More than meets the eye in non-party polls?

IF ONE is to believe what one has seen, heard and read over the past one month, there is no doubt that the elections were anything but non-party. The insistence of the Pakistan Election Commission on keeping them non-party (as conceived by those who had drafted the devolution plan five years ago) notwithstanding, the ground reality is that all political parties worth their name blatantly violated the most important part of the code of conduct — that the polls are being held on a non-party basis and that political parties have no role to play in them. This was clear in the first round on Thursday, and will, without any doubt, be seen again during the second round.

For the purpose of “abiding by the rules” and the fear that their candidates may be disqualified, the political parties formed ‘groups’ — this was done also in the first local body polls in 2001 — but for all practical purposes all the major political parties, as also regional ones, were in full cry during the polls. One could see the top leadership every evening taking part in talk shows and panel discussions on various TV channels. Newspaper offices were flooded with allegations and counter-allegations by these parties and, worst of all, we are told that some of them spent huge amounts of money on advertisements run on some TV channels during the ‘campaign-period’.

The chief ministers of the Punjab and Sindh were seen openly campaigning in their provinces and were more vocal and visible than their counterparts in the NWFP and Balochistan. So were some federal and Sindh ministers, in the latter case mostly those belonging to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. The opposition parties — obviously with no official facilities at their disposal — however did lag far behind in the pre-poll campaigning.

The question is why, then, do the rulers insist on keeping the grassroots-level democratic institutions apolitical? Why are political parties not allowed to participate in local body polls?

People who have studied the original devolution plan and some crucial amendments made just before the current elections have started questioning the wisdom of keeping political parties away from the local government set-up. They think that this ‘philosophy’ will create a political void and ultimately lead to parochial factors like biradari, ethnicity, groupism, etc., to penetrate into the system. Not that national-and provincial-level elections are free from these factors, but over the years the impact has visibly lessened.

The mainstream political parties now have national agenda and contest elections on the basis of a national programme, or at least demonstrate that they are doing so.

If the councillors, nazims and naib nazims are to be non-political elements, from where will the future leadership emerge?

Is it a coincidence that this apolitical format of grassroots democracy is imposed whenever there is military or quasi-democratic rule in the country? First Ayub Khan did it in the early 1960s and now Gen Pervez Musharraf has come up with only a slightly improved version of the basic democracies. Or is there more to it than what meets the eye? Some people think that regimes which fail to get political and constitutional legitimacy resort to such indirect methods.

In a recent discussion it was claimed with such ‘side shows’ the regime is, in fact, trying to divert the attention of the people away from major national issues like unemployment, rising cost of living, uncertainty, etc.

Whatever may be the political philosophy behind making the local government institution apolitical, it has proved to be a farce. For all practical purposes the 2005 elections have proved that this system can only survive if it has the full and active participation of political parties.

World Bank chief and the Iraq war

THE new president of the World Bank, Paul D. Wolfowitz, was in Pakistan for a four-day visit. He succeeded James Wolfenson on June 1, 2005, and his nomination itself had generated considerable controversy worldwide because of his known hawkish views within the Bush administration, where he was serving in the department of defence.

The World Bank president, as is perhaps only to be expected of a poor aid-dependent country like Pakistan, was warmly received and held several rounds of meetings with various government officials, including President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

Mr Wolfowitz is perhaps best known as the Bush administration’s main proponent of the invasion of Iraq (the respected left-wing US publication, The Nation, called him Mr Bush’s ‘chief cheerleader’ for the war in Iraq). In fact, well before the events of 9/11, he advocated Saddam Hussein’s toppling by sending in US troops who would also then gain control of Iraq’s oil fields.

According to investigative journalist Bob Woodward, then-secretary of state Colin Powell had called this idea ‘lunacy’ and strongly opposed it.

Right after 9/11, Mr Wolfowitz again called for attacking Iraq, arguing that it would be a much easier target than Afghanistan. In that role, he was also one of the main proponents for the case made by the US administration (a case which till today remains unproven and many believe it to have been untrue from the start) that Iraq needed to be dealt with because it had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in its arsenal.

On Dec 2, 2002, he said that the US government’s ‘determination to use force if necessary is because of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction’. At a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr Wolfowitz argued that the WMD case for attacking Iraq was ‘very convincing’.

Later, reports by two UN weapons inspectors and the findings of a US Senate intelligence committee report all noted that there were no WMDs in Iraq and that pre-war intelligence on the apparent WMDs in America’s possession was ‘flawed’.

After the Iraqi invasion began, Mr Wolfowitz was asked several times on his WMD insistence. His reply always was that the threat had not been exaggerated, as some were now beginning to suspect, as an excuse to attack Iraq. However, a few months later, in an interview to the US magazine Vanity Fair, Mr Wolfowitz admitted that the WMD argument had been quite convenient.

This is from the interview: “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

However, as time passed by and the much-vaunted WMDs were to be found nowhere in Iraq, the pressure on Mr Wolfowitz and his colleagues at the Pentagon heated up. He now told the US Congress that intelligence was ‘an art, not a science’ and that the absence of WMDs did not mean ‘that anybody misled anybody’.

Other than the now-discredited WMD claim, Mr Wolfowitz was also chiefly responsible for the US administration’s repeated claim after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein’s government had a significant connection to Al Qaeda. It was Mr Wolfowitz who, despite credible evidence, pressed the CIA and FBI to probe an unconfirmed (and untrue) report that the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammad Ata, had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. This he did after both agencies had already investigated the alleged report and come up with the conclusion that it was not correct.

Former commander of the US Central Command, Gen Tommy Franks, is also reported to have told Mr Woodward that he had asked Mr Wolfowitz and his boss at the Defence Department, Donald Rumsfeld, that they needed to plan for the aftermath of the invasion, but that they paid little heed to his suggestion.

US Army Chief of Staff Gen Eric Shinseki had suggested that ‘hundreds of thousands of troops’ would be needed in Iraq. To this Mr Wolfowitz had said that the general was ‘wildly off the mark’.

Mr Wolfowitz went on to compare the invasion of Iraq with France in the 1940s, saying that like the people of France during the Second World War, who welcomed American soldiers as liberators, the people of Iraq would do the same.

As of Aug 17, 2005, 140,000 US soldiers are deployed in Iraq. Around 1,860 soldiers have died since the invasion and close to 13,700 have been wounded - and these are figures released by the Pentagon. In addition to this, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died so far and US taxpayers have spent upwards of $200 billion on the war.

The World Bank president is also known for the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, which in fact later formed part of the Bush administration’s foreign policy strategy doctrine. The Wolfowtiz Doctrine dates back to the early 1990s, in particular to the time when he was serving in the US defence department when Dick Cheney was secretary. Together with another colleague, I. Lewis Libby (now Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff), Mr Wolfowitz wrote the ‘1992 Defence Police Guidance’, which later came to be regarded by many as the initial formulation of a post-Cold War agenda of the neo-conservatives.

The policy of pre-emptive attacks against potential rivals espoused by the Bush administration dates back to this 1992 document. It spoke of the US trying to ‘prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia’.

Also, the US needed to ‘account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging its leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order’.

This is very similar to the National Security Strategy unveiled by the Bush administration a decade down the line. In fact, both the documents are similar to the statement of principles of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), released on June 3, 1997. The PNAC is seen as the fountainhead of America’s neo-con movement, and included among its founding members Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Libby, Mr Cheney and several other current Bush administration officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, Zalmay Khalilzad, Peter Rodman, and Elliott Abrams.

For all this, Mr Wolfowitz ended up being handpicked for the job of World Bank president. Surely, that must count as a worthy reward. One can only wonder whether the WB chief was asked any awkward questions relating to his background during his Pakistan trip.