| 18 December 2004 | Saturday | 05 Ziqa'ad 1425 |
Medals of failure
A short sighted vision
Political doublespeak
Talking with the Tigers
Pakistan's refusal to accept the Line of Control as an international border, as stated repeatedly by the foreign office, the president and now parliamentary sub-committee on Kashmir, is at best a case of jumping the gun.
One says this because since the beginning of the composite dialogue now under way with India, the two sides have barely got down to discussing Kashmir, let alone started working on a resolution of the 57-year-old dispute.
Moreover, the LoC has hitherto not been part of the India-Pakistan broader disagreement on Kashmir. Instead, Pakistan has long had a principled stand on the issue, saying it is a matter of the Kashmiris' right of self-determination and not merely a territorial dispute with India, as opposed to the way New Delhi has seen the conflict.
For its part, India should realize that its long-held position on Kashmir that it is its 'atoot ang' (integral part) is untenable. It is all about laying a claim on a territory whose majority of native inhabitants does not wish to remain part of India.
The challenge now is that while both Pakistan and India have agreed to discuss Kashmir as part of the on-going composite dialogue, it is unclear how the two sides plan to bridge the gap that exists in their respective perceptions of the conflict.
Earlier, Pakistan's stepping down from insisting that a UN-sponsored plebiscite be held in the disputed territory to ascertain its future was a pragmatic concession made with a view to set the tone for a constructive engagement with India.
This should clear the way for the Indians to start a meaningful dialogue with the Kashmiris at their end. Simultaneously, India should stop evading a dialogue with Pakistan on the subject. In good time, the three parties to the dispute can meet and thrash out a final settlement.
Leaving the final status of the LoC and India's claim over all of Jammu and Kashmir aside, the truth is that Kashmir today is a neglected humanitarian tragedy. What is more disturbing is that the world has left it at the mercy of India and Pakistan to resolve between themselves.
According to independent sources, the conflict has claimed over 100,000, mostly civilian, lives since the uprising began there in 1989 - a fact that has been conveniently shoved under the carpet.
An estimated half a million people, comprising both Muslims and Hindu Pandits, have been driven away from their homes in the Kashmir Valley and condemned to live as refugees.
Thousands of men have been tortured by the Indian security forces, and a large number of them have 'disappeared' after security forces took them into custody. Many more have been coerced by militants into taking up arms against repressive Indian rule. Women have been raped and children kidnapped. What more does the world need to acknowledge Kashmir as a seething humanitarian disaster?
A generation of Kashmiris has grown up away from home. While native Hindu residents of the Valley have sought refuge in Jammu and Delhi fearing threat to their lives, Muslims have trailed into Azad Kashmir by the thousands to escape persecution by the Indian security forces.
The Valley has been under the worst kind of repression, with summary execution laws in place that do not give the accused the right to defend themselves. There is a paramilitary person to keep guard on every three Kashmiris. Tourism, once the economic lifeline of the Valley, has shrunk tremendously in the face of the violence that has been going on there for the last 13 years.
The Congress-led Indian government should own the fact that much of the mess created in Kashmir today has not been the handiwork of the outgoing BJP-led government. To be true to history, the BJP had inherited the Kashmir problem the two times it came to power in India but, toeing its hard-line on the issue, it offered no break from the past.
Fraudulent elections held in the Valley under successive Congress governments in the past and installation of non-representative governments in the restive state were what resulted in the outbreak of the insurgency there in 1989 in the first place.
If Dr Manmohan Singh's government can find the courage to own these facts as the starting point of his quest for a Kashmir solution today, there is every hope that a new beginning can be made.
The Kashmiris today are a paradox unto themselves. They are a largely divided people as far as their disparate groups' political thinking and agendas are concerned; yet the only unifying factor among them is their common refusal to be subjugated by New Delhi.
India needs to ascertain the reasons behind this massive alienation among the people it insists on counting among its own. This cannot be achieved through use of force or coercive methods, but only through pursuing an honest and result-oriented dialogue.
For its part, Pakistan should stick to its original position, arguing for the Kashmiris to be given a chance to exercise their right of self-determination.
The insistence on the LoC not being acceptable to Islamabad as an international border at this critical juncture is ill-timed, and it can be expected to have little positive bearing on the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leadership's decision to enter into a dialogue with New Delhi.
Islamabad should instead find the courage to say that any solution acceptable to the Kashmiris will also be acceptable to Pakistan. This is necessary to disprove the impression that Islamabad may be pulling the strings for certain breakaway Hurriyat camps.
Pakistan stands to lose nothing by forcefully enunciating this principled stand, for it is after all the Kashmiris' long-usurped right of self-determination that has been Islamabad's rallying cry on Kashmir.
The public opinion back home is quite favourably disposed towards such a principled stance. The odd ones out there, the extremist elements, for one, who may seek to get political mileage out of this should not be a cause for holding the majority of moderate Pakistanis hostage to the Kashmir dispute - now that there is a hope of moving forward on this stickling issue.
To build on the emergence of this public opinion within Pakistan, and to ease up the pressure on the APHC leadership, India would do well to take a number of confidence-building measures.
Withdrawal of Indian troops from the restive Valley should be expedited, and restrictions placed on the movement of Kashmiris within the state as well as across the LoC could go a long way in creating goodwill on all three sides.
The proposed bus service between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar can start right away if New Delhi stopped insisting on passports and visas being prerequisites for facilitating travel between the two sides.
Leaving aside the final settlement of the dispute between India and Pakistan, this should be permitted on purely humanitarian grounds. Families living on both sides of the LoC have been separated by war and bad blood between the two countries for too long, and they can only respond positively to such a gesture, which will help further the cause of finding a lasting solution to the dispute.
Statesmanship, rather than political one-upmanship, is what is required in Islamabad and New Delhi to move forward on the road to reconciliation which both sides have verbally committed themselves to by promising to travel and meet up each other halfway.
General Musharraf is right when he says that Kashmir is ripe for a solution; India should take up the challenge and show the generosity and confidence expected of it as being the larger, more democratic and powerful country of the region.
Medals of failure
Where's Kerik? This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my computer screen.
First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Then came L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States sent too few troops to Iraq.
One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue velvet ribbon with the ornate medal - one failure after another, each now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a best seller.)
I braced myself. Could Bernard Kerik be next? Would we skip the entire process of mal administration, mis judgments in office and sycophantic admiration of the current president and go straight to the celebrated failure? After all, what seems to matter most to this president is not performance - certainly not excellence - but a matey kind of loyalty and obsequiousness, of which Kerik had plenty.
"Bernie," Bush called out at a White House ceremony last year. Kerik, who was walking away, stopped. "Yes, sir," he said. "You're a good man," the president said.
It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of youth and then - wow! - this explosive career, coming out of the starting gate like Sea biscuit, another runt with something less than an elite East Coast pedigree.
What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.
Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot - on the face of it - both deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United States did not use enough troops there.
"We never had enough troops on the round," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency.
For the record, Franks - prodded by Donald Rumsfeld - is the guy who never had enough troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither. The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush.
It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. -Dawn/Washington Post Service
A short sighted vision
A former Pakistan air chief who led a delegation of retired military officers to India a few days ago made a poignant remark at a farewell party in New Delhi. He said he wished those who left Pakistan after its formation had not done so because his country missed the texture of society it intended to have.
Probably, he did not realize that theirs was not an easy choice. They had to leave because they were non-Muslims. When they locked their houses behind they thought they would return after things had settled down.
There was no going back - this realization came to them only when they saw two streams of human beings on the main Grand Trunk Road, one flowing towards India and the other towards Pakistan. Muslims went through the same traumatic experience.
However, thousands of them have come back to the state, not Punjabis but others. In contrast, there is hardly any Hindu in West Punjab. This is what makes India different despite all the onslaughts of Hindutva.
Non-Muslims would have stayed back in Pakistan if Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's reinterpretation of the two-nation theory had been carried out. Its ethos became secularism, not religion.
He said that Muslims ceased to be Muslims and Hindus ceased to be Hindus; they were either Pakistanis or Indians. Mahatma Gandhi, in turn, declared that he would live in Pakistan and seek no visa to enter.
Gandhi was shot dead by the extremists and Jinnah was abandoned by similar elements and left dying as a disillusioned man. Both leaders who were at the helm of political affairs then did not envisage that the minorities would have to quit because of their religion in the country to which they belonged. Both were dejected when the migration began.
I recall the talk I had with Jinnah in 1946 when he addressed the Law College at Lahore. I was then in the final year. I asked him what would happen in the subcontinent after the departure of the British because the hatred between Hindus and Muslims had reached a boiling point.
He said: Some nations have killed millions of each other's and yet an enemy of today is a friend of tomorrow. That is history. Look at France and Germany which have fought each other for hundreds of years.
I wish that had come true in the subcontinent. We have fought three and a half wars and killed thousands. Retired military officers who came here and some of ours who went there were then in the forefront.
The problem between the two countries has got more aggravated over the years. What was once a Hindu-Muslim hiatus has now become the confrontation between India and Pakistan which are laced with nuclear missiles. Partition has failed solve the basic problem of communal bias.
I see the same fires of prejudice burning in the two countries. Misinformation, misunderstanding or misinterpretation of religion is grist to the hatred mill which is working all the time.
Fundamentalists on both sides are set against communal harmony. The common man wants to bury the hatchet while keeping his identity intact. But fundamentalists on either side sabotage even the most altruistic initiative to span the distance between the two.
It is strange that the Pakistan government should want to take credit for its campaign against prejudice when the history it teaches in schools and colleges is partisan and begins with the advent of Muslim rule in India. What about the civilization of Moenjodaro and Taxila? They do not figure anywhere because they are related to Hinduism and Buddhism. This is how bias is sown.
Revising history books should be one step to judge how serious President General Pervez Musharraf is about fostering secularism, Jinnahs legacy. People-to-people contact has busted the walls of prejudice and suspicion to some extent - only to some extent.
Religious parties wield great influence and they run state governments in the North West Frontier Province exclusively and in Baluchistan with the support of Musharraf. Even otherwise, he has close understanding with the religious elements which first approved of his presidency and now give empty threats that they will not tolerate his uniform beyond December 31.
The process of people meeting from the different fields in India and Pakistan has diluted religious fanaticism. But when Musharraf says, "I am giving bilateralism a final chance in Kashmir" and when Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh declares that "all is not well", the atmosphere becomes heavy.
It means that the two governments are beginning to build a case to restrict the contact. Although India is issuing 10,000 visas daily and Pakistan 8,000, they can go back to the old days when the flow of visitors from one country to the other was a trickle.
This necessitates the implementation of decisions reached on some of the confidence-building measures. Another round of composite talks that has begun now should see to it.
Kashmir is a symptom. The disease is bias. Even in the valley, fundamentalism has come to the fore, pushing to the background what was once a nationalist movement.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani's pre-eminence in the valley indicates that. The efforts made to solve Kashmir are welcome. If they are successful the two countries will benefit immensely. But we would be deluding ourselves about permanent peace if we fail in resolving to tackle bias.
Our priority should be to establish secularism on both sides. India has been lucky because leaders even after Nehru made no compromise with communalism. The BJP which did was ousted lock, stock and barrel. In Pakistan no leader after Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan has pursued secularism.
The result is that ideologically the two countries stand poles apart. Musharraf says he is fighting fundamentalists. But he is also seeking their assistance for political purposes. His other problem is the jihadi elements in the military.
In truth, fundamentalists in both the countries are vitiating the atmosphere and stoking the fires of prejudice. The eruption in India is met with eruption in Pakistan. The demolition of Babri masjid is one example. What happened in its wake in Pakistan was equally vindictive when practically all the Hindu temples were damaged in retaliation.
Relations between New Delhi and Islamabad will not improve until fundamentalists are out of the reckoning. If Kashmir is the be-all-end-all for Pakistan, it can be solved only up to the point which has the support of the BJP. True, former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee deserves all the credit for having set the ball rolling in January this year.
Yet how far he would have conceded to Pakistan would never be known. The Manmohan Singh government, I am sure, must be keeping the BJP in the picture behind the scenes. But the stage of assessing how far it is willing to concede on Kashmir is yet to come.
What people on both sides should meanwhile do is to deepen contacts at every level so as to make it difficult for the governments to impose restrictions even when they want to.
People should not be dependent on their whims. In fact, they should be debating the South Asian economic zone, from Afghanistan to Myanmar, to push relations beyond nationalities, borders and religions. It is a pity that the persons who rule the region are pygmies, not visionaries.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
Political doublespeak
Tommy Thompson announced his resignation the other day as US secretary of health and human services and, in the process, gave Americans a quick tutorial on why they can't control exploding federal spending for retirement benefits - the nation's No. 1 budget problem.
We have a generation of politicians, of both parties and of whom Thompson is symbolic, who want to say "yes" to voters: Yes, you can have what you want, and you can have it now.
The solution to this problem requires leaders to say "no" to voters: No, you cannot have all the retirement benefits you've been promised or desire, because we can't afford them. Americans reject that message, and our leaders don't dare deliver it.
The result is political doublespeak that, on an abstract level, acknowledges the terrible problem of "entitlements" but, on a practical level, does nothing about it - or even makes it worse.
At his news conference, Thompson was asked about his greatest accomplishment. "You got to put the complete overhaul ... of the Medicare [programme] pretty much at the top of the list," he said.
That would be the Medicare drug benefit passed in 2003 and to be introduced in 2006. Here is thunderous doublespeak: Far from a triumph, the Medicare drug benefit is one of the worst pieces of social legislation in decades.
Let's see. Even before the drug benefit, the combined costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (which covers some nursing home care) were projected to grow by about 80 percent, as a share of national income, by 2030.
This implies huge tax increases, immense budget deficits or dramatic cuts in other government programmes. The drug benefit merely adds to the costs. In 2006 Medicare will spend an average of $2,069 on drug bills for each recipient, say Medicare's actuaries. By 2013, that reaches $3,367.
As baby boomers retire, Medicare drug spending rises rapidly. Without the drug benefit, Medicare spending was projected to grow from 2.6 percent of national income (gross domestic product) in 2003 to about 5 percent of GDP in 2030.
Adding the drug benefit, total Medicare spending jumps to almost 7 percent of GDP in 2030 - a huge increase. In today's dollars the extra drug spending would amount to $200 billion annually in 2030.
Well, if the cost is staggering, at least the need must be overwhelming. Actually, it isn't. True, drug costs are rising; the elderly pay more. But there's scant evidence that most Medicare recipients can't get the drugs they need.
CONSIDER: Three-quarters of Americans older than 65 already have some insurance for drugs. Medicaid often covers the poorest of the poor. For many elderly people, drug costs aren't oppressive.
About 10 percent have no drug costs at all, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. An additional 29 percent have annual costs of less than $1,000. Only 28 percent have costs exceeding $3,000.
Those figures represent total costs, including what insurance pays. As for out-of-pocket drug spending, it averaged $623 for people older than 65 in 2000. In opinion surveys, only about 3 percent of Medicare beneficiaries say they can't get the drugs prescribed for them - for economic or other reasons.
Let it be said that there is a case for a Medicare drug benefit covering truly catastrophic costs. But that benefit should have been a carrot for basic reforms, raising the eligibility age and slowly shifting more overall costs to retirees.
No one attempted that bargain. Instead, President Bush, Secretary Thompson and every member of Congress who voted for the Medicare drug benefit knowingly worsened the long-term budget outlook without solving any major social problem. The main result is to allow the elderly to spend more of their money on things they want by shifting the cost of drugs to younger taxpayers.
What motivated this legislative atrocity? Here's Thompson's answer: "Seniors from Alaska to Florida demanded that we provide them a prescription drug benefit ... and I'm happy to say we have delivered."
Another interpretation would be that the Bush administration was trying to buy the support of retirees with hundreds of billions of dollars of new handouts. Either way, it's the politics of "yes."
One narrow lesson: Be suspicious of the Bush administration's forthcoming proposals for Social Security "personal accounts." If the drug benefit is any guide, the motives are mainly political.
The larger lesson is that Americans are living in a self-created culture of delusion. The central truth about retirement "entitlements" is this: The only guaranteed way to cut spending growth is to cut benefits. But this truth is unspeakable, so no one speaks it. In this climate, Thompson's self-serving boast passes as a plausible claim when it's actually an absurdity. There's a compartmentalization of thought and conversation.
Rapid spending growth is considered "bad," but anything that might cut that growth can't be discussed. By and large, the news media abide by this protocol of deception. Not surprisingly, news coverage of the Medicare drug debate was abysmally one-sided.
Hardly anyone mentioned who would pay the long-term costs or asked whether the benefit was justified. Much coverage focused on gaps in the proposed coverage. Meanwhile, a drumbeat of other stories deplored present and future budget deficits. The inconsistency was glaring.
In wealthy democracies - welfare states all - individual benefits once conferred are considered sacrosanct, but when their total costs threaten the collective good, they must somehow be controlled.
There's the paralyzing contradiction. The politics of "yes" must ultimately yield to the politics of "no" - and the longer it's delayed, the more painful it will be. -Dawn/Washington Post Service
Talking with the Tigers
Come to Elephant Pass to witness a rarity: a place where the contradictions of the "war on terror" have not produced the usual regression. In most of the world the fight against "international terrorism" has had negative effects.
In western Europe it has led to restrictions on civil liberties, including prolonged detention without trial. In the US, it has created an unprecedented sense of fear, manipulated by politicians. In Russia, the authorities have used it to prolong a vicious war against Chechen fighters. But in northern Sri Lanka, a group that Britain, the US and other western governments label terrorists administers a huge chunk of land with its own police and courts.
These self-same governments not only give no help towards crushing this enclave, they accept its existence, pump in aid money through UN agencies, and urge the Sri Lankan government to negotiate with its leaders.
The reason? Western states realize that, although the group has used terrorist methods and assassinates Tamils who criticize it, it has widespread popular support and makes legitimate demands.
To view this example of common sense in a world that has gone hysterical over "terror", you drive south from Jaffna, Sri Lanka's northernmost city. Dozens of army posts and sandbagged gun emplacements line the potholed road up to a no man's land where bored monitors from the international committee of the Red Cross watch the trouble-free crossing points.
Then you enter the territory controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam after two decades of armed struggle to safeguard the rights of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. Parliamentary efforts to curb discrimination by the majority Sinhalese have long since failed.
Four years ago, the causeway known as Elephant Pass saw one of the bloodiest battles of modern times. This was not the usual asymmetrical warfare of a hi-tech airforce bombing targets in densely populated areas (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq) but more akin to the First World War. Young guerrillas waded through swamps under heavy artillery to capture army outposts in deserted countryside. More than 10,000 died on both sides.
The strategic result of the Tigers' victory was stunning. The government accepted a cease fire that was brokered by Norwegian diplomats, and the Tigers were left in control of large areas where Sri Lanka's Tamils live.
Because it pioneered the use of suicide bombing that killed scores of civilians in the 90s, the Tigers were put on international lists of "terrorist organizations". That does not prevent the Tigers' chief negotiator from living in London, meeting diplomats and addressing the Tamil diaspora.
Nor has it stopped Britain's high commissioner from travelling to the Tigers' capital in Kilinochchi. US officials take the road to Jaffna that passes through "Tiger country" and when they stop for a rest just happen to find themselves in contact.
If the outside world treats the issue with intelligence and sensitivity, the same cannot be said for the Sri Lankan parties. After six rounds of peace talks on Tamil autonomy, face-to-face negotiations facilitated by Norway collapsed last year. The government then fell in an election in which the opposition claimed too many concessions had been made.
Although the new government, led by President Chandrika Kumaratunga, claims it shares its predecessors' willingness to negotiate, talks have not resumed. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of displaced civilians have seen little or no peace dividend. Money promised by the government to rebuild damaged homes is held back. Tamil villagers and fishermen cannot return to land sealed off by the army.
Now even the cease-fire is under question. Last month the Tigers' leader said that if delays continue, "we (will) have no alternative than to advance the freedom struggle of our nation".
Some saw this as an ultimatum for a return to war, but S.P. Thamilselvan, the head of the Tigers' political section and the Norwegian facilitators' main contact, told me: "It doesn't express any suggestion of a deadline, but the leadership has a responsibility to convey to the world that Tamil people have touched the fringe of their impatience."
For the outside world, the crisis is a lesson in the importance of far-sighted political leadership. Sri Lanka has so much going for it. It has a vibrant parliamentary democracy. No foreign powers are interfering. Tourists flood to its beaches.
But the Sinhalese elite seems unable to embrace change. A coalition between the two largest Sinhalese parties could end the immediate deadlock easily. It is blocked by absurd personal rivalries between the president and the opposition leader. Even if they were to agree on sensible terms for negotiations with the Tigers, both parties would have a huge task. - Dawn/Guardian Service