| 24 November 2004 | Wednesday | 11 Shawwal 1425 |
Defining VIP culture
The debate must continue
Planning the next cataclysm
The Americans have, it seems, been able to gain control over much of Fallujah. Sporadic resistance continues in some parts of the city. The Americans lost some 38 soldiers, but they estimate that 1,200 fighters were killed in the city, which originally had a population of some 300,000 inhabitants but reduced to about one third of that by the time the American offensive was launched.
It is conceded that the main leaders of the insurgency - Abu Musab Zarqawi, Abdullah Janabi, and Omar Hadid - escaped and are probably in other parts of Iraq seeking to foment the uprising against the Americans in both the Sunni belt and in the north.
American observers take comfort in the fact that the attack on Fallujah did not provoke an outcry in other Arab countries and that even in Iraq there was no outpouring of sympathy for the Fallujah defenders from the Shia or Kurdish leaders.
The more optimistic among them also believe that by wiping out this "viper's nest" and asserting American control, a message has been sent out to other resistance groups that American military might will prevail. But at the moment, Fallujah has provided the spur for the intensification of the insurgency in the Sunni-dominated areas and even in the north.
A second front has been opened in Mosul, where some 1,200 US soldiers are battling to retake parts of the city from guerilla fighters. Insurgents are staging attacks in majority Sunni cities in central and north-west Iraq, as well as in the Sunni-dominated neighbourhoods of Baghdad. In addition, some deadly attacks are occurring in the quieter Shia majority areas, south of Baghdad as well as in the Kurdish-dominated zone in the northeast.
In Mosul, a largely Sunni Arab city in a Kurdish dominated area, it is said that the Americans may call upon the trained fighters of the Kurdish peshmergas to restore order in the city and to retake the many police stations that the insurgents had taken over on the day after the American assault on Fallujah was launched. So far, not much has been heard of the actions that Kurdish forces have taken against the Arab insurgents or their supporters in Mosul but if the Kurds do become part of the American effort to restore order and control, new ethnic fissures will be added to the dangerous schism that is already in existence.
In Baghdad, on a single day there were as many as 66 assaults on American troops. The Americans moved on to a mosque in Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni area in Baghdad, and a location where Saddam had appeared for a while to boost people's morale as the US invasion was under way.
It is undoubtedly an area in which Saddam sympathizers could be found. The mosque was probably one that was being used as an arms cache and a haven for the insurgents, but these factors would in no way reduce the rage and frustration such raids caused among the Iraqi Arab Sunnis.
A partial listing of the Iraqi cities in which the Iraqi interim government maintains only a tenuous control would include Mosul, Baghdad, Baiji, Baquba, Ramadi, Sammara, Tal Afar and Suweira.
Some of these are cities in which the Americans had mounted operations and had theoretically cleaned up before handing over control to the Iraqi government forces. This control had obviously failed to be effective. The intrinsic or deliberate incompetence of the new Iraqi army was apparent also in the Fallujah operation.
Even while the American command has praised the role played by the newly created Iraqi military units in the taking of Fallujah, it is generally conceded that most of the units performed badly and that it will be many months if not years before the Iraqi army can become an effective fighting force or even a force for maintaining order in rebellious cities.
The Americans now concede that more troops will be needed and there appear to be plans to induct more American troops to have a better control over the cities in the Sunni belt and elsewhere.
Whether they can afford to induct a large number of troops is a question lacking a satisfactory answer at the moment. Some observers believe that this can be managed by extending the service of the reservists and postponing rotations while others have raised fears expressed during the presidential elections that the draft would have to be reintroduced.
The security situation remains charged. Sunni leaders have consistently called for a postponement of the elections. This has been endorsed by a close aide of the prime minister.
Most importantly, at a gathering of Iraqi political leaders meeting in the northern resort city of Dukan, a five-point charter was drawn up with regard to the elections including a proposal to extend the time for the drawing up of election lists within Iraq and for registering expatriate Iraqis.
There seemed to be disagreement on the timing as some Shia parties insisted that the elections go ahead as scheduled while others argued that no elections could be held until peace was restored in the Sunni areas.
The Dukan gathering included the two largest Shia parties - Dawa and Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the two main Kurdish parties - the Iraqi National Accord and Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; representatives of the president, Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar; and the Iraqi Islamic party, which withdrew from the interim government in protest at the Fallujah offensive.
It seems that the Sunni political leaders are calling for a postponement and believe that if an election is held despite the threat of a Sunni boycott there is every prospect of civil war. Being certain that they would win a majority, most Shia parties, and notably Ayatollah Sistani, are in favour of early elections.
It has now been announced by the theoretically independent Election Commission that elections will be held on January 30, within the January 31 deadline that had earlier been agreed upon.
The election officials have said that some 198 political parties and individuals have applied for registration and some 162 have been approved. Under the current Iraqi law, the entire country is being treated as one constituency with seats in the 275 member national assembly being divided among the parties on the basis of the percentage of the total vote that they obtain.
Theoretically, under these circumstances, even a total boycott of the elections by the Sunnis would not affect the formation of the National Assembly. Most parties would include in their slate of candidates individuals from other ethnic groups.
Therefore, there will still be some representation of the Sunnis in the assembly. Theoretically again, the election commission is estimating that seven to eight million of the 14 million voters that they expect to register will turn out for the vote giving it the sort of credibility that the UN and the international community and the Iraqi people will be looking for.
These, however, are theoretical possibilities. In practice, it is much more likely that the announcement of a firm date for elections will prompt further violence. The Americans very likely will be able to maintain partial control but unless troop levels are increased drastically there seems to be little prospect that the conditions will be created particularly in the Sunni belt in which elections can be peacefully held.
There may be the feeling that like the Afghans the Iraqis too will turn out in large numbers and will ignore the threat of the insurgents exactly as the Afghans ignored the threats of the Taliban.
Unfortunately the situations are qualitatively different. In Afghanistan, many Pushtuns while unhappy with Karzai and sympathetic to the Taliban saw the presidential election as an opportunity to reassert Pushtun influence in Afghanistan.
Secondly, the Americans had the ability to coerce or persuade the Tajik and Uzbek warlords who had the capacity to disrupt the elections to acquiesce, no matter how reluctantly in the holding of the elections, with the implicit promise being that they would have a fair share of the power and would be able to get some political clout through parliamentary elections scheduled for early next year.
The elections will sound a death knell to Sunni dominance of the power structure in Iraq. The Sunnis also seem to fear that, given the resentments of the past, they will have little hope of even retaining the degree of political power that they can rightfully claim.
They have been told that the Sunni Arabs form no more than 25 per cent of the population while Shias constitute 60 per cent. In Saddam's days, while never publicly acknowledged, it was privately conceded that the Shias were in the majority but that they were not more than 52 or 53 per cent of the population while the Sunni Arabs formed at least 30 per cent of the population.
It is not known whether the parties, in drawing up their slate of candidates, will use the right percentages in determining how many Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds they put on their list.
In Iraq, therefore, the insurgency has not only the anti-American component, which all Iraqis may say they share, but also an ethnic or sectarian component. The ethnic component has a particular salience because the Sunnis fear that the Americans have a pro-Shia bias. The fact that this apprehension is shared by large swathes of the population living in neighbouring Arab states adds another level of complexity to the equation.
The successful conclusion of elections in Iraq would help in restoring some semblance of order in Iraq and mitigate the present sufferings of the Iraqi people. For this, if for no other reason, one would like the elections to be held successfully and in a manner that gives the exercise credibility.
Under the present circumstances, this appears difficult unless the Americans can broker an agreement between the main Shia parties - specially Ayatollah Sistani - and the Sunni leadership for an equitable power sharing arrangement.
The Kurds have a reason to be happy with the degree of regional autonomy they have been promised and will probably be able to work out in a democratic Iraq a more equitable sharing of the income generated from energy resources located in the Kurdish areas without necessarily getting the unfettered control of Kirkuk that they are now demanding. In the past, the main threat of Iraqi disintegration came from Kurdish demands. Now it may well be a Sunni-Shia divide.
The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Defining VIP culture
I am a VIP. That is why I am better qualified than social workers like Abdus Sattar Edhi and Imran Khan to define VIP culture. I think they've got it all wrong and make a hash of it when asked by pressmen to say something about it.
In fact the former skipper really put his foot in his mouth when he once said, "there is nothing wrong if I have honestly earned money and purchase a Mercedes every day if I want to." Bad timing, I think. He had not entered politics when he said this, otherwise he wouldn't have made such an impolitic remark.
I and some other VIP friends who are successfully keeping our heads above water these days when you have to be in uniform to be a VIP, had laughed at his words. You see, it is all a question of the right attitude.
What has a truck driver by way of status and prestige? And yet the one who tried to run over a posse of policemen when challenged for jumping a traffic signal in Lahore the other day, was a VIP in the making. You may well ask how he got to the stage where he began to think he could bypass the law.
We VIPs don't have a union, but if we ever form one I shall propose that we adopt Mian Nawaz Sharif as our patron saint. The former PM became a super VVIP by appropriating power of all kind, and, at the same time, condemned VIP culture and exhorted everyone else to give it up. At our level we are doing this all the time.
Let me say that VIP culture doesn't merely mean that over- rated facility called a VIP lounge at airports. There is so much else to make you stand out from the common crowd.
With rare exceptions, everyone in Pakistan is trying day and night to occupy positions where the law should think twice before touching them and where they can enjoy real privileges.
For instance, having moved in the corridors of power for long years, I have the confidence that I can get away with anything short of murder. And even that is manageable if I spend the money to supplement my clout otherwise.
It gives me a great feeling of security. No wonder, other people, less brainy and less fortunate that I am, are working hard to take a seat beside me in this special enclosure.
As a VIP I belong to that category of citizens who are absolutely sure that if they ever take the law into their own hands they will not come to any harm. We have the confidence that the law will take us in its gentle hands as if it was our godfather. For example, I am not bothered by traffic signals (like the truck driver I have talked about) or the constable blowing his whistle at me.
If I am not able to get a court of law to dislodge a truculent tenant from my considerable property I take half a dozen obliging toughs to the place and throw the tenant and his family and furniture out on the road.
If there is a vacant municipal plot adjoining one of my houses, I appropriate it without a moment's thought to propriety or proprietary rights. My son, aged twelve, drives a car that his doting mother has given him and frequently runs over people and policemen with impunity.
My elder son wields a gun in college and was rusticated once, though the principal too had to suffer a transfer. (I sometimes forget the boy has grown so big. I hardly ever see him).
My daughter's father-in-law is a secretary in the provincial government, and my sister is married to a federal additional secretary. My first cousin is an MNA and another a senior police officer.
My elder brother is a budding industrialist with foreign affiliations and was close to the former PM, though I have advised him not to mention the fact nowadays. All said and done, I am rather well-connected, and since I also know a whole lot of people in the right places, it gives me an advantage over many so-called prominent citizens.
The law is not the only thing that holds no fear for me. I am certainly not a common man in respect of many other privileges. If I need cement or steel or bricks for one of the houses I am always building, I know where to get them cheap, and quickly, I don't have to stand in queues to pay my bills or get my servant's ID card made or to have my passport renewed.
Almost regularly, every three years or so, I am allotted a residential plot on the basis of the fact that neither I nor my wife and children own any urban property in any part of the country.
If my college-going son takes a potshot with his gun at a member of the rival student gang, I know a couple of newspaper editors who can be relied upon to keep the news out of the press. The police, of course, I can well look after.
I am also what is known as a respectable citizen. I joined that assembly as soon as I retired from government service. The most enjoyable privilege attached to the appellation "prominent public figure" is that I get invited to all sorts of places.
I regularly receive an invitation to the Horse & Cattle Show at Lahore, and (you won't believe it) I even made it once to a meeting of intellectuals called by a prime minister to find out the country's pressing problems. I am available 24 hours a day to APP to give a favourable comment on the national budget or on anything done by a ruling regime to promote democracy or demote it.
All this gives me the well-deserved feeling that I am the government's son-in-law, to use a crude Punjabi phrase. It also makes me aware of my inherent birthright to get things free.
When cinema-going was common, I never bought a ticket, nor do I buy one now for any play or show or entertainment. During any popular music concert you will find me snoring in the front row or, if it is a cricket test match, chatting with a friend in the VIP enclosure. I always say that whether I go to a function or not, it is my right to be invited.
With all these privileges and contacts why should I have to bother about the law and its piddling concerns? After all, I am not a dacoit or a highway robber (although I have robbed banks in my own legal way) that the minions of law and order should be allowed to spoil my peace of mind. And if my peers are trying to emulate me, and in the process they are jumping traffic signals (like that enterprising truck driver) or throwing their weight about as best as they can, its not my fault. I wish them luck in their endeavours to match my good fortune.
The debate must continue
The national debate on Kashmir which President Pervez Musharraf had called for appears to be running out of steam. Now the president, who saw light at the end of the tunnel only a few weeks ago, has been speaking of vibes that are not "encouraging" from India.
A month ago - on October 25 to be precise - the president had suggested at an Iftar party that new options be explored since the status quo in Kashmir was unacceptable. To kickstart the debate he had suggested that various regions in Kashmir be identified in terms of their local culture and demographic composition and then be demilitarized.
Subsequently, it should be decided under whose control these areas should be. He also said that there could be joint India-Pakistan control or the United Nations could be asked to play a role.
The president described his proposal as "just a food for thought". That is precisely what it could have been considering that it was floated off the cuff at an Iftar party which was hardly a place for formal discussions on Kashmir.
Explaining his move to a conference of South Asian journalists in Lahore last Saturday, he said there were two reasons why he had suggested an open debate on various options on Kashmir.
One, he had never been able to elicit a tangible solution from numerous Pakistanis, Indians and Kashmiris he had spoken to. Hence he had broadly formulated some options to give a direction to the debate. Second, it would give the leaders in India and Pakistan a feel of public opinion before they got down to discussing the Kashmir issue.
This is a rational explanation. But what is difficult to understand is why the president and his colleagues in the government had to jump into the fray when the debate got going.
In fact, the Indian prime minister initially adopted a sensible approach when he responded by saying that he was prepared to discuss President Musharraf's proposals as part of their composite dialogue but no good would come out of conducting the talks through the media.
By keeping the limelight on himself, the president has subsequently found himself in the unenviable position of defending his stance. Since the proposal was first floated, the government has come under attack from the opposition.
And a spate of statements from official quarters has followed reaffirming that Islamabad had not given up its principled stand on Kashmir. Within a week of his earlier proposal, President Musharraf strongly reiterated that there would be no sell-out on Kashmir.
When he had called for a public debate he had not spelt out a solution. In the following weeks, he retracted from the bold stand he had taken and for which he had won public acclaim.
The fact is that if there is to be a meaningful resolution of the Kashmir dispute, the two sides will have to move away from their conventional positions. With the status quo favouring India, and the balance of power in South Asia not tilting heavily towards Pakistan, we cannot expect New Delhi to agree to change the status quo.
The initiative taken by President Musharraf that had promised to make a headway towards peace in the region appears to be losing its promise. The president, who was until a short time ago speaking about seeing light at the end of the tunnel, now says the light is fading.
It is a pity if this opportunity for peace is wasted. The president should realize that at a time when critical issues are under discussion, the more discreet he and other government leaders are in issuing statements about Kashmir and India the lesser are the chances of jeopardizing the fledgling peace initiative.
Let the people debate the options. The governments on both sides should stay out of this exercise which takes place in the limelight of the media. It is inevitable that when either of the two governments feels obliged to defend its position, it has to take a hawkish stance.
Even though its reply may be directed at its domestic audience, the government ends up provoking the other side into reiterating its stance. For India, Kashmir remains an integral part of the Indian Union.
For Pakistan it is the oft repeated demand for a plebiscite in the disputed territory. This helps no one at all while it results in a hardening of the positions of the two sides which makes a solution all the more elusive.
Both India and Pakistan have still to learn from the experience of the governments which have negotiated tricky issues and managed to reach a settlement. The American government negotiated secretly with the Vietcong in Paris for three years before the war in Vietnam ended.
Again, it took the United States eight years after Henry Kissinger had paid his secret visit to Beijing in 1971 to establish diplomatic relations with China. The now defunct Oslo Accord between the Palestinians and the Israelis came after three years of quiet diplomacy.
It takes time to untangle the complex knots which make a dispute of long standing so intractable. But in the period that the two governments are struggling to resolve their differences, wisdom demands that they observe a discreet silence on the issues being debated. Journalists will ask questions. It is their job.
A government upholding the freedom of the press will not try to muzzle their voice. But it should know the art of parrying their questions and be skilful in giving evasive replies.
Hence, the debate which has been prodded by the president should be allowed to go on without the active intervention of the government. It has already had the positive effect of getting the Indian prime minister's office to respond by putting forward its own proposals.
They are not exactly what the Pakistan government may jump at. But they definitely are a shift from India's own long standing position, that is, Kashmir is an integral part of India and not negotiable. The prime minister's office in New Delhi has called for "self rule" in both parts of Kashmir and "open borders" between them.
If both the governments let the political parties, the public and the media in their own countries pick up the thread from here, it may be possible for the diplomats when they meet in the next round of the composite dialogue to negotiate quietly and evolve a new formula based on the positive features of both proposals.
Planning the next cataclysm
In the run-up to the US presidential election, many of us were too busy hoping that George Bush would get his comeuppance at the hands of the electorate to give sufficient thought to the shape his second term might take. That term won't begin for another couple of months, but its contours are already broadly discernible.
It would, perhaps, be unwise to read too much into the projected change at the helm of the state department. Condoleezza Rice will, no doubt, bring to the job a more abrasive personality and a more clearly ideological agenda than the incumbent. But Colin Powell has done little during his tenure as secretary of state to justify his reputation as a reasonable and principled soldier.
Many Americans will be thrilled to see the back of attorney-general John Ashcroft, the most fundamentalist member of Bush's cabinet - although his departure may be lamented by the evangelicals whose electoral participation in unprecedented numbers effectively accounted for the president's triumph.
Ashcroft's successor, Alberto Gonzales, apparently excites more ambiguous emotions among religious conservatives, because during his brief tenure as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, he once ruled in favour of allowing a 17-year-old to obtain an abortion without parental consent.
What's considerably more significant is the fact that he was appointed to that post, despite his lack of judicial experience, by the then governor of Texas - who now happens to be the president of the United States - and that while on the bench he accepted money from corporations such as Halliburton and Enron. That sort of past marks him out as a loyal Bush family retainer, albeit perhaps not quite in the same league as Rice.
There have been other comings and goings, too, among the governing circle, but they pale in comparison to one change that has not occurred: heedless of the calls for his resignation that began in earnest earlier this year when evidence of systematic torture at Abu Ghraib prison first became public, the thoroughly discredited Donald Rumsfeld remains firmly ensconced in his post as secretary of defence.
That, reportedly, is the position that Condi Rice was aspiring for. Bush may anyhow have had some reservations about granting her wish, but the absence of a vacancy presumably made it easier for him to persuade her to take over the State Department. The president may not enjoy comparable leeway over appointments to the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney - quite possibly the most powerful vice-president the US has ever had - go back a long way. They have worked in tandem in several Republican administrations, beginning in the Nixon years, and it is far from clear that they are willing to part company just yet, while their agenda for decisively establishing American hegemony over all the countries in that oil-soaked stretch between Pakistan and Israel remains unaccomplished.
It is conceivable that both of them will go back to lucrative positions in the private sector at some mutually convenient juncture during the second term, if only to make way for the next generation of far-right ideologues.
In which case, it is likely that Rumsfeld will be replaced by his highly motivated deputy, the dreaded Paul Wolfowitz, while it would be logical for the vice-presidency to go to the omnipotent neo conservative cabal's preferred presidential candidate for 2008.
The overall impression imparted by the mood in Washington is that the tendencies of the past four years are likely to be reinforced rather than relaxed. The lessons of the first term remain unlearned.
The one silver lining that some analysts espied around the clouds of smoke that hang over Iraq was the prospect that the scale of the disaster would militate against further misadventures. That presumption was predicated on the supposition that the Bush administration's policymakers were not completely immune to common sense.
However, the recent sabre-rattling over Iran suggests that was too generous a view. The rhetoric - whose chief ingredient, arrogance, is strongly flavoured with deja vu - suggests that a third Gulf war could be around the corner even as the second one continues to rage.
Reports at the weekend, citing official US sources, said that the Pentagon's latest game-plans for Iran involve attacks not just on suspected nuclear facilities but on political targets as well.
Pre-emption and regime change is thus likely to be recycled as a mantra by the would-be aggressors, notwithstanding the fact that, the first time around, it turned out there was nothing to pre-empt, and the puppet-in-chief installed in Baghdad looks like he would be Saddam Hussein's equal in any thuggery context.
The ostensible reason for the sudden heightening of hostility towards Tehran is the latter's nuclear ambitions; after all, the Knesset was informed a few months ago that according to Israeli intelligence assessments, Iran posed the biggest threat to the Jewish state. (That privilege had previous been bestowed upon Iraq, even though the Saddam regime evidently had nothing to fight with.)
Beyond the superficial stimulus for possible action, there is of course a deep vein of animosity that runs all the way back to the Shah's overthrow in 1979, which for the US was tantamount to the loss of an invaluable regional asset.
That did not prevent the Reagan regime from secretly selling arms to the mullahs (ironically, via Israel) when it wanted them to help secure the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. At the same time, however, the US was encouraging and assisting Saddam in his aggression against Iran.
There can be little question most of the hopes raised among Iranians by the successful popular revolt against the Pahlavi dynasty were dashed by the ayatollahs who established a monopoly of power by sidelining - and in many cases physically exterminating - the Shah's liberal and left-wing opponents.
Although leavened by occasional bouts of relaxation, the stifling regime has endured for a quarter of a century. Many Iranians, particularly younger ones, yearn for change and a genuine democracy.
It is extremely unlikely, however, that large numbers would have looked upon an American invasion as a possible panacea even before Iraq exploded in Uncle Sam's face. US ground troops in Iran would encounter even bloodier resistance. Perhaps that is why the Pentagon appears to be contemplating air strikes alone, delivered by American or Israeli forces.
The Bush administration couldn't possibly be unaware of the sort of genies an Israeli attack on Iran would unleash right across the Muslim world, even in countries that don't care very much for the ayatollahs' kind of Islamic rule.
But - and this is what distinguishes it from most, if not all, previous administrations - it simply doesn't care. America's preposterous advantage in firepower is all that matters. Hearts and minds, if they can't be won over, can always be blown apart.
The confrontation with Iran is also likely to set the US on another collision course with Europe. The heightened American rhetoric has already undermined efforts by the European Union to resolve the nuclear row through diplomatic means - which were boosted this week when Iran promised to suspend all uranium enrichment activities, earning a pat on the back from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Mohammed ElBaradei.
But Iranian compliance, superficial or otherwise, with the IAEA and EU conditions hardly provides grounds for complacency. If the Bushies are determined to "get" Iran, chances are they will go ahead and do so, regardless of the consequences. They won't care for European opposition. They won't be devastated even in the unlikely event of Tony Blair opting out of the next gratuitous war.
If the issue is considered in isolation, not many people around the world would be ecstatic at the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons capability. But why should it be viewed thus? The problem is not just that those who condemn Iran's nuclear ambitions after having turned a blind eye for decades to Israel's presumed arsenal are guilty of cant. The bigger problem is that the entire non-proliferation regime is shrouded in hypocrisy.
Non-proliferation makes sense only in the context of a project to rid the whole world of nuclear weapons. In the absence of that, it amounts to what India once aptly labelled nuclear apartheid.
This does not, of course, make proliferation in any way a commendable feat. It does, unfortunately, make it inevitable - particularly in view of the appallingly hegemonistic approach that the US has adopted.
Can nations that fear military aggression or intimidation by Washington help but wonder whether the US would have dared to attack Iraq had its so-called fears about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction been well-founded?
Colin Powell is currently visiting the Middle East in an attempt to add some feat to his legacy that might overshadow the untruths he so sincerely expounded at the Security Council in February last year.
It's probably a futile quest at this stage of his career, and one can only wonder whether he realizes that his reputation would not now be so tattered had he been principled enough to walk out of the Bush cabinet ahead of the assault on Iraq.
Now, with Dubya, Dick, Rummy and Condi in charge, and Karl Rove hovering in the background like a malign spirit, it is painful to contemplate the shape of the world four years hence. In fact, in the worst-case scenario, that may prove to be no more than an academic question.
E-mail: mahirali2@netscape.net.