| 31 December 2004 | Friday | 18 Ziqa'ad 1425 |
Pakistan's nuclear strategy
Where to start with Europe
A state of chaos
Expressions such as "Islamic extremism" reflect both a misunderstanding as well as a bias against the religion. The Quranic world view is that of peace and tolerance while aggression is expressly prohibited.
It is, nevertheless, also true that Islam spread like wildfire within a hundred years of the Prophet Mohammad's (PBUH) death. Arab armies established a vast empire stretching from Spain, across North Africa to the river Indus in what is now Pakistan.
In Islamic history, there has never been any forced conversion because the Quran prohibits coercion in matters of faith. Consequently, no wars of religion have ever been waged. There has never been any Inquisition as in mediaeval Europe and no heretic has been burnt at the stake.
Violence is anathema to Islamic doctrine. In the year 630, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) triumphantly re-entered his native city, Makkah. The event changed history. In 1882, Stanley Lane-Pool wrote: "The day of Muhammad's greatest triumph over his enemies was also the day of his grandest victory over himself.
He freely forgave the Qureysh all the years of sorrow and cruel scorn in which they had afflicted him and gave an amnesty to the whole population of Makkah." Not a drop of blood was shed. In contrast, the Crusaders massacred without pity more than 70,000 Muslim men, women and children when they entered Jerusalem in 1099.
Hatred of Islam has been a recurrent theme of history. Political and military violence against Muslims did not end with the Crusades in Palestine or even with the successful completion of the Reconquista in Spain when, on January 2, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella received the keys of the Alhambra, the Muslim palace in Grenada.
The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed aggression against and occupation of Muslim territories in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1830, the French colonized Algiers, the British captured Aden in 1839.
These colonial powers between them took Tunisia in 1881, Egypt in 1882, the Sudan in 1889 and Libya and Morocco in 1920. They promised independence to these countries but, in effect, divided the region between themselves into spheres of influence and occupation.
Through all this and much more, the crusader attitude towards Islam continued to prevail in the West. In the introduction to her biography of Prophet Muhammad, Karen Armstrong writes that on entering Jerusalem in 1917 General Allenby boasted that "the Crusades had been completed" and when French troops reached Damascus their commander went straight to Saladin's tomb in the Great Mosque and declared: "Nous revenons, Saladin!" ("We have come back, Saladin") The knee-jerk American reaction to the barbaric terrorist acts in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 was a commitment to launch a "Crusade" against terrorism.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 which eventually resulted in the emergence of Israel in Arab and Palestinian territories in 1948 set a modern-day precedent for ethnic and religious cleansing in which Muslims were the victims. This is as true of the Balkans as it is of the Middle East and Kashmir.
The Crusades signified outright aggression against Islam; the 19th and early 20th centuries, colonization. From 1945, till the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the West was selective in its approach to the Islamic world.
It supported those countries that could promote its cold war objectives, but was indifferent to the grievances of those it did not need to defeat its former superpower adversary, the Soviet Union. Even through this period, some intellectuals of the West openly expressed contempt for Muslims.
The post-cold war era has witnessed unparalleled terrorist violence. Most of these atrocities whether in Russia, Spain, Pakistan, the US, Indonesia, the Middle East or elsewhere have been perpetrated by men and women professing Islam.
These incidents resulted in the perception that violence is encouraged by the Quran and obscured its doctrinaire emphasis on peaceful coexistence and tolerance.
The first revelation allowing Muslims to fight is in Chapter 22 Verse 39 of the Quran which came immediately after Prophet Mohammad left Makkah for Madinah in 622. However, the permission was conditional and restricted to fighting only in self-defence.
This stress against aggression is further elaborated in the second chapter revealed about a year later and repeated in other Quranic passages. The clear and simple message is that the only justification in Islam for war is to fight against aggression. Muslims are also obliged to terminate warfare should the aggressor subsequently incline towards peace.
Furthermore, kindness and not hostility towards those professing other beliefs is ordained: "As for such (of the unbelievers) as do not fight against you on account of (your) faith, and neither drive you forth from your homelands, God does not forbid you to show them kindness and to behave towards them with equity: for, verily, God loves those who act equitably."
Muslims are also obliged to grant protection to "those who ascribe divinity to aught besides God" and escort them to a place of safety should they ask for such help. With a global vision so enlightened and moderate, the question arises how a small number of extremists have managed to distort the inherently peaceful message of Islam.
A possible answer is that the Quran is quoted out of context and misinterpreted by persons professing to be Muslims. Their pronouncements have been unthinkingly accepted by those who are determined to project Islam as a religion that endorses extremist violence.
The word "jihad," for instance, is completely misunderstood. Its implication is vast and is not confined to war which, in any event, can only be waged against an aggressor. The Quran urges Muslims to defend all places of worship where the name of God is mentioned including churches, synagogues and mosques. Any attempt to prevent followers of other creeds from practising their religion is prohibited.
One of the early Quranic commentators, Ibn Sa'd, narrates a striking illustration of this principle when a delegation of Christians from Najran called on Prophet Mohammad shortly before his death.
They were given free access to his mosque and allowed to perform all their religious rites even though the attribution of divinity to Jesus, or to any person, violates a fundamental Islamic tenet.
At another level, "jihad" implies the continuous struggle that man must wage against himself and on behalf of himself. The same principle applies to Islamic society which has to be built upon the bedrock of social welfare, justice and equality of opportunities.
Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani was undoubtedly right when he insisted that the malaise in Islamic communities could only be remedied through a proper understanding of the Quran.
The Book is stylistically extremely concise and its contents can only be interpreted against the background of its entire text. A few commentators, even among Muslims, have erroneously held the view that some of the earlier verses of the Quran were abrogated during the process of revelation which began in 610 and continued for more than two decades. In other words, this warped theory militates against the concept of Divine infallibility which is central to all religions that believe in God.
Two indispensable principles, therefore, emerge for a correct interpretation of the Quranic message. The first is that its injunctions cannot be taken out of context and have to be understood against the pronouncements of the Quran as a whole; the second is that not a single verse or statement was abrogated during the long process of its revelation.
Extremists have extracted passages of the Quran to justify suicide bombings and other terrorist acts. They have also exploited the flawed concept of abrogation. For instance, the conditional permission to fight is misconstrued as authorization for indiscriminate slaughter.
Consequently absurd theories have emerged about a "sword verse" although the word "sword" does not appear even once in the Quran. It is interesting that Quran itself predicts in one of its verses (Chapter 3:7) that some of this pronouncements will be deliberately distorted by people who refuse to accept its actual message.
Finally, there is ample scope for legislation in Islamic societies. Professor M.A.S. Abdel Haleem in the introduction to his recent translation of the Quran observes: "The percentage of strictly legal text in the Quran is very small indeed.
The Quran contains some 6,200 verses and of these only 100 deal with ritual practices, 70 verses discuss personal laws, 70 verses civil laws, 30 penal laws, and 20 judiciary matters and testimony." This implies that there is no impediment in the way of parliaments in Islamic countries from enacting laws in line with modern values.
Pakistan's nuclear strategy
Tuesday's tsunami, off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, which took a toll of a minimum 60,000 lives belonging to several countries, and battered thousands of miles of the coastline stretching from Indonesia in the east to Tanzania in the west, has forced India to shut down its nuclear facility at Kalpakkam, 80 miles south of the Tamil Nadu capital of Madras.
While first reports from the area suggested that the shutdown was a precautionary measure, it was later stated that the Tsunami may have forced water into the Indira Gandhi Energy Centre at the site and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was to chair a meeting to review the possible damage.
A private TV news channel also said that 1500 families (a substantially large number) living at Kalpakkam, had been evacuated to safety. Which suggests that the feared damage to the facility could have been substantial but nothing definite could be said without a further review by a committee appointed by the prime minister. About 2290 scientists work at the facility.
An accident at Kalpakkam could have resulted in an unestimable damage to life and property. What is a matter of direct concern to Pakistan is the fact that the damage may not have remained confined to the nuclear facility.
The damage in the event of accidents at nuclear installations do not remain within a confined area and the fallout directly or indirectly hits the surrounding region as well.
The ongoing peace talks between India and Pakistan now in their tenth month have yet to extend their attention to the risks posed by the nuclearization of the subcontinent. Experts are of the view that an accident to a nuclear facility situated in the proximity of a city or a river could mean enormous damage to human life and property.
The worst recorded accident at a nuclear reactor was at a power plant at Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union in 1986 when hundreds of people were directly affected by the fallout radiation and at least 135 people in fact practically everyone within about 30 kilometres of the facility - had to be evacuated.
Accidents at nuclear plants and their storage are lethal and their potential to cause damage to human habitation can perhaps never be accurately known. There is in any case strict secrecy about nuclear facilities and nuclear products; this is in the very nature of a nuclear programme.
The explosion at a Russian site used for storing nuclear waste in the late 1950s was believed "to have killed hundreds of people and poisoned thousands of square miles in the countryside".
The potential damage from an accident at Kalpakkam affecting Pakistan and other neighbouring countries of India can perhaps not be accurately estimated, primarily because India would conceivably never make all the information about its facility public. India like Pakistan is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) nor does its have a bilateral understanding with Pakistan.
According to what is known, based on published information, the Indian nuclear power plant is believed to be similar to the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP). The well known Indian writer on nuclear problems, Praful Bidwai, has said that the reported "unusual occurrences' (with accidents not ruled out but not reported as such) in India in 1992-1993 were a frightening 147 - an accident every two and a half days.
Bidwai also maintains that 1992-1993 was not an unusual year and that "India's 27-year long experience with atomic electricity generation is a story off accidents, flagrant violations of safety rules, avoidable exposures of workers and public to radiation and toxic substances ....."
This has prompted the internationally known Pakistani scientist and peace activists, Dr. Zia Mian, one-time research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, working on peace and security, to remark: how many such 'unusual occurrences were there in Pakistan last year (1994) or the year before? "only the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) knows and they are not telling".
Dr. Zia Mian may not actually be exaggerating the facts for such matters seldom get reported to the public in Pakistan. The right of the people in Pakistan to know precisely how they stand vis-a-vis the potential threat by the nation's nuclear programme, to their health and security cannot be overemphasised.
The Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy (PPFPD) and the South Asia Free Media Association (SAFMA) and other public-spirited public organizations frequently raise the remand for the people to be kept informed on such matters.
Only the other day a group of Indian doctors on a goodwill visit to Pakistan at a seminar hosted by PPFPD and their Pakistani hosts passed a formal resolution repeating the demand.
The Indian Sindhi writers and intellectuals led by the renowned Dr. Suresh A. Keswani, of the Indian Sindh Academy currently in Pakistan, also raised the demand at a conference in Hyderabad in memory of renowned Sindhi literary figures of Pakistan also wholeheartedly endorsed the India - Pakistan efforts for peace.
However, it cannot be said that the talks between the top-level of policy makers in the two countries are progressing at the rate which the people expected at the outset.
It is generally agreed between the intelligentsia in Pakistan and India that going by our experience of the past 57 years, peace between the two countries deserves the highest priority. Unfortunately, nuclearization of the two countries has frightening implications.
For instance, during the Kargil conflict there were believed to be a number of a threats of a possible resort to nuclear weapons. Mercifully, the threats were not carried out.
The preface to the remarkable publication South Asia on a Short Fuse, co-authored by two Indian writers, Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik (the latter has held senior positions on the faculty of the Jamia Millia-i-Islamia in New Delhi) makes the unbelievable 'disclosure' that "Indian and Pakistani high officials exchanged nuclear threats directly or indirectly no fewer than 13 times in just five weeks during the Kargil crisis; it is said that these varied from warnings that "they won't hesitate to use 'any weapon' to threatening devastation in answer to the adversary's nuclear threat". The best one can is that one hopes this is not true.
It is perhaps surprising that one of the most impassioned please for denuclearization in the subcontinent came from a retired major General of the Pakistan army, Mahmud Ali Durrani, in his book The Cost of Conflict and Benefits of Peace, published in 2001.
That the saner elements in India also share Gen Durrani's concern about nuclearization is evident from the fact that the executive editor of New Delhi's daily, The Hindustan Times, which has a background of being the mouthpiece of the hardest of India's hard liners, wrote the foreword to the book.
It is difficult to disagree with Maj. Gen. Durrani's observation that "inflated egos, emotional rhetoric and deep-rooted mistrust are a common heritage of India and Pakistan which predates their independence in 1947 ... With jaundiced vision either adversary can easily misinterpret the other's intentions and initiate devastating action".
POST-SCRIPT: A most encouraging view favouring denuclearization has been expressed, unexpectedly, by a retired Lt-Gen, Mujibur Rehman, of the Pakistan army who for several years served as Gen Zia-ul-Haq's information secretary.
Gen. Mujib has said: "Some of our nuclear strategists and defence analysts supported by some prominent journalists have propagated the theory of nuclear deterrence as the nuclear strategy for Pakistan. ... But nuclear deference is nothing more than a myth. The myth needs to be explored so that it is exploded before any harm comes to our national security".
Where to start with Europe
As President Bush begins a new year's effort to rebuild ties with European allies, one good place to start would be in the heart of Europe, with Kosovo. Europe needs this festering problem resolved - and strong U.S. involvement to do it.
Kosovo is becoming increasingly dangerous. Five years of uncertainty about its future - in or out of Serbia - has left its UN overseers unable to foster economic development and, despite a series of democratic elections, unwilling to give the Kosovo government more power to run itself. The result is enormous popular frustration, leading to new and ugly violence against Kosovo's Serbs and renewed talk of unilateral action.
A further complication is the possible Hague tribunal indictment, for alleged wartime atrocities against Serbs, of the newly named prime minister, war hero Ramush Haradinaj. Sending him to the Hague could generate massive popular anger, leading to violence not just in Kosovo but also among Albanians across the border in fragile Macedonia.
The situation in Serbia continues to decline. Recent elections generated gains for extreme nationalists and produced a government that barely functions. Leading politicians are afraid to publicly accept an independent Kosovo, even while privately recognizing that Kosovo's 2 million ethnic Albanians would make Serbia unviable. They have put forth a plan to gather Serbs in Kosovo's north and east, apparently aiming to establish a strong basis for partitioning Kosovo.
Kosovo's Serbs, frightened by Albanian violence and unwilling to accept Albanian rule, have come firmly under Belgrade's thumb and refuse to participate in Kosovo's political life.
Concern is growing that this spring the perception of international indifference or division will unleash more undesirable results: massive popular protests, pressure on Kosovo's politicians to move on independence somehow and attempts by Kosovo's hard men to use force to further their ends. Belgrade's leaders see such violence as increasing the prospects for Kosovo's partition, and they may want to use provocation to help matters along.
That would be tragic for the people of Kosovo and a great embarrassment to the West. Continued uncertainty over Kosovo's future and over a possible flare-up in violence does more than just hold the region back economically; it brings into question the viability of multiethnic states, and it particularly threatens fragile Macedonia and even Serbia with all its minorities. That is a distraction that neither Brussels nor Washington wants.
The present situation is a direct result of dawdling in Washington, New York and European capitals. For too long the difficulties of working out a Kosovo solution that would stick were just too painful to face. From 1999 on, all sides resorted to hoping something would turn up.
When nothing did, they foisted a neo-colonial administration on Kosovo and saddled its citizens with standards for government that were desirable but unrealistic - while offering little economic development and no reason to hope for a permanent solution.
Today it is the prospect of stalemate and renewed violence that is too painful to face. The United States usefully nudged the process along this year by declaring that 2005 would be the crucial time for starting the resolution of Kosovo's status.
Now the time has arrived. Western countries and Russia - the so-called "contact group" - must work out both the tricky nature of a solution and the difficult process for getting there.
A settlement must bite the bullet on independence, provide ironclad protection for Kosovo's Serb population and offer Serbia a fast track toward membership in the European Union once it resolves the Kosovo problem. Any solution will also require the rest of the world to continue providing resources, troops and careful monitoring for years.
The process of reaching a solution will be equally difficult. The road to resolution will, at some point, have to traverse serious negotiations between Kosovo and Serbia, proceed through a balky and sovereignty-obsessed U.N. Security Council, and, ultimately, be expressed in a final act or international conference.
Time was that the U.S. and European presence in the Balkans symbolized a robust commitment by Nato to defend its interests and values. Today, instead, that presence poses this serious question: If the United States and Europe can't work more vigorously together to resolve conflicts in Europe, how can either hope to deal successfully with much larger conflicts outside Europe? President Bush should commit the United States, working with its European friends and allies, to thrash matters out on Kosovo this year. -Dawn/Washington Post
Morton Abramowitz, former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Heather Hurlburt wrote speeches about foreign policy for the Clinton administration.
A state of chaos
The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius.
To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scow croft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.
At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scow croft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.
"Words like 'incoherent' come to mind," one top state department official told me about Rice's effort to organize her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.
Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November.
Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. "Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public," a state department source said.
Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons.
Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but "he colourfully said he would not", a state department official told me. Rice's radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.
Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.
In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush's conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age." And they wrote: "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns."
The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush's campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Bush junior in Florida.
In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration's "overriding strategic concern in the (first) Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonization of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare."
In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated. Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged.
Those who advised Bush that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a "cakewalk", and that capturing Baghdad was "mission accomplished", are rewarded.
The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about "victory". Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded. -Dawn/Guardian Service.
The writer was senior adviser to President Clinton.