Threat to Iraq’s integrity

THE speech President Bush made at the naval academy in Annapolis on November 30 had been billed as the first of a series of speeches he intended to deliver in order to convince the American people that the situation in Iraq was not one that should invite despair or panic. Did it achieve its purpose? It was the best speech that President Bush has made, say the Republicans.

For the Democrats, it was deja vu — a tired repetition of what had been said earlier — since it failed to indicate the administration’s exit strategy or even what sort of tentative timetable could be visualized for getting American troops to return home. In a sense, both the supporters and detractors of the speech were right.

It was a good speech in so far as it reiterated the determination of the Bush administration to stay the course at least at this point and to set no timetables which, like President Bush’s “mission accomplished” in May 2003 or Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertion six months ago that the insurgency in Iraq was in its dying throes, would then return to haunt the administration. His bottom line in oratorical terms was “Most Americans want two things in Iraq. They want to see our troops win, and they want to see our troops come home as soon as possible. And those are my goals as well. I will settle for nothing less than complete victory.”

It was bad because it failed to address questions about the efficacy of present policies or to indicate exactly how the administration hoped to achieve political reconciliation that alone can defuse the indigenous insurgency and deprive the relatively small number of foreign insurgents of their domestic support base. For the Democrats, the bottom line of the Bush administration was contained in the national strategy paper released by the White House which states in the summary “We expect, but cannot guarantee, that our force posture will change over the next year, as the political process advances and Iraqi security forces grow and gain experience.”

Before the president’s speech, there had been hints in administration briefings that there would be a substantial reduction in the American force level in Iraq by the end of 2006 followed by further drastic drawdowns in 2007 that would leave only a token force behind in Iraq. Senator Biden, the respected ranking Democrat in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writing in the Washington Post a few days earlier had made the case that this sort of withdrawal was inevitable since the American military did not have the capacity to maintain a higher force level without resorting to extended deployments and calling out the National Guard, etc., all politically unpalatable steps.

He reminded the administration that 79 senators had called on President Bush to draw up a “detailed, public plan for Iraq, with specific goals and a timetable for achieving each one”. Senator Biden went on to make some very sensible suggestions on the strategy the administration needed to adopt including calling on the international community to help by fulfilling the pledges of aid they had made, taking responsibility for rehabilitating various organs of the Iraqi government, having a meeting of countries bordering Iraq and asking for their cooperation, and asking the Gulf countries to make larger contributions etc.

The White House chose to interpret the Biden article as an endorsement of the Bush strategy for victory in Iraq, stating: “We welcome Sen. Biden’s voice in the debate. We are pleased he shares our view that the way to a democratic and peaceful Iraq is through aggressively training Iraqi police and soldiers, rebuilding the country’s infrastructure and forging political compromises between Iraqi factions.” The White House did not ignore the call for a timetable but chose to respond by talking about the progress that had been made in training Iraqi troops to take over security responsibilities.

The Democrats are divided on the issue of withdrawal. Many among them would want American troops to be brought home immediately, but recognize that this would create a host of problems in the area, and more importantly, may cause a backlash against the Democrats. They have unpleasant memories of the manner in which Senator Kerry’s bid for the presidency was sunk, at least in part by the vicious propaganda campaign about his call for a withdrawal from Vietnam. Even his war record and the combat awards he had won were called into question. Asking for the setting of a timetable for withdrawal is, therefore, the middle ground the Democrats have had to seek.

The fact of the matter is, however, that the ground situation does not lend itself to the setting of timetables, even though there have been some favourable developments. In November, suicide attacks were the lowest in seven months and roadside bombings were the lowest since June. On the other hand, within five days of the Bush speech, 22 servicemen were killed in Iraq and there was concern about the increased sophistication of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) being employed by the insurgents. Also, the quality of the Iraqi security forces remains doubtful.

An American reporter embedded with US forces during the joint Iraqi-US assault on Husabaya, a border town in Anbar province, early last month had the following assessment of the Iraqi forces: “The Iraqis often seemed disorganized, complacent and undisciplined... House-to-house clearing operations were sloppy...Some soldiers demonstrated unorthodox uses for their weapons, including two soldiers who used their Kalashnikov assault rifles to swat a ball around as if they were playing field hockey...and several used their rifles to pry metal security doors off their hinges.” He went on to report that “American officials have given up any pretence of trying to create a world-class military and say their goal is to leave behind one that can competently patrol borders and police streets.”

This is not the sort of force that can battle an insurgency and that insurgency is bound to flourish while Sunni grievances remain unaddressed. President Bush had said in his speech that “we’re helping the Iraqis build a free society with inclusive democratic institutions that will protect the interest of all Iraqis...We believe that, over time, most rejectionists will be persuaded to support a democratic Iraq led by a federal government that is a strong enough government to protect minority rights.”

There is little indication, however, that the present government in Iraq or the Shia parties which dominate it are prepared to offer protection to Sunni interests. Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, reiterated recently that, “We will not allow the Saddamists and Ba’athists to return to the government and its institutions,” in Iraq. Since there were few Sunnis in Saddam’s Iraq who did not become Ba’athists to further their careers or merely to protect their economic interests, Hakim is in effect calling for the exclusion of Sunnis from government structures.

Hakim also reiterated that his party would work to form regions, meaning that the Shias would form an autonomous Shia region in the south comprising some eight or nine Shia majority provinces akin to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. The recently approved Iraqi constitution not only allows the creation of such autonomous regions but seems to give these regions the right to control the oil resources located there. And that is the rub.

It seems that for the Sunnis the main problem with the constitution and the main reason for their participation in the insurgency is not just the right it gives to the Shias to create an eight- or nine-province region in the south, replicating the Kurdish region in the north, but the manner in which the natural resources of the country will be used.

All the fossil fuel reserves of Iraq lie either in the Kurdish-dominated north or in the Shia-dominated south. The city of Kirkuk, once the resettlement of the Kurds takes place, will, according to the Kurdish plan, also become part of Kurdistan. The constitution does provide that the resources now being exploited are the wealth of the people and should be used by all of them while making a point of positive discrimination in favour of the previously deprived Shia areas. With regard to reserves that are yet to be exploited, however, the province in which they are located will have the final say on how they are exploited and how the proceeds are shared. In other words, Sunni Iraq will be dependent on such handouts as the Kurds and Shias are prepared to offer.

In an amendment to the constitution, unapproved by the Iraqi parliament, it was agreed that, “At the start of its functioning, the Council of Representatives shall form a committee from its members, which will be representative of the main components of Iraqi society and the duty of which will be to (make)...recommendations for the necessary amendments that can be made to the Constitution...The articles amended by the Council of Representatives...will be put before the people for a referendum within two months of the Council of Representatives’ approval of them.” Some Sunni parties accepted this sop as sufficient to overcome their reservations.

The Iraqi rejectionists, as President Bush calls them, however, do not believe that this provision in the constitution, which is of doubtful legal validity in any case, is a sufficient safeguard. The Shias will have an overwhelming majority in the Council of Representatives. They will have the Kurds as allies in seeking control by the autonomous regions of the oil resources in the region. They will not want to accept any amendment that calls for the sharing of oil revenues from hitherto unexploited oil deposits with the Sunnis of central Iraq. This is something that the Americans have to insist upon. They have so far shown no inclination to do so.

It was understandable — even while it was a blunder of monumental proportions — that in the first months of the occupation the ire of the Americans should have been directed against the Sunnis perceived as the main supporters of the Saddam regime and that the Kurds and the Shias should have been perceived as partners in the occupation enterprise.

The disbandment of the Iraqi army, the large-scale purging of the so-called Ba’athists from the government structures, the tolerance for if not encouragement of the private Shia militia and the turning of a blind eye on acts of revenge carried out by these militias gave rise to the Sunni insurgency and gave it a sectarian and ethnic tinge. Whether or not this has done irreversible damage to the fabric of Iraqi society may be open to question now but will no longer be so if corrective measures are not taken.

The Americans can and must take upon themselves the responsibility of devising and securing approval for constitutional amendments that ensure federal rather than regional control of energy resources and of the revenues they generate. They must also ensure in the formulation of the constitution and its implementation that the exclusion of the Ba’athists does not mean the exclusion of Sunnis from the government. The Americans should recognize that only something of this nature will curb the insurgency (and the support it receives from abroad), and act accordingly, overcoming whatever opposition there is from the Shias and the Kurds. If they hesitate, not only will the insurgency continue but the division of Iraq will become almost inevitable.

The writer is a former foreign secretary

Is it really health for all?

THE Alma Ata message of ‘health for all’ has at long last reached the policy planners in Islamabad. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has said that the government’s health strategy was focused on the prevention and control of diseases, provision of maternal and child health care and ensuring nationwide outreach of public health facilities. These are indeed laudable goals and have been demanded by health professionals for decades now.

At a time when there has been a palpable shift in the government’s policy from the public to the private sectors in the areas of health and education, social justice demands that the basic health and education needs of the people should be met because that is the fundamental human right of all.

In the health sector, this should pose less of a challenge if the government undertakes its responsibilities conscientiously and with integrity. But regrettably, this has not been done — the prime minister’s statement notwithstanding — and the failure to follow a vigorous preventive approach while withdrawing support to the curative side of medicine has inflicted enormous suffering on the people.

A policy that focuses on preventive medicine is expected to address the factors which are the basic cause of many diseases. Thus public hygiene and sanitation, clean water supply, an effective immunization programme for children, nutrition for the vulnerable groups, and, above all, a dynamic and innovative approach to health education should form the underpinning of the government’s health policy.

While all this may not incur an exorbitant expenditure as a curative medicine policy would, it definitely calls for greater integrity, vision and a holistic outlook towards health. It also involves the participation of a massive number of people from different departments in different tiers of administration that makes checks and control more difficult.

The mere fact that the government has failed to make even a slight dent in this sector shows how little has actually been done. Take the case of sanitation, the key factor that determines the state of a people’s health.

It is strange but the fact is that we have proceeded to manufacture and test the nuclear bomb that requires a massive amount of money and expertise but have still not been able to discover the art of lifting garbage and keeping our cities clean. We do not know how to lay sewerage lines correctly, treat sewage — it is normal for us to let untreated effluent flow into the sea and rivers — and prevent atmospheric pollution.

We cannot eliminate mosquito breeding grounds and protect our people from malaria. We have even stopped doing what was done routinely before. Probably the water agencies are not even aware of disinfectants, such as chlorine, or of filter plants to clean the water supplied to the people.

Why are we then surprised when the prevalence of diseases directly caused by unhygienic conditions keeps rising? We don’t need to be given statistics collected by epidemiologists to know that rabies cases are on the rise as pye dogs roam freely in our towns and cities, new viruses are emerging from the mounds of garbage left uncollected and causing diseases unheard of before (haemorrhagic fever being a new entrant) and water-borne diseases are fast sapping us of our vitality and productivity.

Then there are more specific health measures that call for the intervention of health professionals, such as the Expanded Programme on Immunization and reproductive health care. The data in these fields is quite shocking. The Expanded Programme on Immunization has provided protection to only 53 per cent of the children against the six preventable diseases of childhood. Polio, which was to be eradicated by the year 2000, is still occurring though mercifully the number of cases has gone down.

The administration of BCG, which is important if the problem of tuberculosis in childhood has to be addressed, has hardly picked up. In 1994, four million infants received the vaccine. In 2004, 4.8 million had been protected against TB, not a very impressive increase in a decade. As a result, 80 per 1,000 infants die within the first year of life, whereas 103 children of 1,000 live births die under five years of age. The maternal mortality rate is 500 per 100,000 live births. We have worse figures than even South Asia’s average infant and under-five mortality rate that is 66 and 91 per 1,000 live births respectively.

If the government is seriously committed to promoting preventive medicine it will have to reorient its approach to all civic issues and sectors of national life — even if they are seemingly very trivial. Its policies will have to be health-centred. For instance, garbage collection should be treated as a political issue because it should be linked directly to public health. Environmental pollution also needs to be so perceived.

Whether it is the KPT stacking huge piles of coal in the open for the sea breeze to carry coal dust to blacken the lungs of Karachiites or the traffic police turning a deaf ear to the noisy rickshaws and fumes-emitting buses, or the factories which release untreated effluents into the soil under the ‘watchful’ eyes of the environmental protection agencies, the authorities will have to address these questions as serious health hazards under a programme of preventive medicine.

Since it is now quite plain, and the prime minister has also confirmed it, that the government is disengaging itself from tertiary health care, its responsibility of promoting preventive health has increased manifold. After all, it is highly immoral to expose people to health hazards, let them fall ill for no fault of theirs and then expect them to die in silence because they cannot pay for expensive medical treatment.

As it is the health expenditure has barely increased as the percentage of GDP. It was 0.6 per cent in 1994-95, rose to 0.7 per cent the following year and then went down to 0.6 per cent in 2004-05.

Moreover, the increase in corruption has ensured that the money being pumped into projects ostensibly to protect people’s health is siphoned off by dishonest functionaries.

There is also the failure of the authorities to take preventive measures that are cost-effective. For instance, there are no screening campaigns which would ensure a health checkup for every child in school or every factory worker or the inhabitants of every low-income mohalla in a city. It is only thus that serious ailments are detected before they become serious threats to life.

The most ironical aspect of the preventive health programme in Pakistan is the nutrition plan. The government calculates the nutritional status of the population in terms of the caloric availability of food which the Economic Survey, 2004-05 informs us has gone up from 2,529 to 2,534 per capita with protein availability going up from 65.3 gm/capita per day to 65.8. The Survey very proudly states, “The supply of calories and protein is well above the average Recommended Daily Allowance.” But availability is different from actual consumption. Is the 34 per cent of the population living below the poverty line receiving enough nutrition?

Taken for a ride

THESE are somewhat abnormal times. As a wag insists, it was the turn of martial law in Pakistan, but the present dispensation is neither here nor there, and, although on paper there is democracy in the country, the ruler is a general in uniform, assisted by his juniors in the army. There is an elected prime minister, a very fine man, but he doesn’t seem to be all there because of the preponderance of uniforms.

This true-to-life utterance apart, I insist that a democratic form of government, howsoever undemocratic it may be in operation, is the normal preference of all patriotic people. Anyway, there is no point in quibbling about semantics. In normal times, various prime ministers have adopted various means to impress upon their cabinet colleagues the need to be aware of the problems of the people who elected them.

I have never been privy to what is said in cabinet meetings, but, in order to impress the public, prime ministers did (and do) shoot off written directives about one thing or another. The public is not impressed because it has always known the worth of these devices. I am certain that there is no record of any minister having advised a prime minister to remain aware of the problems of the people.

Throwing dust into the eyes of the masses was a feature common to the reigns of the two prime ministers who took turns to rule us since December 1988, till the tables were turned some years ago. But let me tell you of what Ms Benazir Bhutto once did to make her ministers realize their responsibilities to the electorate. She had no doubt that, like herself, they were working very hard. Her grouse was that they were not letting the people know all that the awami government was doing for them.

So the cabinet secretary was ordered to keep a tab on the press handouts issued by each minister in respect of the people-friendly activities of the departments under him. In the first report to the prime minister it was stated that the minister of information had topped the list by way of output. Since the entire publicity set-up of the government was controlled by that johnny, he took the credit for all the press notes dished out to the media by the Press Information Department. The fact that none of them related to the functions of his own ministry was conveniently glossed over. So, for once, the dust was thrown into a prime minister’s eyes.

I have been prompted to write on this subject by a reader’s letter in Dawn that, some time ago, the prime minister of Cambodia held a cabinet meeting in a bus travelling on a rather bad road. The reader quoted the premier as saying that he had done this to make the ministers understand the difficulties of the people. Maybe, the premier had plans to show his colleagues many other problems of the people in a similar manner. Meanwhile, he claimed that this was the only cabinet meeting in the world to be held in a bus. I hope Mr Guinness of the Book of World Records was duly informed.

Our Mian Nawaz Sharif, too, once took all his cabinet colleagues in a bus. This was to show them the complete motorway, his personal achievement and gift to his people. The press handout about the event did not say so, but maybe the intention really was to show the ministers what a dedicated elected prime minister could do if he set his heart to serving the people, no matter if the country went bankrupt in the process. Poor chaps! They must have felt small that they had nothing to show to the prime minister in return.

The reader ended his letter to the editor of Dawn by saying, “Looking at the dismal state of our roads in and out of the cities and the people’s problems, is there some lesson to be learnt by high-ups in our country? Is somebody listening?” Of course somebody must be listening in the upper reaches of the army around General Pervez Musharraf. They are surprisingly aware of most problems of the masses. It is another matter that they are dismissed as usurpers by many of the politicians currently out of business.

When the proper time comes and someone from the PML (N) or the PPP or the MMA is elected prime minister, that reader of Dawn should remember to bring the incident of the cabinet meeting in the bus to his notice. If the prime minister is someone like Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto who never read the newspapers, I promise to write a column on the subject and somehow have it placed before him. But I supposed the new man would be so busy taking the nation for a ride in other ways and blaming his predecessors for all the ills of Pakistan, that he may have no time for my submissions.

But suppose the new prime minister does have a feeling for the travails of the people. And as an introduction to the real Pakistan, decides (like his counterpart in Cambodia) to take his ministers around to show them what improvements are required where, what is to be given up as useless and what steps must be taken to pull the country out of the morass of despondency and degeneration that it has fallen into. Let us presume that he is sincere and intelligent and is fully aware of the stark realities in this regard. The question is, where all he must take them so that they can acquire a true picture of the deplorable state of affairs in every field of national activity.

To which government department should the first bus trip be directed? Or should priority be given to the GHQ to find out why democracy has to be toppled every now and then? On second thoughts, better keep the GHQ out, because once they are there the ministers will start fawning on the COAS and the poor prime minister will begin to feel like a fish out of water.

Space is limited, otherwise I would have devoted a few lines to the more important stops on the bus’s route, where things have gone to the dogs and where now even the dogs are bored with scavenging and are looking for new dirt heaps. So I shall not mention any of the government agencies whose contribution to the life of the common man is misery and nothing else, and leave this aspect of the subject to some other day.

FEMA, round two

THIS time around, it’s happening in slow motion. But that doesn’t mean that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the evacuee crisis in the months after Hurricane Katrina is going any better than three months ago. It has become increasingly obvious that neither FEMA nor the states that house the evacuees have any medium-term plan for them. The agency is sending conflicting signals. Several weeks ago, FEMA warned hurricane victims living in every state except Louisiana and Mississippi that it intended to stop paying for hotel rooms by Dec. 1. Then, realizing that thousands of people would be put onto the streets, the agency reversed itself, saying it would continue to pay for rooms in eight other states until Jan. 7.

The agency’s wobbliness reflects the administration’s uncertainty about when it will stop subsidizing Katrina victims. FEMA holds out the possibility of subsidizing rents for as long as 18 months. But at the moment, the benefits are guaranteed for only three months, and not all landlords are willing to rent to evacuees of uncertain status. More important, the criteria for obtaining extensions remain disturbingly vague.

— The Washington Post