the sacrifice of life on the streets of Chicago that May 1, did not go unrewarded. The workers, first in America and then in the rest of the industrial world, won the right to organize and also to strike without losing their jobs. It was that first collective action by industrial workers that the world celebrates on May 1. The Americans, however, have selected a different day to do the same. It is on the first Monday of every September that the United States celebrates the beginning of a new work year and a new school year.

In August, the month preceding the Labour Day, the Americans take time off from work to holiday and to reflect also on what lies ahead in the year. President George W. Bush uses the month of August to withdraw to his ranch in Texas to decompress and to meet with his principal advisers on the course his administration should follow in several areas, not just international affairs but also on the domestic front.

It was in August 2002, that his administration developed the roadmap that took America into Iraq in March and April of the following year. The map had a clear point of entry but, as is now getting to be realized, no defined point of exit. In going to Iraq, America was to seek broad international support through the United Nations. If that did not materialize, it would be prepared to go into that country alone. The world would be allowed no more than six months to make up its mind whether it wished to support America’s effort at regime change in Baghdad, oppose that enterprise or stay on the sidelines and watch Washington’s nation building efforts in the heart of the Arab world.

That was the message President Bush delivered in his speech to the United Nations in September 2002, soon after the celebration of that year’s Labour Day. If the world as represented in the United Nations did not support America, it would only demonstrate the irrelevance of that organization. President Bush had no doubt that the road he had chosen for his country to take to Iraq was morally correct.

The world listened to President Bush’s speech with interest but also with considerable apprehension. At the end of the day — or, more accurately, after six months of failed diplomacy — Washington was able to assemble only a weak coalition that walked with it into Iraq and finally to Baghdad. The invasion of Iraq proved to be easy. President Saddam Hussein’s regime quickly crumbled and, within one month, Iraq was in America’s control.

But that control did not bring peace to the country or an acceptance of America’s occupation. By the time August 2003 arrived and President Bush retreated to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, things in Iraq were not going America’s way. There was heavy loss of life as the Iraqi opposition organized itself to inflict damage not only on the US troops stationed in their country. Also chosen for attack were all those who seemed to support Washington. The targets selected by suicide bombers included the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad and the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, the holiest site of Shia Islam.

Nearly fifty people were killed in the two attacks, one on August 19 and the other on August 29. The first bomb blast claimed the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the UN mission in Iraq. The second killed Ayatollah Mohammad Baqar al-Hakim, a popular Shia leader who opposed the Saddam regime for two decades and had signalled his willingness to work with the Americans. His brother was a member of the 25-member Iraqi Council selected by the US as the first move towards handing to the Iraqis the political administration of their country.

How well has America fared in its efforts at nation-building in the world of Islam is a subject to which I will return later in these columns. Today I will look only at the way President Bush changed his course in Iraq if not by one hundred and eighty degrees then at least by ninety degrees.

On September 3, US Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell, announced in an unscheduled press conference that the Bush administration had changed course. It announced that a new resolution had been circulated to the 15 members of the UN Security Council asking for the creation of a multilateral force led by the United States. How and why that decision was taken and what are its implications for Pakistan?

The ground for this ninety degree turn was prepared by an unusual coalition formed by Secretary Powell with the top leaders of America’s armed forces, notably Gen Richard B. Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs and Gen John Abizaid, the new chief of the US Central Command. The two met in Qatar on July 27 and decided that the US needed help in Iraq from the countries that had large armed forces. They talked about possible troop deployments by India, Pakistan and Turkey.

According to one account, Gen Myers came home determined “to get some international troops in here to do things international troops are good at doing — de-mining, peace keeping.” Myers took that message to Crawford, Texas when he met President Bush. “About the same time as Myers went to Bush, state department officials started to put pen to paper on the draft of a proposed resolution in early August. The department had long favoured such an action but was waiting until the right time to make its case to Bush. After the bombing of UN headquarters, officials saw an opportunity. Though it ‘looked a little ghoulish’ to act immediately, as one senior official put it, they began to prepare.”

The new roadmap called for a fairly significant involvement on the part of several international organizations to bring peace to Iraq, to start the immensely expensive task of rebuilding the country’s economy, and to get the Iraqi people engaged in designing for their country’s new political institutions. A peace-keeping force was to be assembled under the authority of the United Nations.

Although the force’s command was to remain with the United States, it would be responsible not only to the Pentagon but also to the UN Security Council. Pledges for economic assistance to Iraq would be secured from rich nations which were invited to a donors’ conference to be held in October in Spain. The pledged funds were to be managed by the World Bank while the International Monetary Fund would be given the task to develop banking and fiscal institutions in the country.

In terms of political development, the task was entrusted to the US-appointed Iraq governing council. However, the Council was required to report to the Security Council the progress it was making and, in return, get advice from the international body.

Armed with this plan, Colin Powell is said to have “walked into Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli. . . Powell informed the commander-in-chief that the military supported the state department’s position despite resistance by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Bush, and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the UN resolution, quickly agreed.” Having obtained President Bush’s approval, Secretary Powell began discussions with the countries represented on the Security Council, including Pakistan.

“Bringing security, democracy and prosperity to post-war Iraq was always too big a challenge for Washington to have taken on alone,” wrote The New York Times in an editorial published a day after the switch in the US policy was announced. “The passage of a new Security Council resolution, even if it does no more than place military operations under UN auspices, should permit nations like India, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey to contribute troops. . . A more broadly based force with a substantial Muslim component could help transform what looks uncomfortably like an imperial army of occupation into a true international peace-keeping force,” the newspaper continued.

Should Pakistan accept the mandate for a mission to Iraq if it arrives in the form of a UN Security Council resolution? This will not be an easy question for Islamabad to answer. If the Pakistani government is willing to lend a helping hand, it must be assured of at least two things. First, is America prepared to accommodate the voices other than its own in developing Iraq’s economic and political institution? Two, what are the chances of success of the new Iraq project?

The Washington Post, another newspaper read with some care by the policymakers in the US capital was less enthusiastic about surrendering a great deal of authority to the UN and to the countries such as France and Germany that had not accepted America’s call to arms against Iraq. “Excessive concessions for the demand of those countries for UN control in Iraq could make a bad situation worse. It would be wrong, for example, to slow or reverse the assumption of authority by the Iraqi governing council or the speedy recruitment of Iraqi police and security force.”

The newspaper also advised the Bush administration not to beat a hasty retreat from Iraq. “The arrival of fresh foreign troops cannot become an excuse for US withdrawal — the forces now in Iraq will be needed for as long as there is a military threat from Iraqi guerrillas and terrorists. . . A new UN mandate might make the challenge more manageable, and success more likely — and yet this country must still prepare for a difficult, expensive and prolonged effort.”

If Washington heeded this kind of advice, Pakistan and its troops would essentially be serving in a direct manner the U.S. interests in Iraq. Should Pakistani lives be put in danger if that were the case?

There are equally difficult questions that need to be asked about the chance of success even if the UN did get a mandate its members are prepared to live with. Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist, argues that Somalia offers a better analogy than Bosnia and Kosovo for assessing the chances of UN success in Iraq. “The plain truth is the UN does old-fashioned peacekeeping rather well, and neo-colonial nation-building fairly well, but only when those missions are not significantly challenged by local militarized groups. If the critics are right that the problem in Iraq is security, then the UN is probably not the vehicle for addressing it.”

These are then some of the questions and issues Islamabad must ponder before it rushes into Iraq with Pakistani troops.

‘IF at first you don’t succeed, lie and lie again’ seems to be the watchword of the floundering Bush administration.

First, it was the ultimate evils, Osama bin Laden and Mulla Omar. When they couldn’t be found, America was threatened by evil forces ‘that hate our freedoms.’ Then Saddam’s nuclear weapons, anthrax, mustard, and nerve gas, ‘drones of death,’ mobile germ labs, links to Al Qaeda, etc.

Now, in the latest change of sales pitch, the president insists his war on terrorism means the war to pacify Iraq.

According to Bushthink, any Iraqi opposing US occupying forces is a ‘terrorist.’ Ergo, growing Iraqi nationalist resistance will inevitably mean Bush’s signature ‘war on terrorism’ will be a growth industry. Like the gigantic Enron swindle, it’s a huge bubble, inflated by false claims and calculated deception.

Straining credulity even farther, the president claimed that waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan would spare America from another 9/11-style attack that might otherwise happen at any moment - though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

It was the duty of the world community, Bush proclaimed, to ‘share the burden of occupation’ of Iraq and Afghanistan — which the White House finally admitted will total at least US $166 billion for this year and next, an astronomical sum that could buy 39 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

By the end of 2004, Bush’s wars could amount to 30 percent of the total cost of the equally misbegotten 17-year Vietnam war.

By cleverly re-branding the invasion of Iraq as the essential part of his jihad against terrorism, Bush and his handlers were clearly counting on their core supporters in America to have short memories and a weak grasp of foreign geography and nomenclature.

They are probably right: recent polls confirm two-thirds of confused Americans still believe the big lie, promoted by the White House and neo-conservatives that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks.

This example of how the White House shamelessly exploited the confusion and ignorance of many Americans about world affairs recalls another famous quote. Reich Marshall Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trial: ‘the people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That is easy.

All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.’ Indeed.

In an astounding about-face, the Bush administration is now begging ‘old’ Europe, led by those ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ — as Bush’s know-nothing supporters called France — the ‘irrelevant’ UN, and formerly ‘rogue state’ Pakistan to send troops and money to Iraq. In Europe, so long abused and slandered by Bush and his supporters, the plaintive request was greeted by sneers.

France’s conservative Le Figaro headlined White House pleas for help as, ‘Saving Private Bush.’

Congress, terrified of being branded ‘unpatriotic’ and incurring the wrath of the Israel lobby, will go along with this monumental political and economic folly. While America’s economy sags and its states plunge deep in the red, George Bush plans to shortly spend almost as much to wage a hugely expensive colonial war in chaotic Iraq as the cost of rebuilding Europe at the end of World War II.

Bush and his handlers are not protecting America by pursuing the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, they are protecting their own political skins.

These twin foreign misadventures are a historic geopolitical, military and economic blunder. Europeans repeatedly warned against invading Iraq. So did genuine Mideast experts, who were dismissed as pro-Arab or, like this writer, as ‘friends of Saddam.’

The mushrooming disaster was totally predictable and avoidable.

It defies understanding how the many intelligent men and women in the Bush Administration believed their own absurd claims about the danger posed by Iraq, and stuck America in the worst mess since Vietnam.

Mind you, Chief ‘whiz kid’ Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam disaster, was also noted for his intellect, as is his heir, Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Brilliant’ VP Dick Cheney actually claimed last spring that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. In Washington, arrogance and ignorance too often combine,

Shockingly, Congress’s budget office has just reported that the US will run short of troops in Iraq by spring. Almost half of the US army combat units are tied down in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. That’s why Bush is trying to bribe or browbeat nations like Turkey, India, Pakistan to sending cannon-fodder sepoys to Iraq, and force rich Europe to pay part of the bill.

But asking other nation’s to ‘share the burden’ of an unprovoked invasion of another country takes grand chutzpah. Aggression is not a burden, it’s a crime under the UN Charter. The Bush administration did not invade Iraq to perform social work, but to grab its vast oil reserves and destroy an enemy of Israel.

Bush’s demand that the Third World UN troops serve under orders of ‘white’ American officers is a further insult to the United Nations and will reinforce the belief of those who attacked its Baghdad HQ that the organization is merely a cat’s paw of Washington.

What Bush should do is declare victory and bring US troops home. Now. Save $166 billion and many, many lives. It’s still not too late to climb out of the swamp.—Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2003

NOW that President Pervez Musharraf, has declared in no uncertain terms the government’s resolve to build both Kalabagh and Bhasha dams, the question what is to be done to resolve the controversy surrounding the dams, calls for urgent attention.

In an article entitled, “Do we need more dams on the Indus?”, published in this space in August 1996, I wrote that Bhasha was not a substitute for Kalabagh, rather both Kalabagh and Bhasha dams were needed to meet the growing power demand and to provide additional irrigation water, besides recouping the irrigation system for the loss of water supplies from Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma reservoirs as a result of progressive depletion of their storage capacities because of sedimentation.

Since time was of the essence, it was obvious that Kalabagh, which was technically ready to be launched by 1987, had to be undertaken first. However, it was necessary to acknowledge that apart from what had been dubbed parochially or politically motivated objections against Kalabagh dam, serious concern had been expressed by a section of the intelligentsia as well as by various national and international organizations regarding social and environmental impacts of the dam.

Brushing aside the objections and concerns about Kalabagh dam as politically motivated, President Musharraf made the above announcement at the inauguration of the first unit of Ghazi-Barotha Hydropower Project on August 19. He expressed the hope that the government would overcome all problems relating to the issue, but he did not say how. There was no hint in his speech that the government intended to build national consensus on the issue. (He repeated this announcement in his address to the nation on Saturday last).

President Musharraf also said that by June 2004 the government would have two options: either to construct Bhasha dam or Kalabagh dam, but made it clear that the construction of one of the two would have to be undertaken immediately (he presumably meant, soon after June 2004). But will there really be two comparable options to choose from in or around June 2004? That is the question that merits attention right away. A negative answer to this question is more likely to emerge than a positive one, if one looks at the list of technical shortcomings, identified in the initial feasibility study of the Bhasha dam by an International panel of experts in 1988.

In its report the panel recommended initiation of more comprehensive and intensive investigations to establish the feasibility of the project. The panel also recommended that detailed engineering design should be prepared only after the project feasibility had been established.

The recommended studies could have taken some six to seven years (provided access to the site had been substantially improved) for Bhasha to reach near the level attained by Kalabagh back in 1987. Thus, given that the studies had commenced in 2001, Bhasha could become an option comparable with that of Kalabagh not in June 2004, but, perhaps, if everything went well, by June 2007 or thereabout.

Apparently, by saying Bhasha dam would be an option by 2004, President Musharraf attempted to sweeten the announcement for the ears of those who oppose the building of the dam not so much on the Indus in Punjab. However, the hard facts indicate that Kalabagh is likely to continue to stay as the only technically sound option until almost the end of the current decade.

But regardless of which of the two sites is eventually chosen for building the dam, the government will have to address the concerns regarding its social and environmental impacts. These concerns cannot be brushed aside by characterizing them as “wrong impressions created by certain elements about key national projects”. These concerns have been highlighted in the national and international press from time to time.

In an article entitled ‘A River Diverted, the Sea Rushes’ published in The New York Times on April 22, 2003, Erik Eckholm wrote: “The social and environmental damage is most visible in the Indus delta itself, which used to be a vast network of creeks surrounded by rich silt that yielded abundant rice crops for export. The traditional year-round flow into the sea was drastically curbed a few decades back, and more recently, with more withdrawals topped by years of low precipitation in the river headlands, it has disappeared altogether.

With no river to push it out, the sea is pushing in. Along the coast, studies show, least 1.2 million acres of farmland have been covered by seawater. Millions more acres inland has been impaired or destroyed by salt deposits. ... Once more than 850,000 acres, the area of mangrove swamps in the Indus delta has shrunk to less than 500,000. Trees are stunted in many of the remaining forests, and the number of species has dropped to three from eight. Fisheries have suffered accordingly, with catches of some of the most valued species nearly disappearing.

“Overfishing is another problem: driven out of farming by the absence of water, thousands of people have switched to offshore fishing, putting enormous pressure on the stocks... The flood plains banding the Indus along its lower hundreds of miles were covered until recently with rich forests, occupied by more than 500,000 people who engaged in animal husbandry, farming and forestry. But now the river so seldom overflows that the riverine ecosystems are failing.”

The author suggests that the new dams would aggravate the situation. Also, there are serious concerns about large-scale uprooting of the people from the would-be reservoir areas. All these and other legitimate concerns would need to be addressed regardless of the site chosen for building the dam on the Indus. Therefore, without waiting for the completion of Bhasha feasibility study the government should launch a programme designed to identify the adverse social and environmental impacts and to develop adequate measures to mitigate them, and in doing so, seeking the advice of independent international experts if necessary.

After incorporating the mitigating measures in the project design, the government would be in a better position to hold meaningful dialogue with the stakeholders. Such efforts would need to be conducted in line with the guidelines of the World Commission on Dams set out in November 2000 publication, ‘Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision Making’. The outcome of these efforts could form a convincing basis for achieving national consensus.

Assuming that the issues were resolved, consensus achieved, funding arranged and construction begun in the next two to three years, one could look forward optimistically to the years in the first half of the next decade when the second dam on the Indus (Tarbela dam being the first one) would start delivering additional irrigation water and cheap electricity. Although this would happen, if all went well, some two decades later than the target originally set for it by Wapda for the completion of the Kalabagh dam, yet one could take comfort from the thought that the additional water deliveries during the low flow seasons would hopefully alleviate the water shortages experienced almost every year since the early 1990s, and the deliveries of the hydroelectric energy.

For these expected benefits the August 19 announcement of President Musharraf, which indicated that one of the two dams would be built sooner than later, was certainly reassuring. However, the seemingly apolitical announcement was unfortunately laced up with some comments that were unnecessary and inadvisable which could hamper efforts to build up national consensus on controversial dams.

General Musharraf blamed past governments for not undertaking more hydropower projects. Ironically, it was the PPP government which had launched in 1994-95 the 1,450 MW Ghazi-Barotha hydropower project, whose first unit General Musharraf was inaugurating on August 19. Obviously, he ignored this fact for political reasons. Yet, blaming all past governments; including the PPP’s for ignoring hydropower development tended to add a political overtone to the announcement regarding the Kalabagh and Bhasha dams.

In citing the independent power producers (IPPs) for causing increases in power tariff General Musharraf ignored the fact that the IPPs became necessary, or had perforce to be brought in because the 3,600 MW capacity Kalabagh dam did not materialize because the then President General Ziaul Haq decided not to go ahead with the dam although it was technically ready to be launched in 1987. The favourable international aid environment of the 1980s ended with the end of the cold war. The United States cut off its aid to Pakistan in 1990. In addition to financial constraints, the weak and incompetent governments in the 1990s had to contend with the changed strategy of donor agencies which was designed to promote private investment in the energy sectors of developing countries.

In these circumstances the only option available to the then governments for meeting the shortfall in power generation capacity was the induction of the IPPs in addition to implementing a ready-to-be-launched non-controversial hydropower project, like the Ghazi-Barotha hydropower project.

In the light of the above discussion, it would be reasonable to say that the electricity tariff increase was largely the result of the absence of a desirable thing like Kalabagh hydropower development. With the Kalabagh, the hydro-thermal power ratio in the country would have been 48: 52 today instead of 28:72 and would have been further raised to 56:64 with Ghazi-Barotha hydropower plant.

The writer is a former senior staff member of the Asian Development Bank.