| 12 February 2004 | Thursday | 20 Zilhaj 1424 |
The 'clash' theory
The mother of all lies
Return of the poppy
It was the fervent hope of all those concerned with keeping Pakistan's relations with the outside world on an even keel, while maintaining a measure of internal stability, that Dr A.Q. Khan's pathetic confession on television and President Musharraf's subsequent press conference at which a pardon for Dr Khan was announced would bring an end to the crisis that had "traumatized" the nation. It was a forlorn hope. The nuclear controversy will remain with us for some time to come.
There has been an appreciation by the American administration of the steps Pakistan has taken to uncover the extent of the proliferation that Dr Khan had engaged in and of the president's pledge to ensure that no such proliferation ever occur again.
This does not mean that the American administration or other influential governments accept at face value Dr Khan's assertion that he acted alone and that he alone was responsible for the crimes committed by him and his subordinates.
What it does mean is that these countries have not questioned the accuracy of Dr Khan's confession or Pakistan's right to pardon him because of two factors - the need to identify members of the proliferation network, and the apprehension that public reaction to the punishing of a "national hero" may destabilize the Musharraf government. And these two factors are the nub of the issue and the reason why it will not go away for many months to come.
Dr Khan, if one goes by the plausible story that appeared in the Washington Post on February 8, was the central figure in a large network of operators engaged in the supply of nuclear technology and material to any buyer willing to pay the price.
Dr Khan may have wanted to claim that he supplied technology to Libya and Iran to reduce the pressure on Pakistan or, by implication, as a gesture of Islamic solidarity but there is little doubt that the motivation for his German, Malaysian, South African, Japanese and Dubai collaborators was financial gain.
A New York Times story of the same date, obviously based on briefings by Pakistani officials, asserts that Dr Khan had, in the name of a surrogate, a bank account containing several million dollars and the threat of publicizing this evidence of his venality was one factor that induced Dr Khan to confess and possibly to stay away from pleading Islamic solidarity as the motive for his proliferation activities.
From other stories that have appeared it seems clear that many of the participants who acted as conduits for the transmission of technology and material could have acquired the ability to engage in further proliferation even without Dr Khan's participation. Whoever for instance passed on the blueprint for the design of the nuclear device to Libya could have retained a copy of the blueprint.
Clearly if such a network has been brought into being - the head of the IAEA has talked about the revelations of Dr Khan's activities being the "tip of the iceberg" - the principal interest of the American administration as indeed of the international community lies in locating every participant in this network and ensuring that such activity is permanently ended.
The New York Times put this perspective well when it said that "Punishing or pardoning Dr Khan is not as important as ending these sales and the production of fissile material in Pakistan, destroying the network, and making sure that the senior officers involved are removed from power".
It quotes an American official as saying "you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar and there are plenty of flies to catch in Pakistan".
Catching these flies will require Pakistan to make available all details that it is able to collect about the network from its interrogation of Dr Khan and his colleagues.
This does not mean giving the Americans or the IAEA access to Pakistan's nuclear facilities but it does mean that every piece of information that becomes available to the foreigners participating in the network must be made available to us and every Pakistani participant in the network must be rendered incapable of any further proliferation activity.
This is clearly what Powell meant when he said: "I said to President Musharraf that we wanted to learn as much as we could about what Mr. Khan and the network was up to. It has to be pulled up by its roots and examined to make sure we have left nothing behind."
On the question of the domestic reaction it is probably true, as many newspapers have pointed out, that the extent of Dr Khan's contribution to the development of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent was limited.
He pioneered the enrichment of uranium but the development of the warhead and the triggering mechanism - a much more difficult task - was undertaken by the scientists working in organizations other than KRL.
The public perception, on the contrary, thanks to the skilful manipulation of the media by Dr Khan, was that he alone has given Pakistan nuclear capability. He was the "father of the bomb", a national hero, who could get away with the most egregious violations of the law of the land.
Despite his exalted public standing the establishment may have been prepared to take sterner action against him had it not become clear at an early stage in the investigation that once the finger was pointed at Dr Khan, the first to spring to his defence would be the religious parties.
There was no doubt that with such a popular cause in hand they could, if they so chose, use their formidable "street power" to destabilize the Musharraf government or at least to ensure that the campaign against extremism that the government intended launching did not get off the ground.
For Musharraf himself as the target of two assassination attempts and for the US and its allies it could perhaps be said that the unchecked growth of extremism in Pakistan was and is of as much if not greater importance than the question of proliferation and neither therefore wished to take any step that would give the religious parties another popular platform.
It was no wonder then that even while terming the "pardon" decision "odd" the UN Secretary-General expressed understanding for the president's need to take into account the probable domestic reaction to any other course of action.
Powell maintained that "it's a matter for the Pakistani government to handle and make their own decisions." And even the New York Times editorial which asserts that Dr Khan's confession was scripted by the Pakistan military concedes that "Sometimes realpolitik requires allowing a man like Gen Musharraf, who has been helpful in the war against Al Qaeda and escaped two assassination attempts, to claim to be standing up to foreign pressures".
Pakistan may be allowed to let Dr Khan suffer no more than being subject to "house arrest" and to further interrogation to ascertain further details of the network. Even this is not certain.
Already the government spokesman has said that the pardon is conditional and applicable only to the activities about which information has so far become available.
The principal point however is that the fear in the West of Pakistan's nuclear capability falling into extremist hands has acquired a sharper edge in the light of the present crisis.
Musharraf will therefore be pressed to pursue more resolutely his stated goal of eliminating extremism from Pakistan's body politic. The reform of the Madressahs, long overdue will now need to be implemented quickly. The ties of the government with the MMA will need to be attenuated if not severed.
This was something that appeared to be on the cards even before the "nuclear crisis" occurred but it must now be seen to have acquired a greater urgency. There must be some room created for the secular parties to play a greater role in the political arena so that the religious parties do not enjoy as free a hand as they currently have.
There is the view that the Americans have not been as exigent as they could have been on the nuclear issue because they need Pakistan's cooperation for the new operation they intend to launch in Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
Recent reports that Pakistan is launching an operation in South Waziristan in coordination with similar action being undertaken on the Afghanistan side by the Americans seem to support this view.
Certainly there is no doubt that if either or both these persons were to be captured Bush's elections prospects would be vastly improved and in an American election year no other consideration weighs as heavily.
It would be a mistake, however, to see in this an opportunity to put off the difficult steps that need to be taken to restore order in our nuclear establishment and to curb the extremists who President Musharraf must now see as a growing danger both to himself personally and to Pakistan.
The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.
The 'clash' theory
How did an average Muslim perceive the United States of America in the pre-September 11 period? A country to envy and despise? A bulwark of Christianity? A sworn enemy of Islam? Undisputed leader of the West on a collision course with the Ummah?
The answer to all such questions is in the negative. Despite many misgivings about US foreign policy and Washington's ambivalent posture on crucial issues such as Palestine and Kashmir, Muslims have been generally appreciative of America - a country on the march.
I have vivid recollections of my childhood impressions of the United States. The stage coach winding its way on a dusty trail, eager prospectors panning for gold, the rush for California, and entrancing characters - Buffalo Bill, Daniel Defoe, Kit Carson, Monte Hale, Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Lash Larue, Rocky Lane, bounty hunters et al - stalking the 'Wild West'.
With time, I came to identify the US as the epitome of anything and everything quintessential with its glittering Ivy colleges that were soon to be the focus of all our pursuits. Not many of us could make it to Cornell or Harvard.
But the unrivalled excellence of American institutions continued to exercise a magnetic pull on professionals,including the men in the khaki, who were keen to avail of an opportunity of training at Fort Benning or West Point.
A closure exposure to American academics and Nobel Laureates had a singularly beneficent influence on my formative years. Professors Donald Glaser, Nicholas Negroponte, Hofstadter, Michael Moravscik et al were fine human beings. Their wives seemed to complement their values.
Come September 11 and the scene dramatically alters. The media churns out story after story to suggest that Islam and the West are on a collision course! There is a concerted effort to lend credence to Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations.'
A negative perception of Islam is aired day in and day out through newspapers, TV, radio, and films. We are more than familiar with the ridicule that Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington and a host of others hurl on the Muslim world without the slightest call of compunction.
Which brings us to the debate: Are Islam and the West on a collision course? Professor Ralph Braibanti, an eminent scholar who has been on the faculty of Duke University since 1953, makes the incisive point in his illuminating essay 'Islam and the West: Common Cause or Clash?' published by the Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University.
Viewed in this context, the visit of Pope John Paul to the Ommayad Mosque in Damascus on May 6, 2001, was an event of singular importance. He was the first Pope to set foot on a mosque and his message on the momentous day was truly befitting for the occasion: religious conviction was never a justification for violence.
The Pontiff who gave a new dimension to Judeo-Christian ties with his visit to Rome's synagogue in 1985, said it was now time to open a new chapter in relations with the Muslims. "For all the times that Muslims and Christians have offended one another, we need to seek forgiveness from the Almighty and to offer each other forgiveness.
Better understanding will surely lead to a new way of presenting our two religions, not in opposition as has happened too often in the past, but in partnership for the good of the human family," he said.
The Pope's initiative could not have been better timed and it gave a boost to the inter-faith dialogue that had been bringing Christians, Muslims and other believers closer, particularly in the United States. Indeed,Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are three Abrahamic religions whose followers have a lot in common and they ought to work for a common cause rather than be launched on a collision course.
Blissfully, there are several shining examples of Muslim and Christian communities demonstrating a spirit of co-existence and mutual accommodation. The Christian population in Jordan, for example, barely makes up three per cent of the country's total, yet it has been treated with love and respect by the Muslim majority.
The late King Hussain and Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal made sustained efforts to ensure a spirit of harmony to bring the believers of the two faiths closer. The Royal Institute of Inter-Faith Studies established in 1994 has hosted several conferences and published insightful books, including Prince Hassan's 'Christianity in the Arab World.'
The year 1995 saw the establishment of the largest mosque in Europe in close proximity of the Vatican as a testimony of an attitudinal change between the followers of the world's two major faiths. Another significant event took place on September 12, 1997, when the Supreme Pontiff and Prince Sultan, the Second Deputy Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, met in Rome.
Quite a few other developments testify to the wholesome change that is taking place to ensure the well-being of Christians, Muslims, Jews and other communities so that they could live like friends rather than adversaries.
The establishment of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations of Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, England; the Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding of Georgetown and publication of its journal 'Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations'; the publication of 'Islamochristiana' by the Vatican's Pontificio Istituto di Saudi Arabia; the strivings of UMA, AMA, CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, and ISOC, recent PBS documentaries 'Islam: Empire of Faith' and 'Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet' provide fresh proof of this trend.20
The Oxford lecture by the Prince of Wales in 1993 was also vividly indicative of the wholesome change. Prince Charles affirmed, "Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is poorer for having lost."
Two years later, the Prince reaffirmed this view in a televised comment when he said that he would prefer to have the Crown's title "Defender of the Faith" changed to "Defender of Faiths." He specifically mentioned Islam as one of the faiths of Britain.
In one of his Iftar party addresses at the White House, President Bush rightly remarked: "Islam is a religion that brings hope and comfort to more than a billion people around the world.
It has made brothers and sisters of every race. It has given birth to a rich culture of learning and literature and science. Tonight we honour the traditions of a great faith by hosting this Iftar at the White House.
We see in Islam a religion that traces its origins back to God's call on Abraham. We share your belief in God's justice, and your insistence on man's moral responsibility. We thank the many Muslim nations who stand with us against terror. Nations that are often victims of terror, themselves."
Muslims, Christians, Jews and the followers of other faiths have to act in unison to arrest the current decline of civilization so as to make the world a more livable place. Islam and the West are on a coalition course and any suggestions of collision are simply misleading.
The writer is editor of 'Pakistan Link', USA.
The mother of all lies
'We were all wrong,' David Kay, the White House's chief weapons hunter and longtime war booster, admitted last week. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as the US and Britain had long alleged.
Claims Iraq had nuclear weapons, death rays, vans of death, drones of death, mobile germ labs, poison gas factories, hidden weapons depots, long-ranged missiles, links to Al Qaida - all were false. The only thing real: Iraq's oil.
If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), as it long insisted, we must draw one of two conclusions.
1. President George Bush, and secretaries Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, lied outrageously about the global threat they claimed Iraq posed, and gravely deceived Congress and the American people.
2. Or, they were misinformed almost beyond belief and must be judged totally incompetent to lead a great nation.
If Bush and his team of chest-thumping, self-proclaimed national security experts were really so misinformed about Iraq's weapons and capabilities, then they launched a war by mistake....and presided over the two biggest national security fiascos since Pearl Harbour: the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
President Saddam Hussein, whom Bush repeatedly branded a 'liar,' was in fact telling the truth all along when he said all of Iraq's old weapons systems had been destroyed. It was Bush and Blair who were not telling the truth.
Saddam should hire a top law firm and sue the US and Britain for all they're worth. So, take your pick. The Iraqi war either was the Mother of All Lies, or the Mother of All Fiascos.
Confronted by these ugly facts, Bush tried to re-brand the unprovoked war against Iraq by claiming it was justified because Saddam was such a horrid man. What arrant hypocrisy. When Saddam committed his worst deeds - the 1980s - he was a close US ally, secretly supported by Washington and London with arms, intelligence, technicians, and cash.
Now, the White House is trying to blame CIA for the Iraq fiasco. CIA director George Tenet certainly wronged his agency and nation by not going public to debunk White House war propaganda over Iraq.
But active and retired CIA officers kept warning the public and media (including this writer) that intelligence on Iraq had been deeply corrupted and politicized by a cabal of pro-war neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon and vice president's office. They were ignored.
A shadowy Pentagon intelligence unit, the office for special projects (OSP) was created by neo-conservatives to whip up war fever against Iraq. The OSP fed fake or wildly exaggerated reports from Israeli intelligence to the White House and Pentagon, which were then trumpeted by pro-Israel, neo-conservative media.
A former senior Israeli intelligence official recently confirmed his nation had been a 'full partner' in generating 'flawed' intelligence supplied to pro-war factions in US and British intelligence.
A campaign of lies and disinformation was being waged against Iraq. Though I detested Saddam, whose brutal secret police threatened to hang me, I was incensed to see western democracies fabricating war propaganda worthy of Nazi propagandist, Dr Goebbles.
I watched with disgust as so-called 'Iraq experts' and neo-conservative propagandists, few of whom had ever been to Iraq, warned night after night on US TV about the 'deadly threat' from Iraq.
Genuine Mideast specialists were systematically excluded from US media commentary. By challenging war propaganda, I became the object of vicious attacks by fellow journalists and media pundits in the US and Canada. Each week, I was flooded by hate e-mail.
'Don't be on the losing side,' a close friend warned last year. 'Why risk your career and reputation by insisting Iraq has no WMD.' Why? Because I was absolutely convinced of my position, and I passionately hate propaganda of all kinds - worst of all, when it comes from democratic governments.
'Do you feel vindicated,' a radio show host asked me last week...'you predicted a year ago that no WMD's would be found in Iraq.' Not vindicate. Just dismayed. Dismayed by the continuing widespread indifference - or even approval - by many Americans of the aggression against Iraq that violated international law and basic norms of civilized behaviour.
Dismayed by the cowardly attitude of the US Congress and the mainstream media. And deeply concerned by growing hatred for the US around the globe. Too few Americans seem troubled their president either lied or blundered them into a horrible mess in Iraq, so far costing 520 Americans dead, nearly 10,000 casualties, and $200 billion for 2003-04.
This is an historic malfeasance far exceeding in gravity Nixon's Watergate scandal or Bill Clinton's prevarications.The war fever, and hatred of Muslims and foreigners fostered by the Bush administration continues to grip America. - Copyright
Return of the poppy
Two years after American troops arrived in Kabul, how is the Bush administration's project for a democratic and prosperous Afghanistan coming along?
Well, the opium crop is booming: 3,600 tonnes this year, almost back up to the peak production of 4,600 tonnes that was reached before the Taliban banned the crop in 1999. Virtually none of the revenue finds its way into the hands of Hamid Karzai's interim government in Kabul, however: the provincial warlords who control almost everything outside the capital keep it for themselves.
The rest of Afghanistan's cash income comes almost entirely from foreign aid, but much of it is channelled through the same local warlords, strengthening their grip on the population.
Small wonder that the new Afghan national army, supposed to be 70,000 strong, only managed to train 4,000 troops last year, and that the proportion of girls at school, never more than half, is dropping again due to widespread intimidation in rural areas.
Karzai is a legitimate and respected political leader, but he is only a Pashtun-speaking figurehead in an interim government whose dominant figures are mostly drawn from the non-Pashtun minorities of the north.
That was inevitable at the start, because the United States subcontracted the actual job of overthrowing Taliban rule on the ground to the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Turkmen militias of the Northern Alliance, but little has been done to adjust the balance since.
So the southern, Pashtun-speaking provinces that were once the Taliban's heartland are falling back into the hands of the resurgent fundamentalists.
Most of Zabul and Oruzgan provinces and half of the Kandahar region are once again Taliban-controlled by night, and US troops and those of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have come under fire more often in the past three months than in all of the previous fifteen.
Over two dozen American and ISAF troops have been killed this year, a loss rate worse than Iraq given the far smaller number of foreign troops in Afghanistan.
US officials claim to be inflicting vastly greater casualties on their opponents (more than 400 Taliban fighters killed in September alone), but the fact that most of these casualties are caused either by American air strikes or by local militias leaves much room for doubt.
The militias have a habit of furthering their private interests by labelling their opponents 'Taliban', and the air strikes are often inaccurate because the intelligence is so bad: two US attacks in south-eastern Afghanistan killed fifteen children in the same week in early December.
After fifteen aid workers were killed in Taliban attacks in recent months, the United Nations has pulled its foreign staff back to Kabul and forbidden them even to walk in the streets.
Senior UN officials have publicly doubted whether the elections scheduled for next June will happen at all. "There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists," warns Antonio Maria Costa, director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. But why has it gone so badly wrong? Simple arithmetic provides the answer.
Afghanistan's population is only slightly smaller than that of Iraq: around 20 million versus 25 million. The occupation force in Iraq numbers at least 150,000 American and allied troops, but there are only one-tenth as many in Afghanistan: 10,000 US regular and special forces soldiers spread around the country plus 5,000 ISAF troops who are largely confined to the capital.
Orthodox military experts reckon even the US-led force in Iraq is too small for such a large and populous country. By the same token, the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan is hopelessly inadequate for the job.
Why is it so small? Because US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was determined to keep most US troops free for the planned attack on Iraq. This meant that his only option for controlling rural Afghanistan was to make alliances with local warlords and try to rule through them.
Until recently, these local US-warlord alliances did prevent a Taliban comeback - but now that containment policy is failing in Pashtun areas, and of course it meant that the project for a democratic Afghanistan was doomed from the start.
It was probably never taken seriously at the Pentagon, which has always backed its warlord allies against the Karzai government's attempts to assert the authority of the centre. - Copyright