| 11 April 2004 | Sunday | 20 Safar 1425 |
Rise in Iraqi resistance
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President Musharraf says the National Security Council will secure democracy. His opponents say it will undermine democracy. To the common man it doesn't matter either way. Life for him will go on as it has for the past 57 years. The hopes and fears connected with the council are confined only to the debating chambers of Islamabad and the ops rooms of Rawalpindi.
The ignorance or apathy of the people is easy to understand. If they could endure 11 years of rule by the generals alone - Zia's eight and Musharraf's three - they could make do much better with only four generals in a council existing side by side with parliament and the cabinet. (The Ayub and Yahya years adding up to a longer period are not being recalled for a generation has passed, the country has diminished and the times then were less exacting).
The matter of fateful concern is not that the chiefs of the armed forces are getting involved in civil affairs - that they have always been - but that the leaders of politics, bureaucracy, judiciary, business and of all other walks of life are losing the trust of the common man. The crude bargaining that followed the last low-turnout, rigged election and the horrendously large and quarrelsome, divided and directionless governments that emerged from the process seem to have driven the last nail in the coffin of democracy in Pakistan.
When it comes to democracy our intelligentsia and media, leaders public opinion and political parties all show a dogged preference for its parliamentary form. The parliamentary government - it is well known but merits repetition - rests more on unwritten conventions and usage and less on written laws. It also demands a steadfast commitment to political parties and their programmes.
Individual defections or breakaway factions are rare though not unknown. The right of dissent and tolerance of others' views, howsoever arcane or pugnacious, are essential features of a parliamentary system, without which it cannot function. Nor can it function properly if the parties draw strength from religious dogma, race, caste or clan rather than cut across them.
Ironically, the loudest protest against the NSC comes from the parties and persons who have hardly ever shown respect for these parliamentary norms and have, in fact, been leaning on the military and other external forces to shape and then sustain their parliamentary careers.
In the precarious and nervous parliamentary decade of the nineties, a minister was unofficially known as the minister for GHQ affairs. As an emissary of the prime minister, he routinely shuttled between the presidency and GHQ to face the growls of the commanders and to placate them. It did not prevent the inevitable though. The conditions are no different now nor are they likely to change in the times ahead. The NSC will thus provide a forum sparing the emissaries their exertions and predictions.
The concept of a council enabling the chiefs of the armed forces to influence the elective offices or institutions, however, remains repugnant to the spirit of democracy. It is more so in a parliamentary democracy in which parliament is supreme and the source of all power.
Leaving the military and presidential years out, the successive parliaments in Pakistan chose to subordinate their supremacy to the will of the prime minister. The prime minister, in turn, through constitutional provisions or general practice, reduced the president to a figurehead.
In a parliamentary government, the president, or head of state by whatever name he is called, cannot overrule the prime minister but Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took away from his nominee to that office, Chaudhry Fazal Elahi, even the inherent right of a president to counsel or to warn the government. With a pitied president and an obsequious majority in parliament, Bhutto exercised absolute power till he carried it to a point where the people revolted and the army moved in.
Chaudhry Fazal Elahi, though powerless as president, had a long political career behind him. The president that Nawaz Sharif chose, Rafiq Tarar, was new to public life and had a lacklustre career in judiciary. He was chosen only because he was a buddy of the patriarch of the Sharif clan. In statecraft he could hardly play a role, and was given none. The parliament that had played no part in his selection tamely and instantly elected him proving that it was not supreme but subservient to the prime minister.
It was the intrigue and instability of the governments that followed the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951, and later, the total dominance of the parliament by the prime ministers which gave birth to the idea of a presidential form of government, or if that was not to be, "checks and balances" within the parliamentary system. That with Musharraf has become an obsession.
The "deal" between the government which has made the Legal Framework Order a part of the Constitution and Musharraf president of the country by a simple (instead of a two-third) majority vote has given a severe, perhaps the worst ever, setback to parliamentary traditions and the much-touted supremacy of parliament. Yet the deal has partly redeemed itself by keeping the NSC out of the Constitution.
Whether the deal was struck to save the NWFP and Balochistan governments or to avert a national crisis, the credit for it must not be denied to the Jamaat-i-Islami. If the council has been created under pressure it will be abolished as that pressure withers away when Musharraf has relinquished the army command. If, in the course of time, it is seen to underwrite rather than undermine the role of parliament and saves it from the arbitrary actions of the prime minister (now also of the president) and from military intervention, the NSC might as well come to stay.
In any case the supremacy of the parliament all along has been a myth rather than a reality. It has been always equated with the undisputed authority of the government and within that of the prime minister. Here is a passing look at how this assumed supremacy has never been able to assert itself.
The 13th Amendment which amended four articles of the constitution was introduced by the Nawaz Sharif government in the National Assembly and the Senate on April 1, 1997 and was passed that very day. It received President Rafiq Tarar's assent on the same day. The 14th Amendment which muzzled dissent and prevented defections from political parties was introduced on July 1 that year and passed on that very day.
The 15th Amendment (known as the Shariat Bill) which amounted to giving a new constitution to the country was passed by the national assembly after a short consideration by the standing committee in which four of its nine members dissented. The nation should be grateful to the Senate of the time which stalled the bill and thus saved the country from becoming a theocracy. If Pakistan's parliament has ever restrained or disciplined a prime minister, it is difficult to recall when and how.
The present parliament - chastened and expanded - has reasserted the rubber-stamping role of its predecessors in approving the NSC bill. The standing committee took 35 minutes to approve it and a hectoring speaker declared it adopted after a day's discussion which was marked by boos and threats, not argument. Established parliamentary practice required the standing committee to hold public hearings and the assembly to hold a long and reasoned debate. The committees of the parliament elsewhere are its workhorses. Here they are either suspended or meet to fulfil a formality.
The untried and irksome part of the new system is not the NSC but the division of power and responsibility between the president and the prime minister, between the provincial governors and chief ministers and between the district nazim and the police and other departmental officials at that level. The power emanates from persons and not laws. Then it revolves around persons. The political views are also bent to suit personal interests.
Prime Minister Jamali felt indebted to the MMA just three months ago. Now he accuses it of blackmail. Chaudhry Shujaat perhaps no longer thinks as he did some months ago that his League and JI are two bodies with one soul. Raja Zafarul Haq opened Zia's atrocious innings and stayed at the crease to the end with its eighth amendment. To him Musharraf's 17th amendment now appears to have reduced democracy to a farce.
Whatever the seasonal opinions and attitudes of the politicians and their parties, the present government is neither parliamentary nor presidential. Zia's eighth, Nawaz's 13h and now Musharraf's 17th amendments have shown that we have to choose one or the other system and not tinker with both in an attempt to evolve one of our own. We are just not capable or committed enough to do that. The experiments have pushed us closer to anarchy and theocracy but farther from democracy.
Rise in Iraqi resistance
In the past few weeks, the world has witnessed a worsening of the situation in Iraq. This has happened at a time when the United States and its coalition allies were just beginning to feel that they had overcome all resistance in the country.
Earlier on, when the graph of violence had shown a downward trend, congratulatory messages had been exchanged between the American proconsul in Iraq and the Bush administration in Washington. But this optimism did not last as things started heating up on the international scene.
The Madrid train bombings shook Europe last month. The event coincided with revelations made by Richard Clarke, a former official of the National Security Council, during proceedings of the 9/11 Commission of Inquiry sitting in Washington DC. Once again the focus was on Bush's "war on terror" - a war that has still not been won and is beginning to raise serious doubts about whether it actually can.
The whole concept of a "war on terror" is becoming a nebulous affair following Richard Clarke's depositions, that constitute serious allegations of ineptness, incompetence and mishandling as well as of ignoring timely warnings received by the Bush administration regarding the possibility of 9/11. These, in turn, also raise the question of possible complicity by the Bush administration. At any rate, if all the signals had been paid heed to by Bush, the tragic events of September 11 could have been avoided.
Tragically, neither President Bush nor Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, have applied themselves to the worsening situation in the Middle East country. It appears that it is the American generals who are exercising authority on behalf of the allied coalition - and they do not have any notion of the political implications of administering a territory as complicated as Iraq.
To start with, after arresting Saddam and key political figures in his regime, they disbanded the Republican Guards and other units of the Iraqi army at one go. This strategic error was instrumental in getting the current insurgency off the ground, one that has gathered momentum and led to the countrywide resistance against the occupying forces in Iraq.
None of the Americans realized the anger they would incur by dismantling the Sunni-dominated political hierarchy, and that the exercise in swooping down on the minority sect in Iraq would be viewed as one-sided. This Sunni anger against the external intervention in Iraqi affairs has expressed itself in the past one year on a regular basis.
In addition, the Americans in Iraq also appeared to harbour delusions about creating a Kurd state in the Middle East. In short, they have been imbued with half-baked ideas about the Arab Muslim world and have formed impressions based on a simplistic approach to the problem. They had not studied Iraqi society in depth and had thus not anticipated the problems that they are facing today as they occupy the country. They have blundered they way into Iraq and now appear to be losing out to Iraqi resistance.
Had they truly wanted to see a Pax Americana in Iraq they might have gone a little easier on next-door Iran, the fount of inspiration for the Shias of Iraq. Nothing of the sort was on the cards. Instead, Iran was pulled up by America for possessing a fairly minimal nuclear programme and every sort of pressure was applied on it. This could easily have been postponed until Iraq had settled down with some sort of peace in place.
Iraq has been important to the current US administration only on account of the oil factor. In their consuming lust for this energy resource, the Americans went overboard, and in the process have managed to antagonize the Shia population of Iran and Iraq. It is also apparent that when the chips are down, American policy in the Middle East tends to project a strong anti-Muslim, pro-Israeli bias.
In disregarding religious sensitivities and tactful handling, they have managed to antagonize both sects in Iraq and are now experiencing their intense anger. In one of his latest campaign speeches, Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry has not only described the Republicans as a bunch of crooks but has gone so far as to say that the Bush administration was an administration "of oil, for oil and by oil". That more than sums up the entire situation.
No wonder then that the supporters of Moqtada Sadr, the Shia cleric, have been giving the Americans a tough time. There is real danger now that at some stage the Israelis may come into Iraq ostensibly to help and bail out the Americans but in actual fact to seek a fulfilment of their dream of a greater Israel which is their idea of a Middle East roadmap for peace.
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I was out of town for a few days and called my assistant, Cathy Crary. I said, "I've been reading the papers. Tell my broker to sell my shares of ImClone."
She said, "You can't."
"Why not?" I asked.
"You don't have any."
"Darn it. I was just tipped off by Martha Stewart to sell if it went below 60."
"It doesn't matter. Your broker never told you to buy it."
"I'm going to fire my broker. He never tips me off to a good thing."
Cathy said, "A lot of your gay friends got married in San Francisco last week."
"I guess that means a lot of wedding gifts."
"Some are listed with Tiffany and others with Sharper Image."
"You send whatever is appropriate. What else is going on?" I asked.
"Were you planning to do an article on priests who abused children?"
"So far only four percent have admitted to it. I would rather write about the 96 per cent who didn't."
Cathy said, "You got a lot of mail on the 'Passion of the Christ' column."
"For or against?"
"What do you think?"
"Send out a form letter: 'Thank you for your thoughtful letter concerning Mr. Gibson's film about the last hours of Jesus Christ. I haven't seen it yet, but when I do I will think about it. Sincerely yours.' How does that sound?"
Cathy retorted, "I think that says it all."
"Any leaks from the White House or the CIA?"
"No, it has been very quiet. You received by e-mail a copy of Bush's National Guard service records - but so did everyone. Attached was a photo of John Kerry and Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam rally on the Mall."
"That is not a column," I told Cathy. "If Kerry ripped Jane's bra off at the peace rally it could be a story."
"You also received a letter with postage due from the Democratic national headquarters. I opened it. It said for a contribution of $25 you can receive a bumper sticker that says, 'Anyone but Bush."'
"The Democrats are playing hardball. Did you ever find a kid for the piece I wanted to write on 'No Child Left Behind'?"
"I'm still looking. I called every school in Washington and they said thanks to Bush they have no children left behind. I am going to try Maryland and Virginia."
"Who else called?"
"AT&T. They said we could get much cheaper long distance rates than with Verizon.""That sounds like a column. It will appeal to my consumer-oriented readers. Contact Verizon and find out if it's true or not."
"A man called to find out how many jobs Bush is going to take credit for in 2004."
"What did you tell him?"
"Bush will only take credit for whatever it takes to win the election. The man didn't laugh."
"People without jobs have lost their sense of humour," I said.
"And a lady in Tulsa called to ask if she would still get her Medicare drugs if the country runs out of money. I told her probably not, but if she can't afford them she shouldn't get sick."
"Good response."
"David Jaffe called with an idea. Why don't you refer to Washington as 'Lobbywood' in honour of all the lobbyists we have here? They would put their footprints in wet cement on the sidewalk in front of the Capitol."
"I like it. One more thing-call Michael Eisner at Disney and tell him if he leaves I am leaving with him."-Dawn/Tribune Media Services