| 31 March 2004 | Wednesday | 09 Safar 1425 |
A profusion of mushairas
Did Bush administration allow 9/11 to happen?
A successful bazaar is easily defined. You come for a pair of socks and leave with a pair of shoes. By those standards, Anarkali still works. The linger effect is induced by a seamless, ceaseless tide of people past shops that are as unchanging as the banks of a river protecting the flow.
A cacophony of brands spills across open piles on the pavements' edges, while the more respectable shops defend their reputation with order. Some of the spill is clearly spillover from the reject-markets of Bangkok and Dhaka, but that makes it good value, if you know how to bargain.
In the midst of such economic cross-currents is a large island of dark, musty calm, a 19th century bookshop that stopped in the 20th only to pick up a few mementoes on its way to the 21st.
Jinnah, in gleaming monocle and cigar, dominates one wall. A sign etched into the wood of furniture gleaming with age says "Books are the only immortality". The quote is from Gladstone; Jinnah would have approved. Other portraits on walls include the great Urdu poets Iqbal, Hali, Mir and Shibli. This is appropriate, for half the books in the shop are in English and half in Urdu.
The English section is filled with classics from Shakespeare to Shaw with one prominent leap backwards to Dante. The clientele is clearly the few students of English literature left in Lahore.
I wonder, however, if anyone in Pakistan has actually read Dante's Purgatory and its description of the Prophet of Islam. I almost bought Shaw's Plays for Puritans but could not discover the courage to disturb the middle-aged manager hammering away diligently at his Underwood typewriter. I wonder where he gets the ribbon for that typewriter.
Outside, a few steps away, I notice Abdul Ghani's kulfi in a glass box but Abdul is nowhere to be seen. His absence cures temptation. A cart trundles by with Sufi Gol Gappa. Time makes us cowards in the face of such offerings. I shuffle towards the clearing down the bazaar, the sanitised area called the Food Street where Lahore's biggest industry (eating) is at its finest.
Traditionalists argue that the cooking is better in the Food Street at Gowalmandi, but that is a distinction I can leave to gourmets. I order brain curry with soft, creamy naan and ponder. Only a good Mussalman from the subcontinent would have seen brain and, instead of using it, turned it into curry.
On the other hand, it's delicious.Like the rest of Lahore, Anarkali is pulsating with Indians on the eve of the last one-dayer. The most interesting Indian stopped me opposite the Bible Society (with marble on its walls and armed guards at its gates). His first name was Parvin; his second name is a bit of a blur, but I do know that he is the first Indian to walk to Zimbabwe and has written two travel books in Marathi.
The most perturbed Indian stopped me in the lobby of a hotel. He was the leader of a group visiting from Mumbai, and his anxiety was at odds with the general air of bonhomie in the lobby. Since the difference between war and peace is only one mistake, it seemed as if there was after all going to be a bit of rain on the parade. He had a story to tell and wanted me to write it. Please. Definitely.
He had gone to buy some medicine and the shopkeeper refused to take any payment despite his insistence. His face grew even more agitated at the thought. I suggested that this was only another gesture of goodwill: not to worry, Navjot Singh Sidhu had the same pleasant experience.
No, no, he replied; I was getting it all wrong. He and his group had never dreamt of such hospitality when they left for Pakistan, their trip had overwhelmed them etc etc etc. Then?
He wanted me to write and tell Pakistanis that they should not misunderstand if they did not get the same treatment in India. Indians are hospitable too, but he could not imagine a shopkeeper not taking payment in India!
The visa figures vary with each conversation, but it is probable that by the time the cricket is over more than 15,000 Indians will have visited Pakistan for the first time. By the third week of April, in that case, Pakistan will have 15,000 goodwill ambassadors in India. The key has been spontaneity and sustenance. You might be able to put on a friendly act for a day, but no government can order a nation to embrace another.
Imran Khan made a piquant point when he recalled his first visit to India as a leader of his celebrated team a generation ago. He said he was surprised to find that Indians did not have horns on their heads. Demonization was the official policy on both sides of the wall that went up after the war of 1965. Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf have given human beings a chance to be human, and look at the magnificent energy that they have released.
The one unstated fear is that it might be too good to last. The hawks have grown silent, the sharks turned sullen. But they await their moment. The optimum place for a shark is naturally the think tank, where he swims in circles. The shark is not particular about which hand to bite; the one that feeds him is as vulnerable. He is whetting his appetite for August, when the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan will meet for a long-interrupted round of talks.
The standard explanation for the Vajpayee peace initiative in such circles is that he is only doing it to win elections. The paradox in this assumption is totally lost on the hawks of the air and the sharks of the sea.
If a Prime Minister can win an election in India on a call for peace, then it obviously means that the Indian wants peace. This in turn rather spikes the canard that every Indian hates Pakistan and wants its destruction. Such an answer is treated as some clever Brahminical ploy to confuse honest men.
August is important for both India and Pakistan because both will have tested each other's commitment by then. Delhi will have checked the levels of cross-border terrorist activity through a summer, when the valley routes are more amenable, thanks to the warm weather. And Islamabad will have evidence about the seriousness with which Delhi is willing to engage on Kashmir.
By June deputy prime minister L.K. Advani will have completed his third round of talks with the Hurriyat, and reports from participants suggest that initial wariness has matured into candour and even warmth.
The problem with hawks and sharks is that they believe that peacemongers are softies and pushovers, who float in some unreal dreamworld while they are the custodians of the cold, hard truth. But then neither a hawk nor a shark can possibly have his feet on the ground.
Vajpayee and Musharraf know the size of the challenge. Peace is a noble idea that has to be converted into a practical reality. The first change must come in the mind. The mind is persuaded through experience. Experience can only come through opportunity. If the Saarc conference was an opportunity for the elites to meet, then cricket was an opportunity for the people to meet.
There was apprehension before Saarc, there was apprehension before cricket. We did not know the result of Saarc till the last minute; quite the same thing happened in cricket.
There was a warm glow after Saarc, there is a warm glow after cricket. There were saboteurs who nearly got their target in Islamabad before Saarc; there will doubtless be saboteurs who will try and destroy the options of August and beyond. Commitment will be tested with harsh questions. Both sport and diplomacy are best when conducted with honour. If that prevails, the future will be freed from the past.
The most familiar question in Pakistan was an obvious one: who will win the elections? I had a standard answer: we are headed for our first Egyptian poll. An Egyptian election is one in which the results are known before the votes are polled.
The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.
A profusion of mushairas
The city was awash with poetry during the last fortnight, deluged in a spate of mushairas coming one after the other leaving little breathing space in between.
Perhaps it was some doctors at the PMA House who set the ball rolling. They came up with a 'Jashn-i-Baharaan' when an untimely heat wave was sweeping the city. On a Saturday evening, a mini- mushaira was held in an unconventional way with very few poets in attendance and concluded at a time of evening when "real mushaira" organizers begin proceedings.
Soon after, there was an all-Pakistan mushaira at the Karachi Press Club. Some poets from upcountry and parts of Sindh graced the club with their presence. But by that time mushairas had spread in different corners of the city. Landhi and Malir are said to be areas where poetry sessions are held round the year and where the sun of poetry never sets.
The World Poetry Day was observed at major cultural centres of the world at the call of the UN to revive people's interest in classical poetry. So the day was observed in Karachi as well in a modest way.
At a news agency office, Prof Saher Ansari gave a talk on the practices of poetry recital in other countries, particularly in Japan where a full floor is allotted for the promotion of Haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry at a costly commercial area in the heart of Tokyo.
Another participant at the meeting, Ms Fatema Hasan, herself a poet, read out a paper giving her views as to how people's interest could be revived in classical poetry. Education, access to classical literature, availability of poetry collections at a modest price, and proper teaching in schools and colleges were some of her suggestions. Mohalla libraries should be re-built and rejuvenated to cater to the requirements of the reading public.
Then it was also observed that the standard of Urdu teaching in schools had gone down and the crop of new teachers recruited were themselves in most cases under-educated, having no taste for literature.
The UN call was perhaps meant for the heavily inustrialized nations whose people have lost contact with the past, a soulless people who cannot enjoy poetry. As for Asian nations, including Pakistan, poetry and music often go together like conjoined twins and have always remained close to the people's hearts.
Shah Latif Bhittai, Sachchal Sarmast, Baba Farid and many other classical poets have always been popular among the rural folk who find solace in their verses; an illiterate malang sings sufi poetry not only for spiritual contentment but because that is how he lives his life. We too in our emotional moments may recall a couplet from Mir or Ghalib for our comfort, like the following line:
Shama har rung mein jalti hai saher honey tak
So, mushairas have a therapeutic value for many of us in these painful times of joblessness, high cost of living and general despondency. A mushaira of humorous verse held last Saturday provided such an outlet for those who attended it. People seemed to enjoy themselves even when the poetry was humourless.
Hooting and biting remarks helped to keep the audience in good humour. But when the compere invited someone from amongst the audience to narrate a joke, I don't recall any one turning up.
The very next day there was another mushaira, not 'humorous' by itself, but in memory of Syed Mohammad Jafri, that outstanding satirist in verse. Sadly, he has almost been forgotten like his contemporary Zarif Jabal Puri and many others. Inam Ahsen Harif, an optician by profession, who died at the age or 92, was similarly forgotten by his admirers even during his life time.
A senior government officer (with the central government's information ministry), Syed Mohammad Jafri enjoyed huge popularity and his poetry was widely appreciated. He had his own style of recitation that added to his poetry's appeal. Let me quote a few lines from his poem about clerks, which he had recited before a meeting of agitated clerks on strike:
Qudrat ne jis gharhi keh banaya clark ko
Lauh-o-qalam ka jalva dekhaya clark ko
Kursi pey apney paas bethaya clark ko
File ke saath pin se lagaya clark ko
and the last line:
Utra falak sey third mein, inter bata diya
And if I am not wrong, the late Zarif Jabalpuri at a similar meeting declaiming the report of the pay commission regarding the payscales of the lower staff of government had said:
Yeh jo Kapra mujhey detey ho langoti ke liye
Pay commission ke jolaho mujhe manzoor nahi
If the collective works of these poets could not be compiled and published in separate covers, at least a volume of humorous poetry representative of our past poets should be compiled by some literary organization. The decade of the 50s and 60s was a rich and productive period in Pakistan's literary history. It must not be buried under a layer of forgetfulness.
* * * * *
Shafi Aqeel, author and compiler of around 30 books, appeared at the Arts Council on Monday with another set of three books - as is often the case with him. A senior journalist and writer and a self-taught person, he writes essentially on the folk literature of Punjab, its tales and verses, and translates folk stories from Iran, Japan and Germany.
The launch of his books was attended by noted contemporaries like Dr. Jamil Jalibi, Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi and Dr Hanif Fauq. His book at the launch most admired by the speakers was on the life and works of our two painters - Bashir Mirza and Ozzir Zubi.
The book, readable like a novel, unfolds not only the painters personal lives but the social and cultural environment of the last decades. That was how Mobin Mirza, a literary critic, defined the biographies. Dr Hanif Fauq admired Shafi for paving a new path by writing on the lives of painters and writers in Urdu, which is common with writers in the West.
Dr Jamil Jalibi praised Shafi for his commitment to literature and dwelt on the setback suffered by literature on account of the electronic media's onslaught because the profusion of channels has rendered the mind inactive. Shafi knew the art of writing and had the quality to fascinate his readers, Dr Jalibi said.
Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi had interviewed Shafi Aqeel some years back and this was later published in the form of an essay. It has been partly reproduced in a brochure. Yusufi read this out and enthralled the listeners.
The life story of self-made Shafi introduces a man of tremendous physical and intellectual powers. When a boy, he was employed by his maternal uncle for menial jobs. Later, he learnt reading by picking up pieces of paper from the road-side. He came to Karachi and was employed first as a book- binder.
When employed at an Urdu daily, Shafi introduced a children's corner. Poet and compere Naqqash Kazmi in his discourse recalled the 'Bhai Jan' of those days who had encouraged children to write and groomed them. The present generation owes so much to Bhai Jan, a loving but a hard task master and teacher. Shafi now leads a retired life.
His strength lies in his will to live against heavy odds. Love for the people, the land and the culture to which he belongs is another source of his strength.
Sassi Punno, Hakim Shah is a study of a 'lok dastaan' and unfolds Shafi's deep study of the folk culture of Punjab and Sindh. His effort to revive the study of a bygone era is admirable, the speakers at the function agreed.
Did Bush administration allow 9/11 to happen?
In an appearance on March 24 before the national commission investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks, and in an hour- long appearance on the NBC News programme 'Meet the Press' on March 28, former Bush counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke reiterated his charges that the Bush administration downplayed the threat of terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda until after the hijack-bombings of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and then used the attacks as the pretext to set in motion pre- existing plans to invade Iraq.
Clarke's accusations are laid out in his newly published book, Against All Enemies, and amply corroborated by the documentary record and testimony of other participants. The controversy has created the biggest political crisis for the Bush administration since Bush took office in January 2001.
An array of Bush administration officials, congressional Republican leaders and right-wing media pundits have denounced Clarke's account, without providing any refutation of its factual content.
Nor have they provided any explanation of why the former assistant to the president for counter-terrorism, a registered Republican, would seek to destroy Bush's political credibility on the issue upon which the president has largely based his reelection campaign - his leadership in the - war on terror.
Clarke's charges focus on the most explosive of political issues: the connection between the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq.
Clarke explicitly and insistently links the Bush administration's inaction prior to 9/11 on the danger of Al Qaeda attacks and its obsession with invading Iraq. He maintains that the firm consensus of the US intelligence establishment was that Iraq had no connection to the terrorist attacks, and denounces the Iraq war as a diversion from the "war on terror" and a strategic blunder that has inflamed the Muslim world and politically strengthened Al Qaeda.
With 30 years experience in the US national security establishment, including high-level positions in the Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton administrations before he served in the second Bush White House, Clarke is no anti-war dissenter.
He is a ruthless advocate of military and covert action in pursuit of the interests of American imperialism. This makes his testimony against the Bush administration all the more damaging.
In both his 9/11 commission testimony and his March 28 television interview, Clarke highlighted the difference between the approach of the Clinton administration to an upsurge of terrorist threats and that of the Bush administration under similar circumstances.
In the period leading up to the millennium celebrations in December 1999, US intelligence agencies reported a dramatic spike in intercepts of threatening communications involving Al Qaeda.
At Clinton's behest, his national security adviser, Samuel Berger, convened daily meetings of the highest-level security officials, including the heads of the CIA and FBI, to monitor efforts to forestall an attack.
This continuous pressure, according to Clarke, led to the disruption of a planned New Year's Eve attack on Los Angeles Airport when an Al Qaeda operative assigned to that attack was arrested attempting to cross the US-Canada border near Vancouver, British Columbia.
If an effort of similar intensity had been mounted during the summer of 2001, when intelligence intercepts about terrorist threats from Al Qaeda again began to spike, Clarke insisted, the September 11 attacks might have been disrupted or prevented.
Much of the media focus on his testimony has concerned a series of meetings and memo exchanges among White House officials during the first eight months of 2001, and alleged differences between what Clarke said while he was a Bush aide and what he is saying now. But Clarke insists that bureaucratic foot-dragging by the administration had real consequences for efforts to prevent a terrorist attack within the US.
Well-documented facts support his case. When, for example, the CIA learned that two Al Qaeda operatives who had attended a high- level planning meeting in Malaysia had entered the United States, it did not notify the FBI for more than a year. Neither agency informed Clarke or his cohorts on the White House counter- terrorism team.
These two known Al Qaeda operatives were among the hijackers who, using their real names, boarded four commercial jets on September 11 without encountering any impediment from either government or airline officials.
The lack of communication was despite the fact that Clarke had convened a high-level meeting of agencies responsible for preventing an Al Qaeda terrorist attack, including the CIA, FBI and Federal Aviation Administration, which monitors airline security, in June 2001, in response to the increased level of reported threats.
In the same section of his testimony, Clarke said the FBI had not notified the White House counter-terrorism office of the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected Al Qaeda member who was arrested after he attempted to get training on a 747 jet at a Minnesota flight school.
Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, asked, "And had you known on top of that there was a jihadist who was identified, apprehended in the United States before 9/11, who was in flight school acting erratically..." Clarke responded, "I would like to think, sir, that even without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I could have connected those dots."
It has long been maintained that, in analyzing the events of September 11, the least plausible explanation is the official version of the Bush administration, propounded endlessly by the American media for two-and-a-half years: that 19 Al Qaeda operatives entered the United States, hijacked four aeroplanes on the same day and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - using suicide pilots trained at US flight schools - without any US government agency having the slightest idea what the terrorists were doing.
Clarke's testimony confirms that the Al Qaeda attacks were made possible by a virtual stand-down of the counter-terrorist preparations that had been in effect in the last years of the Clinton administration - certainly from the time of the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
What neither Clarke, nor his interrogators, nor the media have addressed is whether this stand-down was deliberate: i.e., that at some level of the US government, a decision was made to permit a terrorist attack to go forward in order to provide the necessary pretext for US military action in the Middle East and Central Asia, a step which up until then was politically impossible.
Not only Clarke, but the entire array of former and current national security officials who testified last week before the 9/11 commission agreed that public opposition made such military intervention impossible before the September 11 attacks. This was a fact of political life, confirmed by both Madeleine Albright, Clinton's secretary of state, and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's secretary of defence.
Clarke, following in the footsteps of Paul O'Neill, former treasury secretary, and other eyewitnesses, confirms that the Bush administration was focused from its first days in office on preparing for war against Iraq.
Initially, Rumsfeld and other warmongers hoped to use Iraqi self-defence actions, such as anti- aircraft fire at US warplanes patrolling the "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq, as a suitable pretext for war. But this proved to have little impact on public opinion.
Clarke never suggests that the Bush administration deliberately decided to "take" a terrorist attack in order to generate popular support for war, but he is clearly not saying all he knows about the background to September 11.
Consider, for example, his comment during Wednesday's hearing: "You know, unfortunately, this country takes body bags and requires body bags sometimes to make really tough decisions about money and about governmental arrangements."
Another significant detail is Clarke's report that after his office had triggered a nationwide counter-terrorist alert during the summer of 2001, based on intelligence intercepts, it encountered pressure from the Pentagon, which said that military units on alert status were beginning to suffer from fatigue.
The alert, which had included the Federal Aviation Agency, was eased by the end of August, two weeks before the 19 suicide hijackers boarded their flights. The timing suggests that those who dispatched the hijackers knew when security was being relaxed.
More than two years ago, the WSWS on January 16, 2002, laid out in detail the evidence that the US government had been alerted to the terrorist attacks well before September 11.
The Bush administration was making preparations, not to forestall such attacks and the consequent loss of thousands of lives, but to use a terrorist atrocity as the pretext for carrying out long-planned military operations in the oil-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East.
The revelations of Richard Clarke provide further evidence that something far more sinister and ominous than incompetence or a failure to "connect the dots" was behind the government's failure to prevent the worst terrorist attack in US history. -Courtesy: World Socialist Website