| 30 June 2004 | Wednesday | 11 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
Iraq: a cruel paradox
Education blues
A hasty transfer of sovereignty
The people of Pakistan have become accustomed to being short-changed by their rulers in receiving their basic political and economic rights, especially the right to be governed as a democracy.
The latest setback has been the "resignation" of the much-heralded first prime minister from the poorest province of the country in terms of per capita income (ironically, also the richest in terms of natural resources).
The abrupt change-over, which came as a "surprise" to political pundits, who had safely predicted that for the first time a prime minister will complete his term in office.
This, it was hoped, will replicate the other miracle of the Musharraf era, the completion of an IMF Accord, without missing a tranche. The fall of Mr. Jamali's government cannot but help recall the dismissal in almost identical circumstances of another prime minister, Mohammad Khan Junejo, who was unceremoniously sacked on arrival at the capital's airport from a foreign visit.
Although it can be quibbled that Mr Jamali resigned "voluntarily", unlike Mr Junejo, who dared the military regime of President Ziaul Haq, there is no doubt who really calls the shots in General Musharraf's democratic dispensation. What a distance we seem to have travelled from Junejo to Jamali - fast downward.
Mr Jamali was unabashedly obsequious to his military bosses and was always over-eager to do everything at their bidding. If anything, Mr Jamali went too far in allowing the President to acquire the constitutional rights of the prime minister as the chief executive, a title Gen. Musharraf assumed on staging his coup in October 1999 and never found the grace to grow out of.
It is, therefore, very puzzling indeed why the military would like to upset the political apple cart it so dexterously built in the past few years beginning from a sham referendum to the passing of constitutional amendments to legitmize the presidency.
It has gone on to bulldoze the passage of the controversial National Security Council bill and to continue its prevarication on the "uniform" issue, which still rankles the parliament and pervades political uncertainty.
The only explanation for forcing Mr Jamali's exit at this point seems to lie in the military's insatiable appetite for its "command and control" of the minutiae of domestic politics.
This is hardly conducive to the nurturing of Pakistan's stunted democratic process. Neither is it a recipe for promoting harmonious domestic polity, which the general came to introduce five years ago and for which he received understandable public acclamation.
Instead of imparting a freshness to it, the general has turned the domestic political scene into a putrid cesspool of discredited politicians who are being recycled in an unending game of musical chairs.
Indeed, by forcing out Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who are arguably no worse than the pack being favoured, he has reduced the competition in terms of political agenda and astuteness to a level that has made Pakistan a laughing stock among political democracies of South Asia.
With such political credentials and with the latest Indian elections having raised the bar of political maturity in the region even higher, it is unlikely that Pakistan can play a leading role in the South Asian renaissance which was heralded by Saarc's last summit in Islamabad.
It is even doubtful that India which is currently engaged in an official dialogue will take us seriously as the government's democratic deficit continues to balloon and will more likely be tempted to take advantage of this basic weakness of Pakistani negotiators in driving a hard bargain.
Although the United States is committed to support the military regime through thick and thin, it too would be embarrassed by the continuing erosion of democratic credentials of its Pakistani ally while it peddles its plan to make the Islamic world more democratic.
Instead of providing a lead or inspiration to others in the Muslim world, Pakistan is regressing towards a full-fledged military dictatorship or, at best, an Egyptian-style democracy.
The President's recently-paraded doctrine of "enlightened moderation" has been rendered completely hollow and hypocritical by using his sleight of hand to oust his prime minister.
While the exit of Mr Jamali is itself a great blow to whatever democratic pretensions the present dispensation may have, the manner in which his succession has been orchestrated by the president and his men is even more unpalatable.
Not only Mr Jamali was forced to sign his political death warrant, he also had to suffer the indignity of naming his executioner as his successor. Constitutionally, he could well have recommended the dissolution of the parliament and holding of fresh elections, thereby calling the president's bluff.
Instead, he was forced, ostensibly as a gesture of goodwill and solidarity, to nominate as his successor, the person who had been trying to oust him. There was no discussion among the PML parliamentary members as to who should succeed Mr Jamali.
Decisions like this usually require a good deal of debate and deliberation in a parliamentary democracy. Mr Shujaat Husain, who has the reputation of being the king-maker in the party, but who himself is hardly any more dynamic than the allegedly lackadaisical Mr Jamali, was "unanimously" chosen for the job, at least for the interim period.
It had been reported in the press that the president himself, contrary to all norms of parliamentary democracy, was openly canvassing from his chambers in the parliament, to oust Mr Jamali and to instal someone whom he considered to be more pliable and of more value to his own (and the military's) political ambitions.
That choice fell on Mr Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister. Again, there was no formal discussion or debate regarding Mr Aziz's candidacy, despite the fact that he is at present not eligible to become the prime minister and will have to wait at least six months to get elected to the National Assembly.
It is worth considering why Mr Aziz has been chosen as the person to head the government for the remaining period of its tenure until 2007. Of course, any number of other aspirants could have filled the bill as a pliant and disposable candidate, but Mr Aziz has the advantage of being among the more internationally presentable persons (with the possible exception of Foreign Minister Kasuri) while having no real roots in domestic politics, which may tempt him to be less timid than the job description requires him to be.
But the Musharraf regime, obviously lacking in a firm domestic constituency other than the military, needs to capitalize on Mr Aziz's self-created image as the "turn-around" financial wizard with wide experience of international capital markets which helped Pakistan raise a $500 million bond issue recently, the merits of which were far from transparent.
General Musharraf is surely not unaware that the generally short-term and ephemeral achievements as the accumulation of over $10 billion foreign exchange reserves, the reduction in the foreign debt and the reversal of a negative growth trend are just dessert for services rendered in the war on terror.
However, the general is content to let his multi-millionaire finance minister bask in false glory for the sake of advancing military's more vital interests. If, somehow, the general is under the illusion that Mr. Aziz is likely to be a match for the latter's Indian counterpart, Dr Manmohan Singh, in either economic savvy or political astuteness, he should be prepared for a shock.
It is high time that the civil society in Pakistan forcefully challenges the military's prescription for democracy. By raising the scarecrow of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in tackling which it has miserably failed by running with the fundamentalist hare and hunting with the FBI hound, the military's only purpose is to prolong the lease of its privileged and unfettered rule.
It has shown gross ineptness in nurturing democratic institutions in the country and has repeatedly forfeited its trust of the people to deliver on its promise of better institutions of governance.
The only safe course for it is to hand over power for the holding of new elections to a neutral administrative machinery, such as Mr Brahimi has produced for Afghanistan and Iraq, while it can still be done without the deployment of foreign forces.
Iraq: a cruel paradox
So in the end, America's enemies set the date. The handover of "full sovereignty" was secretly brought forward so that the ex-CIA intelligence officer who is now "prime minister" of Iraq could avoid another bloody offensive by America's enemies. What is supposed to be the most important date in Iraq's modern history was changed - like a birthday party - because it might rain on Wednesday.
Pitiful is the word that comes to mind. Here we were, handing "full sovereignty" to the people of Iraq - "full", of course, providing we forget the 160,000 foreign soldiers whom Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has apparently asked to stay on in Iraq, "full" providing we forget the 3,000 US diplomats who will constitute the largest US embassy in the world in Baghdad - without even telling the Iraqi people that we had changed the date.
Few, save of course for the Iraqis, understood the cruelest paradox of the event. For it was the new Iraqi foreign minister - should we not put his title, too, into quotation marks? - who chose to leak the "bringing forward" of sovereignty in Iraq at the Nato summit in Turkey.
Thus was this new and unprecedented date in modern Iraqi history announced not in Baghdad but in the capital of the former Ottoman empire which once ruled Iraq. Alice in Wonderland could not have improved on this.
The looking-glass reflects all the way from Baghdad to Washington. In its savage irony Ibsen might have done justice to the occasion. After all, what could have been more familiar than Allawi's appeal to Iraqis to fight "the enemies of the people".
Power was ritually handed over in legal documents. The new government was sworn in on the Holy Quran. The US proconsul, Paul Bremer, formally shook hands with Allawi and boarded his C130 to fly home, guarded by special forces men in shades.
It was difficult to remember that Bremer was touted for his job more than a year ago because he was a "counter-terrorism" expert - this definitely should be in inverted commas - and that what he referred to as "dead-enders" [Baathist diehards] managed to turn almost an entire Iraqi population against the United States and Britain in just a few months.
According to Allawi, the "dead-enders" and the "remnants" belonged to Saddam Hussein. Those of them who had not committed crimes could even join the new authorities, he announced.
But it had already been made clear that Allawi was pondering martial law, the sine qua non of every Arab dictatorship, this time to be imposed on an Arab state, heaven spare us, by a western army led by an avowedly Christian government. Who was the last man to impose martial law on Iraqis? Wasn't it Saddam?
No, Allawi and his chums - along with the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, now dug up from his political grave - are not little Saddams. Indeed, it is Allawi's claim to fame that he was a Saddam loyalist until he upped sticks and fled to London.
He almost got assassinated by Saddam before - this by his own admission - he took the King's shilling (MI6) and the CIA's dollar and - this again by his own admission - that of 12 other intelligence agencies.
On Monday, Allawi was talking of a "historical day". As far as the new prime minister is concerned, Iraqis were about to enjoy "full sovereignty". Those of us who put quotation marks around "liberation" in 2003 should now put quotation marks around "sovereignty". Doing this has become part of the reporting of the Middle East.
Perhaps most remarkable of all was Allawi's demand that "mercenaries who come to Iraq from foreign countries" should leave Iraq. There are, of course, 80,000 western "mercenaries" in Iraq, most of them wearing western clothes. But, of course, Mr Allawi was not speaking of these men.
And herein lies a problem. There must come a time when we have to give up cliches, when we have to give up on the American nightmares. Al Qaeda does not have an original branch in Iraq. And the Iraqis didn't plan September 11, 2001.
But not to worry. The new Iraqi prime minister will soon introduce martial law - journalists who think they can escape criticism should reflect again - and thus we can all wait for a request for more American troops "at the formal request of the provincial government". Wait, then, for the first expulsion of journalists. Democratic elections will be held in Iraq, "it is hoped", within five months. Well, we shall see.
True, Mr Allawi promises a future Iraq with "a society of all Iraqis, irrespective of ethnicity, colour or religion." But the Iraqis who Mr Allawi promises to protect do not apparently include the 5,000 prisoners held in America's dubious camps across Iraq. At least 3,000 will remain captive, largely of the Americans.
There have been many promises of a trial for Saddam Hussein and his colleagues although, not surprisingly, Iraqi lawyers felt there were other, more pressing issues to pursue.
Paul Bremer abolished the death penalty in Iraq but Mr Allawi seems to want to bring it back. Asked whether Saddam might be executed, he remarked that "this is again something which is being debated in the judicial system in Iraq".
He said, however, that he was in favour of capital punishment. According to American sources, the United States has been putting pressure on Allawi for at least two weeks in the hope that his ministries could - in theory, at least - function without US support.
American advisers had already been withdrawn from many Iraqi institutions. Yet when he appeared on Monday, Iraq's new prime minister spoke with words that might have come from George Bush.
He warned "the forces of terror" that "we will not forget who stood with us and against us in this crisis". As the new "cabinet" stepped forward to place their hands on the Quran, a large number of Iraqi flags lined the podium behind them - though not the strange blue and white banner which the former interim council had concocted two months ago.
The real problem for Allawi is that he has to be an independent leader while relying upon an alien, western and Christian force to support his rule. He cannot produce security without the assistance of an alien force. But he has no control over that same force. He cannot order the Americans to leave. But here is the real question.
If Mr Allawi really intends to lead Iraq, the most powerful demonstration he could show would be to demand the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces. Within hours, he would be a hero in Iraq.
The Americans would be finished. But does Mr Allawi have the wit to realize that this ultimate step might save him? Who can tell, at this critical and bloody hour? America's satraps have been known to turn traitor before.
Yet the whole painful equation in Baghdad now is that Allawi is relying on the one army whose evacuation he needs to prove his own credibility. The western occupying powers have left behind a raft of dubious legislation in Iraq.
Much of it allows western companies to suck up the profits of reconstruction - an issue over which the Iraqis had no choice - and many people in the country have no interest in continuing Mr Bremer's occupation laws.
No one, for example, is likely to spend a month in jail for driving without a licence. But why should US and other western businesses have legal immunity from Iraqi law? When a British or American mercenary shoots dead an Iraqi, he cannot be taken to an Iraqi court.
But Allawai relies upon these same mercenaries. Which is why, sadly and inevitably, he and his government will fail. The insurgency now has a life of its own - and a plan.
If it can continue to maintain an independence struggle for nationalists within the Sunni Muslim areas north and west of Baghdad, then the Sunnis may also claim that they have the right to form Iraq's first independent, post-American government. -(c) The Independent
Education blues
A Friend was saying the other day that but for frequent cataclysmic changes in our politics and the constitution, the problems of education might have been taken more seriously by successive governments.
They might even have been dealt with to some purpose if the elected representatives of the people, or the military regimes, had not had other things on their mind. Their own survival, for instance.
There have been commissions galore as well as numerous syllabus committees. There have been more changes in the education policy than in any other policy, and every change has been described as revolutionary.
Maybe our educationists are just not made to bring about the required improvements. For instance, I can think of some decisions that were senseless. The teaching of Persian was abandoned, although it is inconceivable to develop Urdu without classical Persian or even to practise Urdu literature.
This was done to promote Arabic, but poor Arabic was hardly promoted. Then, the script of children's Urdu textbooks was changed to the naskh and, after ten years, when children had mastered the unfamiliar script, we went back again to nasta'aliq.
No one has been able to understand why this was done, nor did the government have a plausible explanation. English was relegated to the background but now it is a popular pursuit again after we saw India moving ahead fast by concentrating on the lingua franca of the world.
The subject of drawing in schools was given up and the drawing-master became extinct. All these were not very vital matters, but they are symptomatic of mindlessness and the tendency to fumble without the ability to choose the right path.
You can only imagine how educational planners would have treated really important things. After every decade the old nostrums were tried all over again, but with the same lack of success, and given up.
And now of course the government seems to have come to the conclusion that education is too big a task for it to handle and every day more and more stress is being laid on the increased contribution from the private sector.
The biggest hurdle in the way of spreading education and making it meaningful is that the existing faulty structure must first be dismantled, and this means re-education of teachers themselves.
The host of difficulties that are bound to crop up in the process will be too daunting for timid planners to tackle and overcome. These would cover new syllabi, new textbooks, making up the shortage of staff, school accommodation and equipment, and what not, and the most important could be the sheer shortage of educational facilities for the ever-growing population.
The other day I read a news report pertaining to the availability of staff. In a newly-opened intermediate college in a small town, posts of a principal and twelve lecturers had been sanctioned but only two lecturers and the principal had turned up.
The townspeople had written in despair to the newspaper. They asked, if the boys are admitted who will take the classes, and if admissions are not made what would be the point in spending lakhs of rupees on the building and its appurtenances.
This is a case that is quite common in Pakistan and may perhaps be found nowhere else. Influential legislators get colleges started in places where they are actually not needed, whereas the government does not have the wherewithal to equip them properly.
My mind went back to the sixties. In Parachinar, in the heart of the tribal area, a brand new degree college had been constructed and the situation was the other way round. When admissions were over, it was discovered that there were more lecturers in the college than students.
That too was a case of ignoring reality and trying to please a lobby. Few people realize (least of all politicians) that the provision of education or lack of it, its qualitative inadequacy, its duality (Urdu medium, English medium), its unpardonable neglect of science, its examination system with its cheating and forgeries - all these make it the biggest and the most complex problem facing Pakistan today.
But since it is chronic in nature, it does not draw the attention of the authorities and the public as law and order does, or confrontational politics do. We talk about it with concern, discuss it like an abstract issue and then go over to worrying about sectarian killings or gossiping about what led to Mr Jamali's ouster as prime minister.
Sometimes, however, we are shaken out of our apathy when we see a newspaper photograph showing little boys and girls being taught in the open in a municipal primary school. The only chair is for the underpaid teacher.
Naturally he or she must be shown respect since we can't show them consideration salary-wise. In a society where respectability is measured by the money you possess, teachers should be thankful they are not equated with sweepers.
And sometimes we are really shocked to read that the roof of a school has collapsed burying children underneath and bringing tragedy to so many homes. But we never read that so-and-so has been punished with imprisonment for causing the tragedy, because essentially it is the government that is responsible.
You can't send the government to jail, though that is the heartiest wish of many citizens. On the other hand the prime minister visits his old school, a fancy school in Murree Hills, and announces a handsome donation - for an institution run by the government!
And then every political and religious party has invaded the colleges and universities. What our politicians lack in guts and militancy to promote their respective ideologies, they expect their student fronts to make up, naturally with violent and disastrous consequences.
Has any party ever honestly assessed the immeasurable damage it has done to the nation by politicizing education. And yet every politician issues a statement every day appealing to the students to keep away from politics.
Do you know that more has been spoken and written about education than on any other subject in Pakistan during the last 57 years? But if you read a speech on the subject by Mr Fazlur Rahman, Education Minister, made in 1948, and a speech by the outgoing federal education Minister, Ms Zubaida Jalal you will hardly find any difference.
Both the speeches say the same things about re-fashioning education to suit the genius of the people and meet their aspirations. Either our leaders have not been able to discover the genius of the people or they are rank hypocrites who live on spouting platitudes and making fools of poor Pakistanis. One is inclined to believe the latter.
A hasty transfer of sovereignty
Paul Bremer sure as hell was in a hurry to get out of Baghdad. And who can blame him? It is said D-day was brought forward by two days on Iraqi insistence, but Bremer's bags were packed.
That's not D for democracy, mind you. Any sort of representative rule, even in a limited form, is more than six months away. More like D for deception. Or delusion. The so-called handover of sovereignty, conducted in considerable haste in the Iraqi capital's ultra-protected (yet not entirely safe) Green Zone, effectively amounts to a rebranding of the occupation.
It doesn't require much of a leap of the imagination to extrapolate that the only meaningful handover involves Bremer and his successor as proconsul, John Negroponte. Anything beyond that was little more than a puppet show.
Even so, given that the Americans had made such a big deal of it, a degree of imperial pomp and ceremony was considered likely. At least that's what US presidential adviser Karl Rove evidently had in mind when he engineered the rescheduling of the Nato summit in Istanbul.
It's just a 90-minute flight from there to Baghdad, and the photo-ops there - even though there was never any question of a limo ride down a boulevard resounding with the cheers of "liberated" Iraqis - could have proved invaluable to a president dogged by rising unpopularity in an election year.
Why, with a bit of spin, the D in D-Day could have been made to stand for Dubya. It's highly unlikely - albeit not out of the question - that George W. Bush will drop by today, without advance notice, to personally bless the puppets.
Chances are that the risk of unauthorized fireworks, which apparently accounted for Monday's low-key ceremony, will keep him at bay. Of course, with 160,000 Western troops - 138,000 of them American - staying put indefinitely, it is not easy to pretend that Iraq is suddenly independent.
But then, the US of A rarely allows implausibility to interfere with its storytelling. We had the long-running saga of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Billed as incontrovertible fact, it turned out to be pot-boiler fiction.
The yarn about close links and coordination between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda appears to have been based on a schlock-horror screenplay out of Hollywood rather than any credible information. For all that, it hasn't quite been laid to rest just yet.
Of course, even if Saddam had some WMD and was on chummy terms with Osama bin Laden, it is extremely unlikely that he would have invited massive retaliation by trying to attack the US directly or indirectly.
He may have offered compensation to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, but he wasn't one himself. So the pre-emption argument never held much water. So all that the aggressors are left with is what was initially held out as no more than a bonus - a salutary but nonetheless secondary goal: the liberation of Iraqis from a brutal tyrant.
The problem with that contention is that even those who are gullible enough to accept that the US would voluntarily have expended tens of billions of dollars just to give Iraqis a taste of what it describes as "freedom", are then faced with a supplementary question: How many deaths can be considered an acceptable price to pay for such a privilege?
Of the nearly 20,000 Iraqis believed to have been killed since March 2003, more than half were civilians. On the side of the aggressors, the toll is rapidly approaching the 1000 mark. There are those who will say it's a worthwhile sacrifice. But for what, exactly?
In the sphere of brutality, the US was never in any position to claim the moral high ground. It did so nonetheless, and it did so relentlessly. But the revelations about what was going on in Abu Ghraib prison put an end to that, at least temporarily.
Another tale was rapidly spun, suggesting that the scandal resulted from the actions of a small group of particularly wayward troops. It has since emerged that certain forms of torture have been common at US detention centres from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, and that the paper trail stretches up to Donald Rumsfeld.
Opinion polls and western media reports suggest that even those Iraqis who were delighted to be rid of Saddam now tend to look back at the relative stability and mundane predictability of years gone by with a degree of nostalgia.
The minority that hailed the invasion now overwhelmingly feels that the Americans have outstayed their welcome. And, unlike Bremer, they are not leaving in a hurry. Not today, nor tomorrow.
Mugged by reality, the neoconservatives who hold sway in Washington have readjusted their radars and lowered their ambitions. It has been speculated that after all that has happened in Iraq, they couldn't possibly still have Syria and Iran in their sights.
But it's unlikely that they have abandoned hope of establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. After all, the Iraq venture was viewed as an investment in both economic and political terms.
By that logic, what guarantee can there be that it will pay dividends in the absence of a coercive option? For example, an Iraqi government that takes the notion of sovereignty too seriously may deem it prudent to cancel the lucrative oil industry reconstruction contract that has been awarded by the Bremer administration to Dick Cheney's former employers, Halliburton.
The problem, of course, is that as long as US troops remain in Iraq, the resistance will retain its raison d'etre. This is not to suggest that an immediate American pullout would inexorably lead to peace and stability. The US has, with little provocation, stirred the pot, and the Iraqis are now compelled to live (and die) with the consequences.
There can be little question, however, that a convincing end to the occupation would hasten a resolution. It may be bloody, but would it be any worse than the status quo? One crucial ally that early on lost all faith in America's ability to mould a new Iraq was Israel - which knows a thing or two about sustaining an occupation.
According to a comprehensive report by the well-connected and usually reliable Seymour Hersh in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker, towards the end of last year the Israeli government decided it could no longer trust the US to safeguard Israel's strategic interests, so it put into effect Plan B, which involved "establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan".
"Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan," says Hersh, citing US and Israeli intelligence sources, "providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria."
An Israeli presence can only exacerbate the region's volatility, and the collaboration could cost Kurds dearly in terms of the sympathy they aspire to by virtue of being denied a nation-state.
And Israeli influence may well account for the recent increase in suggestions from American sources that a trifurcation of Iraq may be the best solution - an idea that reportedly has the blessing of leading neocon and warmonger Paul Wolfowitz.
In the run-up to D-Day, meanwhile, Iraqis were lumbered with a bonafide CIA-approved terrorist as their head of government. In the early 1990s, Ayad Allawi was responsible for organizing car bombs and the like in Iraq on behalf of the CIA. Before that, the neurologist was a Baathist who aided Saddam in his ascent to power, and may have helped to track down renegade Baathists in Europe.
It is not clear how and why he fell out with Saddam, but by the 1990s he was head of the Iraqi National Accord - and a prized CIA asset by virtue of having contacts inside Iraq, unlike Ahmad Chalabi.
Hersh quotes a former CIA case officer as saying of Allawi: "His strongest virtue is that he's a thug." That's a remarkably Saddam-like trait - which is probably no coincidence.
What may, on the other hand, be a coincidence is the fact that Ghazi Yawer, who has been named to the largely ceremonial post of president, is a dead ringer for his incarcerated predecessor.
Since being named to the post of prime minister, Allawi has lost little time in living up to his reputation. Emergency rule and martial law have been aired as options to cope with the continuing unrest, which took a sharp turn for the worse last Thursday - as if such measures would prove any more effective than full-fledged military occupation.
He has threatened the insurgents with dire consequences. And there has already been talk of postponing the elections scheduled for next January. Allawi needn't worry too much about how to handle his responsibilities.
There will be plenty of advice available from his sponsors. The Coalition Provisional Authority hasn't really disappeared: it is only being morphed into the world's largest US embassy - a mission whose role certainly won't be limited to maintaining diplomatic relations.
US officials occasionally cite Afghanistan as a role model for the transition from occupation to sovereignty. That's less than gratifying for a variety of reasons - not least the US ambassador's grip over the supposedly independent administration of Hamid Karzai.
As The Washington Post reported a couple of months ago, "The genial Mr Karzai may be Afghanistan's president, but the affable, ambitious [Zalmay] Khalilzad often seems more like its chief executive... As he shuttles between the American Embassy and the presidential palace, where Americans guard Mr Karzai, one place seems an extension of the other."
Negroponte and Allawi may not be quite as chummy as Khalilzad and Karzai, but there can be little doubt about which of them will be running the show.
E-mail: mahirali2@netscape.net.