| 11 February 2004 | Wednesday | 19 Zilhaj 1424 |
Burning issues
Britain after Hutton
After the end of the Second World War the victorious powers led by the United States and the Soviet Union put in place a multilateral system to deal with the types of tensions that had led to that global conflagration in the first place.
The assumption on which the new multilateral system was crafted was a simple one: that conflicts can arise between and among states and must be resolved before they lead to all-consuming wars.
The victorious powers also recognized that the global picture will change in a remarkable way following the withdrawal of European colonialism from the continents of Africa and Asia and the emergence of scores of independent countries. This newly independent cluster of states had to be catered for.
Accordingly, the multilateral structure that was put in place had four components. The United Nations' Security Council was given the power to address political differences among states.
Chapter VII of the UN Charter authorized the Security Council to bring into line errant states. The IMF was mandated to keep the global financial system stable. It was to ensure that the type of disruption that took place during the Great Depression of the 1930s would not be repeated again.
The World Bank was established to provide resources for the reconstruction of the war ravaged countries and to promote development in the newly independent states. The model the World Bank developed was replicated by a number of regional banks, including the International Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank.
The fourth pillar of the system - a world trade organization - was not established immediately. The WTO became a reality four decades after the end of the Second World War.
Can this multi-institutional, multilateral system serve the world of the 21st century? The world today is as fractured as it was in the 1940s but in the early days of the 21st century fault-lines run not along the borders of states but along cultures, religions and sets of beliefs.
Perhaps the most important fault line is defined by demography - an asymmetry between the developed and developing worlds. Today, half the people in the world are below the age of 24.
Of these, nearly 90 per cent live in the developing world. A billion of them will need jobs in the next ten years. Of these, 60 per cent are in Asia, including the Middle East, 20 per cent in Latin America, 15 per cent are in Africa.
The real challenge before the global community is how to incorporate the people, cultures and religions that, for some reason or other, feel acutely that they have been disenfranchised.
In addition to bringing people and groups operating outside the structures of states to pursue their diverse interests into the global system, a new structure must also look at the future. The approach to be adopted should take a dynamic view of the world - how the world is likely to evolve in the next few years and decades - rather than a static view.
The architects of the old global order did very little crystal gazing other than to see the consequences of the withdrawal of colonial powers from Africa and Asia. They certainly did not foresee the growth in rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that kept the world frozen in a cold war that lasted four decades.
They did not expect the rapid growth in the economic power of Continental Europe that would have France and Germany challenge in the early 1970s the economic power and profligacy of the United States.
That challenge resulted in the collapse of the fixed exchange rate system on which the Bretton Woods structure was built. They did not believe that the constraints against external trade will be dismantled so rapidly that the share of trade in global output would increase manifold.
They did not see the revolution in information and communication technologies that would cause trillions of dollars to move from country to country or among different financial systems within the space of a few seconds.
They certainly did not see the demographic revolution that would result in such a sharp divide in the age profiles of the people living in developed and developing countries.
There was no way the architects of the old system could have imagined that by the end of the 20th century the global economy would have three poles - America, Europe and East Asia.
Had they seen such a development they would have accommodated within their system not only one reserve currency but several, each interacting with the others in profoundly complicated ways.
There was also no reason to expect at that time in the late 1940s when the contours of a new order were being drawn that the most rapidly growing component of international trade, fifty years hence, would not be goods and commodities and something quite intangible - knowledge.
Value added in knowledge containing "products" - if they can be called products at all - would begin to dominate international trade by the opening years of the 21st century.
The preparation of such products would not require workers to sit in close proximity with one another. They could be disbursed in the four corners of the globe linked together with something that would be called the "internet." This outsourcing of work would produce tensions in the labour markets of the developed world that would challenge policymakers in America, Europe and Japan.
The information and communications revolution brought about another revolution - the restructuring of the transnational corporation. Tens of thousands of TNCs restructured their production processes placing them in the areas which could provide whatever they were looking for - cheap labour, good physical infrastructure, access to places that produced knowledge, good communications. Thus unbound, the TNCs were not any longer under the control of the state. In fact, the rise of the TNC weakened the state.
What also weakened the state was the increasing awareness of groups of people around the globe who were persuaded that an international system with the state at its centre was not serving them well.
These "stateless" people began to challenge the world order first sporadically in Europe through the operations of groups such as the Red Brigade and later in Europe and America with Islamic radical groups playing the central and extremely destructive roles.
It would be wrong to assume that the kind of terrorism currently associated with radical Islam will remain confined to those who exist at the fringes of that particular faith.
Other disaffected and disgruntled groups - those suffering extreme deprivation in Africa, those unhappy with the existing political order in some countries in Latin America, those fighting for autonomy and or secession from the control of large states - may, at some future date, also resort to anti-state terrorism.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent focus on Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Iraq have created the impression that the world today is faced with a challenge the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington described as "the clash of civilizations." But it is wrong - and dangerous - to focus on religion as the main fault line in the global system. Demography is a better definition of that fault line. Why is demography suddenly the destiny?
Not only is the developing world very young compared to the developed world. The demands placed by the aged in rich countries can only be met if these two worlds work together.
People in rich countries live 50 per cent longer than those in poor countries. The median age in the developed world is twice as high as in the developing world. The age profile of rich countries will produce enormous economic burdens on their economies. For instance, in Europe there are four workers for every person living in retirement; three decades hence that number will decline to only two.
In Italy, Spain, France and Japan government benefits to the elderly will exceed 27 per cent of the GDP by 2040. In the United States, the deficit between the promises made by politicians for the care of the aged and expended funding is estimated at more than $44 trillion, four and a half times the country's current GDP.
On the developing country's side, the demographic dynamics is producing pressures that don't have any precedence in human history. The youth in the developing world are increasingly concentrated in cities.
This trend will continue. China alone plans to relocate 500 million people from the countryside to towns and cities in the next couple of decades. Demographers estimate that by 2050, 17 of the 20 largest mega cities (those with populations greater than 10 million) will be in less developed countries.
As one analyst put it recently, "this sequence of converging problems creates two perfect storms," one swirling in the developed world, the other in the developing part of the globe.
To focus on radical Islam as the cause of the problem is to miss defining the main problem by a wide margin. "Terrorists, whether in Afghanistan or Colombia or Indonesia, are united by the fact that the vast majority of them were recruited from places where a burgeoning youth population sees hope as more of a taunt than a promise."
The architects of the post-Second World War did not look beyond the world that existed when they did their work. The designers of the new world order must look into the future and answer many questions: How to bring into the new global order people who have deliberately opted out of it or have the potential of doing so? How to bridge the demographic divide between the world's rich and poor countries? How to design a system that brings together communities, the civil society, states and supranational organizations? What recourse is available to the countries or the people who feel that they have been wronged by the existing global order?
In addition to these there are several other questions also of great import. For instance: How China's emergence as a global economic and military power affects the rest of the world? Will India also emerge as another near-superpower? Will the democratization of the Middle East contain the spread of radical and political Islam? How can a country with an extraordinary amount of economic and military power such as the United States be persuaded to operate within a multilateral framework? How will the extraordinary developments in technology and communication affect the structure of the global economy?
All these weighty questions await answers. Providing answers to them could set the stage for structuring a new global order.
Burning issues
Suicide is becoming so common now, with psychologists desperately, helplessly and unconvincingly trying to fathom the mindset behind them, that people are now apt to take them in their stride just as they regard the innumerable everyday road accidents and forget them soon afterwards.
But then, most tragic and unforgettable are the instances in which men and women choose to burn themselves in public. That is why two such incidents - quite old now - are permanently etched in my mind and, because of a recent sad case of suicide, have obliged me to write about them and express my grief at what happened.
In their smugness people characterize suicide as an act of cowardice. They say the man did not have the guts to face misfortune or poverty or injustice or adverse personal or family conditions and so put an end to his life. I don't think so.
A soldier in battle attacks a superior force single-handed, knowing that he is going to face certain death. Since his fearlessness gives his side a certain advantage that probably decides the fate of the battle, he is called a hero.
Why should the suicide be deprived of this appellation, particularly when his act is to highlight a deficiency of the Islamic state which is supposed to take care of him? In the case of self-immolation, the person is convinced that his self- sacrifice in the glare of publicity might lead to some benefits to a large number of deprived persons like him and is thus undertaken in a noble cause. It takes the courage of a hero to commit suicide in such circumstances.
There is a vast difference between the two incidents of self- burning which I cannot erase from my memory. The man who immolated himself in full view of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif outside his residence in Lahore had despaired of finding gainful employment and was heart-broken by the lack of response to his appeals for financial help. He was one of the millions who stalk this benighted land making no dent in the merciless armour of society and the state.
The Constitution does not provide for such people, nor does it make the state responsible in so many words for their bread and butter and that of their families. They hope vainly that the verbal crusaders of Islam will not let them die of hunger, forgetting that Islam in this country is manipulated by those in power for their own good and not to feed famished mouths.
Then there was the second case, an altogether unique instance of suicide. The man was one of the numerous workers of the Sindh Road Transport Corporation (SRTC), Hyderabad, who had not been paid their dues for a long time, and, in desperation, he and two of his companions set themselves on fire after giving due notice to the authorities. The two were saved from death while he could not survive and succumbed to his burns after a few days in hospital.
As educated citizens you must have observed that while the government may not be able to pay such people their salaries (what with the Accountant General barring the way for lack of funds) or relieve their distress by other means, its top leaders do make it a point to visit them in hospital along with a photographer and leave strict orders that the best possible medical aid should be provided. I have been wondering who was luckier - the one that died of self-inflicted arson or the two who lived to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?
As was his generous habit, Mian Nawaz Sharif provided adequate help for the family of the man who had died in front of his house, though that did not solve the tragic problem of unemployment and its harrowing effects.
I recall a news report of those days that said that nearly two lakh workers had already been laid off by the federal government (given employment by Mian Sahib's predecessor) while another hundred thousand were going to lose their jobs very soon.
The case of the three SRTC workers was deplorable from the administrative and ethical points of view because they could have been saved, one from a horrible death and the other two from grievous burns.
I say this because they had warned that they were going to take the extreme step. The chief of the SRTC must surely have known this, being the boss involved. Couldn't he have prevented this gory tragedy? Most decidedly yes, but to do that he would have had to untie the red tape that binds our affairs.
All that he had to do was to send a message to Karachi that, in view of the threat, he would relinquish his office if the government didn't take timely financial steps to save the situation.
"Let someone else be appointed in my place who can stand the sight and sounds of unpaid workers' cries," he could have said. But this was too unorthodox a method for any officer to adopt who valued his job.
In every administration in Pakistan the information set-up keeps government leaders informed of what appears in the press. Similarly the intelligence bureau and the special branch provide diaries of coming events.
It was inconceivable that the Governor of Sindh, the chief secretary and the secretary transport remained ignorant of the impending self-immolation, unless they never cared to read these diaries.
There were possibly no funds to pay the workers, but I'm sure that did not affect the salary and perks of the SRTC boss and the above-mentioned highly placed gentlemen.
Even if there were budgetary constraints, couldn't the workers be paid, as an interim measure or even as a loan, from the huge zakaat fund or the bait-ul-maal or the secret service funds that some government leaders misuse to corrupt officials and petty political personalities? Once in a while they could be used for a decent purpose. My point is that the problem of the workers' dues could also have been looked at with compassion and not solely through inhuman office procedures.
If that is not possible then let no government leader in future talk of following in the footsteps of the Khulafa-i- Rashedeen who didn't wait for budget grants to relieve the distress of the poor and the suffering.
But what am I saying? To be fair to government leaders they never talk of walking on the footprints of those great men; they only advise us, the people, to do that. Since they think they are "rashedeen" themselves, they follow in each other's footsteps and try to outdo one another in every kind of wrongdoing.
While one of the deaths in the above narrative was a blot on society (which includes the state and the administration) the second was a clear example of government heartlessness towards the poor SRTC workers.
You can imagine how strongly I felt in the matter that I still remember all its details. Some of you may not agree with me, but the Sindh government should have been called to account for disregarding the threat given by the workers before self-immolation. But what can you do now? And what could anyone have done at that time?
Britain after Hutton
By now it is crystal clear that state intelligence services are not immune to political pressures and temptations. So British Prime Minister Tony Blair remains beset by a growing credibility problem despite, and to some degree because of Lord Hutton's obliging report which Blair, spinning the report into a complete vindication, impetuously said, 'leaves no room for doubt or interpretation.'
In the inquiry into the death of weapons expert Dr. David Kelly, whose fretful comments formed the basis of an accusation by BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan on an early morning radio broadcast last year that the Blair government "sexed up" the dossier on Iraq's notorious absentee weapons of mass destruction, Lord Hutton decided that his remit omitted the overarching question whether the government deliberately misled the public about the grounds for going to war. Lord Hutton's remit, dismayed observers complained, was to miss the whole point of his own investigation.
Hutton's self-imposed as well as government-imposed limitations could not help but operate as a wilful form of naivete about the dirty and shifty game of politics.
Naivete is just not a quality one commends to anyone investigating what political leaders do, and how and why they do it - unless of course you are one of the political leaders. Lord Hutton accordingly did what eminently satisfied the pillars of the establishment are supposed to do: uphold the authorities and thrash miscreants.
Considering the awesome reputation of the judge and the painstaking scouring of evidence, Hutton's report was a stunningly clueless and hypocritical document, qualities which did not go unnoticed among the British public where a majority instantly rejected it as an outrageous whitewash.
Fiftysix per cent of conservative Daily Telegraph readers spurned Hutton while three times as many liberal-left Guardian readers still trusted the BBC more than the government - with plenty of folks distrusting both institutions.
Lord Hutton, however, was 'satisfied' that Dr. David Kelly was a suicide, 'satisfied' that Blair did not intentionally lie, 'satisfied' that the BBC was utterly incompetent, and 'satisfied' that Kelly ought never to have dared play the wretched role of whistleblower.
As Hutton read out his sour stream of findings, he behaved rather as if he were perched atop a towering stockpile of Saddam Hussein's vaunted nuclear, biological and chemical weapons - for nothing less could possibly have warranted the report. It was beyond Lord Hutton to imagine that anyone ought to permit conscience to overtake their prescribed duties.
Hutton clearly found Kelly's 'leak' distasteful. Hutton scurrilously implied in an albeit refined way that Kelly's suicide was triggered by his troubled conscience over breaking the prim civil service code of silence, rather than out of dread of the imminent prospect of having his life shattered in retaliation by a pitiless government.
For his part, Blair, like any accomplished politician, is perfectly capable of stating that the moon not only is made of green cheese but drenched in Roquefort dressing, and passionately believe it, if he needs to.
Nothing the laboriously sincere prime minister ever says would jiggle a polygraph. Blair really manages to believe that his emphatic signals that he wanted evidence to support his hell-bent desire to go piggy-backing on the American neo-con juggernaut into Baghdad did not in the least influence the evidence he got.
Yet Scarlett admitted last autumn that Blair's claim that Iraqi WMD could be 'ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them" referred to short-range weapons ("mortar shells or small calibre weaponry"), not to missiles. There was never a threat to the West. Even so, the 45 minute claim was based on distortions of the UN reports and testimony by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law.
Dr Brian Jones, retired head of Britain's defence intelligence staff, last autumn accused the government of "overegging" the dossier and ignoring intelligence staff who were thereby alarmed.
It's not just the British who went all wobbly, CIA Director George Tenet in February 2003 succumbed to fierce political pressure to link Iraq and Al Qaeda, retracting sober appraisals he had given a Senate committee the previous October.
CIA analysts, who have mortgages to worry about, howled as best they could through the sedate medium of leaks. Hutton seems sublimely unaware of such goings-on.
Hutton, however, did know of the prime minister's press secretary Alastair Campbell's memo to joint intelligence committee chairman John Scarlett "suggesting" nine changes to the wording of the dossier, each designed to accentuate the sense of peril. Hutton declined to consider the 'dodgy dossier' of September 2002, largely contrived from a mouldering Ph.D thesis.
But that's okay because, Hutton sagely says, "Mr Campbell recognized, and told Mr Scarlett that 10 Downing Street recognized, that nothing should be stated in the dossier with which the intelligence community were not entirely happy." Isn't the whole point of "spin" that clever practitioners use facts in partial, partisan and deniable ways? Lord Hutton wouldn't recognize a spin doctor if his gall bladder were removed by one.
The Hutton enquiry outcome is consistent with patterns in judicial case records during the two hundred years of British rule here. Customarily, in cases contested between individuals, the integrity of judges was impeccable. Indeed, one hears nostalgic laments from older people about the unbiased fair play of colonial era judges.
The picture is far different, however, regarding cases, especially political ones such as that of Khilafat leaders in the 1920s, between government and individuals where verdicts always favoured the state.
Now that the colonies are gone, this dual approach in the justice system of British India seems to re-emerge to colonize the colonizers.
One moral of the Hutton Report is that so long as any government can blame bad intelligence, they can do what they please because attacks on their integrity are simply "not on them." Hutton judged that the government acted reasonably in naming Kelly because the poor things would have been accused of a cover-up otherwise.
"If I didn't do it, somebody else would have," is not a principle looked upon kindly in most courts if you as an individual were to advance it in your defence. Yet it's perfectly okay for a government, which has to protect itself. Who appointed Lord Hutton a judge? Mussolini?
Blair cannot be unaware that the tide may be turning in America too. Chief weapons inspector David Kay gave up looking for Saddam's nukes. So U.S. newspapers are pressing Bush to come up with the fearsome Iraqi weapons for which over 500 soldiers died and nearly 3000 wounded. Ultimately, this forced a very reluctant Bush to allow an inquiry into the dubious causes of the war to proceed.
A Newsweek poll shows the most likely Democratic candidate John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran (and critic of that war), is leading Bush. Washington is busy trying to lay the blame on intelligence, like Blair, but the evidence of tampering with intelligence through special ideological vehicles like the Office of Special Plans is gargantuan.
In the first meeting of the US national security council after Bush took office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was mentioned, according to former cabinet member Paul O'Neill.
Back in Britain the Guardian (January 27) reported that the MI6 chief significantly did not deny that the infamous 45 minute claim "came second-hand from a single source who was a senior Iraqi army officer." In other words, someone far less reliable than Dr. Kelly, except that his word was seized on to justify killing and maiming tens of thousands of people.
Tony Blair assiduously avoids upsetting conservative voters who gravitated to Labour in 1997 with tax hike threats. Yet Labour backbenchers grow restive as the near-defeat on tuition fees the day before the Hutton Report demonstrated.
Blair exhibits pure pugnacity when facing down so-called "old labour" factions inside Labour but cannot curtsy low enough to the biases of his party's deadly enemies, who are far richer, well-connected, and better defended.
In any case, the Hutton Report is hardly Britain's finest hour - or 45 minutes. The controversy, thank goodness, won't end there because Blair was compelled by skeptical public opinion to order a separate inquiry into the pretexts for the Iraq invasion.