Militancy in the Mid-East

IN March 2003, before US troops reached Baghdad, Middle East scholar Volker Perthes wrote that while the risks of this “illegitimate” war were enormous, those of “a US failure to stabilize post-war Iraq would be even higher”. With those words looking increasingly prophetic, no one, in picturing the implications of such failure, is now more lurid than the Bush administration.

The direness of the prospect has become its strongest argument for “staying the course”, but for others it is already a given, amounting to “the greatest strategic disaster in US history”, in the words of the retired US general William Odom.

If so, what will this disaster look like? In scale, it will surely be at least commensurate with the vast ambitions that came with the invasion in the first place, Iraq being cast as the platform for reshaping the entire Middle East.

A general US retreat from the region, with troop withdrawal at its core, is no doubt a prerequisite for, and yardstick of, the emergence of a healthy, self-reliant new Middle Eastern order. But, with the kind of ignominious scuttle from Iraq that failure would presumably entail, the region won’t just revert to the status quo ante. Instead of Iraq becoming a beacon of all good things it will become the single most noxious wellspring of all the bad ones the invasion was supposed to extinguish — and new ones to boot.

If the Middle East was a jungle before, it will be a wilder one afterwards, with most elements of the decadent existing order, in their increased insecurity, driven to even cruder methods — increased internal repression or external adventurism — to preserve themselves. And it will become even more anti-American. For while a “good” retreat would decrease such sentiments, a “bad” Iraqi one will only spur and spread the active, often violent expression of them.

That is because, for the Arabs, Iraq was only the latest drastic episode in a long history of western interference in their affairs. Until the wider, pre-Iraqi consequences of that interference are remedied, the example of successful anti-American resistance in Iraq will only encourage it elsewhere, especially in Palestine.

Saddam’s Iraq was the very model of Arab tyranny — with sectarianism, in the shape of Sunni minority rule, as its main component. With American failure it will become the model of Arab anarchy, embodying the two most disruptive forces in the Middle East today. One is a sectarianism (chiefly Sunni versus Shia) or ethnic antagonism (chiefly Kurd versus Arab, Turk and Iranian) as malevolent in its new pluralist form as it was in its more familiar despotic one.

The other is universalist, ideologically driven Islamism. Elections show that this is the dominant or rising force on both sides of Iraq’s widening sectarian divide. Extremism will spawn its inevitable fanatical progeny and Iraq, till now mainly a magnet for pan-Islamic jihadists, will become, Afghan-style, a main exporter of them too; it already is, in fact, as the Jordanian suicide bombings illustrated.

The Arab states will be sucked into this Iraqi maelstrom. With the world’s only superpower on its way out, who but they — along with Turkey and Iran — are left to replace it there? But they will fail disastrously in their turn. In the past the regimes more or less controlled the business of interference in each other’s other affairs, as they exerted such control over their domestic arenas.

Now they will be competing with those non-state forces, primarily the ethnic/sectarian and Islamist ones, by which they also are increasingly challenged. In

fact almost all these countries are latent Iraqs, especially Ba’athist Syria. Far from mastering Iraq, it is Iraq — in its death throes as a unified state — that is more likely to master them. Nor will Turkey and Iran, Iraq’s strongest neighbours, be immune from the contagion, with Iraqi Kurdish emancipation already contributing to a resurgence of Kurdish resistance in both.

If all this portends an unfathomable mess, one thing at least is already clear: Iran will be the main beneficiary of US failure and the long-overdue accession of the Shia majority, its coreligionists, to political ascendancy in Iraq. The increase in regional clout it derives from this will be used at America’s expense. The mullahs have long been readying themselves for a great reckoning. With their new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, readiness seems to be mutating into active desire. He and those around him believe that only the US stands in the way of Iranian regional dominance and that the US, seen as defeated in Iraq, is now a “sunset power”.

For Iran, the sectarian/ethnic and Islamist factors are now potent assets. Its Kurdish vulnerabilities are more than offset by improved Shia influence throughout the region. This is a reality which, within the Sunni-dominated Arab establishment, Jordan has been most publicly alarmed about. King Abdullah warns of a “Shia crescent” stretching from Iraq, via Syria (so long as its pro-Iranian Alawite regime survives), to south Lebanon. Jordanian politicians even talk of building a “Sunni wall” through Iraq to keep the peril at bay. In addition, non-Arab Iran is now the main state patron of radical Islamism in the Arab world, and Palestine is its most profitable arena. Long an advocate of Islamicizing the Palestinian struggle, nothing could better serve its ambition than the effect that US failure in Iraq will have on Hamas, which is now close to supplanting the secular-nationalist Fatah as the dominant political force in the occupied territories.

But the thing that will really make it and Israel the most dangerous animals in the post-Iraqi Middle East jungle is Iran’s apparent quest for nuclear weapons. On the one hand, this commands grassroots popularity among the Arabs. They see it as a self-assertion that no Arab leader would dare offer against colonial-style western bullying and the hypocrisy of the West’s acceptance of Israel’s nuclear monopoly.

On the other hand, no one invested greater expectations in the Iraqi adventure than Israel. US success, it thought, would transform its strategic position. But with US failure, Israel will grow more repressive against the Palestinians, and more ready for military action against Iran. Should the US itself deal with Iran in the same violent and partisan fashion as it did Iraq, the adverse consequences of that new adventure will outstrip those of the earlier one. For there is no reason to doubt that Iran’s response, from both itself and its strengthened Shia and Islamist allies in the region, will be the devastating one it constantly promises. — Dawn/Guardian Service

Europe still the odd one out

IF the past year were judged by headlines alone it looks like a bit of an economic disaster. But behind rocketing oil prices, collapsed trade talks, tsunamis, hurricanes and (this week) cuts in Russian gas supplies, the world economy has been quietly going about its business of increasing wealth — with a good chance of it continuing this year.

Once again the disasters that some economists have been predicting for years - such as the US imploding under its huge trade deficit or collapsing UK house prices - did not happen: or maybe were postponed.

In Britain, the Treasury — unusually — got its GDP forecasts badly wrong as growth turned out to be half the 3 per cent to 3.5 per cent predicted, while City forecasters — as usual — failed to predict a strong recovery triggering a 17 per cent rise in the FTSE 100, its best for six years. With the two engines of growth — spending by consumers and government - both faltering, the UK needs a boost from exports and a recovery in consumer confidence to return to its former growth path.

However, although Gordon Brown may have failed an end-of-year test based on predictions of a year ago, the economy is still in good shape by historical standards. Unemployment is rising but employment is at near-record levels and the economy has, unprecedentedly, expanded for 53 continuous quarters, an achievement that won plaudits from the IMF and the OECD last year.

The outlook for the world is surprisingly resilient. Of the four leading economies, Japan is at last emerging from a decade of near deflation, the eurozone, particularly Germany, may be awakening from a long slumber, China - now the second biggest economy by some measures - is still expanding by over 9% a year while the US, like Old Man River, just keeps rolling along, confounding all the Cassandras.

The biggest laggard is still the eurozone. Instead of exploiting its economic advantage in being a mutually supporting trading zone (with a $47 billion trade surplus) by stimulating demand, it is again relying on the rest of the world to pull it out of stagnation. This is fine for Germany, the world’s most successful exporter, but may not be enough to stimulate GDP growth in 2006 to even two per cent. The big success is Asia where China’s appetite for imported components and materials to fuel its boom has enabled it to displace Japan as the growth locomotive for the region including Hong Kong and India, both of which are growing by more than 8 per cent.

Elsewhere, Russia, thanks to a surge in energy prices, is growing at seven per cent, faster than less well-endowed neighbours in eastern Europe such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. South America has also shared in the boom in world trade with Venezuela and Argentina both growing at over nine per cent and Peru not far behind at seven per cent. In sub-Saharan Africa there has been a mild recovery but not enough to stem growing poverty even in South Africa where five per cent growth must be seen against 25 per cent unemployment.

—The Guardian, London

Not quite back to square one yet

PAKISTAN spokesperson Tasneem Aslam must be having a great sense of humour. Otherwise, how can she say that the forecast about the peace progress between New Delhi and Islamabad was certainly not “bleak”? There is nothing else to suggest.

The spokesperson said: Please do not read too much. What can one do when President General Pervez Musharraf expresses explicitly in an interview to an Indian TV channel that he feels disappointed because there is “no progress in the peace process.” He even criticized the futility of a process which was not making any headway, although he says that India-Pakistan relations had never been so improved before.

His real regret — he made no secret about it — is that no new ground has been covered since the beginning of the talks. Back channels, according to him, have elicited no response from India. Obviously, they are clogged by officials who stick to old thinking. Musharraf did not hesitate to say that if Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came to Pakistan to watch the cricket match and there was no progress on the problem, meaning thereby Kashmir, then the meeting would be of little use.

I know that military men are frank and come straight to the point. But the president has been in politics long enough to know what he should say in public. He should realize that here, unlike the battlefield, discretion is the better part of valour. Musharraf’s defence is that he had no option except to go public when India had not reacted to his various proposals. Still, there are better ways to make the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Kashmiris debate his initiatives. Even the manner in which he invited the prime minister to the cricket match “Yes I invite him” — does not befit a head of state.

On the other hand, Manmohan Singh, reserved and taciturn, told me during a conversation before Musharraf’s interview was shown on TV that it was not possible for him to proceed further when cross-border terrorism continued even after Musharraf’s repeated promises to stop it. Musharraf says that he has done so much that no other person could have done as much. But the fact remains that cross-border terrorism has not ended.

The two interviews, one of Musharraf and the other of Manmohan Singh, took place within a span of five days. Both indicated more or less the same distance between the two governments as before. This is despite people-to-people contact. However, there is no doubting the absence of tension in both countries. This is a plus if it stays that way.

New Delhi admits that the number of infiltrators has gone down but it claims that the intermittent flow has not stopped. Musharraf’s defence is how can he guarantee that not a single bullet will be fired. Nor can he say for certain that none will cross over. It is difficult to imagine Musharraf’s helplessness knowing well how disciplined the Pakistani forces are and how tight is his control over the men and the corps commanders. He himself said in his interview that he would throw out anyone from the army who disobeyed him. Then how can infiltration take place without the army’s connivance?

Exasperated, Manmohan Singh says that he does not know what is in Musharraf’s mind. On an Indian TV show, the number of people who ticked “no trust in Musharraf” was 80 per cent. New Delhi suspects that he has kept the machinery of training and arming terrorists intact to be able to play the jihadi card whenever he thinks that India needs to be pressured. During my recent visit to Pakistan, I heard some voices confirming the existence of training camps. One young man described how the terrorists were boarding army vehicles at Muzaffarabad and how they were being transported to the Line of Control (LoC).

One leading Pakistani newspaper has alleged that the banned jihadi organizations had changed names and were still operating. If there was any credibility to Pakistan’s claim that they had gone off the field, the paper said, it was destroyed when the jihadis reemerged and took over the reconstruction of the earthquake hit regions of Azad Kashmir and the NWFP, incidentally the very areas where they had been known “to train for covert jihad.”

Governments on both sides have their own versions and perception. Even the little common ground is shrinking bit by bit. Bureaucrats on both sides are having a field day. Spokespersons in the two countries are using such language and expression which do not reflect civilized behaviour. The worst fallout is that practically every act of violence or sabotage in one country is attributed to the other.

Intelligence agencies get the most blame. In India it is ISI and in Pakistan it is RAW. New Delhi also believes that the ISI is egging on Bangladesh terrorists to foment trouble in India. The hand of the Lashkar-i-Taiba in the Bangalore incident is seen as a confirmation of the Pakistan establishment’s support. The Indian press has quoted extensively from the 9/11 US Commission report to reiterate that Pakistan continues to send jihadis across the border.

The two countries may not yet be back to square one. Yet, the lack of agreement on anything, except on the itinerary of cricket matches, is pushing things to a point where the same old mood of estrangement is taking over.

The peace process may be irreversible but if there is no progress on confidence-building measures, the situation will become more uneasy and more uncertain as the days go by. Musharraf is talking about demilitarization in three cities of Kashmir to begin with. How does he expect Manmohan Singh to reciprocate when the latter says unequivocally that he cannot move forward until cross-border terrorism ends? The entire process is stuck at that.

Is it possible for the two countries to set up a joint committee of eminent people, including retired police officers, to verify the allegations of cross-border terrorism and to suggest ways to stop it if the committee has such evidence? Subsequently, Indian and Pakistani forces should jointly patrol the LoC to stop infiltration.

The foreign secretaries of the two countries are discussing Kashmir at New Delhi, something which they should have done long ago. But they must keep in mind what Jawaharhal Nehru told Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: “Zulfi, I know that we must find a solution for Kashmir. But we have got caught in a situation which we cannot get out of without causing damage to the systems and structures of our respective societies.”

The writer is a leading columnist based at New Delhi.

Snails for money

MONEY is not only the root of all evil — it is the root of everything. Despite what you may have read in the comic strips, the first money early homo sapiens used wasn’t clams, but snails.

Before snails, people traded bearskins for wild turkeys and sharks’ teeth for homemade apple cider. But bartering was too cumbersome, so one day, a certain Beijing Man (he asked not to be identified) offered to exchange a wheel, which he had just invented, for a kangaroo pouch of snails.

Thus occurred the invention of money as we know it today.

In the beginning, Beijing Man had a surplus of snails and almost everyone could purchase whatever they wanted, from alligator belts to caves with beautiful views overlooking the water. It was known as the golden age of snails.

But besides luxuries, Beijing Man used to accumulate sticks and rocks to throw at other homo erecti. And he still had enough snails left over to harvest wild marijuana for medicinal purposes.

As more snails were found, Beijing Man prospered. He learned how to sell heat from fire and catch rainwater from large eucalyptus trees.

But he still kept making more weapons for defence.

About this time, another tribe, known as Cro-Magnon Man, started making weapons too, which were as powerful as any in Beijing Man’s arsenal. So Beijing Man had to spend more and more snails to protect himself against Cro-Magnon Man. What had been a surplus of snails became a deficit.

In those days there was no God, and it was every Beijing Man for himself.

An advisor suggested that Beijing Man launch a pre-emptive strike against Cro-Magnon Man, who otherwise might launch a strike on them.

Beijing Man said, in the language of Pekinese, “It’s a good idea. The world would be a better place without Cro-Magnon Man. How many snails will it cost us?”

“Two hundred and fifty billion snails for starters.”

“It’s worth it to rid us of this devil.”

“What’s a devil?” the advisor asked.

“I don’t know. We may not know for thousands of years. Then someone will invent heaven and hell, and we’ll know what we’re fighting for.”

“Are we going to bomb the Cro-Magnons back to the Stone Age?” “Something like that, unless Cro-Magnon Man says ‘uncle.”’

And so it went: snails . . . war . . . snails . . . war. Eventually, everyone stopped trading in snails and went on the gold standard, mainly because gold looked prettier than snails around a lady’s neck.

Gold eventually turned into greenbacks. And as of this writing, Beijing Man’s descendents owe eight trillion dollars.

It’s more than all the tea in China — but that’s another story.

—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

While Congress slept

THE performance of US Congress during much of the Bush administration has been, to put it kindly, undistinguished. But revelations that the National Security Agency may have violated the law by secretly eavesdropping on US citizens offer Republican congressional leaders a chance to redeem themselves — and their institution.

It remains to be seen whether the spymasters were merely overzealous in their efforts to track international terrorists or deliberately snooped on Americans. Congressional hearings on the NSA affair may answer that question. What is alarmingly clear, however, is that President Bush has consistently overreached in his claim to expanded powers as commander in chief during wartime.

It is up to Congress to restrain those powers. His duty to protect the nation does not place him above the law.

Bush’s claim to disturbingly broad wartime powers first surfaced in the infamous 2002 “torture memo” written by John Yoo, then a lawyer in the Justice Department and now a professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

The most quoted part of the memo is its definition of torture as only the extreme standard of pain accompanying “serious physical injury such as death or organ failure.”

The much scarier part comes a dozen pages earlier, with this assertion of unfettered presidential wartime power: “In light of the president’s complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, we will not read a criminal statute as infringing on the president’s ultimate authority in these areas.” Translation: Fighting a war is more important than obeying the law. If a law interferes with our strategy, we can ignore it.

Was Bush chastened by the political repudiation of a 90-9 vote in the Senate in favour of Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s amendment banning torture? Not in the least. When he signed the law, Bush announced that “the executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president ... as commander in chief” to further the goal “of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.” Translation: We can override this law whenever necessary.

Congress also stood by when the administration overreached with its novel definition of enemy combatants, who are not entitled to challenge their own detention.

— Los Angeles Times