| 01 March 2005 | Tuesday | 19 Muharram 1426 |
A report that haunts Tony Blair
Spreading democracy
Hovering shadows of scandals
In spite of Pakistan's size, its location, and the role it has played in the recent confrontation between extremist Islam and the West, the country has not attracted a great deal of serious scholarship or analysis by American authors.
Most of the recent books on the country were written either by foreign journalists who gained some understanding of the country while covering it, or by scholars for whom Pakistan is not the main area of study. A quick overview of what has recently become available in print is useful to underscore the gaps that exist in knowledge about Pakistan.
To the category of journalistic writings belongs Owen Bennet Jones' recent book, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. It deals with the period that began when General Pervez Musharraf thrust himself on to the political stage by a military manoeuvre that he refuses to call a "coup d'etat."
Jones, a correspondent working for the BBC, provides a highly readable account of the fast paced developments that have marked most of the time General Musharraf has been in power. However, the book does not deal with the underlying forces that have shaped today's Pakistan.
The second book of some note by a western journalist is one by Mary Anne Weaver, Pakistan in the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan. Weaver is a writer for The New Yorker, and her book is basically a collection of the articles she wrote for her magazine.
Her stories, covering subjects such as Benazir Bhutto, Kashmir, the tribal areas and falconry by the Arab sheikhs provides a number of vignettes about Pakistan but does not probe deeply into how the country has come to be what it is today.
That kind of analysis is attempted - but not with total success - in Stephen P. Cohen's latest book, The Idea of Pakistan which, according to the author, has taken him "44 years to write... the length of time I have been studying Pakistan (and India)." But, he goes on to write, "unfortunately, the United States has only a few true Pakistan experts and knows remarkably little about the country. Much of what has been written is palpably wrong, or at best superficial."
The Cohen book fills some of the gaps in existing knowledge about the country, in particular about the role played by the military and Islam in Pakistani politics. Cohen asks many questions but does not answer all, or many, of them.
If something seems unclear, if something appears random, it is because we have not looked deeply enough beneath the surface to grasp the real meaning. A great deal about Pakistan can be explained by diligent enquiry, which is only partially undertaken in this book.
To this list of recent writings on Pakistan, we should also add the works already done or underway by some American diplomats with a knowledge of Pakistan. In 2001, Dennis Kux published his long awaited book on relations between Pakistan and the United States.
The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies is a useful compendium of what transpired between these two unequal powers and what made Pakistan into a disenchanted partner. Unfortunately, the book ends right at the time when Pakistan reappeared as a highly troubled spot on the American television screens.
The United States' reengagement with Pakistan came following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Washington was back on the Pakistani scene after an absence of a dozen years during which many segments of the country's society developed serious doubts about America's long-term intentions in South Asia. Pakistan's re-involvement with America will, no doubt, have enormous consequences. This is an aspect of the Pakistani story that needs telling.
Dennis Kux reappeared in print two years later as one of the co-authors of a Council on Foreign Relations pamphlet, New Priorities in South Asia: US Policy Toward India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
The authors advocated a highly calibrated US approach towards Pakistan. "Pakistan represents one of the toughest and most complex policy challenges that the United States faces anywhere in the world", they told their readers.
"This almost entirely Muslim country of 145 million people - a population the size of Russia's - has been plagued by chronic political instability, lack of a clear sense of national identity, sub-par economic performance, and deteriorating institutions."
The study, having diagnosed the problem of Pakistan, went on to suggest that Washington should keep Islamabad on a short leash. It recommended that the $3 billion, five year package of aid, offered by the United States during President Musharraf's visit to Camp David in the summer of 2003, should not be evenly split between economic and military aid as agreed by the two sides.
The authors recommended that two thirds should go for economic aid and appropriations by the US Congress "should be linked to Pakistan's actions in implementing the political, economic and social programme reform agenda and its cooperation in the war on terrorism, as well as filling non-proliferation responsibilities."
To this genre of work - diplomats writing about their experiences - also belongs Strobe Talbott's book on his negotiations with Jaswant Singh who was India's foreign minister when the number two American diplomat tried hard to rein in India's nuclear ambitions.
Pakistan fares exceptionally poorly in Talbott's Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb. In one place, he concurs with Singh's feelings towards Pakistan. "He was right that partition had been a huge and tragic mistake.
He was right that in the 50 intervening years, Pakistan had, more often than not, tended to confirm the apprehension that it was a state based on a flawed - perhaps fatally flawed - idea: a homeland for South Asian Muslims, yet sharing a much larger, secular neighbour that was home to even more Muslims. And he was not certainly imagining things when he saw Pakistan as being in danger of becoming a failed state."
Talbott was a friend of President Bill Clinton - both were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford at the same time. He was also the deputy to Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state in President Clinton's second term.
His impression of Pakistan may have had some influence on the thinking of both President Bill Clinton and Secretary Madeleine Albright. Neither gave much space or displayed much understanding of Pakistan in their long autobiographies.
In his 957-page book, President Clinton has only a dozen references to Pakistan, most of them perfunctory: a brief reference to Hilary Clinton's visit to Pakistan and equally brief mentions of a meeting with Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Even the two developments that occupied a fair amount of the former president's attention while in office - the decision by India and Pakistan to test nuclear weapons in May 1998 and the brief war between the long time South Asian rivals on the Kargil heights in the north of Kashmir - are briefly discussed.
"India claimed its nuclear weapons were needed as deterrent to China; Pakistan said it was responding to India. Public opinion in both countries strongly supported the possession of nuclear weapons, but it was a dangerous proposition.
For one thing, our national security people were convinced that unlike the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, India and Pakistan knew little about each other's nuclear capabilities and policies for using them.
After the Indian tests, I urged Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not to follow suit, but he couldn't resist the political pressure." For the purpose of the autobiography, that was the end of the matter, and the former president passed on to the discussion of other issues.
Clinton's intervention in the Kargil episode and his visit to Pakistan - "the leg of the trip the Secret Service thought was the most dangerous" - receive brief mentions in the autobiography.
He also refers to his television address to the Pakistani nation and offers a quick assessment of President Pervez Musharraf: "He was clearly intelligent, strong and sophisticated. If he chose to pursue a peaceful progressive path, I thought he had a chance to succeed, but I told him I thought terrorism would eventually destroy Pakistan if he didn't move against it."
Almost all mentions of Pakistan by Madeleine Albright in her autobiography concern the Afghan problem starting with a reference to "initiating an arms supply and training relationship with Afghan resistance, the Mujahideen, using Pakistan as a base" to a visit to a refugee camp in the northern border of Pakistan.
"The sun was getting low, and I was startled to see the shadow of Pakistani marksmen guarding us inflated by the angle to a height of 20 feet or more. I told my audience that it was part of my job to care about issues of war and peace, development and human rights.
I added that no country could modernize or become prosperous without contributions of all its citizens and no society could move forward unless women had access to schools and health care and were protected from physical exploitation and abuse."
This was a correct assessment, but we are not told how this message was communicated to the Pakistani leadership and policymakers, and what kind of assistance was offered by her and her country to bridge this gender divide.
If President Clinton and Secretary Albright had developed a deep understanding of Pakistan, which was now a force behind the emergence of Taliban and their later conquest of Afghanistan, a sanctuary for a number of senior leaders of Al Qaeda after the December 2002 fall of Kabul to American troops, and a valuable ally of America in the war against Islamic terrorism, there is very little evidence of it in these two books. Talbott has much better grasp of Pakistan but it carries a bias.
Most of what Talbott learned about Pakistan appears to have been taught to him by Jaswant Singh, an active member of the Bhartiya Janata Party, an organization that never really reconciled itself to the partition of British India.
The BJP supported the Hindutva programme aimed at creating a Hindu identity in India. It was unfortunate that a senior member of Washington's foreign policy establishment should have allowed himself to be tutored by a person who represents a political party in India that has never fully reconciled to the partition of British India in 1947 and the emergence of Pakistan as a state for a large segment of the Muslim population of Britain's Indian empire.
What this brief overview of the recent writings on Pakistan shows is near absence of serious scholarship on Pakistan by American writers. This is unfortunate since the books to which I have referred influence public policy in Washington.
A report that haunts Tony Blair
Who would have thought that 13 pages of paper would so come to haunt Tony Blair? Yet the full version of the opinion drawn up by the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, about the legality of a military attack on Iraq will, one suspects, come to rank in recent British history only with the protocol enshrining the Anglo-French-Israeli collusion before the invasion of Suez in 1956. Sir Anthony Eden instructed his cabinet secretary to burn the British copy of that protocol.
Tony Blair has long been irritated by what he sees as a malign British obsession with procedure rather than results. In the past, he has publicly dismissed such debate about the nuances and due processes of government as a kind of anoraky.
Here he is in the House of Commons in July 2000 on the significance of the ministerial code, formerly known as questions of procedure for ministers: "No one will be better governed through fine-tuning the ministerial code.
Those are good issues for academics and constitutional experts, but they are not the big issues that parliament should debate when we consider our role in modern society."
The Butler report placed such matters as proper procedure right at the heart of Blair's prime ministerial "role in the modern society". On July 20, 2004, six days after Butler was published, Blair was on his feet in the Commons undertaking to implement its procedural recommendations. The constitutional anorak suddenly fitted the prime ministerial shoulders.
"Prior to the war," he said, "meetings were held with an informal group, including the foreign and defence secretaries, the chief of the defence staff, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, the chairman of the JIC, and my foreign policy adviser.
In any future situation, such a group, which brought together the key players required to work on operational military planning and developing the diplomatic strategy, will operate formally as an ad hoc cabinet committee."
In his report, Lord Butler showed that the government's fundamental shift in the spring of 2002 from a policy of containing Saddam Hussein to one designed "to enforce disarmament" was not based on any new development in the current intelligence picture on Iraq.
Similarly, in the run-up to the war, Goldsmith (who eventually judged it legal without a further, specific UN resolution authorizing the use of force) warned his ministerial colleagues that "there would be no justification for the use of force against Iraq on grounds of self-defence against an imminent threat".
One of the impressive aspects of the Butler report was the way his committee followed the intelligence trail into the attorney general's office and assessed the degree to which it did or did not shape his advice to the prime minister's group on Iraq and to the cabinet.
The attorney general's legal opinion has not been published in full. All parliament has been given is a written answer from Goldsmith, with an accompanying summary prepared by the Foreign Office, dated March 17 2003. The Butler committee has seen the opinion in full.
What we did not know until Butler appeared before the select committee on October 21, 2004, was that initially the government had been unwilling to show it to Butler's committee of privy counsellors.
As Butler put it: "There were moments when we had a bit of tension with the government about whether they were going to disclose documents to us. One of the examples of that was the attorney general's legal opinion.
Had we gone public and said, 'We think this is relevant to our committee and the government will not give us access to it,' we would have had huge public and media support. That was an important leverage on the government."
Butler's revelation was striking in itself. But it also suggested that Goldsmith's opinion, which led to the resignation of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the FO's foremost expert on the legality of military operations, was even more finely balanced than we had thought.
Missing from the Butler report is the information that it was not ministers who requested that final legal opinion from Goldsmith. It was the senior military and top civil servants in the Ministry of Defence who did so.
Can the full cabinet really have tested Goldsmith's opinion when, as Butler reported, the attorney general set out his view on the legal position to the cabinet on March 17 2003, by producing and speaking to the written answer he gave to parliament on that date? I doubt it.
For me, this and the other accumulations of failures to scrutinize and question in the privacy of the cabinet room amounts to a dereliction of cabinet government comparable only to 1956.
Then Eden's cabinet did not press him at the height of the Suez crisis on the significance of his telling them that "from secret conversations which had been held in Paris with representatives of the Israeli government, it now appeared that the Israelis would not alone launch a full-scale attack against Egypt".
From these remains you did not need a background in British intelligence to sniff out the collusion between the UK, France and Israel, which Eden subsequently flatly denied in the Commons.
For me, Goldsmith's March 2003 opinion on the legality of the Iraq war remains the fault-line under the Blair government. Like the permanent stain of Suez on Eden's reputation, it will not be eradicated from the memory of the Blair premier ships for generations to come.
The ultimate systems failure in both instances occurred at proper, formal cabinet meetings. If the full cabinet will not take on a dominant prime minister in full cry, there is no other part of the system of government that can compensate for such supineness.
The Commons, even if it is permitted a specific vote on peace and war (as it was in 2003), is not going to possess a range and detail of knowledge comparable to that of ministers.
In the Commons last July, Blair promised to tighten up his procedures if, heaven forbid, he should contemplate leading his country into another war of pre-emption.
It was a welcome recognition that Butler's concerns were justified. But can it make any difference if cabinet ministers will not, in a phrase beloved of Roy Jenkins, "rise to the level of events"?
With a few big exceptions in the cabinet room, such as Gordon Brown and John Press cott, power and place come courtesy of Blair alone. "Tony wants" usually means that "Tony gets".
Will the Butler report really change those ingrained habits on the part of the dispenser and the receivers of patronage? Only, I suspect, if the engines of war are cranked up once more. -Dawn/Guardian Service
Spreading democracy
Liberty and democracy are the linchpin of Bush's foreign policy and, it would seem, not the enlightened self-interests of the United States. On his trip to Europe, he did not seem to go beyond those two words though a lot more may have been said in private.
Liberty and democracy are a self-evident good and to reduce foreign policy to such utter simplicity is to produce a comic-strip version of it. The world is a far more complicated place, an obvious example is the reconciliation of Guantanamo with liberty and democracy yet it doesn't seem to trouble the Americans, or a section of them who see themselves as a chosen people earmarked to spread the good word.
The preferred option is to bring democracy by military means wherever that is possible, Afghanistan and Iraq for example or otherwise democracy is a long process and there is no end in sight and it is constantly evolving.
A good military strike that kills a few people and destroys a few cities in the long run seems more cost effective. Iran seems next on the line. Nothing it seems can stop the march of democracy and, of course, liberty.
A stronger case for democracy would be made was it to start with those who are its most robust advocates. There seems to be general agreement that it is an imperfect system but infinitely more preferable to others that are top-heavy and arbitrary and seem to be driven by private ambition. But the true strength of democracy comes in a time of crisis.
It was my good fortune that I was in the United States as a university student when the Cold War was beginning to gather steam. In my book As Time Goes By, I wrote that when I had arrived in the United States, I had had some pre-conceptions, some images and no prejudice at all, one way or the other.
I had found the United States very much the same that I had imagined it would be, a dynamic country, hustle and bustle, a country in a hurry though not able to explain what the hurry was about.
It was by no means a perfect country and there were huge gaps between the reality on the ground and the assumption of virtue that included life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
On the face of it, democracy seemed to be working well if one disregarded one-tenth of the population, which comprised of blacks. I was studying in California and though there was prejudice against the blacks, it seemed not to be on the same scale and without the viciousness with which it was practised in the southern states and there appeared no difference between the treatment of blacks and South Africa's apartheid. How could this happen in a democracy? I lived with this question for all the time I was in the United States and never found an answer.
Unlike the white immigrants who came to the United States off their own volition and in high hopes, the blacks were brought to the United States against their will and had actually been abducted.
The blacks arrived as slaves, as human cargo on specially constructed ships with platforms below deck to maximize the human cargo that could be transported, forced to lie in chains on their sides, spoon fashion.
Their diet consisted of rice, stewed yams and plants. Many ships reached their destination with barely half their cargo, the other half having perished because of the filthy, unhygienic conditions or being killed by whippings and other punishments.
It was a dark stain on democracy and though the race question, as it was called, now comes in the category of civil rights and though considerable progress has been made and racial segregation has been made illegal, the black, by the very colour of his skin, is not yet an equal citizen.
I remember many discussions that I had with friends, all of us abhorred racial discrimination, but none could truthfully answer the question: would you want your sister to marry one? It seemed to be an ultimate test of tolerance.
Nor were the blacks the only people against whom there was prejudice. There were other groups, the Hispanics, the Jews and the Catholics and indeed all those who were not White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants.
But I certainly cannot deny that there was a general sense of freedom and provided one did not want to overthrow the status quo, one lived as best as circumstances allowed but on one's terms.
On a political level, democracy seemed to be functioning smoothly though the nitty gritty of local, state and national elections would show up sharp practices, rigging and fraud.
It is an imperfect political system but it works for the American people. Would it work for other people in other parts of the world? It does, with modifications, in many countries but democracy is not an ideology or a set of beliefs that can be transported to any corner in the world.
There is also the assumption that a genuine democracy does not go about invading other people's countries and making wars. That democracies are on the side of angels.
I see more and more countries showing greater political flexibility but do no see the world becoming a safer place. George Bush's concern with democracy may have something to do with his place in history but he will be best remembered as the man who spread democracy in his own country by clipping its wings and elsewhere, though the use of overwhelming force.
Hovering shadows of scandals
US President George W. Bush's whirlwind wooing of European leaders last week after years of acrimony over the Iraq war is still the most popular subject of discussion in EU capitals.
But increasingly, the scandals engulfing two of Europe's top politicians - German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Herve Gaymard, the French finance minister, who was forced to resign on February 25 - are climbing up the agenda.
Both men have embarrassed their respective governments and at least one has already lost his job. But on the brighter side, their troubles are proof that for all their moralizing about good governance, European politicians are as vulnerable to the temptations and trappings of power and privilege as their poorer counterparts elsewhere in the world.
Mr Gaymard's situation makes for particularly entertaining reading - and presents a scenario more likely to be repeated in other countries. The 45 year old French finance chief was forced to resign following revelations that he was renting a government funded apartment worth 14,000 euro a month for his family - including eight children.
French government ministers are entitled to government-paid lodgings but the fact that the rent on this one was as high as the minister's monthly salary came as quite a shock to the French public.
Mr Gaymard's response to the allegations that he's been a tad too generous with government money did not help matters. Nor has the fact that as French finance chief, he was running a national campaign to rein in government spending.
The minister first portrayed himself as shocked to learn the monthly rent figures of the 6,500-square-foot luxury duplex apartment he recently moved into with his wife and eight children after the living arrangements were unveiled by the Parisian newspaper, Le Canard Enchanni.
Then, Mr Gaymard moaned that he was a victim of his humble origins. "I have always lived humbly; I do not have money," he said in an interview in the weekly magazine Paris-Match.
"Obviously, if I weren't the son of a shoe repairman-shoe salesman but of a rich bourgeois, I wouldn't have a housing problem. I would own my own apartment, and this thing wouldn't have happened."
What Mr Gaymard failed to reveal, however, was that he does own an apartment - a 2,150-square-foot, four-bedroom unit on Boulevard St. Michel in the heart of the Latin Quarter that he rents out for 2,000 euro a month.
The Liberation newspaper, meanwhile, has listed the minister's properties, which in addition to the apartment in the Latin Quarter, include two others in Savoie, a house in Brittany and another in Savoie.
The scandal heated up over the last week, with the socialist opposition demanding that Mr Gaymard be asked to resign. Under pressure to act, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin called on Mr Gaymard to explain the appartment's costs although the minister has already vacated his palatial residence. The collective value of his properties makes him liable for wealth tax in France.
Mr Raffarin has been forced to impose new limits on official housing for ministers under which members of the government living in rented apartments are limited to 80 square metres plus 20 square metres for each child living at home.
Mr Gaymard and his equally powerful wife Clara, who runs the state agency that promotes foreign investment in France, have eight children aged from seven to 17. The finance ministry's modern headquarters at Bercy in eastern Paris has apartments. Clara Gaymard judged them too small and too far from the children's schools, which are in western Paris, according to reports.
Mr Gaymard was named finance minister at the end of November, taking over from the charismatic Nicolas Sarkozy who has emerged as a leading centre-right rival to French President Jacques Chirac. His replacement at the finance ministry is Thierry Breton, chief executive of French Telecom, who now has the daunting task of putting French finances in order.
The French newspapers were unrelenting in their criticism of the embattled Mr Gaymard. "This is no longer a real estate affair; it is a crisis of confidence," Le Monde said in a stunningly strong editorial. Blaming Mr. Gaymard for "political blindness and the lack of a sense of propriety," the editorial added, "There is now only one way in a responsible democracy: resignation.
The problems facing Germany's Joschka Fischer are equally troubling for the ruling party. Mr Fischer, long viewed as Germany's most popular politician - ahead of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder - is entangled in a mounting scandal over illegal immigration and allegations that the German foreign ministry authorized the granting of fast-track visas for tens of thousands of visitors from Ukraine who would normally have been barred from Germany.
Staff at the German embassy in Kiev were sacked after handing out tourist visas improperly to Ukrainians seeking illegal work in the EU between 2000 and 2002. People smugglers helped themselves, before Berlin realized its mistake and tightened rules.
"I take political responsibility for possible failures to act and errors by my staff," Mr Fischer said recently, adding: "The principle of ministerial responsibility applies and I stand by my staff."
He added that he had been overworked and distracted by weighty foreign policy concerns at the time. But he rejected demands by opposition Christian Democrats that he resign, calling this a "power play".
Chancellor Schroeder is standing by his deputy and foreign minister. If the opposition think they can pull down Fischer, they are making a huge miscalculation," he said. "Joschka Fischer has my complete confidence and my full support and has the support of the whole coalition."
Mr Fischer has defended fast-track visas, saying the policy brought skilled people into German industry and science. But reports say the Kiev embassy for a time was issuing 20,000 visas a month, with prostitution rings and people smugglers taking advantage of the opening to spirit illegals into the whole EU.
Pressure on Fischer has increased following the decision by former state minister Ludger Volmer to step down from his current post as Greens foreign policy spokesman.
Volmer, who had signed the edict while he was deputy to Fischer at the ministry, has taken most of the heat. Opposition attacks on Fischer have focused on the length of time it took the popular Green politician to shut a loophole in the supply of visas.
A poll published by the public German broadcaster ZDF shows that the affair is taking a political toll. After more than three years leading the ranks of Germany's "top 10 most popular political officials," Fischer has slipped to second place, behind Lower Saxony state premier Christian Wulff of the conservative opposition Christian Democrats, who has been considered a dark-horse candidate for the chancellery in next year's general election
A spokesman for the European Union judicial affairs commissioner Franco Frattini has said that the commission had opened its own investigation into whether Germany " which shares an open-borders agreement with France, Italy, Spain and other EU members " had breached EU law.
Mr Fischer, 56, is a pillar of Mr. Schroeder's centre-left coalition government and has so far ruled out resigning. "I own up to the mistakes that were made," he said recently, adding: "They are mistakes made in my ministry or my mistakes as minister. This applies to me."
Unlike his French counterpart Gaymard, Mr Fischer is idolized by his party and widely regarded as one of Germany's most astute politicians. He has had a remarkable career, starting out in the student movement in the 1970s, working as a taxi driver and then entering parliament for the Greens in 1983. He swapped his sneakers and scruffy attire for sober three-piece suits when he became foreign minister in 1998.
The minister has had a long running battle with weight. He managed to lose about 25 kilos on becoming foreign minister but has now put all of it on again - allegedly because of a penchant for chocolates.
The extra pounds do not seem to have caused him trouble with the opposite sex, however. Mr Fischer has been married three times and German press reports say he is currently involved with a German-Iranian film student who is in her mid-20s.
Meanwhile, a less explosive but equally telling political scandal has hit the headlines in Britain with Christine Wheatley, 53, an Oxford-educated trainee barrister and Labour party candidate being struck off the list of potential MPs after a revelation that she worked briefly as a prostitute in Paris during the late 1970s.
Ms Wheatley said she spent six weeks in the French capital in 1979, lounging in terrace cafes attracting the attentions of clients. She says she sees nothing to apologize and paints a romantic picture of her work: "It was very gay.
I was living on the Left Bank and I was a delightful young woman. I used to sit at a cafi on the Boulevard St Michel. French guys would come along and say, 'Would you like something to drink?'
Labour party officials were apparently stunned when they read of Ms Wheatley's revelations. But the lady in question told The Independent newspaper that she is "mind-numbed" by Labour's course of action: "We have single mothers who want to be MPs, gay and lesbian candidates, so why not former sex workers?"