| 30 May 2004 | Sunday | 10 Rabi-us-Saani 1425 |
Revolt of the underclass
Advent of a loyal opposition
Remembering D-Day
Are we about to witness the decline and fall of the United States as the sole superpower? Is the Iraq war the defining moment of this fall?
Less than a quarter of a century ago, a supremely confident Soviet Union rolled its tanks into Kabul (December 1979). Getting in was easy; getting out humiliating. The Berlin Wall fell within four years of the Soviet exit from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union died not with a bang but with a whimper.
Seen in the cool retrospect of time, Soviet adventurism in Afghanistan was hubristic and, like the Iraq invasion by the US, based on faulty intelligence fed to a hawkish politburo and a cabal of neocons respectively. The war drained the resources of the Soviets; a moribund economy was brought to its knees.
Much the same and more is happening in Iraq. Consider:
In its 80-year long history Iraq was never salvageable as a unitary state. It required a succession of terrorist military dictatorships, after the assassination of King Feisal and Nuri-el-Said, culminating in Saddam Hussein, to keep the northern Kurds, the southern majoritarian Shias and the mid-Sunni triangle together.
If the US is committed to keep Iraq as a unitary state, it must inherit the job of enforcing unity where Saddam left it, whether or not the Abu Ghraib prison is destroyed. The federal or confederative system does not work without a preceding culture of civil society (indeed, such a culture did exist in the time of kingship about 40 years back).
The handing over of legal power to an undefined Iraqi constitutional order on June 30 this year is not likely to change the combat situation on the ground. The US army, reinforced by a further force of 20,000 men in arms, will be bogged down in the centre and the south of Iraq. It is difficult to imagine a US army in Iraq taking orders from the local legal entity. Following Mao's dictum "Power grows through the barrel of a gun", the alleged transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis is merely cosmetic.
The war has cost the US at least $150 billion so far. What with plans for manned flights to Mars, homeland security and counter-terrorism measures already in the triple digit billions (a new $15 billion contract will monitor all foreign visitors before arrival in the United States), a perennial adverse balance of trade, with Europe today more competitive in selling America's principal export - commercial and military aircraft, the US is living beyond its means. In the last three years, the euro has climbed by approximately 35 per cent over the dollar.
The universal perception of the US today is something between a bully and a paper tiger. North Korea brandishes defiance to the US; it is offered a mountain of bounties to roll back its nuclear programme. Its anti-democratic and human rights credentials, even bleaker than Saddam's, invites no invasion.
The Iraq war is a fiasco on a par with the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979. Poor intelligence, compounded by unilateral adventurism, insults heaped on "old Europe" by the neocons, sidetracking the Security Council, the US has alienated its traditional allies, lost its traditional leadership role and intensified alienation of the Muslim world to a boiling point.
Never in the past century has the US been so utterly alone as it is today.
The US aim at the start of the Iraq war was to destroy alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Not finding any WMD, the war aim was conveniently changed to installing civil society in Iraq. Can you think of another war where aims were changed like curtains? Who on earth has given the US the right to declare war on a sovereign state without the sanction of the UN Security Council?
The so-called clash of civilizations has its genesis in the crass injustice meted out to the Palestinians by Israel with the participation and acquiescence of the US.
American policy on Israel is mortgaged to the US Jewish voting machine. No US political aspirant at any level of office can ever hope to win an election unless this monstrous machine directly or indirectly stamps its approval.
Today, Sharon has walled in Israel exceeding the territory way beyond the green line sanctioned by the UN in 1967. Washington meekly protests. Is it not a case of the tail wagging the dog?
As a consequence, the US has lost its moral power as a world force - in much the same way the Soviets lost the underpinnings of Marxist morality when it colonized and enslaved Eastern Europe after World War II.
A war is the most unpredictable of all human enterprises. Who could have imagined that a single bullet assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 would, in domino fashion, lead to World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and would follow on to the Russian Revolution of 1917?
Who could have foreseen that Nazi Germany's aggression against Poland in 1939 would end in the overlordship of Eastern Europe by Soviet Russia in 1945, or nearer home, no soothsayer or political pundit would have staked his reputation in predicting the fall of the Soviet Union within a decade of its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
What are the probable consequences of an Anglo-American withdrawal from Iraq? The future is a land without any maps. Yet, the drama of real life in moving the logjam of humanity is more daring than our wildest imagination.
Firstly, the threat of a Kurdish state emerging in north Iraq is a possibility that cannot be ruled out. The Kurds have an elected parliament, two regional governments, their own court system, and a 100,000-strong military force, known as the Peshmerga. They have enjoyed US protection since the Kuwait war of 1991.
A Kurdish declaration of de facto or de jure autonomy or independence will have grave consequences for Turkey, Iran and Syria (all have large Kurd minority populations). The Turkish dilemma will be either to grudgingly accept Kurdistan's quasi or complete independence or to give up its quest to join the European Union, if it resorts to force.
The Iranians would desire a Shia state in the south with at least the same elbowroom as the Kurds may extract; which leaves two huge imponderables: the Sunni triangle in the middle and the cynosure of all eyes - Kirkuk with its huge oil wealth.
Kirkuk is historically part of Kurdistan; but after the discovery of oil, the Kurds were expelled. They now demand restitution and de-Arabization. Moreover, backed by Turkey, ethnic Turkmen assert that Kirkuk is a Turkmen city, which would be Turkey's counterpoint to a possible Kurdistan. Oil wealth may prove more divisive than the Shia-Sunni divide. The Sunni triangle (now without known leaders) may join the Shia south in claiming Kirkuk for a rump Iraq state if the Kurds separate.
Rump Iraq would be the richest oil state in the world after Saudi Arabia. The US would be loath to see such an oil prize fall under the influence of the Iranian clerics. Kirkuk, therefore, lies directly on the Iraq fault line. The only way to avoid it becoming yet another perennial flashpoint in the Middle East, is for a tripartite Iraq to remain to form a true federation with complete regional autonomy for each constituent unit.
We live in a world of linkages. The central link for the Muslim world is Palestine. The current situation there may be described as Shakespeare's "mad scene". Sharon appears bent on seeking revenge for the expulsion of Jews from Babylonia by enclosing the hapless Palestinians in three West Bank enclaves, which would be similar to the White South African Bantustans; and a pogrom to expel recalcitrant Palestinians to Jordan and beyond.
The massive wall now under construction claims large parts of the West Bank for Israel in total defiance of the 1967 UN resolutions. The Palestinians have been pushed to the wall and conditions have never been so intolerable.
There is a body of minority opinion within Israel and the US, which is in revolt against this obnoxious state of affairs. President Clinton in the dying days of his administration did make an effort to find some middle ground. Since then, it has been a nosedive into a living hell.
And matters are made more complicated by Jihadi terrorism against Israeli civilian targets, which is trumped up by the Israeli hawks and religious parties to justify Israel's policy of ruthless suppression.
The Americans are a generous, friendly, caring, open-minded and democratic people. Most Americans I encounter express their helplessness with regard to Palestinian rights and the mindless invasion of Iraq. At most levels of society, Americans are for coexistence with moderate Islam.
But, given the mortgage of its politics to the windmills of organized Jewry, this mass democracy falsely sees security tied to Israel. Muslim society sees no alternative but to confront the US at each opportunity. One hopes that a truly democratic America will some day transcend this myopia and search its conscience for where it has gone wrong.
The writer is a member of the National Assembly
E-mail: murbr@isb.paknet.com.pk
Revolt of the underclass
The dramatic results of the recent Indian elections constitute a watershed in India's polity and economy, and will have a far-reaching impact not only in India, but in entire South Asia, especially in Pakistan - in the long-run, if not in the immediate future. The elections will also have some effect on the future of Indo-Pakistan relations, although the pace of the inter-governmental dialogue currently under way may have to take a breather in view of the change of command in New Delhi.
However, the perception that the BJP-led coalition would have been a more reliable interlocutor with Pakistan than the Congress-led government is highly misplaced since the BJP, having initiated the dialogue process, would find it very difficult to oppose a possible detente with Pakistan.
The elections and the subsequent emotionally-packed events leading to the formation of the new government have brought out the robustness of democratic institutions in India, which were painstakingly grafted and nurtured by successive generations of Indian political leadership.
They have belied the oft-repeated claim of Third World dictatorships and their patrons in the West that democracy is unsuitable for developing countries. What the half-century long experience of democracy in India does show, however, is that these institutions require an uninterrupted period of evolution and adherence to democratic norms.
It is a tribute to Indian democracy that despite being surrounded by countries where political stability was an exception rather than a norm it did not deviate from the democratic path for any significant period of time (Mrs. Indira Gandhi's emergency rule in the late 1970s being the only notable exception). Not only the Indian leadership, but more importantly the electorate, has shown considerable deftness in crossing the difficult bends and pitfalls of an evolving democratic polity. Pakistan's leadership and people have obviously a lot to learn from that experience.
Unfortunately, the hatred cultivated by influential sections of Pakistani society (no doubt fully reciprocated by their Indian counterparts) has blinded us to their successes. The task of building democratic institutions in Pakistan has been continually usurped by the military, with the active connivance of political elites and the acquiescence of civil society.
Indeed, Pakistani elites, including the capitalists, have become used to rent-seeking, rather than earning their incomes through hard work and competitive enterprise. They have no stake in a democratic dispensation or in the promotion of democratic institutions in the country.
Unlike India, where the elites were in the vanguard of the freedom struggle and in the development of a democratic polity, Pakistani elites have tended to expect everything (including the attainment of freedom) served on a platter. As a result, opportunism and ad hocism became a political way of life. That opened the door for frequent dismissals of elected governments and their replacement by military rule. The latter was not only welcomed but often urged by the entrenched elites in the name of "cleaning up" the mess created by politicians, although, more often than not, it led to the compounding of the mess.
At the same time, it gave rise to religious fundamentalism and ethnic conflict, as a way of giving vent to public grievances created by the lack of a democratic process in the country. The military used these fissiparous tendencies to its advantage and as a way of legitimizing its rule. It also paved the way for manipulating civilian rule by periodically redefining "real" democracy to ensure its control.
In a vast country like India, where so many currents and cross-currents are at play, it would be quite simplistic to attribute the unexpected defeat of the BJP-led alliance - and the equally unforeseen change in the Congress fortunes - to a single factor. Among the many factors that analysts have recounted are the problem of incumbency, the mistrust of the minorities or the outrage of ordinary people at the Gujarat massacre, which is comparable to the impact the Abu Ghraib atrocity is having on US politics, the assertion of secular ethos in Indian politics and the mystique of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty (notwithstanding the foreign origin factor unscrupulously used by the BJP).
It is gratifying, however, that despite the hype and propaganda, the election did not turn into a personality contest. Both its attempt to capitalize on Mr Vajpayee's soft and sagacious image of a seasoned statesman and its portrayal of Sonia Gandhi as a weak and inexperienced leader, not only lacking in charisma, but also having the disadvantage of being foreign-born for leading the nation, backfired on the BJP.
Ironically, however, the one factor that the BJP government counted among its winning points - the economy - turned out to be its real nemesis. While the protagonists of Hindutva succeeded in removing the stigma of the Hindu rate of growth, which had haunted the Indian economy for decades, they were unable to tackle the essential problem of exclusion of a large majority of the population, especially the rural poor, from the mainstream.
However, fortuitous circumstances, such as the impending monsoons and the outsourcing boom, rather than visionary economic policies, were more responsible for the turnaround in Indian economic fortunes during BJP's tenure of in office.
The BJP government went overboard in displaying its "market friendly" stance to placate big business and international finance and, desperate to resolve its budgetary difficulties, sold some of the most valuable and profitable of public sector assets at extremely attractive prices. To prove its credentials, it competed with Pakistan to become a front-line state in Mr Bush's war on terrorism against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
It was, however, cleverly out-manoeuvred by General Musharraf, who was desperate to attain legitimacy in the eyes of the world and even more frantic in search of cash to shore up his country's sinking economy. For that he was willing to do America's bidding. The geo-political odds were also clearly against India.
The BJP's stress on economic growth and economic reforms was directed towards the upper-caste, urban middle class and was a camouflage for the party's hidden agenda of militant Hindu nationalism in which the minorities would merge their identity with that of the Hindu majority. "Let Muslims understand," an official RSS resolution said in March 2003, "that their safety lies in the goodwill of the majority."
The emphasis on high growth also was seen as a means of fulfilling India's elusive dream of becoming a superpower in the midst of poverty. Achieving the crowning glory of becoming a nuclear power became one of its first tasks on attaining power six years ago.
But the real Achilles heel of the BJP was not the widely perceived danger that it would widen the communal divide by concentrating on issues like the Babri Masjid and the burning of Christian churches, but the widening economic divide as a result of its "India Shining" policies. The dramatic repudiation of the BJP's "India Shining" policies was witnessed in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where the leader of BJP's electoral ally, the Telegu Desam Party, Chandra Babu Naidu, was regarded as one of the chief architects of the IT revolution in India.
Naidu, who fashioned himself as the state's CEO and maintained his own website and wanted his state capital, Hyderabad, to be renamed as Cyberabad, helped transform the state into an IT centre and had ambitions of turning the state into a virtual Singapore.
To be continued
Advent of a loyal opposition
Last Monday, President Pervez Musharraf assured the people that religious extremists could not lead the country. The following day, the speaker, Chaudhry Amir Husain, negated that assurance by appointing Maulana Fazlur Rahman as leader of the opposition.
In this contradictory and excruciating situation, two facts cannot be overlooked. First, the speaker has not acted on his own; and secondly, Maulana Fazlur Rahman is an acknowledged patron and admirer of the Taliban whose primitive and brutally repressive, though mercifully short-lived, rule had given a fillip to extremism as no other factor had in recent times. Islamic fighters from far and near had converged on Afghanistan to conjure up the phantom of Al Qaeda, unheard of until then.
That the selection of the maulana is not by the speaker but by the ruling party has been betrayed (in fact, no attempt has been made to conceal it) in more ways than one. Chaudhry Shujaat, the unified League's chief, had announced it a day or two ahead of the speaker's ruling; the information minister reminded every one that he had always held that the MMA alliance was the government's ally and not its rival.
The maulana then lost no time in affirming that his would be the government-in-waiting as he was loyal not just to the country but also to the system. Seldom has a speaker's ruling been so gleefully owned by the politicians whom he is required to hector or guide irrespective of party affiliations.
In this complete convergence of views and interests, the extremists could not lead but were welcome to join the leader i.e. Musharraf. His long harangue to a "captive" student audience was thus intended to be not an assurance to the liberal but an invitation to the orthodox. Shujaat and Rashid may consider the MMA their soul-mate. Aitzaz Ahsan and Raza Rabbani may call the religious alliance the government's "B" team. The point the two sides make, however, remains the same: the rhetoric of the opposition led by the maulana may be fiery but not so its content.
There should be no doubt that the real opposition to the government and to the official opposition as well will come from the larger group led by Makhdum Amin Fahim of the PPP. The following may provide comic relief: Makhdum Amin Fahim criticizing the leader of the opposition but the treasury benches defending him, and the maulana chastising Fahim's followers rather than the ministers.
Pakistan's fragile and hybrid parliamentary system, thus, will experience yet another stress under which it might altogether break down. This unexpected turn of events gives rise to many troubling thoughts, the foremost being about the country being driven on a totalitarian path. This is not a far-fetched idea in a situation where the man at the helm appoints not just the head of the government but also of the opposition.
A lesser apprehension and a more likely explanation for this bizarre decision is that to destroy even a rump PPP and Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League (after large-scale defections to the ruling coalition), President Musharraf is ready to court even those elements in politics whose ideas and programmes are utterly at variance with his own. The divergence is complete and, apparently, irreconcilable.
A day before Maulana Fazlur Rahman became the leader of the opposition, the president repeated his determination, more empathetically than before, to make Pakistan a liberal and tolerant state. A day after his nomination, the maulana repeated with greater vehemence that he would not let this happen nor permit the review of Islamic laws that have been a subject of controversy.
An opposition led by Amin Fahim would have encouraged the majority party to enact such laws as to rid Pakistan of its reactionary and violent image abroad. It would have also, perhaps, enabled Musharraf to muster a two-third majority in parliament to amend the Constitution to strengthen fundamental rights and prevent the enactment of such regressive laws in the future.
Now, the disenchanted majority in the opposition is unlikely to support Musharraf's programme, nor will the minority faction that is loyal to him. The hope of a liberal Pakistan is thus lost - in fact, it is feared that the atmosphere might turn more reactionary.
It was no coincidence that the day Maulana Fazlur Rahman's nomination was announced, the NWFP government led by his nominee decided to move the stalled Hisba bill in the legislature. This bill is a leaf out of the Taliban's book. It would give party vigilantes a licence to raid people's homes and harass women in public places.
As a sequel to the nomination of the leader of the opposition it seems that political forces will be once again realigning themselves. First, the MMA may split up as it did earlier when Maulana Samiul Haq left it. The Jamaat-e-Islami shall have to fold up its banners of street protest if it wants to remain a part of the opposition which the government party chief and ministers claim is in fact its ally.
The MQM, which is almost militant in its liberalism, will also be, perhaps, reconsidering its association with the government in a situation in which its reactionary arch foes have come so close to it. It may be a bit early to say a requiem for Musharraf's liberalism but the pomp of power has obviously overshadowed it. However, some lesser worries arising out of this episode could be summed up here.
One, the independence of the office of the speaker which in the recent troubled past was painstakingly protected by men like Ilahi Bukhsh Soomro, Hamid Nasir Chattha, Zafar Ali Shah, Fakhar Imam and Gohar Ayub has been compromised. Two, the president remains the power broker - a role which in a parliamentary system belongs to the prime minister. Three, unless there has been a secret deal, the Taliban and other foreign fighters will become more defiant in Waziristan and elsewhere along the border with Afghanistan.
The conclusion is that both the politicians and the generals have failed to run the country. The failure is more apparent now that they are trying to run it together. The basic cause of these successive failures was just one - polling was poorly attended and the whole electoral process was manipulated by perverse rules and men. For once, a chance should be given to the people through mass participation in a free election to decide how they wish to be governed.
Remembering D-Day
It certainly seems appropriate that Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, will be a guest of honor on June 6 at the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Normandy landings. For it's high time Russia was accorded overdue recognition of its primary role in World War II in defeating National Socialist Germany and its allies.
Many people seem to believe the US-British-Canadian landings at Normandy were the decisive stroke of the war. Not so.
When the Allies invaded France, most of the war-battered German units they met were undermanned, short of armour, trucks, and heavy artillery, almost immobile, and reduced to 40 per cent combat effectiveness by previous savage fighting on the Eastern Front.
Most important, Germany's once splendid air force was almost extinct. German forces at Normandy had almost no air cover and were pounded day and night by thousands of Allied strike aircraft and bombers. Few recall that 15,000-20,000 French civilians in Normandy were killed by the ferocious Allied bombing campaign. The Germans still put up fierce resistance against overwhelming odds, inflicting 209,000 casualties on the Allies and suffering 200,000 of their own. As Churchill observed, "you will never know war until you fight Germans.'
Still, the German Wehrmacht was not defeated in France, as many still believe, but on the Eastern Front during 1941-1944 by Stalin's Soviet Union, a tyranny far more murderous and bloodthirsty than Adolf Hitler's Germany.
The Red Army (according to its official history) claims to have destroyed 507 German divisions, 48,000 German tanks and 77,000 enemy aircraft; 100 divisions of Nazi-allied Romania, Hungary, and Italy; and at least 450,000 Japanese soldiers, 32 per cent of Japan's total military losses.
Of Germany's 10 million casualties in WWII, 75 per cent came fighting the Red Army. The Luftwaffe lost most of its warplanes and its best pilots in the East. Almost all German military production went to supplying the 1,600 km Eastern Front, where elite German forces were ground up in titanic battles involving millions of men.
Soviet forces lost upwards of 20 million casualties. Total US casualties (including the Pacific) were one million. To the Russians, D-Day was mainly a diversionary sideshow to tie down German troops while the Red Army pushed on to Berlin.
We may dispute this view, but there's little doubt the Soviets destroyed most of Germany's military capability well before June 1944. It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if Hitler had not invaded the USSR, and if the Allies would then have landed in Normandy to face intact German forces with air cover. My own view: the Allies would have been beaten as quickly and thoroughly as the French Army in 1940.
So Russia's Putin certainly merits an invitation to Normandy, though reluctantly, because of Moscow's frightful human rights violations against the oppressed Chechen - the children of the survivors of Stalin's concentration camps.
But what about German Chancellor Schroder? A bit odd, Germans celebrating a German defeat? Schroder claims Germans were also victims of Nazism, and so should fete its defeat. That seems a bit much. Mind you, Schroder, a deft, intelligent politician, is only doing what former wartime Nazi allies Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Finland, Romania have managed to do: totally escape their pro-German wartime role and through the magic of doubletalk, emerge as "Allies." Call it Euroamnesia.
I recently saw a plaque in Italy lauding the liberation of a town from the Germans by "Italian Allied forces." Excuse me. I always believed Italy was on the German side. If the wily Italians could start on one side in the war and end up on the other, why not the Germans?
It makes you wonder just who was fighting against the Allies? Everyone seems to have been either anti-Nazi, in the Resistance, or vacationing in South America at the time. Maybe all that shooting was just friendly fire?
Whatever, the war is long over and today's Germans bear no responsibility or guilt for such long-ago events. Let them join the party as guilt-free members.
The border between old enemies France and Germany, along which millions of soldiers died in three wars, is marked only by a small plaque. There are no security or customs posts, no barriers, no guards. The old border has simply vanished. You only know you are in Germany when the signs change language. Perhaps one day that is they way the border between India and Pakistan will be: a borderless border. -Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2004