WHEN India exploded its nuclear bomb, Nawaz Sharif, sent one of his ministers to seek my advice whether we should also explode a nuclear device, I advised him not to do so. However the widespread frenzy and a false sense of pride got the better of him and he took the step that was acclaimed in the country as an act of statesmanship.

If Pakistan was a non-nuclear power it would not be necessary for India to attack Pakistan with nuclear weapons even if Pakistan was the aggressor. It makes no sense that India should launch a nuclear attack against Pakistan when it already has three times Pakistan’s strength in conventional weapons. It is Pakistan, a smaller military power that may, in desperation, want to use nuclear weapons in its defence.

However if it ever did so, India could retaliate and within minutes destroy three or four of Pakistan’s cities and also Pakistan’s main command and control capacity. Anything comparable that Pakistan could do may damage India in many ways but it would be nothing compared to the damage that would have been done to Pakistan.

Pakistan would, as a result, be mortally damaged whereas India would be damaged to a much lesser extent and would still survive as a nation. It is also possible that in a state of heightened tension, India could itself explode a bomb or two in one of its lesser populated or vital areas and then within minutes obliterate Pakistan’s main strategic centres. India could claim that Pakistan had bombed it first. There would not be many of us left to deny this.

There are other scenarios that are frightening. India and Pakistan are today the only two hostile nuclear powers with a common border. The warning time is less than one minute and in this situation, a misreading of a warning of a nuclear attack could initiate a reaction and the launching of a retaliatory strike. This could initiate a nuclear conflict by miscalculation.

After the second world war there were a number of occasions when the two nuclear powers, the US and the USSR, misread the warning of a possible nuclear strike and ordered their interceptor aircraft to meet the ‘hostile’ aircraft, assumed to be carrying nuclear weapons. After some time and before the interceptor aircraft had made contact, it was discovered that the warning was false and the interceptor aircraft were called back.

In our situation, we do not have the distance or the time to correct our mistake. The few seconds that we have, will not be enough and it is likely that we will destroy ourselves before the error is recognized. There is also the danger that some madman on either side, might press the button in the belief that it was his national or religious duty to do so. The possibilities are frightening and only fools can disregard this real danger.

It has been true throughout history that an enemy has been created to infuse unity in a country and indeed sometimes desirable for it to make progress. The dissolution of the Soviet Union posed a problem for the United States and it had been faced for over a decade with the need to invent threats for its progress and stability.

The attack on the twin towers on September 1, 2001, tragic as it was, has given the United States the enemy that it had begun to miss. Iraq and other countries that may follow are required to mobilize the American public to strengthen the government of the time. This has been true throughout history but the nuclear bomb has changed the world in the last half century.

It is now necessary that the public should exert its power and influence to ensure that it is not exploited by its government for its narrow political purposes. What is true of the United States or other powerful states applies equally to Pakistan — a country placed in a critical strategic position. Misleading the public, in matters of survival, could have disastrous consequences.

I believe that with the present unsatisfactory international situation with India, Pakistan would be more secure without nuclear weapons. If Pakistan has no nuclear weapons and opened itself to inspection to satisfy world opinion that it could no longer use nuclear weapons, it would have only a conventional threat to its security. India could not use its nuclear power against Pakistan and would have to rely on its conventional weapons alone.

Because of its heavy investment in maintaining a large nuclear capability, India’s capacity to maintain a large conventional force at the same time would be limited. That itself would give greater security to Pakistan which should review its concept of defence.

In this situation, with the knowledge that India could not launch a nuclear strike against Pakistan, it should prepare only for a conventional war. Pakistan should maintain an effective air force with reasonable armoured strength and should cut down drastically, the defence expenditure on its regular land forces. With a large reserve of trained manpower it should have a large territorial reserve force organized in geographical sectors called up for periodical refresher training and capable of deployment at 24 hours’ notice. Their weapons should be kept at suitable locations for rapid issue.

Not only would Pakistan’s defence thus be strengthened but what is equally important, the defence budget could be cut down drastically. If other wasteful and totally unnecessary expenditures are cut down and the fat reduced, our defence would be greatly strengthened at far lesser cost. It is however sad but true that few in power or those aspiring to get into power, will have the courage to face facts and accept reality. It is more likely that they will continue to misguide the people and lead the country towards greater misery and possible destruction.

THE unanimous Security Council resolution on Iraq represented, on one level, an extraordinary achievement for American diplomacy: it accepted the American occupation and defined a procedure to return Iraq to self-government that is related, at least to some extent, to the requirements of Iraqi stability rather than to an arbitrary timetable.

At the same time, Russia, France and Germany have accompanied their positive votes with reservations, indicating that the proclaimed return to multilateralism is more of form than of substance. These countries have explained their positive votes as a contribution to a multilateral world order and their refusal to send military forces or to increase their financial contributions as an expression of national policy. But world order depends less on common votes than on shared perceptions and cooperative actions.

When nations agree on goals and necessary tactics, multilateralism moves from slogan to concrete policy. When basic purposes diverge, each nation is obliged to determine to what degree it is prepared to modify its definition of its national interest for the sake of multilateralism. The more vital these challenged interests are perceived to be, the more unlikely it is that multilateral arrangements will flourish. In the period prior to the outbreak of the Iraqi war, fundamental national purposes clashed. No multilateral solution was possible; unilateral action was the result of a special case, not of a general principle.

But the debates over the origin of the war should not shape the issue at hand. In the current situation, a sense of common purpose — especially with traditional allies and new partners like Russia — is (or should be) imposed by reality. Crucial objectives such as bringing about security, the establishment of a stable and legitimate government, the expeditious restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and successful reconstruction seem to be agreed. The differences concern means and timing — though not on all issues. There is no disagreement that the principal responsibility for security must be American. Responsibility for reconstruction can be related to the contribution a nation makes without controversy. The major disagreement concerns the method of creating an Iraqi government and its status.

The United States seeks a process whereby the American-appointed governmental authority supervises the drafting of a constitution that leads, after adoption in a referendum, to the establishment of a government by free elections. This process could take as long as two years. It runs the risk that a premature election, before political groupings are fully formed, could destabilize the entire process and put a premium on the old political structures. France, Germany and Russia advocate the rapid creation in an as-yet-undetermined manner of a sovereign political entity, which would then guide the political process. The difference is that, under an occupation regime, the United States retains a technical veto; under the French, Russian and German scheme, the evolution is subject to an undefined international authority.

However, the real issue is not procedural. American leadership has been crucial in bringing about the unanimous Security Council resolution. But in the next phase, the effectiveness of any new Iraqi government depends on the degree to which it can achieve international recognition for necessary security and reconstruction efforts. Leadership now requires an effort to involve other societies in the political evolution of Iraq. This is not as forbidding a task as previous consultative efforts on Iraq suggest, for most nations, whatever their views then, have a common interest in a peaceful Iraq.

If the American occupation were to wind down into a radicalized or fundamentalist Iraq, what is now a conflict with a segment of Islam could turn into a clash of civilizations. Should the balance within the Islamic world shift toward radicals and fundamentalists, moderate secular governments would be in jeopardy, and the world from South-east Asia to India and western Europe would risk growing turmoil. Nor will countries such as France, Germany and Russia be able to avoid reaping the whirlwind by dissociation from the United States. Presenting themselves as spokesmen of Arab nationalism feeds the flames of a radicalism from which there is no exit. Emboldened radicalism and fundamentalism would pursue its victims to wherever they may retreat.

Establishing self-government will not by itself end the contest for power in Iraq, where power has grown out of the barrel of a gun for most of history. The idea that a constitution would be quickly embraced and effectively implemented bears no relationship to Iraq’s historic realities. Any new government’s hold on power will surely be contested. A constitution for Iraq must not be confused with an exit strategy. The presence of military force guaranteeing the political structure for many years is inevitable, and the United States must be an essential element of it. The key issue is not that of command of the vital outside security forces — which will be dominantly American — but the political framework within which it operates.

This requires adaptation to current realities. For America the analogy between the reconstruction of Iraq and the occupation of Germany and Japan at the end of World War II has been overtaken by events. Germany and Japan were national states with long national histories; Iraq was formed in 1922 by European fiat on an arbitrary multi-ethnic and multi-religious basis. After Nazism’s collapse in Germany and unconditional surrender in Japan, there was no philosophical and political alternative to western democracy — except a militant communism discrediting itself by its oppression. In Iraq, a combination of armed Baathists, fundamentalists and terrorists poses an internal challenge. In Germany and Japan, the threat from the outside, represented by the Soviet Union, became a spur to close ties with the West and a democratic political order.

In Iraq, a plethora of outside forces are pulling Iraq in the opposite direction: Syria, for fear of a popular government; Iran, because it has historically considered Iraq its geopolitical rival and may thus welcome a weakened, perhaps even dismembered Iraq, possibly by appealing to Iraq’s Shia majority. Other nations, including some allies, will seek to prevent an American monopoly position with respect to oil supplies and add national business and financial competition to the underlying divisiveness. To protect the borders of Iraq, to achieve a western-style democracy by western military occupation is not something that the United States should undertake alone except as a last resort and having exhausted all alternatives.

As for the countries that have urged an alternative approach to building Iraqi institutions, is their position based on a judgment as to the most effective means to restore stability to Iraq? Or do they urge a rapid transfer of sovereignty primarily in order to undermine a putative American monopoly position in Iraq so that they can begin competing for influence there in the shortest possible time? Are we dealing with differing approaches to stability or the assertion of classical balance-of-power politics in the guise of multilateralism?

An answer to these questions will determine the prospects of a multilateral outcome. It is complicated by the unsettled conditions in Iraq. Were America clearly dominant, other countries would join to achieve influence. Were America in serious difficulty, other countries might participate to prevent the consequences described earlier. In-between conditions put a premium on fence-sitting.

Too much is at stake to let matters drift. Iraqi policy must navigate between two extremes. A solitary American effort, while it may become a last resort, would run up against the psychological and political pressures of a hostile international environment and the encouragement this provides to Iraqi guerilla movements. On the other hand, an abstract multilateralism will multiply vetoes and frustrations, and it will tempt nationalist policies in Iraq justified by multilateral slogans. Iraq thus becomes a major test of the possibility of an enlightened world order and, above all, of the possibility of restoring the Atlantic relationship.

The United States should be prepared to share defined responsibilities with its allies and with the international community because the international legitimacy of the emerging Iraqi government depends in part on its international acceptance. America’s allies and putative partners such as Russia must choose between using these discussions to play balance-of-power politics or to make a serious commitment to a common concept of the political future of Iraq. If they press for transfer of sovereignty without appropriate safeguards, they are basing their policy on encouraging a virulent Iraqi and Arab nationalism; from the consequences of it, they cannot be immune. A genuine role implies not only a voice but also an effort and a general understanding as to the nature of the government to be established and its security framework.

An interim government that respects Kurdish autonomy, restores a meaningful role for the Sunnis, and gives the Shias for the first time a role commensurate with their numbers would represent a major achievement. Even were it to fall short of full western-style democracy in its early stages, it should nevertheless open the way to an evolution in that direction by protecting human rights, ending the discrimination against women, and establishing representative local government, independent judiciaries and a constitutional foundation for the central government.

The Security Council resolution requires a report by the United States on its proposed timetable for self-government. The United States could use the occasion to test the prospects for a cooperative solution by inviting a dialogue on Iraq’s political evolution toward an interim government — perhaps by using the ‘quad‘ that worked on the ‘roadmap‘ or some other ad hoc group. The United States can enter such a process from a position of confidence. For no matter how an eventual Iraqi government emerges, it will have a considerable incentive to cooperate with the United States as the principal provider of security and financial support.

The stakes could hardly be higher. For success in Iraq would alter the dynamics of the entire region and of international relationships. The major countries and especially the western nations face the choice that will define the future: whether the world order reflects a new version of power struggle or a more creative system from agreed positive purposes. — Dawn/Tribune Media Services International

IN Baghdad, the Bush administration acts as though it is astonished by the post-war carnage. Its feigned shock is a consequence of Washington’s intelligence wars. In fact, not only was it warned of the coming struggle and its nature — ignoring a $5m state department report on ‘The Future of Iraq’ — but Bush himself signed another document in which that predictive information is contained.

According to the congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, the administration is required to submit to the Congress reports of post-war planning every 60 days. The report, bearing Bush’s signature and dated April 14 — previously undisclosed but revealed here — declares: “We are especially concerned that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime will continue to use Iraqi civilian populations as a shield for its regular and irregular combat forces or may attack the Iraqi population in an effort to undermine Coalition goals.” Moreover, the report goes on: “Coalition planners have prepared for these contingencies, and have designed the military campaign to minimise civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.”

Yet, on August 25, as the violence in post-war Iraq flared, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that this possibility was not foreseen: “Now was — did we — was it possible to anticipate that the battles would take place south of Baghdad and that then there would be a collapse up north, and there would be very little killing and capturing of those folks, because they blended into the countryside and they’re still fighting their war?”

“We read their reports,” a senate source told me. “Too bad they don’t read their own reports.”

In advance of the war, Bush (to be precise, Dick Cheney, the de facto prime minister to the distant monarch) viewed the CIA, the state department and other intelligence agencies not simply as uncooperative, but even disloyal, as their analysts continued to sift through information to determine what exactly might be true.

For them, this process is at the essence of their professionalism and mission. Yet the strict insistence on the empirical was a threat to the ideological, facts an imminent danger to the doctrine. So those facts had to be suppressed, and those creating contrary evidence had to be marginalized, intimidated or have their reputations tarnished.

Twice, in the run-up to the war, vice-president Cheney veered his motorcade to the George HW Bush Centre for intelligence in Langley, Virginia, where he personally tried to coerce CIA desk-level analysts to fit their work to specification.

If the CIA would not serve, it would be trampled. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld formed the office of special plans, a parallel counter-CIA under the direction of the neo-conservative deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to “stovepipe” its own version of intelligence directly to the White House. Its reports were not to be mingled or shared with the CIA or state department intelligence for fear of corruption by scepticism.

Instead, the Pentagon’s handpicked future leader of Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, replaced the CIA as the reliable source of information, little of which turned out to be true — though his deceit was consistent with his record. Chalabi was regarded at the CIA as a mountebank after he had lured the agency to support his “invasion” of Iraq in 1995, a tragicomic episode, but one which hardly discouraged his neo-conservative sponsors.

Early last year, before Hans Blix, chief of the UN team to monitor Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, embarked on his mission, Wolfowitz ordered a report from the CIA to show that Blix had been soft on Iraq in the past and thus to undermine him before he even began his work. When the CIA reached an opposite conclusion, Wolfowitz was described by a former state department official in the Washington Post as having “hit the ceiling”.

Then, according to former assistant secretary of state James Rubin, when Blix met Cheney at the White House, the vice-president told him what would happen if his efforts on WMDs did not support Bush policy: “We will not hesitate to discredit you.” Blix’s brush with Cheney was no different from the administration’s treatment of the CIA.

Having already decided upon its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to fit into an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the driven logic of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence a la carte.

In Bush’s Washington, politics is the extension of war by other means. Rather than seeking to reform any abuse of intelligence, the Bush administration, through the Republican-dominated senate intelligence committee, is producing a report that will accuse the CIA of giving faulty information.

While the CIA is being cast as a scapegoat, FBI agents are meanwhile interviewing senior officials about a potential criminal conspiracy behind the public identification of a covert CIA operative — who, not coincidentally, happens to be the wife of the former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of the report on the false Niger yellowcake uranium claims (originating in the Cheney’s office). Wilson’s irrefutable documentation was carefully shelved at the time in order to put16 false words about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear threat in the mouth of George Bush in his state of the union address.

When it comes to responsibility for the degradation of intelligence in developing rationales for the war, Bush is energetically trying not to get the bottom of anything. While he has asserted the White House is cooperating with the investigation into the felony of outing Mrs Wilson, his spokesman has assiduously drawn a fine line between the legal and the political.

After all, though Karl Rove, the president’s political strategist and senior adviser, indispensable to his re election campaign, unquestionably called a journalist to prod him that Mrs. Wilson was “fair game”, his summoning of the furies upon her apparently occurred after her name was already put into the public arena by two other unnamed “senior administration officials”.

Rove is not considered to have committed a firing offence so long as he has merely behaved unethically. What Bush is not doing — not demanding that his staff sign affidavits swearing their innocence, or asking his vice-president point-blank what he knows — is glaringly obvious. Damaging national security must be secondary to political necessity.

“It’s important to recognize,” Wilson remarked to me, “that the person who decided to make a political point or that his political agenda was more important than a national security asset is still there in place. I’m appalled at the apparent nonchalance shown by the president.”

Now, post-war, the intelligence wars, if anything, have got more intense. Blame shifting by the administration is the order of the day. The Republican senate intelligence committee report will point the finger at the CIA, but circumspectly not review how Bush used intelligence. The Democrats, in the senate minority, forced to act like a fringe group, held unofficial hearings this week with prominent former CIA agents: rock-ribbed Republicans who all voted for and even contributed money to Bush, but expressed their amazed anger at the assault being waged on the permanent national security apparatus by the Republican president whose father’s name adorns the building where they worked. One of them compressed his disillusionment into the single most resonant word an intelligence agent can muster: “betrayal”.—Dawn/The Guardian news service

The writer was a senior adviser to President Clinton and is author of ‘The Clinton Wars’.

THERE comes a time in the life of a writer, when he asks himself whether there is really any point in churning out, week after week, epistolary essays designed to make Karachi, or for that matter, the country, a better place to live in. Especially when the rulers display a sublime indifference to press criticism and treat criticism as a case of sour grapes.

It is bad enough that we have the misfortune of living in an age when the selfish pursuit of worthless outdoor goals is all too suddenly confused with real achievement. We also appear to be blessed with an assortment of administrators who, while they give the impression that they are harbouring cosmic ambitions, are really doing precious little to improve living conditions in the city.

Take, for example, the saga of the Circular Railway. There was a time when every sane denizen of this blighted city thought this was the perfect solution to the ever growing transport problem, with its snarling traffic jams and ill planned tidal waves. Today, the people who are in a position to take vital decisions, won’t touch the project with a pair of tongues.

So many articles have appeared in newspapers during the last ten years on the subject, and so many writers have vented their spleen in an attempt to come to grips with the problem that it is strange the issue has been put on the back burner. After all, some of the journalists have argued, if the city fathers of Bombay, Kolkata and Delhi can tackle the issue head on, why can’t the city fathers of Karachi? Is it because they are afraid to rock the boat and are anxious not to annoy those who operate the intricate network of road transport, or is it just a case of gross incompetence?

I was, in fact, caught in the traffic jam on Chundrigar Road on the evening before the sighting of the moon. I must have inhaled vast quantities of freshly manufactured carbon-monoxide, while I listened to the incessant bleating of an assortment of horns that stretched over two octaves in the musical scale. And I really cursed when it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get from the Cotton Exchange Building to Clifton Bridge. This is just a portent of things to come.

Arif Hasan, the celebrated town planner, is not the only person who has argued the case for the Circular Railway. The two chief executives in the province, the governor and the chief minister, who always sound marvelously prescient, have had more than one meeting with the Chinese, and appeared to be greatly in favour of starting the project. In fact, the impression that was conveyed to the general public was that it won’t be long before bogies will be trundling along the metal veins of the old circular network.

But the town nazim apparently has different ideas. He keeps talking about installing the ‘corridor’ system, which is an altogether different project. It is also very expensive to construct, and will cost the commuter three times what he would pay for travelling on the circular railway.

This must be the third time that the nazim has asked for tenders from firms who are bidding for a programme which will progressively blot out whatever few architectural landmarks are still remaining in the city. All these delaying tactics are giving the nazim a bad name. He must decide, one way or the other, and implement his decision, soon. If a ‘corridor’ system has to be built, then he should go ahead and build it. There is a limit to the amount of prevarication that the public can accept.

Meanwhile, the reports say that the current national assembly will conclude on November 10, as the ruling party would have completed 120 days of proceedings. What an incredible state of affairs! One hundred and twenty days without having passed any legislation. Never before in the history of parliamentary democracy in this country, has there been a greater dedication to redundancy.

But this is not all. The salary and privileges committee of the national assembly has apparently decided to raise the salaries of the legislators by 150 per cent. That’s 135 per cent more than what the government offered a fortnight ago. The legislators had asked for only a 50 per cent raise, but the S&P committee has gone completely berserk. A hundred and fifty per cent raise for doing nothing, must be something of a world record, and should find a place in the Guinness Book. Is this just a case of being a trifle recondite, or is the public missing something?

The committee came up with the lame excuse that the calculations had been made on the basis of the salary raises given to bureaucrats over a four-year period. This is absolute nonsense. The government’s record of improving the pension and allowances of retired government servants, is not exactly laudable. But that is not really the point. The issue is, should the legislators be encouraged to perpetuate their indulgence ?

Theoretically, the role of a legislator is essentially a voluntary one. He is supposed to be fired by a spirit of altruism and patriotism and a fervent desire to work for the fatherland.. Surely, perks and allowances should therefore be relegated to the background. Unfortunately, the opposite is frequently the case. A candidate who forks up fifteen million rupees in order to get elected, hopes to recover this amount with interest. This is one of the uglier aspects of the system under which this country is governed.

The argument has also been proffered that legislators should be compensated for the rising cost of living triggered by high inflation. This also doesn’t make sense, especially when one of the important claims that was made in the document issued after three years of President Musharraf’s government, was how well Mr Shaukat Aziz and his ministry were able to curb inflationary pressures.

Good managers have always believed that pay raises should be linked to output. This principle certainly does not apply to the incumbent national assembly. The current scenario in that august house, with falling attendance, is rather depressing. At the best of times, it is the treasury benches, rather that the opposition benches, that are empty.

Against a background of desk-thumping and symbolic walkouts, the controversial LFO which has split the government down the middle, policies that are based on hollow reasoning , and promises that are made and not kept, the future of this government looks exceptionally bleak. Raising the salaries of legislators will not stop the PPP and the MMA from protesting against what they believe is a sham democracy. The government should take the bold step and save the peoples’ money.. That is the least that they can do.

Email: a-mooraj@cyber.net.pk