| 15 October 2004 | Friday | 29 Shaban 1425 |
Over to the other side
British secret service chief must quit
Even before the advent of Islam, it was customary for Arabs to devote a certain period of the year to exclusive worship and prayer. Muhammad Hussein Heykal in his biography of the Prophet (peace be upon him) has referred to this tradition as, "the Arabs annual retreat".
He states that much before the revelations, the Prophet would each year spend the whole of Ramazan in the cave of Mount Hira, devoting himself uninterruptedly to his spiritual pursuits in peace, solitude and tranquillity.
The sacred month of Ramazan is in fact an annual invitation to delinquents to shed evil ways and put on the garb of humility. The Holy Quran states, "O ye who believe! Fasting is prescribed for you, even as it was prescribed for those before you, that ye may ward off evil" (2:183).
The regulations pertaining to Ramazan in Chapter II of the Holy Quran are coupled repeatedly with the emphasis on two aspects: facilities and concessions given in respect of fasting and the spiritual significance of fasting.
The verse i.e. II: 187, that follows the ordinance about Ramazan, is of particular significance to the concept of self-denial and offers limitless assurances to those who fast, "when My servants ask thee concerning Me, I am indeed close (to them). I listen to the prayer of every suppliant when he calleth on Me..."
According to a tradition, the Prophet said, "Verily, a month of blessing has come to you... Allah has made obligatory the fast of it on you. The doors of paradise are opened during it, while the doors of hell are closed.
Satan is put in fetters. There is a night in it, which is better than one thousand months. Whoever is deprived of the goodness of it is really a deprived person."
Thus fasting has been enjoined and made incumbent upon every Muslim adult but with the condition that he must be fit physically for it. A sick person, one who is travelling, an old person and one who finds the severity of fast hard to bear on account of age or other infirmities are exempt. But for the sick and the traveller this is a temporary exemption, they have to complete the period on other days. "And whosoever of you is sick or on a journey let him fast the same number of other days." (2:185).
Yusuf Ali, in his commentary on the Holy Quran, writes, "Illness and journey must not be interpreted in an elastic sense; they must be such as to cause pain and sufferings."
On the other hand, Allah does not wish to burden the man who has permanent infirmity. For such a person the Quran states: "And for those who cannot afford it there is ransom, the feeding of a man in need." (2.184).
Fasting infuses in man a great degree of determination and trust in Allah, imparts loftiness to his character and personality. There is a tradition related by Abu Hazim, that the apostle of Allah once said, "In Paradise there is a gate named ar-Rayyan through which on the Day of Reckoning those who fast will enter, and through which none but they will enter." It is said that the Prophet during Ramazan was more generous than the rain-bearing wind.
Ramazan is a month of patience. Every Muslim during the course of this holy month has to observe utmost patience against all provocations. "The object of fast is to attain righteousness, patience in adversity, steadfastness in deprivation and to increase one's power of resistance.
Fasting places everybody the rich and the poor; the high and the low on the same pedestal. Both the well to do and the less favoured experience in common the pangs of hunger and privation to an equal degree.
"Muslim fast is not meant for self-torture. Although it is stricter than other fasts, it also provides alleviations for special circumstances. It is not merely a temporary abstention from food and drink but this abstention enables the attention to be directed to higher things" writes Yusuf Ali.
Fasting accustoms us to face hardships of life - by renouncing everyday comforts; we give strength to our resolve and increase our power of resistance. It must not be forgotten that the whole purpose of fasting during Ramazan is to promote righteousness, which is a progressive cultivation of spiritual values.
The Prophet was very particular and emphatic in drawing attention to this aspect of fasting. He said, "He who abstains from food and drink during the period of fasting but does not strive to abstain and safeguard himself against moral lapses, starves to no purpose."
Maulana Mohammed Ali Jauhar in his eloquent discourse "The Religion of Islam" comments, "the injunction laid down in the Holy Quran runs as follow: "the month of Ramazan is that in which the Quran was revealed..." (2:185).
It will be seen from the words of the injunction that the choice of this particular month is not without reason. It is well known that the Holy Quran was revealed piecemeal during a period of 23 years; therefore, by its revelation in the month of Ramazan is meant that its revelation began in that month. And this is historically true. The first revelation came to the Prophet during Ramazan when he was in the cave of Hira. The month which witnessed his greatest spiritual experience was thus considered to be the most suitable month for the spiritual discipline of the Muslim community which was to be effected through fasting."
During Ramazan falls the night of al-Qadr on which day the Prophet received his call and the first verses of the Holy Quran were revealed at Mount Hira. "Lo! We revealed it on the Night of Power. (97.1).
It is on this night that God's decree for the year are brought down on the earthly plane. "And angels and the spirit descend therein, by the permission of their Lord, with all decrees."(97.4).
"The Night of Power is better than a thousand months." That is how this verse is interpreted "A thousand nights must be taken in a very indefinite sense as denoting a very long period of time. One moment of enlightenment under God's light is better than a thousand months/years of animal life and such a moment of enlightenment translates into a period of spiritual glory."
The Holy Prophet said about al-Qadr that whosoever rises up for vigil and prayers during the night of al-Qadr with faith, and in hope of recompense, will have all his previous sins forgiven.
The most significant aspect of "fasting" is the reformation of the "self" through a conscious management of the "self". It is this process, which is to receive our utmost attention, while we engage in fasting.
If this objective is not achieved, then fasting would be a ritual without a purpose. The object is to make our behaviour symbolic of the virtues attending to fasting such as mercy, generosity, truthfulness, endurance, patience and fortitude.
We should not defeat and outrage the primary teaching underlying this fundamental injunction of Islam, because in the final analysis, fasting erases from the believing soul every evil, it perfects and liberates the human spirit and directs it towards common welfare, thus helping in the establishment of a righteous and stable society.
Over to the other side
The first-ever visit of a group of Pakistani media representatives to Indian-held Kashmir was a daring, commendable initiative. If it had been undertaken when the Kashmir problem initially erupted it may have saved much suffering to the people both in India and Pakistan.
However, there are elements on both sides of the divide who do not look favourably on such a move. They have convinced themselves that anything of the kind would be contrary to the national interest.
Unfortunately, the visit sponsored by a Pakistan-based NGO apparently did not have much positive impact. There appears to be a feeling in Kashmir that perhaps the visit was much too heavily stage-managed.
A report from across the border has insinuated that the visitors virtually saw only what the Indian authorities wanted them to see. It is not known how their programme was worked out, or whether or not they were free to meet anybody that they wanted to meet.
There have been suggestions that they were not exposed to whatever could have given them a more authentic idea of how the common Kashmiri people view their own situation.
From press reports it appears that they had the opportunity to meet some of the freedom fighters, even the more militant among them, such as Yasin Malik and Asiya Andrabi of the Dukhtaran-i-Millat who freely spoke their mind to the visitors. But in the end ,there seemed to have been no meeting of minds.
Ms Andrabi has even been reported as telling the Pakistanis that she knew they would go back and write only what the Indian authorities wanted them to write. Yasin Malik apparently also made no secret of his feelings and bluntly told the Pakistani journalists that they had come with a "brief" from Pakistan, something that hurt the sentiments of the Kashmiris.
He did not quite amplify what sort of "brief" he had in mind but seemed to make it clear that he did not want to be part of an officially managed goodwill exercise. It has also been reported that similar anger and hostility were noticeable in the talk that the Pakistanis had with some of the leaders of the (Kashmiri) political parties.
There is no reason to doubt the bona fides or professional antecedents of the Pakistani journalists that comprised the group that travelled to the Indian-held Kashmir.
It is not unlikely that before going they may have been exposed to some sort of official briefing on the Pakistani position on the Kashmir question. It is also conceivable that not all the officials involved formally or informally in the briefing were supportive of a visit by Pakistani media persons to occupied Kashmir. They may have regarded it as premature, and not favoured the opening up of a new channel of communication while the composite dialogue was still in progress.
Unfortunately, not all the relevant agencies in Pakistan view the sort of initiative undertaken by Safma as a desirable alternative to officially established channels of communications.
Bureaucrats of other diplomatic establishments have a tendency to believe they only have the monopoly of skills to deal with the complexities of interstate relations; non-professionals could not be trusted to intrude into what is their domain.
It goes without saying that nothing should be allowed to impede the composite dialogue between India and Pakistan. Progress towards the goal of normalization of India-Pakistan relations is of utmost concern. Since both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers, the matter is also of concern to the region as a whole.
While the more politically stable India can be expected to concentrate on the dialogue without distraction, Pakistan with its domestic problems such as the trouble in Wana and sectarian conflicts, has to try harder to keep the dialogue going.
Not surprisingly, the pace of the dialogue has not been even. What makes the going even more difficult is the tendency among responsible leaders (on both sides) to come out with controversial comments on key issues (such as Kashmir) which are part of the agenda.
After the meeting between President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York it was generally believed that the two sides would be mentally prepared to move away from their stated positions to arrive at a mutually acceptable basis for settling even long festering issues.
However, soon it was being said that there could be no departure from the principled positions - a statement that would tend to bring both India and Pakistan back to an irreconcilable position.
In India, the foreign minister has reportedly even said that there was no question of his government parting with even an inch of its territory. Such a statement is not reconcilable to the frequently proposed formula of settling the Kashmir issue by accepting the LoC with minor adjustments as the international border.
The Kashmiris in both parts of the state are not quite in favour of the LoC being converted into a permanent border, and instead, seem to hope that Azad Kashmir and Indian-occupied Kashmir would sooner or later find it possible to reunite.
The Kashmiris stress that their objective is self-determination. It is not quite clear whether self-determination would mean the right to complete azadi or merely a large measure of autonomy.
Autonomy as the way out of the Kashmir quagmire has been endorsed by several Indian and Pakistani writers and also by some South Asia experts in the West.
The renowned Indian author and political writer, A.G. Noorani, has suggested that the level of autonomy in Indian-held Kashmir should be restored to the level originally visualized under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, and Pakistan, under a bilateral accord with India, should grant the same quantum of autonomy to Azad Kashmir. That way India's compact with its Kashmiri population and Pakistan's with its Kashmiris would legally be guaranteed by the other side.
The well-known American expert of South Asian affairs, Selig Harrison, in 1992 made a similar proposal suggesting a "soft border between the two halves of Kashmir and the same level of autonomy for both parts of the state. He defined autonomy as "the surrender of authority in all spheres except for defence, foreign affairs, communication and currency."
It is possible that the composite dialogue, if allowed to proceed smoothly, would eventually lead to some such solution to the Kashmir dispute. This could perhaps result in the normalization of relations between India and Pakistan. In the meantime, however, the responsible leaders in both countries could be expected not to publicly speculate on issues which have yet to be settled.
It is not clear whether the Pakistani journalists who visited Indian-occupied Kashmir discussed any possible solution to the Kashmir dispute with any of the established Kashmiri leaders.
They had a meeting with Mehbooba Mufti, chairperson of the political party which is in power in the Indian-occupied state (where her father Mufti Sayeed is the chief minister) but, as far as one can recall, no other meeting with any top leader has been reported.
The large number of Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) which are on the agenda for the composite dialogue indicate the total absence of mutual trust in India-Pakistan relations and which will need to be restored before any semblance of normality can be established.
Neither India nor Pakistan appear to be willing to accept on face value the assurance given by the other in respect of any of the issues which is yet to be settled. Since Kashmir is the major issue between the two, the lack of trust is most marked in respect of it.
A businesslike down-to-earth meeting between the Pakistani journalists and the Kashmiri leaders could perhaps have paved the way to an honest amicable discussion of the Kashmir problem.
However, this was not to be, at least not during this visit. The opportunity to establish an independent line of communication between the estranged neighbours was therefore lost.
However, a group of Indian journalists is scheduled to visit Pakistan towards the latter half of November. It is hoped that Pakistanis, particularly those whose opinions carry weight with the people, would have no inhibitions in holding a free and fair dialogue with their Indian counterparts and through them with the people across the border. A composite dialogue, free of bureaucratic inhibitions, could go a long way in establishing peace in the region.
British secret service chief must quit
John Scarlett, the head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, should resign. He should resign because he was, in his previous job as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), directly responsible for the false prospectus on which Britain went to war in Iraq.
The September 2002 dossier, of which Scarlett claimed bureaucratic "ownership", made intelligence-based claims about the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction which the Iraq Survey Group has conclusively established were wrong. The prime minister, the foreign secretary and other cabinet ministers have now admitted as much.
For an intelligence assessment to have erred so seriously, when the lives of British soldiers were at stake, is bad enough. Honest mistakes can kill as surely as dishonest ones.
What is worse, in this case, is that those claims were presented in the dossier with a propagandistic confidence which Scarlett and his professional colleagues should have known was not justified by the evidence available to them.
The claims were not just wrong, with benefit of hindsight they were misleading, in the light of what Scarlett (but not the public) knew at the time. That is what tips the balance to the need for resignation.
Can it really be that no one in government will take personal responsibility? Are they all to move smoothly on, festooned with additional gongs in the special Iraq section of the new year's honours list? The BBC's chairman and director-general have resigned, after supporting a Today programme story which, while presented with unacceptable inaccuracy by the reporter Andrew Gilligan, turns out to have had more substantive truth in it than the sexed-up dossier it criticized.
Two cabinet ministers have resigned in protest at the war. Across the pond, the head of the CIA, George Tenet, has resigned, at least implicitly taking responsibility for intelligence failures over 9/11 and Iraq.
Tenet assured George Bush that the evidence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "a slam dunk". Yet even the eager Tenet did not swallow the claim that Saddam's WMD could be deployed in 45 minutes. Buried in the Butler report there is a mention of Tenet's pithy dismissal of the "they-can-attack-in-45-minutes" tale.
Lord Butler dryly adds: "We asked Mr Tenet directly for a comment but no reply had been received by the time that he resigned from office." Well, exactly: he resigned. But in Britain's own little White House, apparently no one is to blame.
Meanwhile, Butler reveals that the SIS had a grand total of six sources of human intelligence on Iraq, of which three have been discredited and two, which were more reliable, were "less worrying" about Iraqi chemical and biological weapon capabilities.
The 45-minute claim came from an unreliable "sub-source" via an SIS "main source". According to journalistic reports, the sub-source was a senior Iraqi military officer.
His loose talk was passed on to British intelligence, second or third hand, by someone at the Iraqi National Accord, an opposition movement headed by Ayad Allawi, then a frustrated political exile in Wimbledon, but now prime minister of Iraq. (Allawi, at least, got what he wanted.)
So here's how it went. This single unreliable source's claim was transmitted to the SIS, doubtless suitably exaggerated, by a politically motivated exile. The SIS's own caveats about the claim were, as the parliamentary intelligence and security committee noted last year, not adequately reflected in the JIC's summary assessment.
That assessment was simplified and exaggerated in the Downing Street dossier, with Scarlett compromising the careful presentational rules of his trade to satisfy spin-doctor Alastair Campbell.
It was yet further strengthened in Tony Blair's introduction, becoming the bald claim that Saddam's "military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them".
On a rope made of such feeble, twisted thread, we were led to war. The man who could and should have cut this particular thread, and several others, was Scarlett. As a career intelligence officer, he had all the know-how to see that the source would not bear the weight being put on it.
Why did he go along? Lord Hutton famously concluded that the prime minister's desire to make the case as strong as possible "may have subconsciously influenced" Scarlett.
Whether the influence was conscious or subconscious, it seems a fair bet that finding yourself in that charmed but also embattled inner circle of power, behind the door of 10 Downing Street, with the prime minister's favour depending on your coming up with the intelligence goods, and your own future appointment as head of SIS depending on the prime minister's favour, might turn even the strongest head.
This is speculation on my part. I have never met Scarlett. I am not privy to any secrets of his service. I have no doubt that he is a very able, decent and honourable public servant.
And I do not call lightly for anyone's resignation. Two arguments are urged against it. Butler concluded that, while it was a "mistaken judgment" for the JIC to be so closely associated with the dossier, "it was a collective one for which the chairman of the JIC should not bear personal responsibility".
Coming from a former cabinet secretary, this is a piece of mandarin special pleading worthy of Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Minister". Everyone is to blame so no one is to blame.
A more serious objection is that he was doing the prime minister's bidding. Why sack the monkey, not the organ-grinder? But Scarlett's role in all this was far more than the monkey's.
The fact that he is an unelected official who cannot speak up publicly for himself cuts both ways; it also means that he cannot be voted out, whereas the prime minister can. When Scarlett resigns, Blair should apologize for the false prospectus.
Not for the war itself, not for removing Saddam - that is a larger ground on which he must plainly stand or fall - but for the false prospectus. Then, probably next May (as Cherie Blair unintentionally confirmed, in the unlikely setting of the Cheltenham Literary Festival), we shall have a chance to decide, at the ballot box, whether his considerable achievements, and the lack of better alternatives in British politics, outweigh this monumental blunder.
I personally think they still do, although a Lib-Lab coalition with the wise Menzies Campbell as the new foreign secretary would be the best outcome of all. But that's another story.
For now, Scarlett should go - perhaps being kicked upstairs to the House of Lords, in time-dishonoured fashion, as Lord Scarlett of Epsom-cum-Dossier, there to give us the benefit of his wisdom at 45 minutes' notice.
One clinching reason he should depart is to restore the minimal credibility, if not the irreparably damaged mystique, of British intelligence. For, let's not kid ourselves, we will need that intelligence, and to know how far we can rely on it, in the dangerous years ahead - whether the subject is Iran, Libya, Russia or China.
If Scarlett goes, his successors will understand that their own futures depend on sticking scrupulously to what the evidence will bear, whatever the political blandishments from above. That would be one small lasting benefit from this whole tawdry affair. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service