Talking to Israel

THE Pakistan foreign minister met his Israeli counterpart in Istanbul on Thursday. The first public and official contact between Pakistan and Israel was carefully arranged, reportedly through the good offices of Turkey, and was preceded by back-channel contacts over a period of time. The development will inevitably lead to controversy because it marks a major shift in what had so far been a principal —- and principled — concern of Pakistan’s foreign policy. Islamabad has said this should not be construed as a move to recognize Israel and that Pakistan’s stand on the Middle East crisis remains unchanged. Unfortunately, the debate on the issue will largely be conducted on the religious plane when the context should be secular and political. Nor should it be linked to President Musharraf’s plan to address the American Jewish Congress, which is a political lobby like many other public affairs committees in the United States advocating particular group interests. The problem with Israel is not that it is a Jewish entity, but that it is a colonial power that is run by settlers from Europe who have captured Arab lands. It is in illegal occupation of Palestine, large areas of which it has emptied of its original inhabitants through force. By and large, the Palestinian movement also places its struggle in a secular perspective. Israel has also been guilty of officially sponsored terrorism, for which it has been repeatedly rebuked by the United Nations General Assembly, and the idea of engaging in a dialogue with it at a time when we are in the forefront of a ‘war on terror’ itself appears to be something of a paradox.

Several Arab and other Muslim counties have ties of some sort or other with Israel. The Palestinians, bereft of active support from Arab and Muslim counties, have long ago abandoned their refusal to accept Israel’s presence in the Middle East and have since agreed to the two-state principle. They have also been holding direct talks with the Israeli leadership, while keeping up their armed resistance. A combination of the two streams, dialogue and resistance, recently led to the vacation of some occupied areas by Israeli settlers. This process of negotiation has been spread over two decades and more, ever since the catastrophic 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Why the Musharraf government has chosen this particular moment to start public dealings with Israel is inexplicable. The latter’s growing strategic ties with India have been cited by some as one of the reasons, but it is difficult to believe that by getting in on the bandwagon now will significantly affect the Indo-Israeli equation. US pressure has also been mentioned, but both Israel and Pakistan are in the American camp — is there any other? — and to believe that we will be able to play a mediatory role of some sort in solving the Middle East crisis may be self-deluding. At the same time, any initiative in this direction could not wait indefinitely on the wishes of the OIC or the Arab League, both of which are in a state of paralysis. The foreign minister has said the gesture “is meant to demonstrate that the Muslim world will respond positively if Israel is ready to accept the imperatives of peace”.

However, the wishes of the Palestinians are important. The Palestinian Authority’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nabil Shaath, says he is “worried” because this is “not a good time to start relations” with Israel. Within Pakistan, the opposition’s stand that a policy change like this should have been undertaken with at least some consultation with political parties also carries weight. It is to be hoped that the government will take the first opportunity to put its case before parliament. It is also important that it should categorically state that, whatever the motivation for this first exploratory public contact and the justification for its timing, it has no intention of setting up diplomatic relations with Israel — which is seeking to lessen its vulnerability — till the Palestinians are in a position to declare that they have reached a final settlement with Tel Aviv. All major decisions need to be subjected to democratic debate and sentiment. And the sentiment on Palestine has a long political tradition in South Asia which should not be allowed to become the monopoly of the mullahs.

Trifling with FPSC’s tenure

THE government’s promulgation of an ordinance reducing the tenure of the members of the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) from five to three years can only be seen as a step to arm-twist a body whose key function is to select officers for posts in the federal government on merit. A constitutionally-mandated body, the FPSC selects officers in grades 11 and above (above grade 16 in some cases) for all federal government jobs and hence plays a crucial role in the composition, and quality, of the civil bureaucracy. However, because of the mandate, successive governments have tried to influence the commission into appointing their favourites to plum government jobs. Of late, cases have been reported in the press where the FPSC has been bypassed, with senior bureaucrats being given repeated extensions in service or appointments made directly by the government.

The ordinance also needs to be seen in the light of a recent press conference held by the FPSC chairman where he complained that the government was deliberately bypassing the commission and extending the contracts of its favourites without any reference to it or seeking its approval. It is quite clear that by reducing the tenure of FPSC members the government is sending a message to the commission that it intends to get its way in matters relating to the appointment of federal officers. In fact, the reduction of the tenure seems all the more odd considering that in 2000 President Pervez Musharraf himself agreed to increase the tenure from three years to five years. At that time, the reason for the decision was given that a five-year term would help enhance the commission’s independence by ensuring that its chief and members got on with their job without worrying about having to quit soon. So for the president now to issue a fresh ordinance reversing the decision his own government had taken a few years ago seems puzzling. It seems that the FPSC has been punished because its chief spoke out in public against the government’s penchant for appointing or giving extensions to senior bureaucrats without consulting the commission, as required under the law. It also shows the intention of the government to keep within its tight grip all matters relating to the appointment, promotion and extensions to senior bureaucrats. In fact, it were the various out-of-turn promotions and repeated extensions in service given to certain senior bureaucrats that prompted the FPSC chief to publicly voice his concerns and disapproval on this score.

The decision to reduce the tenure of the FPSC chief and members also runs counter to the government’s own oft-repeated claims of promoting greater transparency in the working of agencies and organizations within its jurisdiction. By virtue of its function and mandate, the FPSC has a very important role to play in shaping the quality and performance of the federal bureaucracy, and by extension, the quality of services provided to taxpayers. This ordinance is only going to compromise its ability to play that rule effectively and with the independence that the commission would need in its selection of candidates.

A tale of two wars

I WENT to Vietnam a hawk. It was July 1967; I was an ex-Marine and a reporter for the Associated Press.

It took only a few months before I realized I was being fed official lies on a daily basis. Now, having spent decades covering war and its aftermath around the world, I have just been through an eerily reminiscent experience in Iraq.

In the Baghdad of 2005, as in the Saigon of four decades ago, my government tells me that by staying the course, we’ll cut out a vicious tumour metastasizing through the body of western democracy.

Today’s cancer is terrorism, not the red menace. But the singular constant remains this: Armies and governments at war all lie. They tell us that we’re winning hearts and minds, that the troops will be home for Christmas, that the mission is accomplished. They did it then, and they’re doing it now. My hawkishness is long gone. I went to Iraq this May on an assignment for National Geographic magazine, already convinced that this war was a mistake. I found myself cloistered in a nightmare world, behind layers of 12-foot concrete barriers beyond which no thinking American strays without armed guards. I returned home a month later, certain that this war, like Vietnam, will never be won.

What would “winning” in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that’s free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at U.S. taxpayers’ expense? Shias, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I’m afraid there’s no good way to get out.

Americans didn’t know what “winning” meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn’t understand the enemy, its objectives or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain them. We had a fuzzy notion of communist “world domination,” and the “domino theory” and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, south and north, was independence.

They didn’t want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn’t want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out. Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth — that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we’re making it into one today — has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.

The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon’s daily “5 o’clock follies” — as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps — has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson’s vision of “light at the end of the tunnel” has evolved into Dick Cheney’s embarrassing “last throes.” Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs.

Where two million Vietnamese were killed by the war’s end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed “shock and awe.” Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares?

This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn’t have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe.

What we failed to understand in Vietnam — that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes — we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq. I’ve returned repeatedly to Vietnam since the war. About 20 miles northwest of Saigon, in Cu Chi, I had one of the more harrowing experiences of my reporting career, crawling for an hour through black, airless, grave-like tunnels that spider-web for well over 100 miles beneath the jungle floor. (This was before the tourism ministry enlarged some of the passages, to accommodate super-size Western travellers.)

Here, entire armies and civilian communities had lived and worked and plotted attacks, through not just the American war but the earlier war against the French. With dirt dropping into my sweat-stinging eyes, my imagination raced: What must it have been like with tanks and bombers rumbling overhead? When I stumbled out, heart pounding, I told my guide that finally I understood why his side had won.

Today, Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists are our Viet Cong. We can bring ‘em on, smoke ‘em out and hunt ‘em down from now until doomsday, but the line of committed volunteers seems only to grow longer. The world — not just the Middle East, but South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America — is being populated with more and more alienated and bitter young Muslims who feel that they have nothing to lose. The ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq and across the Middle East doesn’t intimidate them; it just stokes their fury.

That there is no military solution to this conundrum is clearly illustrated by a ride I took on my first day in Baghdad. The small plane I flew on from Amman, Jordan, corkscrewed into Baghdad airport early one afternoon. The South African pilot warned the 20 passengers that the stomach-heaving descent might be uncomfortable, but that it was necessary in order to avoid any heat-seeking missiles. The last time I’d made such a landing was in April 1975, on a flight into Phnom Penh as a correspondent for The Washington Post. Two weeks later, Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge.

I was bound this time for the relative security of the walled-in Green Zone, just five miles from the airport. For security reasons, we could not leave immediately. I was assigned one of two dozen canvas cots in a large tent. It was air-conditioned. (This — along with Internet availability, 30-minute-guaranteed to-your-tent-door Pizza Hut delivery, Cuban cigars at the PX, fresh meals and regularly sanitized portable toilets — is one of the gains the U.S. military has achieved since Vietnam.) We weren’t told our departure time.

Again I was reminded of Vietnam, where the GIs used to say that the night belonged to the VC. In Iraq, it’s the roads — where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, have replaced punji sticks as the guerrilla weapon of choice. If, 2 1/2 years in, you don’t control the only road linking your military airport to your headquarters, you don’t control much of anything.

The next day, a U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general told a televised news conference that the escalating rate of car bombings in the capital and around the country was a sure sign of the enemy’s “final desperation.” (Two weeks later, Cheney issued his tweaked version.) The troops on the ground in Iraq, much like the grunts in Vietnam, know better. Yet by and large they’re loyal, and most told me that they believe in the mission — at least until they’re ordered back for their second or third tours. These “stop loss” soldiers are most bitter about their perception that the administration’s effort to wage the war on the cheap applies only to them, while private contractors grow rich.

The nonpartisan Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Vietnam War cost the United States $600 billion in today’s dollars. Iraq, according to the centre, is costing between $5 billion and $8 billion a month — $218 billion to date. That would mean $700 billion if the guns fall silent six years from now, a modest timetable according to numerous military analysts. Other estimates predict an eventual bottom line of over $1 trillion.

So, do we cut our losses — human and financial — and leave? If so, when? If not, how long do we stay? If we stay, the insurgency continues; if we go, it most likely expands into an all-out civil war, the fragmenting of Iraq and the intervention of its neighbours, Iran, Turkey and Syria, followed by the collapse of promised democracy in the Middle East: a kind of reverse domino theory. What likely will happen in the short term, it’s beginning to appear, will be an attempt to spin a more positive illusion: President Bush will order several thousand troops sent home in time for the 2006 midterm election campaign. He will claim that the Iraqis are taking charge of their own security (see “Vietnamization”) and leave the mess to his successor.

Then what? If the bulk of the 130,000 U.S. troops are kept in Iraq for the rump of the Bush presidency and into the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic, the insurgency will go on.

The tax dollars we’ll be spending on that military presence might be better spent on helping educate new generations of Iraqis, and millions of other young Muslims around the world, on the basics of running a country.They need it: “Democracy is wonderful,” exclaimed a mother of two teenagers whom I met in the southern city of Basra. “It means you’re free to do whatever you want.” While that may be an understandable interpretation from a people who weren’t free to do anything under Saddam Hussein’s 35-year dictatorship, surely it’s not what Americans are fighting and dying for.

The ultimate lesson of Vietnam — one that is applicable to Iraq — has been that once Americans declared victory and returned home, the Vietnamese went through the inevitable, sometimes brutal, shakeout that we had merely delayed. Eventually, the realities of the marketplace and the appeal of capitalism resulted in a nominally communist but vibrant nation. Today, Americans feast on low-cost Vietnamese shrimp and wear inexpensive Vietnamese T-shirts. Two month ago, President Bush welcomed Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to the White House and promised him increased trade and military cooperation.

So, what happens if we don’t apply that lesson to our Iraq adventure? One of the most senior diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad told me that if the United States is serious about establishing democracy in Iraq, it would take two generations of our soldiers fighting there. That’s 40 years.—Dawn/Washington Post Service

The writer is a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post.