| 26 September 2004 | Sunday | 10 Shaban 1425 |
Keeping balance of power
Global warming
A second Iraq war
Freeing Hamdi
That Mr Shaukat Aziz has been a stranger to Pakistani politics has been regarded by some observers as a blessing. They urge him to retain his innocence and leave any politicking that must be done to General Pervez Musharraf and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. Others believe that a politician Mr Aziz will have to be, and the real question therefore is: what kind of a politician will he be? (editorial in Dawn, August 28).
Members of PML (Q) and others in the ruling coalition voted for Mr Aziz, presumably, because Chaudhury Shujaat Hussain told them that that was what General Musharraf wanted. They have nothing to gain by defying the general and upsetting the apple cart. No inviting alternative beckons them.
Mr Aziz's supporters in the National Assembly will want favours (jobs, licences, loans, plots, intercession with police and other officials). If they are told that he will only do that which is right and honourable, and that they cannot, therefore, have the "goodies" they want, they may soon conclude that they have no use for such a prime minister. They may begin asking General Musharraf to find them another prime minister, one who is sensitive to the "realities" of politics in Pakistan.
The general will not have the time or the inclination to insulate Mr Aziz from the politicians' pressures. He will have to find his own ways of resisting them. One of these ways may be that if the pressures become unacceptable, he stands ready to quit instead of bending to them.
His readiness to quit may usher in an admirable change in our political culture. His ability to withstand pressure should not be underestimated. He can let the general and his government's current supporters know that he too has terms that must be met if he is to serve. Being independently wealthy, he does not need the pay and perquisites the job carries . He is not a professional politician, and rising to the prime minister's office has not been a driving ambition in his case. He will rise in public esteem all around if he is seen as one who values personal integrity and probity more than the job.
General Musharraf's choice of Shaukat Aziz as our prime minister remains an enigma. There is the belief in certain quarters that with him in that office, Islamabad's credibility in American official circles, investment houses, and international lending institutions will increase. That may be true. But why did we want greater receptivity in Washington? Can it be that General Musharraf and his associates are about to do something dramatic for which an enhanced level of American (and international) understanding and indulgence will be needed? (Not some kind of a coup, we hope.)
If persons other than Mr Aziz are to have the principal role in settling the sizzling political issues (such as provincial autonomy, devolution, water distribution, development strategies, disaffection in Balochistan, terrorism, sectarian violence, and peace with India, among others), the office of the prime minister as envisaged by the "powers that be" is not good enough for Mr Shaukat Aziz. Yet, ironically enough, he will have to take some of the blame, possibly all of it, if these horrendous problems, which are none of his making, are not resolved satisfactorily, and fairly soon.
Regardless of his own preferences in the matter, Mr Aziz will have to function as a politician in addition to his role as an economic manager. Politicians in the country, especially those in the opposition, and spokesmen of foreign governments will want to deal with him, not with Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. Five PPP "patriots" went to see him on August 29 to discuss their group's representation in the cabinet; they did not go to Chaudhry Sahib. The Pir Sahib of Pagara (who recently met Mr Aziz) has been saying for weeks that his PML (F) will have no truck with PML (Q) if Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain remains its head. As Mr Aziz settles down to the routines of his job, he will inevitably become involved in national politics and that of his own party.
Even if he is allowed a major role in resolving the aforementioned issues and problems, there isn't a whole lot that he, or any prime minister, can accomplish quickly. We will have to live with fundamentalism, extremism, sectarian and ethnic divisions, and the violence they generate, for quite some time before they can be subdued. These states of mind did not arise in a day, and they will not go away in a day.
It may be possible to stop these tendencies, and the devastation they cause, from growing deadlier, if the government's own secret agencies can be persuaded not only to support its plans of combating them, but also to give up their former practice of pitting groups of Pakistanis against one another for short-term, and essentially misconceived, reasons of expediency. The mission, and modus operandi, of these agencies are directed more by our military establishment than by the prime minister. Mr Aziz can counsel them, but it remains to be seen if they will listen to him.
Nor can Mr Aziz do very much to reverse the rising tide of crime and bring security of life and possessions to his fellow citizens. The same goes for the currently widespread bureaucratic corruption. He may, however, be able to apply a corrective to political corruption to some degree. We may assume that he will not take what does not rightfully belong to him, and that he may even be sparing in taking that which is lawfully his (perquisites, etc.). His example of self-denial may work to restrain the propensity to self-indulgence on the part of his 50 or so ministers.
If I may be allowed a brief digression, I should like to say a quick word about these ministers. It is known that many of them are superfluous, but apparently he has had to take them to ensure secure support for his government. So, we are stuck with a ridiculously large number of ministers. This grotesqueness can be mitigated to an extent by making a distinction between Mr Shaukat Aziz's "cabinet" and his "ministry." The cabinet (the body that is collectively responsible for the government's performance) should consist of no more than a dozen or so members, who head the key departments. They, with the prime minister at their head, should act as the chief decision-making organ in the government.
Other ministers, ministers of state, and advisors should not be entitled to attend cabinet meetings except when one or more of them are specifically invited because some item of business in their charge is to be discussed on that particular day. It should be easy to see that there is no reason for the minister for religious affairs, or the one for special education, to be present at a meeting that has been called mainly to discuss, let us say, a proposed trade agreement with Brazil.
Returning to the matter of corruption, Mr Shaukat Aziz should do all he can to discontinue the pernicious custom of giving away state-owned land (especially "plots" in urban centres), free or at throw-away prices, to politicians, civil servants, and judges. The generals may not accept this innovation in their own domain, but he will probably have greater leeway in this regard in the civilian sector.
The access of both ministers and higher civil servants to a variety of perquisites (official cars for private use, furniture and furnishings in official residences, foreign travel, entertainment allowances, domestic servants) should be rationalized according to the criterion of need in the public interest. The custom of providing "discretionary funds" to the president, ministers, and higher civil servants (except "secret agents") should be curtailed as much as possible, if not abolished altogether.
By way of discouraging ostentatious consumption, the prime minister should routinely decline invitations to dinners and receptions except those sponsored by the government itself for reasons of state, and the ones coming from his close relatives and personal friends. By way of discouraging hypocrisy, he should decline all invitations to speak at meetings of groups with whose field of special interest or competence he has no personal affiliation.I should now like to mention a problem whose amelioration may well be within Mr Shaukat Aziz's reach. We all know of the under development of our political institutions. The foremost of these is the National Assembly. It does not function as it should because ordinarily neither the government nor the opposition leaders take its work seriously. But I have seen it work as a mature and competent body on days when the prime minister happened to be present on the floor.
On those rare occasions when the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, for instance, came to the National Assembly, the house was full, members were alert, speeches were well considered and relevant, and interpolations were astute. I have seen something of the same order when Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was present to participate in the debate.
Mr Shaukat Aziz will contribute to the National Assembly's viability and vigour immensely, and thus render a great service to his country, if he makes it his business to be present on the floor each day that it is in session. He should be present to answer questions, speak, and intercede when his colleagues are in trouble with the opposition. He should bear it in mind that in a parliamentary system it is the prime minister's duty to be present in the house. If he goes there, his ministers, party members, and the opposition leaders will do the same. If his participation in the proceedings is competent, the standard of performance all around will rise, and we will have a parliament that deserves to be supreme in our system of governance.
The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA.
E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net
Keeping balance of power
Pakistan's present constitutional structure is neither federal nor unitary. Likewise, its form of government is neither presidential nor parliamentary. It is a hybrid which President Musharraf insists would prevent recurring military coups. To his opponents, it tends to undermine the supremacy of the parliament as well as the autonomy of the provinces.
Leaving aside the president's expectations and the opposition's apprehensions, there is no doubt that the power the president has acquired to dissolve the parliament without the advice of the prime minister and, further, the constitutional protection he has provided to the district governments, have indeed made the whole system more unitary and presidential in character rather than federal and parliamentary.
Under the current domestic and world circumstances, the president is performing more functions and exercising greater influence than envisaged in the Constitution, even after the enactment of the 17th amendment. When the war on terror ends and the president ceases to head the army, the balance of power will still weigh heavily in his favour and against the prime minister. And the district government scheme will continue to make the centre more powerful at the cost of the provinces though it was not so intended by the 17th amendment.
Under the Constitution the president is elected by the National Assembly, the Senate and the provincial assemblies - all meeting together. That position remains unchanged. The president has no other representative credentials while the members electing him are elected by the people from all parts of the country. It would be facetious for a president to dismiss the very parliament which had installed him in that office. It goes against common sense and rule of nature.
Imagine Chaudhary Fazl Elahi dismissing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto or Rafiq Tarar dismissing Nawaz Sharif. Farooq Leghari - though he himself was elected to parliament, had been a minister, and thus felt more confident - had to pay a heavy political price for dismissing Benazir Bhutto. Shorn of his army rank and the importance that it has brought to him in the present international crisis, Pervez Musharraf, or his successors, would have no better claim or right to dissolve an elected house and dismiss its leader, i.e. the prime minister, than Fazal Elahi or Tarar had. Both were conscious of the fact that they had none.
The checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in an individual, or in an institution, would be worth their while only if the parliament and the prime minister were able to act against the president as he can against them. The present arrangement is absurd in that while a nominated president can dismiss an elected prime minister exercising his personal judgement, the prime minister is required to muster a two-thirds majority of the National Assembly, Senate and provincial assemblies put together to remove the president, and that too only in the case of physical or mental incapacity or for violating the Constitution or gross misconduct. The inequality of power is made obvious by the fact that while presidents have dismissed quite a few prime ministers, no president has ever been impeached or removed in this country.
The president could have the moral authority or legal power to dissolve the parliament only if he too were to be directly elected by the people. Checks and balances on an equal footing, perhaps, would be desirable in our kind of conditions because some prime ministers in the past, lacking calibre but brimming with ambition, became, or tried to become, authoritarian - indeed the "commander of the faithful" acting beyond the frontiers of the Constitution and the country.
The referendum and the vote of the parliament from which Musharraf draws his presidential authority are both disputed. He should seek a direct mandate from the people in a countrywide constituency. That would also vindicate, or disprove, his claim that a vast majority of the people want him to continue as president and retain the army command too. An elected president working in conjunction with an elected parliament may be able to avert military coups, a nominated National Security Council would not.
Direct presidential elections in Indonesia - a Muslim country more populous and sprawling than Pakistan with an equally turbulent and autocratic past - should serve as an inspiring example for Musharraf. There, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of a charismatic leader, was pitched in a free and peaceful countrywide election against a retired army general of fair reputation named Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The general won though Megawati was in power.
With General Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, Shahbaz Sharif and some others taking part, elections would be an exciting prospect, especially if our laid-back election commission were to ensure it was also free and peaceful. Like Indonesia, the second round of election could be between the two top runners in the first round. The emerging winner then may legitimately share executive authority with the prime minister and also dissolve the parliament or face impeachment for misconduct if he acts in bad faith.
To create a balance of power between the centre and the provinces, the first necessary and legal step would be to return the control of the district governments to the provinces. If the system of local councils, that the centre through its National Reconstruction Bureau has uniformly foisted on all the provinces, proves its worth it would last. In any case with a five-year presidential term assured, General Musharraf's interest in the nazims and councils should wane. If it doesn't, he could still enforce his plans through the provincial legislatures and governments.
The direct election of governors and senators as a means to assert provincial rights and get a larger say in national affairs has been suggested before and merits repetition. Similarly, the near-total financial dependence of the provinces on the centre must be brought to an end by giving them a bigger share in the income from their natural resources like water, oil and gas and by assigning more taxes to them. The sales tax which world-wide is a provincial or local tax should be an obvious candidate for transfer from the federal to the provincial list.
In reviewing the balance of power in its totality, it has to be borne in mind that discontent and destitution in the provinces carry a greater potential threat to the integrity of the federation than military coups or arbitrary dismissals do to the stability of the government.
Global warming
An International group of scientists studying global warming predicted in 2001 a sharp increase in melting of glaciers and polar ice, heat waves and related deaths, severe storms and flooding, and drought and wildfires, as well as substantially altered patterns of species migration.
Three years later, it can be reported all of that and more has happened - with stunning and record speed. The latest fearful evidence storming in from the Gulf of Mexico goes by the name of Ivan, the fourth major hurricane of a season that usually doesn't produce so many and still has 2 1/2 months to go.
Japan has been hit this year by seven typhoons, the most since record-keeping began in 1951, and the worst floods in decades have killed more than 400 people in China. In Europe, 19,000 people succumbed last year to a heat wave that was one of the deadliest of the decade.
This is only the beginning, experts agree. Even those who contend climate change is a natural cyclical phenomenon expect the cycle to last decades or more. But conceding Mother Nature's contribution to these extreme weather events makes it all the more important for humans to take whatever steps they can to minimize the damage.
"It is a huge issue, and time is running out," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday in trying to goad his Group of Eight peers, including President Bush, into getting serious about reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that appear to be accelerating global warming by trapping heat from the sun.
Blair has also set his sights on China and India, the two giant nations whose rapidly expanding economies could easily wreak havoc on the global environment over the next few decades. But China and India can't be expected to impose the emission controls and other steps required to curb greenhouse gases unless the United States leads the way.
Sens. John McCain and Joseph I. Lieberman, leading champions of capping emissions on utilities and other industrial sources, are scheduled to resume their crusade today at a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change.
All those in Ivan's path will be able to answer the question firsthand - the lives lost, the houses flattened or flooded, the property destroyed, the families separated and routines disrupted. New Orleans, the below-sea-level delta queen who has been flirting with disaster for years, could finally be overwhelmed by it. Would Ivan have happened without human influence on global warming? Perhaps. But with the climate already heating up, it's foolish to imagine that we shouldn't take what precautions we can.-Baltimore Sun
A second Iraq war
We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That is how we run the Iraq war or the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange track-suits to remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of women held prisoner by the Americans.
Abu Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little snapshots? But don't worry. This wasn't the America George Bush recognized, and besides we're punishing the bad apples, aren't we? Women? Why there are only a couple of dames left and they are Dr Germ and Dr Anthrax.
But Arabs do not forget so easily. It was a Lebanese woman, Samia Melki, who first understood the true semantics of those Abu Ghraib photographs for the Arab world. The naked Iraqi, his body smeared with excrement, back to the camera, arms stretched out before the butch and blond American with a stick, possessed, she wrote in 'Counterpunch', all the drama and contrasting colours of a Caravaggio painting. The best of Baroque art invites the viewer to be part of the artwork. Forced to walk in a straight line with his legs crossed, his torso slightly twisted and arms spread out for balance, the Iraqi prisoner's toned body, accentuated by the excrement and the bad lighting, stretches out in crucifix form. Exuding a dignity long denied, the Arab is suffering for the world's sins.
And that, I fear, is the least of the suffering that has gone on at Abu Ghraib. For what happened to all those videos which members of Congress were allowed to watch in secret and which we "the public" were not permitted to see? Why have we suddenly forgotten about Abu Ghraib? Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib story and one of the only journalists in America who is doing his job, has spoken publicly about what else happened in that terrible jail.
I'm indebted to a reader for the following extract from a recent Hersh lecture: "Some of the worst things that happened that you don't know about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib...The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what's happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking..."Already, however, we have forgotten this. Just as we must no longer talk about weapons of mass destruction. For as the details slowly emerge of the desperate efforts of Bush and Blair to find these non-existent nasties, made so credible in the long and equally detailed and utterly untrue pre-war reports of Judith Miller in the New York Times, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. US mobile site survey teams managed, at one point, to smash into a former Iraqi secret police headquarters in Baghdad, only to find a padlocked inner door.
Here, they believed, they would find the horrors that Bush and Blair were praying for. And what did they find behind the second door? A vast emporium of brand new vacuum cleaners. At Baath party headquarters, another team, led by a Major Kenneth Deal, believed they had discovered secret documents which would reveal Saddam's weapons' programme. The papers turned out to be an Arabic translation of A.J.P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Perhaps Bush and Blair should read it.
So as we continue to stagger down the crumbling stairway of our own ghastly making, we must listen to bigger and bigger whoppers. Iyad Alawi, the puppet prime minister, still deferentially called "interim prime minister" by many of my reporter chums, insists that elections will be held in January even though he has less control of the Iraqi capital (let alone the rest of the country) than the mayor of Baghdad. The ex-CIA agent, who obediently refused to free the two women prisoners the moment Washington gave him instructions not to do so, dutifully trots over to London and on to Washington to shore up more of the Blair-Bush lies.
Second Iraq War indeed. How much more of this tomfoolery are we, the public, expected to stomach? We are fighting in "the crucible of global terrorism," according to Lord Blair of Kut. What are we to make of this nonsense? Of course, he didn't tell us we were going to have a Second Iraq War when he helped start the First Iraq War, did he? And he didn't tell the Iraqis that, did he? No, we had come to "liberate" them. So let's just remember the crisis before the crisis before the crisis. Let's go back to last November when our prime minister was addressing the Lord Mayor's banquet. The Iraq war, he informed us then, and presumably he was still referring to the First Iraq War was "the battle of seminal importance for the early 21st century."
Well, he can say that again. But just listen to what else Lord Blair of Kut informed us about the war. "It will define relations between the Muslim world and the west. It will influence profoundly the development of Arab states and the Middle East. It will have far reaching implications for the future of American and western diplomacy." And he can say that again, can't he?
For it is difficult to think of anything more profoundly dangerous for us, for the West, for the Middle East, for Christians and Muslims since the Second World War the real second war that is, than Blair's war in Iraq. And Iraq, remember, was going to be the model for the whole Middle East. Every Arab state would want to be like Iraq. Iraq would be the catalyst n perhaps even the crucible of the new Middle East. Spare me the hollow laughter.
I have been very struck these past few weeks how very many of the letters I've received from readers come from men and women who fought in the Second World War, who argue ferociously that Blair and Bush should never be allowed to compare this quagmire with the real struggle against evil which they waged more than half a century ago. "I, now 90, remember the men maimed in body and mind who haunted the lanes in rural Wales where I grew up in the years after 1918," Robert Parry wrote to me.
"For this reason Owen's Dulce et decorum est remains for me the ultimate expression of the reality of death in war, made now more horrific by American 'targeted' bombing and the suicide bombers. We need a new Wilfrid Owen to open our eyes and consciences, but until one appears this great poem must be given space to speak again." It would be difficult to find a more eloquent rejoinder to the infantile nonsense now being peddled by Blair.
Not for many years has there been such a gap in America as well as Britain between the people and the government they elected. Blair's most recent remarks are speeches made to quote that Owen poem "to children ardent for some desperate glory." Ken Bigley's blindfolded face is our latest greatest crisis. But let's not forget what went before. -(c) The Independent
Freeing Hamdi
Nearly three years after his capture, the government has agreed to release Yaser Esam Hamdi, the American-born Saudi it has been holding as an "enemy combatant" at a naval brig in South Carolina.
In and of itself, the deal is unobjectionable. Hamdi, even accepting the worst of the government's allegations against him, was nothing more than a Taliban foot soldier, neither a major national security threat nor a likely intelligence asset of ongoing consequence.
The deal will allow Hamdi to return to Saudi Arabia, where he will renounce any claim to American citizenship and accept travel restrictions. His release is part of an important process of belatedly distinguishing detainees who may need to be held from those who can be repatriated.
What remains objectionable - what looms as more objectionable than ever, now that the government has acknowledged Hamdi's unimportance - is the unnecessary assault on civil liberties that the administration led in his case. For three years the administration insisted that Hamdi be held incommunicado and without any semblance of normal legal process or rights despite his citizenship.
For most of his detention he was prevented from meeting with his lawyer. In 2002 the government contended in court that merely allowing him to meet with counsel "jeopardizes compelling national security interests" and would "interfere with if not irreparably harm the military's ongoing efforts to gather intelligence." Hamdi, it warned, might even "pass concealed messages through unwitting intermediaries."
The government insisted that the courts authorize Hamdi's detention purely on the basis of a two-page affidavit from a mid-level Defence Department bureaucrat who claimed no personal knowledge of the case. An American citizen could be plucked out of all of the protections of the civilian justice system with no significant judicial review and no opportunity to rebut the facts behind the decision, the administration argued _ and it pushed this view all the way to the Supreme Court, where it received the rebuke it deserved.
The military's contentions would have been extreme even in the case of someone who truly represented a threat - as, for example, the way the government describes Jose Padilla, the other U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant. It is unpardonable to have staked out such ground over someone whom, it turns out, the government considers so unthreatening.
Had the military allowed Hamdi to meet with his lawyer in a timely fashion and not acted so aggressively to prevent him from presenting his own account of his behaviour, it might have had credibility to reserve the right to act otherwise in a truly exceptional situation.- The Washington Post