| 03 August 2004 | Tuesday | 16 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425 |
Intervening for oil or genocide?
For whom the bell tolls
Police enjoy new-found popularity
To read what America is reading today is to get very confused about a confusing situation. As the Americans get engaged in a high-decibel debate about their role in the world in anticipation of the presidential election in November, they have begun to explore more deeply a number of issues.
These include terrorism, jihadism, nation-building, and the role of empires in shaping the world. Some of these topic were discussed by the various speakers who addressed the Democratic Party's convention in Boston in late July.
Former President Jimmy Carter, for instance, lamented the fact that Washington's stance on some of these issues had created enormous resentment against America in most Muslim countries.
"Even in Indonesia, which has made an impressive transition to a democratic system from autocratic rule, there is no fondness for the United States," he told some news analysts after delivering his convention address. In other words, the argument that the advent of democracy in Muslim countries will produce goodwill for America was misplaced.
In view of reactions such as these, there has been a subtle shift in the thinking of most people in the United States on all these issues. There is no longer a ready acceptance of President George W. Bush's declaratory statements about good and evil, friend and foe, either you are with us or against us. Instead, there is much greater willingness now to accept more nuanced view of the world and America's own role in it.
This debate will go on with great intensity until the Americans go to the polls on November 2 to elect their next president. It would matter a great deal to the Islamic world in general, and Pakistan in particular, as to who the Americans send to the White House.
Another Republican triumph may not mean the continuation of all the policies adopted by Washington over the last four years. Even neo-conservatives, no matter how confident they are about the righteousness of their cause, can learn from experience. And there has been a lot of experience to learn from since September 11, 2001. Why was America attacked three years ago?
This question has been asked repeatedly since that fateful event and was re-examined by the "9/11 Commission." One important message in its recently issued report is to recognize that the source of terrorism originating with proponents of jihad is not dislike of America because of its values but because of its policies.
The same conclusion was reached by a veteran employee of the CIA who wrote a book titled "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror." The author was identified only as Anonymous but the CIA permitted him not only to publish the book but to identify himself as an analyst who has worked for the last seventeen years focusing exclusively on terrorism, Islamic insurgencies, militant Islam and the affairs of South Asia.
He knows Pakistan well and fully understands the circumstances that led to Islamabad's involvement in Afghanistan and Kashmir. As such, his book should be of considerable interest for Pakistan's policymakers.
The war President Bush launched on militant Islam, writes Anonymous, was "not to defend freedom and what is good and just in the world," as the president proclaimed. It was to protect America's strategic interests that were under attack by the Al Qaeda and other Islamic groups. Why were these groups at war with America? Essentially because of the six policies Washington has pursued in recent years.
The author identified these as the US support for Israel; the presence of US and other western troops on the Arabian peninsula and, therefore, in close proximity to Islam's holiest sites; occupation by the US of Afghanistan and Iraq; Washington's support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants; the US pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low; and Washington's support for apostate, corrupt and tyrannical Muslim governments.
What should America do in light of the growing distaste for its policies in many parts of the Muslim world? Anonymous offers two solutions. On the one extreme is an all-out war against Islamic militants wherever they are even if it means occupying a number of Muslim countries.
The other is to change America's position with respect to the policies that have caused so much aggravation in the world of Islam. "Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come Sherman-like razing of infrastructure.
Such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies towards the Muslim word," writes Anonymous.
Some believe there is a third way. If an all out war won't deliver victory and if it is not feasible for America to change its long-enduring policies in the Middle East, what other options are available? There is, of course, the hope that democracy and nation-building in what President George W. Bush has labelled the "Greater Middle East" - the stretch of land between Morocco in the West and Pakistan in the East - would pacify the Muslim world.
It is this belief that led the neo-conservatives to sponsor the attack on Iraq in the first place. It is the same belief that transformed the present American president from a person who had total contempt for nation-building at the time of his campaign for the US presidency to one whose only hope now is that such efforts will succeed and bring his troops back home.
However, the West's record in nation-building experiments one distance removed is not exhilarating. This record was examined recently by a foreign policy analyst who once held senior positions in the US government.
According to Morton Abramowitz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, "no fewer than nine times over the past decade, western powers have deployed noble rhetoric, soldiers and tax payers dollars in the service of nation building. And no fewer than nine times, they have, to one degree or another, failed to build stable, self-sustaining nations. The litany consists of Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Liberia, Afghanistan and Iraq," listed in the order in which western interventions occurred.
"The best one can say is that they were work in progress. The worst: too many of them still can't function on their own and continue to pose threats to their own citizens as well as US national interests."
There were many reasons for these failures. As Anonymous pointed out in his book, the West intervened to limit its own casualties, and therefore, to undertake only limited wars.
According to Abramowitz, "in Afghanistan, we opted to leave the warlords in charge of their fiefdoms, and in both Iraq and Afghanistan we left hostile elements on the field with access to arms - a factor that may yet erase our gains in both places."
But there were also other problems. Western nation-builders couldn't agree on how that task should be done. The lack of consensus produced half-hearted responses to difficult situations that were often not fully anticipated.
This was the case in both Afghanistan and Iraq. While the United States is not alone in Afghanistan, it has not been able to decide how active a role it and its Nato partners should play in restoring the authority of Kabul over all parts of the country.
The temptation to let individual warlords bring peace to the areas they control may minimize casualties of foreign troops but it would not bring about nation building in Afghanistan.
The challenges faced in Iraq are even more forbidding since the US went into the country without the support of the major powers who could have supported Washington with their troops as they did in 1991 for the first Gulf War.
Even after changing its stance and persuading the United Nations to get involved has not helped much. This is for the reason that the insurgents have managed to gain traction for themselves in the Iraqi society and the resultant precarious security situation is unlikely to bring in a large number of non-US troops into the country. Although the recent Security Council resolution bestowed legitimacy on the interim government in Iraq, it has not brought international cooperation.
If nation building has not worked one distance removed, if an all out war against Islamic extremism is not possible, and if the policies that irk a large number of Muslims cannot be changed, what other options are available? Is a fourth way possible? A small but fairly influential community of scholars has begun to argue that the world may have reached the point at which another imperial power was needed. The United States is the only country in the world that could seriously contemplate creating an empire for itself.
The most articulate exponent of this point of view is Niall Ferguson, the British historian now teaching in America. A couple of years ago he published a book titled simply Empire in which he extolled the virtues of the British rule of much of what is today's developing world.
He believes that Britain did more good than harm by bringing millions of people under its rule. The same can now be done by the United States. In the book titled Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, Ferguson argues that empires are a time-tested method for imposing order, securing justice, promoting development and alleviating poverty. "What is required is an agency capable of intervening... to contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations."
The US has already reached the point at which it is widely viewed as an imperial power; it is looked upon by most of the world with a combination of awe, admiration, envy and now by some with hatred.
It should now act out the role, though not necessarily by occupying much of the world as the British and other European colonial powers did in the 19th century. It should simply lay the rules by which the rest of the world would be governed and by the promise that any deviation from them would be punished and may also result in long-term occupation.
Ferguson calls such a way of governing the creation of a liberal empire. His views are, therefore, close to those held by the neo-conservatives who persuaded President George W. Bush to invade Iraq by launching a "war of pre-emption."
How will this debate be settled? Much will depend not only on who enters the Oval Office in January 2005. It will also depend on what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the border areas of Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
Intervening for oil or genocide?
If proof were needed that Tony Blair is off the hook over Iraq, it came not during the Commons debate on the Butler report on July 21, but rather at his monthly press conference the following morning.
Asked about the crisis in Sudan, Mr Blair replied: "I believe we have a moral responsibility to deal with this and to deal with it by any means that we can." This last phrase means that troops might be sent - as General Sir Mike Jackson, the chief of the general staff, immediately confirmed - and yet the reaction from the usual anti-war campaigners was silence.
Mr Blair has invoked moral necessity for every one of the five wars he has fought in this, surely one of the most bellicose premierships in history. The bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, the 74-day bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, the intervention in Sierra Leone in the spring of 2000, the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, and the Iraq war last March were all justified with the bright certainties which shone from the prime minister's eyes.
Blair even defended Bill Clinton's attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan in August 1998, on the entirely bogus grounds that it was really manufacturing anthrax instead of aspirin.
Although in each case the pretext for war has been proved false or the war aims have been unfulfilled, a stubborn belief persists in the morality and the effectiveness of attacking other countries.
The Milosevic trial has shown that genocide never occurred in Kosovo - although Blair told us that the events there were worse than anything that had happened since the second world war, even the political activists who staff the prosecutor's office at the international criminal tribunal in The Hague never included genocide in their Kosovo indictment.
And two years of prosecution have failed to produce one single witness to testify that the former Yugoslav president ordered any attacks on Albanian civilians in the province. Indeed, army documents produced from Belgrade show the contrary.
Like the Kosovo genocide, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as we now know, existed only in the fevered imaginings of spooks and politicians in London and Washington. But Downing Street was also recently forced to admit that even Blair's claims about mass graves in Iraq were false.
The prime minister has repeatedly said that 300,000 or 400,000 bodies have been found there, but the truth is that almost no bodies have been exhumed in Iraq, and consequently the total number of such bodies, still less the cause of their deaths, is simply unknown.
In 2001, we attacked Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and to prevent the Taliban from allegedly flooding the world with heroin. Yet Bin Laden remains free, while the heroin ban imposed by the Taliban has been replaced by its very opposite, a surge in opium production, fostered by the warlords who rule the country.
As for Sierra Leone, the United Nations human development report for 2004, published on July 15, which measures overall living standards around the world, puts that beneficiary of western intervention in 177th place out of 177, an august position it has continued to occupy ever since our boys went in: Sierra Leone is literally the most miserable place on earth. So much for Blair's promise of a "new era for Africa".
The absence of anti-war scepticism about the prospect of sending troops into Sudan is especially odd in view of the fact that Darfur has oil. For two years, campaigners have chanted that there should be "no blood for oil" in Iraq, yet they seem not to have noticed that there are huge untapped reserves in both southern Sudan and southern Darfur.
As oil pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq, the West not only has a clear motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely this. Oddly enough, the oil concession in southern Darfur is currently in the hands of the China National Petroleum Company. China is Sudan's biggest foreign investor.
We ought, therefore, to treat with scepticism the US Congress declaration of genocide in the region. No one, not even the government of Sudan, questions that there is a civil war in Darfur, or that it has caused an immense number of refugees.
Even the government admits that nearly a million people have left for camps outside Darfur's main towns to escape marauding paramilitary groups. The country is awash with guns, thanks to the various wars going on in Sudan's neighbouring countries.
Tensions have risen between nomads and herders, as the former are forced south in search of new pastures by the expansion of the Sahara desert. Paramilitary groups have practised widespread highway robbery, and each tribe has its own private army. That is why the government of Sudan imposed a state of emergency in 1999.
But our media have taken this complex picture and projected on to it a simple morality tale of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They gloss over the fact that the Janjaweed militia come from the same ethnic group and religion as the people they are allegedly persecuting - everyone in Darfur is black, African, Arabic-speaking and Muslim.
Campaigners for intervention have accused the Sudanese government of supporting this group, without mentioning that the Sudanese defence minister condemned the Janjaweed as "bandits" in a speech to the country's parliament in March.
On July 19, moreover, a court in Khartoum sentenced six Janjaweed soldiers to horrible punishments, including the amputation of their hands and legs. And why do we never hear about the rebel groups which the Janjaweed are fighting, or about any atrocities that they may have committed?
It is far from clear that the sudden media attention devoted to Sudan has been provoked by any real escalation of the crisis - a peace agreement was signed with the rebels in April, and it is holding. The pictures on our TV screens could have been shown last year. And we should treat with scepticism the claims made for the numbers of deaths - 30,000 or 50,000 are the figures being bandied about - when we know that similar statistics proved very wrong in Kosovo and Iraq.
The Sudanese government says that the death toll in Darfur, since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, is not greater than 1,200 on all sides. And why is such attention devoted to Sudan when, in neighbouring Congo, the death rate from the war there is estimated to be some 2 or 3 million, a tragedy equalled only by the silence with which it is treated in our media?
We are shown starving babies now, but no TV station will show the limbless or the dead that we cause if we attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be what the Red Cross always said it must be - politically neutral.
Anything else is just an old-fashioned colonial war - the reality of killing, and the escalation of violence, disguised with the hypocritical mask of altruism. If Iraq has not taught us that, then we are incapable of ever learning anything. -Dawn/Guardian Service
The writer is an associate of Sanders Research Associates.
For whom the bell tolls
Tony Blair says that Iraq is a safe country. It is for him and his wife and his children. It was not so safe for Raja Azad Khan and Sajjad Naeem. They were executed by Iraqi militants, call it an act of mindless savagery but their only purpose to be in Iraq was to earn their livelihood.
They were no different from hundreds of thousands of Pakistani workers who went out in search of greener pastures and are scattered all over the globe. But Iraq is a war-zone and no matter what kind of spin we may want to put on it, there is a no-holds-barred insurgency going on and the only rules are that there are no rules.
One cannot even say that Raja Azad Khan and Sajjad Naeem happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There seems little doubt that the group that calls itself the "Islamic Army of Iraq" knew that the two were Pakistanis and in executing them were sending us a blood-stained message.
But it was the wrong message for I have yet to meet a Pakistani who has not been sickened by these murders. We need to know more about this group for with friends like the "Islamic Army of Iraq" the Iraqis need no enemies.
There has been and still is great support for the Iraqi people. The people of Pakistan, like most of the world opposed the war in Iraq, saw the reasons for waging it as a tissue of lies and as an integral part of a neo-conservative agenda to re-align the balance of power in the Middle East. There never was a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussain.
But was the "Islamic Army of Iraq" sending a two in one message? Raja Azad Khan and Sajjad Naeem were working for the Kuwaiti branch of the Saudi group Al Tamimi. The Al Tamimi group does work in Iraq for the US firm Kellogg, Brown and Root, a contractor to the US military.
If I am not mistaken, Kellogg, Brown and Root is either a subsidiary of Halliburton or has strong links to it. In this context, Halliburton sounds like such a far away place but plays a central role in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11. It has been given the lion's share in the contracts for re-building Iraq.
When the Korean war had ground to a stalemate and only the tumult and shouting remained, Eisenhower who was then the President of the USA and had been the supreme commander of the allied forces, had advised that the US should never get involved in a land war in Asia and for good measure added that Asians should fight Asians.
Of course, he did not heed his own advice. He was the first to send military advisers to Vietnam and this was the beginning of the US involvement in a war that lasted many years, from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon and claimed millions of lives including a percentage of the US armed forces, 58, 000 which was much less than the three million Vietnamese dead.
I recall this to give some historical context to efforts now being made to address the security situation in Iraq. The bottom-line is that while sovereignty is formally transferred to Iraq there are still some 140, 000 combat troops belonging to the coalition but now re-named multinational forces.
In his press conference in Baghdad, Colin Powell said about this multinational force that it was a "guest" of the Iraqi government. Did he mean that if the Iraqi government asked it to leave, it would do so? At the same time, about the worsening security situation in Iraq, it is now being said that Iraqis are killing Iraqis.
There is also some serious kite-flying about sending troops from Muslim countries to assist the Iraqi government in peace-keeping operations. Is it being assumed that troops from Muslim countries would be more acceptable? The murder of the two Pakistanis would seem to suggest that religion is not a factor in the thinking of the insurgents. The perception remains that Iraq is still occupied.
But if Muslim troops are to be sent to Iraq to restore law and order, there should be an insistence that this would be as a part of an overall Middle East plan and the Israelis must stop their military operations against the Palestinians and sit on a negotiations table and hammer out a settlement that fully respects the legal, political and human rights of the Palestinian people.
Israel must be brought to heel and the blank cheque that was issued to it after 9/11 should be cancelled. There has to be some substantive role that the Muslim countries must play beyond issuing statements.
Much has been made of the murder of the two Pakistanis and it has been called un-Islamic. That it certainly is but so too is the countless lives that have been lost in the bomb blasts in Pakistan many of which have been sectarian in nature. And what are we to say about this latest outrage, the assassination attempt on Shaukat Aziz? A senseless, mindless act of some twisted mind? Or some sinister conspiracy to destabilise Pakistan?
Shaukat Aziz is a personal friend, a very decent and gifted person and the only thing fanatical about him is his love of cricket. That he should have been the target of an assassination attempt shows how dangerous the country has become.
And John Donne's words come to mind in a haunting way: "Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
And since this is August and Independence Day is only a few days away let me ask the question that I raised in an article I have written for a leading English-language magazine: "Did Pakistan turn out the way that the Quaid-i-Azam would have wanted? Each one of us needs to answer the question for him or herself." This August 14 we need to be more introspective.
Police enjoy new-found popularity
Their Kalashnikov automatic rifles regularly jam after firing two bullets, their flak jackets don't protect them, their promised Pounds Sterling 45 pay increase never arrived, their boss wants to take away the air-conditioners in their vehicles and the hospitals can't cope with their wounded.
Apart from that, the men of the new Iraqi police mobile patrols in Baghdad - the front line victims of the Iraq war - are fighting fit. More than that. They've found that protecting people - rather than oppressing them as they did under Saddam - makes them genuinely popular.
Sergeants Mahmoud and Mohamed and Constable Nahed drive their Land Cruiser, police number 365, through the streets of Baghdad with something approaching bravado. "The people like us now," Sergeant Mohamed says.
"They want our patrols and we want to help them and we are ready for the looters and the troublemakers." 'Erhabi' is the word he uses for troublemakers - it's the nearest Arabic equivalent to 'terrorists' - and he will not use the word 'resistance'. "These people want anarchy here so that the old Baathists can come back and take over again."
All three men were cops under Saddam - as were most of the 310 officers at the Al-Risafah police station on Palestine Street - and if they complain about the failure to honour a promise to raise their pay, their monthly salary of pounds 250 is a lot better than their pounds 14-a-month under the previous regime.
But weaving through the traffic past Mustansariya University, you can see that their lives could be improved; indeed, that their lives would be more easily saved.
Mohamed hands me his Kalashnikov ammunition clip. "We get into battles and after two rounds the gun jams and what are we supposed to do?" he asks. "We have flak jackets that are past their expiry date.
We've fired at them and the bullets go right through. We want to help people. We are ready to be martyrs. But surely the authorities can do better than this." As we travel through one of the worst districts for looting and kidnapping in the Iraqi capital, their all-police radio suddenly dies. Their only contact with headquarters now is the walkie-talkie on the dashboard.
Within an hour, we have to start scrounging for petrol. At the police fuel dump, there is a two-hour wait for gas. So they pay from their own pockets to re-fuel their patrol car at a commercial petrol station.
Only when another police vehicle comes alongside do they hear that they are needed on the other side of the motorway. "A red car covered in blood, parked half way across a road - you better get there," the sergeant in the other vehicle shouts. The Kalashnikovs bounce on the floor of our Land Cruiser as we mount the central median, career towards the oncoming traffic and race across an intersection at red.
Baquba, I keep saying to them. Baquba. Almost a hundred died outside the police station there on Wednesday. Doesn't it frighten them? "We feel very sorry for those martyrs," Mahmoud says. "Most of them were civilians who only wanted to earn a living and join the police.
But we are not afraid. We like our job. We are protecting people." Until now, Mohamed and Mahmoud have been joking and telling stories but now Mahmoud is fighting the steering column, driving across the top of a hot, foetid rubbish dump, its garbage collectors sweating in the muck. Round the corner of a tree-lined middle class street is the car.
It's a red Toyota, battered, the windows open, half blocking the empty road. We climb out of the Land Cruiser into the oven of midday. Mohamed approaches the car with his arms held out behind him to keep us at a distance, like an elderly man about to dive into a swimming pool.
We walk around the car and then we peer through the open windows. There is no blood but there is a key in the ignition. And we all start whispering the word 'infijah' - booby-trap.
Then from the corner of the street comes an old man in a stained grey gown and a white head cloth and a little beard who starts to apologise. "I broke down - it's my car and I went to try to find a mechanic."
Cigarettes appear in policemen's hands, sweat drips from their chins. Thirty-six hours earlier, on the Risafah bridge a few hundred metres away, one of Mohamed's colleagues was hit by a roadside bomb.
"He had bad burns on his stomach and I took him to the nearest hospital and they said it was too full of wounded; they told me to take him to the Yarmouk hospital.
But when I got there, they said they were full too, that they had patients in all their beds. What are we to do when the authorities won't look after their own policemen?"
Mahmoud believes the Americans really did invade Iraq to bring democracy. "I cannot believe that I can speak freely to you now," he says. "We were always forbidden to talk to other Arabs or to foreigners and we could be easily arrested by Saddam's 'mukhabarat' (intelligence) men."
Mohamed knows all about it. Although he was a policeman, he was repeatedly questioned by Saddam's goons after a cousin deserted the army during the Iran-Iraq war. "They shot him 24 hours after they caught him and informed the family one day later. He had four children."
All three cops are from Sadr City - which means they are Shia Muslims although we do not discuss their religion and their patrols search for thieves and gunmen in Sunni as well as Shia areas of Baghdad.
"The Americans coordinated very well with us in the Haifa Street shooting last month," Mohamed says. "They brought in helicopters and tanks when we confronted the 'erhab' people and we went out in front and fought the gunmen and we felt strong."
Mahmoud hands me a torn piece of cardboard, given him by a female US soldier once based at his police station. "Dear Mahoud," it says. "Thank you for being kind to us while we have been here.
We really appreciate it. This a great station to be at. Spc (Specialist) Fletcher." Mohamed asks for a translation. "The Americans are very serious when they are working," he adds. "But they are very pleasant off duty."
We pass American patrols on the bridges over the Tigris. Neither the soldiers nor the Iraqi cops acknowledge each other. Other cops say they suspect the Americans don't all trust them - which is not surprising after the police force of at least one southern city went off to join the Shiite insurgency last April - but it's the chief of police, Abdul Razak, who seems to earn fewest brownie points.
"This man was a big intelligence head under Saddam," another policeman - not the men of Land Cruiser 365 - says. "Now he's our big boss and he tells the police to take the air conditioners out of their vehicles because he doesn't want them to stay in their cars.
We can do without air conditioners but it was wrong to try and impose this on us. So in one part of Baghdad, the police threatened to strike. In the old regime, we had to work for bosses. Abdul-Razak wants the same. But I don't work for him now. I work for my country and for the people."
We stop in front of a revolutionary mural in the centre of Baghdad, next to the homes of a thousand looters off Saadoun Street. Mohamed and Mahmoud and Nehad ask a street photographer to take their picture with the foreign journalist.
So we stand in the baking white light and grin at the old man with his ancient camera. "I will tell you how we feel," Mohamed says afterwards. "We are like 'fedayeen' and we policemen are sacrificing our lives for the people. And while this is happening, the commissioner of police is sleeping in his house." - (c) The Independent