IT is ironic that the United States and Britain, who would never have invaded Iraq had it not been for the superior technology which they trusted would limit their casualties to a tolerable level, now face a military and political crisis in that country precisely because of the primitive technology which those resisting them are employing. What the US army snootily calls “improvised explosive devices” have wrecked convoy after convoy.

A few cheap shoulder-fired missiles have been enough to hamper helicopter use, the main means of rapid mobility possessed by the coalition forces. And the combination of an automobile, a bomb, and a man willing to die has proved devastating in attacks on the coalition’s camps and outposts, military and civilian, and on the offices of international organizations.

For the attackers, it has been as “target-rich” an environment in its different way as any in which an American fighter-bomber was able to pick and choose during the few weeks of the war proper. Supply, movement, fixed positions and the commitment of allies and helpers — both Iraqi and international — have all been affected. Hence the urgency of the re-thinking that has been going on in Baghdad and Washington, and the evident search for new policies.

With all the lessons that have been learned about the power of the weapons of the weak, from Vietnam to the West Bank, all this might have been expected. Yet almost always in the past such weapons have been employed in the context of substantial support for resistance among the general population.

The paradox of Iraq is that the occupiers face a militarily successful resistance which is not at all popular except in limited areas and among limited groups. A further paradox is that this is a resistance without an identity and without a programme, without an announced plan for the nation and without objectives — except for the withdrawal of foreign forces.

That, it may be said, is the cry of the occupier through the ages, always claiming the allegiance of the majority and always classifying those resisting as bandits or fanatics. But, while the evidence is admittedly largely anecdotal, the picture in Iraq does seem to be one in which a majority, while by no means pro- American, very definitely do not want those resisting them to prevail.

Typically, in a posting on the Open Democracy website, a returning Iraqi exile wrote after a trip to Baghdad and Amara, a town near Basra, that he had not met a single person ready to endorse any of “the violence as legitimate resistance to occupation... the vast majority in Iraq, especially women — who represent 60 per cent of the adult population — do not want the Americans to leave anytime soon”.

Such views may be too rosy. But even if the estimate, of 50,000 “insurgents”, both fighters and supporters, is correct, that still represents a very small proportion of the Iraqi population.

During the recent Arab media summit in Dubai there was a clash between those who saw the conflict in Iraq as a fight between invaders and resisters and those who saw it as a continuation of the justified effort to get rid of Saddam’s regime. At one point a speaker extolling the resistance was interrupted by cries of protest from Kuwaiti and Iraqi delegates. One of them said afterwards that those who romanticized the violence in Iraq did not see that they were “turning it into a movie in which real people are dying, and most of those who are dying are Iraqis”.

It might be said that there are two rival movie crews filming Iraq. One wants to film Arab resistance, and the other an Arab democracy rising from the ashes of dictatorship, thanks to US help. If the first movie is almost entirely fictional, the second is not the whole truth. Part of the problem in Iraq, and arguably the main reason why violence is growing rather than diminishing, is that the Iraqis have been conditioned by their modern history to move with extreme caution. Commitment has historically been dangerous, particularly beyond the boundaries of sect or tribe.

A combination of passivity and as much a defence of group interests as can be managed without too much risk made the population vulnerable in the past to the manipulations and predations of a minority ready to ruthlessly reach out for power.

Now, in addition, there may be a tendency to wait out the conflict between the occupiers and the resisters largely as onlookers, albeit onlookers who have their preferences about which side they want to win. How to unlock Iraqi knowledge about who is doing the violence, and how to release Iraqi energies and courage so that the conflict becomes one between the Iraqi majority and the minority of wreckers is thus the main preoccupation of the coalition authorities.

Speeding up the handover of power may or not be the solution. The difficulty is that there is a clear conflict between bringing an Iraqi government and a new army, police, and intelligence service into being quickly — so that they can take the lead in the campaign against the bombers — and doing what was originally envisaged, which was to lay the groundwork for such changes surely and to ensure they were made to stick through properly prepared elections. The overly rapid creation of Iraqi institutions, already under way as far as security forces are concerned and clearly now being contemplated for the political side, must compromise both their efficiency and their legitimacy. The Americans and the Iraqi governing council have not helped each other, the US by failing to hand over any real powers and the council by its dilatoriness in forming a cabinet and in coming up with a programme for choosing a constitution.

This latter is a critical dimension because true politics in Iraq cannot start until a framework for them is in being and in particular until the way in which the country will vote — whether for a constituent assembly or for parliaments — is decided. The hard choice is between arrangements which give different ethnic and religious groups automatic representation, thus diluting the advantage of the Shia majority, and those that do not. But it has to be made and, in this case, the sooner the better.

Sometimes panicky changes in US policy have made the situation worse. The Iraqis may wish to see the back of the Americans, but not before the threats to their security have been reduced and basic political decisions have been taken. Iraqis must know that the changes in policy, whether good or bad in themselves, are driven by the need to reduce the bad news reaching the US during an election campaign.

If American seriousness becomes widely questioned that will reinforce the wait-and-see attitude, which is part of the problem. The final paradox may be that the more determined the US is to stay, the sooner it may be able to leave.—Dawn/The Guardian Service

AS the general election approaches, one question that torments liberals all over India is: Whom do they give their vote? The two main political parties, the Bhartiya Janata Party and the Congress, cross out each other when their record of non-performance, corruption and maladministration is taken into account.

The only point of difference that remains between the two is their approach to the problems that a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious society like India faces.

I can understand the dilemma of Arif Mohammad Khan, former union minister, when he wonders whether he should join the BJP which openly advocates Hindutuva or go back to the Congress which appeases communalists in both the communities. Understandably, the choice is hard.

I recall how Jaswant Singh was torn between options after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. We were close to each other at that time. I asked him to leave the BJP in protest. “Tell me, which party should I join?” he asked. Honestly, I could not suggest any, not the Congress whose prime minister, Narasimha Rao, had done little to stop the demolition.

The question which Arif has raised now or the one that Jaswant raised then has been eating up many people for years. Except for a few on the Left, there is hardly any political party which is devoid of communal or caste elements. But then the communist parties suffer from other infirmities.

Pathetic is the sight of those who once upon a time had secular credentials or so it seemed. Most of them are now apologists for the BJP. Leave George Fernandes, Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav apart — they became part of the BJP’s furniture long ago — Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress from West Bengal, M Karunanidhi of the DMK from Tamil Nadu and Naveen Patnaik of the Biju Janata Dal from Orissa are only a shade better.

Even Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam from Andhra Pradesh is not too distant from the BJP. Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav who has fought the BJP all his life has suddenly gone soft towards it after coming to power in UP.

The Congress, considered an alternative to the BJP, has also many holes. It does not consider the Muslim League communal and invites Banatwala to a meeting of secularists it sponsors. It looks too ready to compromize for electoral considerations. An understanding with Dalit leader Mayawati is too open and too recent. The Shah Bano case, over which Arif resigned from the Congress and the opening of the locks at the Babri masjid, were its doings.

The scenario is, indeed, dismal. It shows how the commitment to pluralism has gravitated to power. The paradigm of political behaviour has changed. Personal considerations have come to supplant principles. Why there has been a dip in liberal ethos within a decade or so is something to ponder over.

If I were to apportion blame, I would hold the middle class responsible. This class, the intelligentsia, has provided liberal thoughts in the past. Most movements against obscurantism were led by it. Today, it is a part of the Hindutva zeal. Its image is tainted. One, it has come to seek a religious identity in a country where diversity strengthens its pluralist ethos and, two, this class, having lost idealism, is now driven by considerations of career and consumerism.

Economic reforms may not have much to do with the rise of communalism in India. But, strangely enough, the graph of fanaticism has been rising since the opening up of the markets. Any gain is good enough as long as it comes to you. Unfortunately, the intellectuals who questioned the convention in the past now question the values of secularism itself. They have begun to argue that the concept is not suited to India’s genius which, according to them, is religious in tone and temperament.

I do not know why religion is brought in whenever a discussion on secularism takes place. The latter does not exclude man’s faith in religion. One can go to a temple, mosque or gurdwara. One can believe in one god or scores of them. Secularism does not come in the way. All it emphasizes is that religion should not be mixed with politics or the state.

After Pakistan’s formation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah said that Hindus and Muslims in Pakistan were one nation just as the two communities in India. He assured the non-Muslims not to have any fear because his state would not mix religion with politics. Jawaharlal Nehru is wrongly denounced as non-religious. He was not against religion but bigotry. He said in a lecture: “I find the approach (of fanaticism) wholly unscientific, unreasonable and uncivilized whether it is applied in the realm of religion, economic theory or anything else.”

The question which Arif has raised is not whether secularism is the right policy to adopt but whether it should be used by the Congress as a pretext to practise communalism. The BJP makes no bones about Hindutva. It never did although its top leader, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, tries to cover it up with his fig-leaf liberalism.

If the BJP selects chief minister Narendra Modi for electioneering in the four state that go to polls, what message is it sending to the Muslims? True, the Congress has communalists in its ranks. But the party at least owns secularism which gave a meaning to our independence movement. None in the Congress owns or preaches Hindutva as the BJP does. Pictures of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Maulana Azad still occupy central place at the Congress meetings. It is a pity that the party has been hamstrung by a coterie which has its own notions about communalism, for example, the policy to join hands with the casteists. It is a short-term gain which could be stalled if leaders within the party spoke against it.

The main thing is the ideology. Arif and people like him will get confused if they drift away from the ideological moorings. The Congress may have fallen on bad days but secularism is in its bones. The BJP, because of its RSS roots, believes ideologically in the Hindu Rashtra. From that angle, the two are diametrically opposed to each other.

India won independence to establish a pluralistic society and consecrated those sentiments in the country’s constitution. The criterion to choose a party is to find out how close it is to the pluralistic concept. Nationalism cannot be synonymous with Hindutva. Arif says that both parties are practising communalism — the BJP overtly and the Congress covertly.

Indeed, choosing between the two may look like jumping into the sea or into the lake. But liberals betray the lessening of their ideological commitment or show exhaustion when they begin to question the basics. A party with liberal traditions cannot become communal, however its deterioration. It can never produce a Godse to kill a Gandhi.

The remedy is to try to reassemble secular forces so that the country is retrieved from growing fanaticism. The problem with liberals is that they have no heart in any endeavour which is not going to bear fruits in their lifetime. India needs many lifetimes to ensure that the sapling of secularism grows into a sturdy tree. With the hot wind of communalism blowing, it is going to be a challenging task. The liberals have neither the stamina nor the commitment to undertake it.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.

Those anti-Semitic Europeans are at it again. In an opinion poll conducted in October, when shown a list of countries and asked “if in your opinion it presents or not a threat to peace in the world,” some 59 per cent of European Union citizens polled said that Israel was a danger. The other leading threats to the peace were (in descending order) Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

“This shocking result...defies logic and is a racist flight of fantasy that only shows that anti-Semitism is deeply embedded within European society, more than at any other period since the end of the war,” responded Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Other US-based groups joined the chorus of condemnation, blaming it all on the ingrained anti-Semitism of ‘old Europe’. But the poll involved 500 randomly selected citizens in each of fifteen EU countries from Ireland to Greece, from Portugal to Finland.

These are very different countries. Why did an average of 59 per cent of their citizens say ‘yes’, that Israel is a threat to world peace? One possible explanation is that 59 percent of Swedes, Dutch, Spaniards and Italians are rabidly anti-Semitic, and spend their spare time desecrating Jewish cemeteries. Another possibility, however, is that they genuinely think that Israel’s present government is a threat to the peace.

If they do, then they are thinking like a lot of Israelis, starting with the Israeli army’s chief of staff, General Moshe Ya’alon. He summoned senior Israeli journalists to army headquarters a few days ago to tell them that in his opinion the roadblocks and military lock-downs that keep Palestinians from travelling between cities and towns in the occupied territories were just fuelling Palestinian resentment of Israel and building support for militant groups like Hamas.

General Ya’alon added that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government undermined the peace process by not supporting former Palestinian prime minister Abu Mazen, and that the route of the new wall Israel is building around the West Bank, which cuts deep into occupied territory to keep Jewish settlements on the ‘Israeli side’, is storing up trouble for the future. If the general in charge is driven to talk like that, is it surprising that Europeans are worried?

There are a lot of worried people in the countries bordering the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean who learned last month (just after Israel bombed Syria for the first time in thirty years) that they will all be within range of the nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that Israel is currently fitting into its German-supplied Dolphin submarines.

Israel regularly promises to attack potential opponents before they develop nuclear weapons — Iran is the current focus of its suspicions, though it insisted Iraq was working on them too — and that sort of talk is almost as worrisome for people living downwind from Iran as it is for Iranians themselves.

But surely Europe is safely distant from all this, isn’t it? Not according to Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has been warning for several years that the only logical outcome of Prime Minister Sharon’s settlement policy is ethnic cleansing: the military expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank. Sharon is confident that the United States under the current administration would never defy Israel and intervene to stop it, van Crefeld believes — and if the Europeans thought about intervening, they could easily be deterred.

“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome,” says van Crefeld in the new edition of David Hirst’s classic book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, ‘The Gun and the Olive Branch’. “Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ ...Our armed forces are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

Not that Israel is in any imminent danger of going under, but this sort of talk scares the hell out of Europeans. You wouldn’t have got 59 per cent of European identifying Israel as a threat to world peace ten years ago, when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister and the Oslo accords had just been signed. They have changed their minds in response to changing events.

So have many Israelis, like the 28 Israeli air force pilots who signed a letter in September refusing to carry out any more “illegal and immoral orders to attack (Palestinians), of the type Israel carries out in the (occupied) territories.” Or Major-General David Lampidot, a former commander of the air force, who told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronot: “The occupation is increasingly corrupting this nation...We must begin to dismantle the settlements, we must recognise the fact that the Oslo accords have failed not only because of the other side but because of us.”

There are plenty of sensible, moderate people in Israel, but they are not in charge at the moment. There are still some old anti-Semites in the fifteen countries of the EU but the vast majority of the Europeans who said Israel is a threat to world peace are not anti-Semitic.—Copyright

ODD as it may seem, bigotry and religious fanaticism is a gift to Pakistan from the United States. For the first thirty years of its existence, until Ziaul Haq appeared on the scene, Pakistan was relatively free of religious fanaticism. At about this time, the Soviet Union took control of Afghanistan and the United States decided to support Ziaul Haq, a natural ally, to engage the Soviet Union in a proxy war in Afghanistan.

In this the United States received powerful support from its ally, Saudi Arabia, which provided funds to establish a wide network of Madressahs in the country and to the Mujahideen in their “Jihad” in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia, along with the United States, financed the ISI in training and arming the anti-Soviet ‘Jihadis’ in Afghanistan. The Godless Soviet regime was a natural target for devout Muslims and the philosophy of ‘Jihad’ spread rapidly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Since Pakistan did not have a Soviet presence, the definition of Jihad in Pakistan assumed a wider meaning and included those sects of Islam, particularly the ‘Shias’, which did not subscribe to the Sunni, particularly the Deobandi, code of Islam and were farthest from the Wahabism of the Saudi rulers. In Pakistan, the targets were the Shias.

The ever present Wahabi apathy towards, and hatred for, Iran further fuelled the anti-Shia role of those engaged in their misguided ‘jihad’ against the non-believers. Ziaul Haq and both the Muslim League and the Pakistan Peoples’ Party, in their over 20 years in office, from 1977 to 1999, did nothing to curb this trend.

Ziaul Haq actively encouraged this misguided Islamic fervour and advised a Sunni delegation from the Kohistan district of the NWFP, which had complained that Shia ulema from the Chilas and Gilgit area were converting people to their brand of Islam, to take care of this themselves and not to expect the government to sort such things out. He gave them the impression that his government will not interfere if they took strong-arm measures.

Ziaul Haq’s advice led to widespread religious riots in Kohistan and in the adjoining northern areas of Chilas and Gilgit. Many people, mostly Shias, were killed and their houses burnt. The local administration did little to control the situation. A foreign diplomat, who happened to be travelling by road from Skardu to Islamabad a couple of days after all this started, told me that he saw houses en-route burning and that the route provided a spectacle of war and destruction.

The United States’ support and the momentum that the ‘Jihadi’ spirit created led to the fall of the Dr Najibullah’s regime in Afghanistan and to the spectacular rise of the Taliban. The youth that the United States had helped to ‘educate’ mostly in the Madressahs of the NWFP and Balochistan had been well trained and motivated by the time the Taliban came to power.

It was therefore only natural to expect that some of the trained youth, imbued with the spirit of “Jihad”, would divert their attention to “liberating” their oppressed Muslim brethren in occupied Kashmir. By the time they began to divert their attention to Indian occupied Kashmir in the mid-90s, the youth trained in the Madressahs in Punjab and Sindh had also begun to be actively involved in these operations.

As the tempo of the ‘Jihadi’ operations slowed down in Afghanistan, their activities in Kashmir increased. Along with this a new element in Pakistan became a source of sectarian strife and violence. The unchecked sermons in the mosques and madressahs of Pakistan, and the absence of a government policy of restraint and regulation increased this malady manifold. Even normal prayers in mosques were not free of danger, and police guards to protect the faithful while in prayer became a common sight. In Karachi alone, one hundred doctors, mostly Shias, were murdered in one year; many of them had left their lucrative practices abroad to return to their native land to serve the people.

An association of doctors has now been formed in Karachi to obtain licences for weapons and to undergo training for their use in self-defence. The world was treated recently to the sight of commandos protecting the South African cricket team while playing matches in the relatively peaceful cities of Pakistan. Even with highly trained commandos available to ensure security, Karachi and Peshawar were not considered safe for matches.

It is in this background that the ability of Pakistan to restrain the youth, imbued with the spirit of Jihad operating in Kashmir, should be seen. However, the task of controlling these misguided Jihadis appears to be beyond the capabilities of the government. Nor can India accomplish the task that had proved beyond the capacity of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

It must also be appreciated that the present government in Pakistan was formed with a majority of one and is at the mercy of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, a collection of religious parties some of which have had close links with the Taliban. It cannot therefore be expected to take any meaningful steps to curb the misguided ‘Jihadi’ culture prevailing in the country. It is an irony that the ‘crusade’ launched by President Bush against terrorism is, in fact, a struggle to control the monster that it had itself created.

CONCORDE, the most beautiful and swiftest passenger aircraft ever built, a true goddess of the air, flew for the last time last month and has now gone forever out of service.

Were I not laid up by a knee operation, I would surely have been aboard to bid a passionate and deeply sorrowful adieu to ‘la belle’ Concorde.

The needle-nosed, Anglo-French supersonic transport was unlike any other airliner — save its ill-fated Soviet carbon copy, the TU-114, which proved a flying coffin. Nikita Kruschev ordered KGB spies to steal Concorde’s plans from Britain. Alerted by a mole, MI5, British counter-intelligence, replaced the drawings with doctored plans that caused the Tupelov to be fatally unbalanced and crash spectacularly at the Paris air show.

Concorde could cruise at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, reducing a New York-Paris flight to only 3.5 hours. My heart raced each time I laid eyes on this sleek, sensuous beauty.

Concorde’s cabin was cramped. The aircraft could carry only 100 passengers, not enough to make a profit, in spite of sky-high fares. When Concorde hit Mach 2, the aircraft’s thin skin become very hot from outside air friction, radiating heat into the cabin.

Those were the negatives. The rest was sheer exhilaration. Takeoff was an explosion of raw power and ferocious propulsion -0 to 380kph in 20 seconds — as Concorde’s four mighty engines — big, brutes built for Britain’s Vulcan heavy bombers — hurled it into a steep climb. Once at altitude, and away from populated areas, Concorde’s engines went to full throttle, and the aircraft punched through the sound barrier to Mach 2, a delta dart hurtling through inner space at a vertiginous 20,000 meters altitude.

From the small windows, you could see the distinct curvature of the earth, and eerie black sky above. Yet there was no sense of motion or speed, other than the Mach indicator and heating cabin walls. On landing, it seemed Concorde would never stop; its landing roll was extraordinarily long, reminding me of the famous auto designer Bugatti’s reply when a driver criticized the brakes of his racing cars: ‘Bugatti cars are designed to go, not to stop.’

On deplaning from Concorde, I still felt I was still hurtling at Mach 2. I wanted to run. Standing, worse, sitting, felt intolerable. I kept looking back at the magically beautiful aircraft, with its sinister nose and drooping, bat-like delta wings. A work of art, and for a veteran flier like myself, an object of true beauty.

Decades of financial losses, growing maintenance problems, and a crash in Paris caused by a tire explosion, finally sealed Concorde’s fate. First Air France, then British Airways, took Concorde out of service.

This loss would be tolerable if Concorde were being replaced by an equal or superior aircraft. Our society is by nature teleological: we expect life to improve through technology and human intellect. Alas, after Concorde, we see the march of progress squarely reversed and heading backwards.

Boeing toyed with a design, the Supersonic Cruiser, that would approach, but not surpass, Mach 1. It was dropped. Once the most daring of aircraft designers, mighty Boeing now contents itself with reinventing the wheel, producing more versions of its venerable 747 or ever larger twin engine transports, like 777, that offer little or no benefit other than saving fuel, and must cross wide oceans on only two engines. Boeing’s rival, Airbus, will bring out a 500-seat plus jumbo jet, but this new flying whale will be little faster and just as crammed as its predecessors. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2003