| 22 November 2004 | Monday | 09 Shawwal 1425 |
America's turn to right
Delving into the past
Arafat's quest for peace
That Pakistan remains a highly centralized state in a multi-ethnic society is a measure of the political immaturity of the elite. The issue of provincial autonomy, high on the agenda after the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971 and implied in the constitution of 1973, has been gradually reduced by numerous constitutional amendments made since the late 1970s. In addition, the dominant influence of one province in the federation, thanks to history, is seemingly an important cause of distrust and disharmony.
Two issues best reflect the festering political malaise, namely, the proposed Kalabagh dam and the NFC award. In both cases, the concerns of smaller provinces seem quite valid and need resolution through genuine negotiations between the stakeholders. So far the federal government seems - appearances are important to the sceptics - to have shied away from taking the bold initiative necessary to reflect its sensitivity to these concerns.
In the context of the controversy about Kalabagh Dam, no one would dispute the fact that Pakistan needs to enhance the supply of water and power to meet the rising demand. Supply can be increased in two ways.
First, the existing supply should be used more efficiently, reducing waste and theft. Second, there should be additional supply as well. There is substantial evidence that a significant proportion of water supply is wasted and likewise power supply is stolen. There is, however, little or no evidence that these leakages have been reduced significantly.
The attempts to improve the distribution systems of water and electricity have not yielded the anticipated results. The irrigation system is still supply-oriented and dependent on a public sector monopoly in each province.
The much-publicized reform in the provincial water management system - establishment of autonomous water authority in each province - seems to have gone nowhere in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh.
Similarly, with regard to the distribution of electricity - most of which is generated from the Indus water resources - the impact of reported restructuring is not visible either. So far a competitive and efficient public-private partnership has not developed to reduce the waste in, and theft from, the existing supply of power.
It would be relatively easy to show that doing nothing is not an acceptable option to meet the future demand for water and power. However, the case for Kalabagh dam rests on several crucial assumptions and observations, some of which are hotly contested.
For one thing, the proponents of the project must show that, given the projected demand for water and power, there are either no alternative projects or that the alternatives would be far more expensive.
Why not smaller dams and water diversions for additional water? For electricity, perhaps coal - reportedly Sindh has large deposits - can be a significant source for power generation with new technologies? Why is this information, if it exists, not in the public domain? The second aspect has to do with the costs and benefits of Kalabagh dam itself.
It seems that there are three important dimensions of the controversial project: environmental impact (both around the site and at the tail end in the delta region), displacement of people, and distribution of additional water.
Needless to add that, in each case, the potential beneficiaries and losers are not necessarily the same groups. The important point, therefore, is to identify the benefits and costs to each group and compare the change in welfare between groups due to the project. Also, the mechanisms for compensating the losers and form of compensation should be discussed and resolved.
It is quite clear that a serious division of opinion exists on the issue of Kalabagh dam for at least two interconnected reasons. First, there is palpable sense of deep mistrust - trust is the glue of relationships - in the minority provinces about what the federal government and its supporters say or do. The dispute about the distribution of water between provinces has been feeding into other grievances for some time.
The second reason is that the issue of future development of water and power has not been subjected to critical analysis and public debate. Why has the public not been informed on the alternative sources that include Kalabagh Dam? Of the alternatives why should the country choose to build this dam? What are the "facts" and their consequences to the country and its provinces separately? So far there has been more heat than light on the issue, reflected by the sharply divided opinion between those who are set on building the dam - as if there is no alternative to it - and others who oppose it vehemently since they suspect mala fides on the other side.
A sensible approach would be to make a technically sound analysis, using the best and trustworthy expertise available, of the alternatives and then undertake a political discourse - that is transparent and participatory - to decide about which of the alternatives is the least costly or most acceptable.
With regard to the lingering dispute about the NFC award, there are two basic questions. First, what should be the shares of the federal and provincial governments in the national revenue? Second, what should be the share of each province in the "divisible pool"? The first question needs examination of the roles of the federal and provincial governments.
The federal government has used the argument that certain services and investments must be made at the national level for reasons of national security, development of infrastructure and repayment of the public debt used for development and non-development purposes.
The federal government has two major commitments that claim a large part of the state revenue, namely, expenditure on the armed forces and servicing the public debt. Does Pakistan still need a large military establishment that competes against the much-needed social and economic services for scarce national resources? This question needs to be debated in the light of (a) the development of, and access to, atomic weapons and (b) the peace initiatives with India since the two countries have been locked into a very expensive zero-sum game.
In addition, the federal government maintains responsibility for a wide range of services and activities, many of which should be with the provinces for reasons of efficiency and equity.
Obviously the rhetoric of devolution has not translated into a smaller size of the federal government. A large federal government-reflected by the civil and military establishment-also plays a divisive role in that a disproportionately large share of the spending benefits the residents of one province.
The shares of the federal and provincial governments in the "divisible pool" should be changed in favour of the provincial governments as more of the responsibilities are shifted to them and the size of the federal government, including its military establishment, is reduced.
The share of provincial governments should be much larger than what is being currently suggested in the public discourse, rising from 37.5 per cent to at least 50 per cent for the next five years. The real problem is that the federal government and the National Assembly are unwilling to redefine the highly centralized structure of the federation.
The second question is equally important since it brings into play the principle of equity and determines the relative distribution of resources between the provinces.
There seems to be a consensus that the formula based on population size alone is patently unfair: in a multi-ethnic and unequal society, it is a recipe for political and social instability if not disaster. There are at least three good reasons for which the current formula must be rejected.
First, the federal government still claims nearly two-thirds of the public revenue and a large part of the federal government's spending on its civil and military establishment benefits one province disproportionately relative to its share in the population.
Second, there are serious inter-provincial disparities in the level of per capita income, incidence of absolute poverty and the state of development of industries, infrastructure and services. Third, there are disparities of revenue contribution by provinces on account of the private sector activities located and managed in each province.
Admittedly it is not easy to identify the corporate ownership and management of industries and services. But it is also a fact that the province provides resources and services that contribute to the personal and corporate incomes no matter where the individual entrepreneur or the corporate body resides or brings capital from.
The NFC should make a start by reducing the weight of population size from 100 per cent to 50 per cent, with the rest given to the other two factors-level of development and revenue generation-in the ratio of 35 and 15 per cent, respectively. The federal government should stop the practice of providing arbitrary - implying political considerations - grants-in-aid to provinces, except in severe emergencies.
Since the suggested transfer formula puts onerous demand on the quality data about each province's population size, level of development and revenue contribution, it is absolutely essential that the federal and provincial governments with other autonomous public agencies and private sector institutions produce credible data and evidence on these indicators.
Many writers and analysts have repeatedly noted the arbitrariness, opacity and dissension associated with the past NFC awards in Pakistan. The NFC can assure transparency, and hence its accountability, if it keeps its meetings and deliberations in the public eye and uses the best resources and expertise available to the country.
The current impasse on the NFC award can be broken if the federal government fulfils its commitment to make the process of decentralization and devolution effective and regards the inter-provincial disparities as a serious national issue.
America's turn to right
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. - Winston Churchill
Relection is, perhaps, the greatest, political endorsement. On November 2, after a $750 million campaign, the American electorate not only re-elected George Bush as its president but also handed the conservative Republicans a majority in the Senate, the House of Representatives and the governorships of the states.
This time, Mr. Bush won the popular vote (52 per cent) beating John Kerry by 3.5 million votes. The Supreme Court too is now likely to retain its conservative majority for the foreseeable future. Through the fog of election statistics, a definite step to the right can be seen. What were the Americans thinking?
Internationally, Mr. Bush's first term smacked of a palpable disregard for international institutions, laws, treaties and regulations. After a unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, he angered the EU by arbitrarily imposing duties on steel imports from Europe in violation of WTO regulations. He led an illegal and unjustified invasion of Iraq, weakening the United Nations and Nato.
His administration has kept hundreds of prisoners of war incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay without trial and outside the Geneva Conventions. Add to this, the systematic and sustained physical and sexual abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail uncovered earlier this year. It's no surprise that most nations of the world were praying for Kerry to win.
Aside from the arrest of a handful of terrorists leaders, Libya's abandonment of its nuclear programme and the holding of elections in Afghanistan, there is little to cite by way of Mr. Bush's foreign policy achievements.
Domestically too, the Bush administration's record is questionable. It curbed civil liberties, converted its inherited budget surplus into the country's largest budget deficit and there was a loss of over a million jobs.
Mr. Bush, in fact, earned the distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover to have lost more jobs during a presidential tenure than having created new jobs. Yet states such as Ohio, which lost 200,000 jobs over the last four years, preferred Mr. Bush over Mr. Kerry, albeit narrowly.
The November 2 election has highlighted changing trends in America. In 2000, 50 per cent of the country's voters described themselves as moderates and 29 per cent as conservatives. This time, the segment of self-described moderates fell to 45 per cent and that of conservatives rose to 33 per cent.
Exit polls have indicated that in this election, more voters were most concerned about moral values than about Iraq, the economy or national security. This is surprising in view of 9/11 and lately America's move towards a more conservative direction. Even the word "liberal" is now used pejoratively.
"Moral values" comprise the polarizing issues of abortion, gay marriages and stem cell research. Mr. Bush is against abortion and stem cell research. He also favours an amendment to the constitution outlawing gay marriages and save America from those he refers to as "activist judges."
Bush will feel fortified, no doubt, in this endeavour by the verdict of a section of the electorate on November 2. All 11 states holding ballots on the question of gay marriages voted to ban the practice. "Thank God," quipped Michael Moore, "just think of all those wedding gifts we won't have to buy now."
Mr. Bush benefited from the large turnout of Evangelicals, a relatively large voting bloc of four million right wing, Christian voters strongly opposed to abortion, gay marriages and stem cell research.
The fact that this demographic group did not vote for Bush in 2000 and yet came out strongly in favour of him on November 2 is an indication of the notable success of Mr. Bush's organized campaign that of his chief campaign strategist, Karl Rove.
Despite losing three presidential debates and despite bad news from Iraq culminating in a report that hundreds of tons of explosives had disappeared from a weapons dump, his campaign never faltered. Without ever dipping into the deep waters of policy minutiae, Bush maintained the persona of a resolute and motivated crusader.
His campaign effectively portrayed Mr. Kerry (with help from himself) as a vacillating "flip-flopper". His memorable statement, "I voted for the war before I voted against it", immortalized by this election, will, no doubt, be found in every compilation of political quotations published henceforth. The election results lend credit to the Clintonian law that the people would rather have a leader who is strong but wrong rather than one who is right but weak.
One indicator of America's insularity is that Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or the thousands of Iraqi dead did not even merit a mention during the campaigns let alone be election issues.
Amidst their soul searching, the Democrats will invariably have to ask themselves whether they were right in choosing Mr. Kerry as their candidate to beat President Bush.
They had an accomplished and far less assailable candidate in the retired General, Wesley Clarke. They may also be thinking about his choice of John Edwards as his running mate. Aside from bringing his much needed charm to the otherwise wooden ticket, Mr. Edwards failed to deliver either of the Carolinas to the Democrats, despite being born in the south and representing the north as Senator.
The problem for them, however, seems to be graver than merely the choice of candidate. In their eagerness for cohesion following 9/11, the Democrats appeared to have lost their compass. It was the firebrand, bold campaign of Howard Dean that revitalized the party helping it go some distance in reclaiming the centre and centre-left of American politics.
Democrats need to learn their party's dire need for something more than good ideas: a clear vision- what Andrei Cherny, a former Kerry adviser, writing in the New York Times refers to as "a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is and where we want to take it."
The new Bush administration also has its work cut out for it. It faces a plethora of growing challenges. It must be a just broker of peace between the Palestinians and Israel and hold Ariel Sharon to his promise of helping create a viable Palestinian state in a post-Arafat Middle East. It must ensure an early withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It must repair transatlantic ties. It must intervene effectively in the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
It must commit itself to increasing America's trade with developing countries, especially the Muslim world. It must make a more decisive contribution to ensuring a stable South Asia that is secure against Indian hegemony. It must work towards writing off the debt crippling many African countries and take bold initiatives to arrest the spread of AIDS and other diseases.
The writer is a barrister based in Karachi.
Delving into the past
One of the most frustrating things that a writer in this part of the Third World encounters, is the total lack of concern shown by the establishment to suggestions, ideas and constructive criticism.
Many of us toil in monastic solitude, flinging inky darts into the dark, wondering if we will ever hit our mark. Occasionally, a strangled cry comes out of the gloaming and we know it's been worthwhile.
But it's usually from a civilian who, having been caught with his fingers in the till, puts up a spirited defence to claim his innocence. Or an enterprising businessman whose partner has suddenly disappeared with the corporate silver and bought a house in Buenos Aires where they serve beef four times a day.
But the functionary who squanders millions of rupees of the taxpayers' money, in the mistaken belief that the only way to ensure the survival of a fledgling democracy is to tour countries which are financially worse off than we are, and import bullet proof cars for the apparatchiks who make up the pecking order in the Islamabad politburo, will, of course, get away with it. Wasting resources is a national pastime. It's just that some people are better at doing it than others.
In this country, thrift and parsimony have always been regarded as signs of weakness. People admire authority, pomp and ostentation. It's part of the national psyche. A culture in which a government employee expects to be tipped for performing a job he's being paid to do. Besides, this government has its own secret weapon in the person of Shaikh Rashid who my bridge partner recently described as the quintessential Pakistani.
Though short on plot but long on endearing lines, he always appears to have a plausible explanation for every official gaffe and indiscretion, which he delivers in his wildly oscillating guttural voice, interspersed with prophetic pronouncements like, now that President Bush has been re-elected, the Palestinians will have their own homeland. It's going to take some time before he lives down his charming short circuit theory of the blast at the Islamabad Marriott.
Week after week journalists plug away on some theme or the other, cataloguing the latest iniquities of the government and listing fresh indignities inflicted on the common man by some agency of the power brokers. But these entreaties are always met with a stony silence and a sublime indifference. For all they care, these writers could be crafting their columns and news reports on Titan, the environmental friendly satellite of Jupiter, to which a friend of this writer had threatened to migrate if Bush had been re-elected.
Shortly after taking over power, President Musharraf was entertained to a dinner hosted by a former president of Karachi's most prestigious club. During the question and answer session, one of the members pointed out that it was rumoured that in spite of the fact that journalists were regularly venting their spleen, writing about social injustice and wanton waste, the head of state did not read the local newspapers.
The president just shrugged his shoulders, conveying the impression that he had better things to do than waste his time reading about things that were repeated ad nauseum - and invited the next question.
Sometimes, one wishes that he would read the papers and not rely on terse one-line statements which state that the law and order situation in under control. He would find out that between the governor, chief minister, minister of railways and the town nazim, the people of Karachi have been taken for the biggest roller coaster ride of the decade.
One day the commuter was told the circular railway was being revived and at last the people of Karachi will be able to avail of really inexpensive transport. Shortly after he was informed that the nazim was studying quotations for erecting corridor-one. And before the week was out he learned that the two chief executives of the province issued a statement that they had been locked in discussions with a Chinese team that was still studying the feasibility of reviving the circular railway. If it hadn't been for Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who took the bull by the horns, and told the minister of railways and the chief minister to get his act together, the guessing game would have continued unabated.
The president would have also been reminded that there are over three hundred women prisoners in Karachi jail who don't know why they are there, and that Asif Zardari, who was incarcerated on October 5, 1996, has spent a little over eight years in jail. He can't obviously compete with the great Jeeay Sindh leader, G.M. Syed, who was locked up for six months longer than Nelson Mandela. But the belief is growing among his supporters that the authorities might have plans to ensure that Asif Zardari is provided boarding and lodging for many more years to come, and that he will, somehow or the other, find a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
That is just the point. Nobody is really interested and nobody seems to care. 'Lucky Jim,' who argued in favour of selfishness as a modus vivendi, has been resurrected in this country, for he appears to be among us in every nook and corner.
This feeling about wanting to chuck everything and to get away from it all, is nothing new. One sees it on the faces of the families flickering goodbye at the airport rail like poplar leaves, as a son or nephew who has decided to throw in the towel has finally managed to get away. One sees it on the faces of factory workers, bank clerks, graduate students who can't get jobs, and commuters being jostled along the grid of streets, sieving anguish for a better time, a better place.
This feeling has persisted from the time of the traditional corporate bureaucracies, relics from the smokestack era of manufacturing, when the enlightened despotism of Ayub Khan was snuffed out by a populist uprising, after which the country completely lost its moorings.
Members of the older generation still look back on those relatively peaceful days with nostalgia. Barring a few countries, Pakistanis could travel to any place in the world without a visa. Unlike today, when the foreign office watches with weary resignation how some of their countrymen are given the third degree at a number of foreign airport immigration counters.
There was a certain predictability about prices of consumer goods, and a marginal rise in the price of sugar or wheat could invoke a law and order situation. Petrol used to cost a rupee and a quarter for a gallon, and one could buy a dollar for a fifteenth of its present day price. There were laws that protected women, factory and agricultural workers.
Arafat's quest for peace
The death of the veteran Palestinian freedom fighter Yasser Arafat has certainly removed a moderate leader and a peacemaker from the Arab-Israeli centre-stage. Yasser Arafat was last in the line of Afro-Asian leaders who fought for the liberation of their people against colonial domination and apartheid.
Like Jomo Kenyatta and Nelson Mandela, he was branded as a terrorist by the colonial powers. No wonder they sought to eliminate him in order to perpetuate the Zionist occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.
Both George Bush and Ariel Sharon demanded his dismissal from the presidency of the Palestinian Authority because he had refused to accept a Bantustan-like status for the Palestinians.
Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, once told Sharon that he could not care less if the Israeli prime minister hanged Arafat. George Bush had publicly told the Palestinians that they would have to find another leader if they wanted a Palestinian state.
The constitution of the Palestinian Authority was therefore tampered with to make room for a prime minister who would be the Authority's chief executive. The motive behind this amendment was to reduce Yasser Arafat to a mere figurehead. But little did the Israelis and their imperialist patrons know that Yasser Arafat derived his power from the Palestinian nation and not from his office.
First Mahmoud Abbas and then Ahmed Qorei became prime minister while Yasser Arafat, the Authority president, was incarcerated in the ruins of his Ramallah headquarters for two and a half years where during the Israeli siege he lived on one boiled potato and a cup of coffee a day and worked under flickering candlelight well into the night. An old man in his mid-seventies, his health deteriorated as no proper medical treatment was possible under such conditions. But the spirit of the intrepid freedom fighter remained unbroken. He refused to sell out the holy city and parts of the West Bank to Zionists in return for a truncated Palestinian entity.
In the meanwhile, the Intifada gained momentum which neither Mahmoud Abbas nor his successor Ahmed Qorei could suppress. They are bitterly opposed to the Intifada, but their security chiefs, acting under the advice of the CIA, could not crush the on-going freedom struggle.
They do not command the respect of the Palestinian people. Mahmoud Abbas dubbed the popular struggle a crime while Ahmed Qorei's critics accuse his agents of supplying cement and other material for the construction of the notorious wall that runs through the Palestinian territory.
True, Yasser Arafat had also renounced armed struggle after his participation in the Oslo peace process that culminated in a series of agreements including the Wye River, Sharm-al-Shaikh and Al-Khalil accords that were supposed to lead to a Palestinian state in 1998.
Arafat had gone more than half-way to seek a reconciliation with Israel. In 1988, he recognized Israel's right to exist within the pre-June 6, 1967, borders. It was a courageous act on the part of the Palestinian leader to have proven by deed his words to drop the gun and extend the olive branch. The Palestinian leader had made this observation at a historic speech during the UN General Assembly session in 1974.
The Clinton administration acknowledged the significance of Yasser Arafat's peace initiative when he signed the September 13, 1993, agreement with Yitzhak Rabin for Palestinian self-rule in preparation to statehood.
The ensuing peace process gradually defused the hitherto stone-throwing movement of unarmed Palestinians who hoped that they would get back a quarter, if not the whole, of their occupied land.
It was the Clinton administration which together with the West European countries was instrumental in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the Palestinian leader. President Clinton tried to play the honest broker and personally mediated between the Palestinians and Israelis.
He very nearly brought the two sides closer to a settlement than ever. However, the status of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements, the border of the would-be Palestinian state and the Palestinian refugees' right to return remained the sticking point.
There, too, some breakthrough was made as under Clinton's pressure the Israeli leader offered Abu Dis, a suburb of Jerusalem, as a site for the new state's capital. Israel's insistence on retaining eight to 10 per cent of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank brought about an impasse in 2000.
For his part, Yasser Arafat did not insist on the return of the four million Palestinian refugees driven by Israel from their homes. It would not have been possible for any Palestinian leader to part with any more land in West Bank but the western media blamed Arafat for displaying a rigid stance.
This was uncharitable because the Palestinian leader was demanding a mere 22 per cent of occupied Palestine and had renounced claim to 88 per cent of that territory which was historically the ancestral land of Palestinians.
Earlier, during the seventies, Yasser Arafat proposed a federation of Palestinian and Israeli entities on the pattern of the United States of America, where both the Palestinian Arabs and Jews would enjoy autonomy in their respective regions.
Under the proposed formula, the federal state would be secular and democratic in character, guaranteeing equal rights for all. This proposal is still open to Israel but it has been rejected by the state and the US, on the grounds that the bi-national state would lose its Jewish identity.
Does this mean that Israel and the US want Israel to be an exclusively Jewish state, allowing no room for non-Jewish people, while they want a truncated West Bank and Gaza in which to dump the Palestinian diaspora? This has been rejected by the Palestinians.
Yasser Arafat founded a nationalist movement Al Fatah in 1961 which became an important component of the eight-party movement called the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Arafat took over the leadership of PLO from Ahmed Shukairi, one of the pioneers of the organization.
Yasser Arafat made it a broad-based national liberation movement and engaged the Israelis in a heroic battle at Al Karameh in 1968; then two years later the PLO bore the brunt of the Jordanian blitz that triggered a civil war.
With the intervention of the then Egyptian president, a peace agreement was signed between the PLO and the Jordanian government. Again, during 1975-76, Hafez al Assad sought in vain to break the power of the PLO in Lebanon.
In 1982, the PLO held the invading Israeli army for 11 weeks in Beirut and Arafat moved the headquarters of the organization to Tunis by an accord in April 1983 following international mediation.
The PLO suffered a setback when Israeli commandos assassinated five of its top-notch leaders, including Saleh Khalaf and Khalil Wazir, in Tunis in 1982. Though exiled, the PLO remained a force in Palestine and inspired non-violent passive resistance to Israeli occupation in December 1987 known as the Intifada.
The Israelis killed 1,000 street demonstrators during the first phase of the resistance. With the participation of PLO in the Oslo peace process, Yasser Arafat opted for negotiation as opposed to armed resistance, and the Palestinians ceased their struggle to give a chance to peace process.
As the peace negotiations proved an exercise in futility, the younger generation of Palestinians was disillusioned and rallied round the radical Islamic movement, Al-Hamas, that vowed to liberate the occupied motherland. The second Intifada broke out after an interlude of seven years, owing to Ariel Sharon's provocative tour of the Al Aqsa mosque compound on September 28, 2000.
With George Bush's endorsement of Sharon's annexation of certain Jewish settlements, the Palestinians are left with no option other but to continue their struggle.
With the demise of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian National Authority and the PLO are incapable of appeasing - much less suppressing - the Palestinian resistance which will run its own course. If the American occupying army in Iraq has been unable to quell the resistance there, how can their Israeli proxy subdue the Palestinians?