EVENTS like CIA’s aerial strike that killed at least 18 men, women and children in the Damadola village of the Bajaur agency invariably send out waves of shock, disbelief, indignation and grief. All these emotions have been much in evidence since this atrocity was committed. The rage of our people was also accompanied by a deep feeling of humiliation at the wanton violation of national sovereignty. The popular reaction is perfectly understandable; it should not, however, be allowed to obfuscate the fundamental perspectives in which this tragedy needs to be understood.

Much has already been written about the facts of the case even as efforts continue in Washington and Islamabad to shroud them in a cloak of uncertainty. It is not difficult in this age of disinformation to do so. It would inevitably become a matter of subjective choice whether the focus of attention should be the Predator’s civilian victims in a simple, virtually apolitical, 18th century hamlet or the belatedly discovered mystery of empty graves. Similarly, one would be free to either lament the dead and the shattered lives of the survivors, or opt for a reductionist debate on the quality of intelligence, a debate that would supersede human tragedy and replace it with the mechanics of counter-terrorism.

Media narratives in the United States began with a deliberate blurring of the humanitarian focus. Readers of The New York Times were informed on January 16 that it was “the third air strike in recent weeks inside Pakistani territory by American aircraft”. A day earlier the Washington Post had the US military sources saying that “Pakistan’s intelligence service had been heavily involved in the attack.” It identified the real target as the Egyptian physician, Ayman Zawahiri and described the Pakistani government’s response as “muted”.

This drift in reporting caused consternation in Islamabad that got aggravated with observations made by two US congressmen and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. With Bush Sr. in town and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz about to take off for a long-awaited visit to Washington, the Pakistani establishment was caught between a rock and a hard place. Nothing reflected the dilemma better than a newspaper column written by the director-general of the official Institute of Strategic Studies who is routinely described by the capital’s foreign and diplomatic community as “a government insider”. She posed the question if Washington was trying to ‘destabilize’ the Pakistan government and went on to recommend that the prime minister “should postpone his present visit to the US”, that the US undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Nicholas Burns, should be told “not to visit us on this round of his South Asian tour” and that “finally, the president needs to summon back our ambassador in the US.”

It is difficult to gauge the resonance of these drastic recommendations in Islamabad’s official circles. But one could not miss an alternative view that it was time that Islamabad got its act together and used the prime minister’s visit, the impending conversation with Mr Burns and the current appointment of Pakistan’s former army chief in Washington to settle with much greater precision the framework in which the two countries were collaborating in the so-called war against terrorism.

Aspects of this “war” go beyond considerations of the sanctity of national frontiers and impinge upon norms, laws and conventions underpinning any civilized state. Unless one resigns to a totally Hobbesian world view, questions of great import have to be asked about the legitimacy of war, the legality of the means by which it is being conducted, its ultimate purpose and the application of the time-honoured laws of war to combatants, be they from regular armies or from the more recent “grey” category of non-state belligerents. A mystical and endless invocation of the term “terrorism” does not absolve either the United States or Pakistan from observing a regime of lawfulness in their conduct of hostilities against a perceived common enemy.

Several states, including the United States and Pakistan, were preoccupied with a new kind of asymmetrical warfare being employed in diverse situations before the cataclysmic events of 9/11. The Soviet state had consistently described the Afghan resistance fighters and the foreign volunteers helping them as “bandits”, thus putting them outside the laws of war. The United States had encouraged a similar disregard of international law as well as domestic norms of law enforcement in several situations of guerilla warfare and civil disorder in Latin America and had thus condoned widespread torture and extra-judicial killings.

Evolving patterns of terrorism were leading to counter-terrorist practices that increasingly tested a generally accepted framework of lawful responses by established states. By declaring a “global war against terrorism” in the wake of 9/11, the United States brought this framework under unbearable strain as it unilaterally appropriated power and prerogative to deal with anticipated as well as unforeseen contingencies. With an acceptable closure receding further and further away, the world is faced with an ever deepening legal nightmare.

Presumably, the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq began with at least a tacit acceptance of Geneva Conventions and other international treaties bearing upon the laws of war. But even in that optimistic hour, an unknown number of Taliban were suffocated in containers or just murdered after their surrender. Asserting that prisoners, classified as “terrorists”, were not entitled to the normal laws and conventions applicable to lawful combatants, the victors invented “Guantanamo”.

In both cases, there was a wilful disregard of restraints that needed to be legally observed in dealing with those resisting an alien occupation. The result, particularly in Iraq, was a rapid degeneration of warfare into indiscriminate terrorism on one side and Fallujah-style counter-terrorism on the other. It was a classic case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This particular brand of counter-terrorism is based on the executive judgment that the Afghan and Iraqi insurgents are not entitled to Geneva conventions, law enforcement procedures, or ordinary laws of criminal justice. It is argued that extension of any such rights would be disruptive of military operations. Since the United States is fundamentally a law-bound state, there have been legal challenges to this executive arbitrariness.

One notices efforts to ward off such challenges by locating a special approach to insurgents and terrorists in a self-serving interpretation of customary laws of war rather than the law of inter-state conflict or even the laws applicable to guerillas resisting outside invasion and occupation. Revenge rather than justice continues to determine the actions of the greatest military power of human history.

American analysts deliberately highlight coercion as the instrument by which Pakistan was made to join the war against terror. The Pakistani state counters this claim of duress by describing it as its own war and by citing convergence of interests as the leitmotif of a coalition of the willing. Neither narrative, however, explains the uncritical enthusiasm with which Pakistan has pursued it without calibrating the degree of national interest involved in it. For those who want to see their state act within the parameters of recognizable laws, there is still no explanation of the legal basis for the killing and the capture of men fleeing Afghanistan and the transfer, without due process, of prisoners to the United States.

If the only explanation is political expediency, no wonder the state finds itself weakened in resisting US expeditions across the Durand line. The people of Pakistan have been poorly served by its leading jurists who have demonstrated unrivalled ingenuity in exploiting the law of necessity to legitimize the military’s seizures of power by coup d’etat in Pakistan but have, with only few honourable exceptions, maintained a stony silence on the long-term ramifications of their government embracing the same kind of arbitrariness as the United States.

Even today government ministers act as if leaking few Arab names amongst the dead in Damodola will absolve the state from its primary responsibility. Way back in 1878, in a similar situation of lawlessness on the US-Mexico border, the then US secretary of state defined this responsibility in the following terms: “The first duty of a government is to protect life and property. This is a paramount obligation. For this governments are instituted, and governments neglecting or failing to perform it become worse than useless.”

In the absence of effective initiatives for national reconciliation in Afghanistan, which President Hamid Karzai is unable to launch, and which are alien to the basic thought processes of United States’ warrior president, the situation in that country and on our common border may deteriorate further. The recent shift to Iraqi-style suicide bombing strengthens this apprehension. Not to be ignored is the attempt in Kabul to link the suicide attack not very far from Kandahar to Pakistan.

In these circumstances, it is still not too late to review our strange passion to be a frontline state in America’s imperial wars. The role of our armed forces deployed in the border areas must be defined more carefully. The framework of our cooperation with occupation forces in Afghanistan must also be laid down with greater precision. Above all, the existing ambiguity about Pakistan’s sovereignty created by the unilateralist actions of these forces must be removed. There is no legal, political or moral basis for Pakistan underwriting wrong-headed decisions across the border. If they think they can pacify Afghanistan by bombing wedding parties, let them take the consequences also.

Pakistan’s foremost duty is to rehabilitate law and order in the tribal areas so that the task of their political and economic development gets accelerated. This is by far the most acceptable justification for the deployment there of more than 70,000 troops. It is a complex and difficult task that needs a new balance between innovative approaches now under discussion and the 150-year old strategies employed by the British and the successor state of Pakistan to bring them into the national mainstream.

We can establish the writ of the government only by anchoring it in the rule of law. Condoleezza Rice may think of these territories as the eternal badlands; we have to reclaim them as integral and equal parts of the motherland. We must set our priorities right. We can do it by asserting and not diluting our sovereignty over them.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

THERE was a time in Karachi’s pre-historic past when one looked forward to going out in the evening to attend a dinner or a marriage in a hotel. One could at least get to the destination without having to traverse, for the better part of the journey, on roads that resembled the rocky topography of the moon.

But these days, with every well meaning official from the president and the prime minister down to the town nazim wanting to do what’s best for Pakistan’s commercial capital, it is difficult to find a thoroughfare that does not, at some point in its trajectory, have half its surface scraped off, with a steam roller idling at the side of the road, while the smell of hot tar scents the air.

It got to the stage that whenever an envelope containing elaborately designed wedding invitations made an appearance, announcing that a guest’s catering arrangements had been taken care of for at least five evenings, families without drivers were suddenly gripped by panic. How was one going to get to the place when so many roads were under repair? Where was one going to park the car? And what if the car got stolen? These were some of the anxieties that tempted one to feign sickness and stay at home with a Cuban cigar and the juice of the grape, listening to Beethoven’s Ninth or Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. At least it kept one off the telly and the lengthy debates on what one should do to stop the Indus from flowing into the sea.

President Musharraf recently argued himself hoarse about the need for dams, graciously conceding to the will of a section of the opposition when he saw a hardening of the political arteries in Sindh. But what is significant is that since February 3, 2005, he hasn’t said a word about what the government should do about easing the traffic that crawls at a snail’s pace and clogs the city’s arteries 16 hours a day. In fact, the last time he was in the city attending the wedding of the daughter of a friend, five people died because their ambulances couldn’t get to the hospital in time.

However, on that windy day in February 2005, the people of Karachi got the message first hand. “We are determined to develop Karachi, which is the commercial hub as well as an important city. The government has approved a most-modern mass transit magnetic one-track system from Sohrab Goth to Keamari in Karachi which will be operational in 18 months, and the Karachi Circular Railway will be reactivated in a week. Both these projects will help solve the transport problems of the city.” That magnetic one-track system seems to have evaporated along with the two-track corridor system and the flat rail circular railway. But at least somebody in a position of authority had the sense to realize that the way to tackle the horrendous transport problem was to divert a proportion of the traffic onto rail tracks.

The president’s dramatic pronouncement represented the second last in a series of official statements on a project which is apparently proving to be more difficult to handle than sending a space ship to Uranus. The last announcement occurred a month ago when the citizens of Karachi learned to their dismay that the KCR project has been pushed forward for another two years.

The 1977 plan consisted of developing the circular railway built in 1962 and pushing it into the suburbs by branch lines. In addition, a part-underground-part-elevated spine that bisected the circle was also proposed. This would link up the circle with Saddar and other residential and commercial areas of the city. The proposal had no adverse environmental impacts but it was never implemented.

The story of the Karachi Circular Railway from the time a proposal for a light rail mass transit system was made in 1973 to the present when the former city government planners were monosyllabically bereft of the ability or the language to ask why the president suddenly and whimsically decided to divert the funds earmarked for the light rail mass transit system to the Lyari Expressway, would make the subject of an interesting documentary.

In fact, if such a film were to be made, one could suggest that the director should use Richard Strauss’ tone poem An Alpine Symphony as a background score. The abnormal psychology, brilliantly mirrored in music of dissonant harmonies and perverse instrumentation, would adequately describe the chaotic traffic conditions that exist in the metropolis today and how various administrations have succumbed to the pressures exerted by the road transport lobby. The bad news isn’t that it is getting worse year by year, but that nobody seemed to be pushed about doing anything to improve matters.

All kinds of reasons have been attributed for the mess. It has been suggested that the absence of a national transport deletion policy is the main cause for the traffic jams. There are just too many cars, buses, trucks, carts and other assorted vehicles on the narrow roads. The argument goes something like this. Cars of a certain vintage should be declared obsolete and taken off the streets, so that room can be made for the thousands of locally manufactured and imported new vehicles. It is a typical bourgeois argument. Get rid of the old cars so that people can buy the newer models. It doesn’t work that way. The reason that people hang on to their jalopies is because they can’t afford the latest models.

It has also been suggested that what the city needs is more flyovers and underpasses. The granddaddy of the Overpass School is the former nazim of Karachi, Niamatullah Khan, who had established something of a record for globe trotting during the five years he headed the local government. The flyovers have certainly helped to relieve some of the congestion. But what can the poor citizen do when policymakers suffer from tunnel vision and keep inundating the streets with more buses? According to the second edition of Arif Hasan’s excellent book Understanding Karachi, in 2002 there were 14,854 intra-city buses, 513 inter-city buses. In addition to this the Karachi Transport Corporation had 800 buses. There were also 13,613 taxis and 23,337 rickshaws in the city. These figures must have been augmented during the last four years.

As it is, the denizens of this city have to occasionally suffer the trauma of VVIP movements where whole streets are cordoned off to traffic for often as long as 12 hours a day. This causes unnecessary inconvenience to commuters, parents picking up and dropping their children and just about everybody else. As if that was not enough, there are far too many officials who have to be provided police escorts, their sirens whooping demonically in the bowels of their motor-cycle or vans. The latest mandarin to have joined this exclusive club is the chief executive of PIA Tariq Kirmani, who apparently doesn’t leave home or office unless his car has security coverage, fore and aft. This is a facility that wasn’t provided to any previous PIA chief, including the two former air marshals — Asghar Khan and Nur Khan.

The latest news to have come down the pike is that the centre has assured the Karachi town nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal, that it would provide all assistance in the implementation of the Corridor 2 plan of the Karachi Mass Transit Project. Anybody who has read the works of the town planner Arif Hasan will conclude that Corridor 2 is not necessarily the best option. But people have become so sick of hearing about the elusive circular railway that they would welcome any plan that is an improvement on the current theme of tossing more and more buses on to the overcrowded streets.

The reason why people are hopeful that the project will finally see the light of day is that both the nazim and the naib nazim belong to a party with strong roots in urban Sindh. The MQM enjoys considerable support not only among the poor of the city but also the less affluent. But to ensure that people don’t see this as another ploy to gain popularity Mustafa Kamal and Nasreen Jalil must stay focused and keep chipping away until the public sees concrete evidence of their efforts. So far, from what one has seen of the dedication of the two, it certainly looks like they are going to swing it.

LAST week, at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, we presented a new estimate for the likely cost of the war in Iraq. We suggested that the final bill will be much higher than previously reckoned — between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending primarily on how much longer our troops stay.

Putting that into perspective, the highest-grossing movie of all time, “Titanic,” earned $1.8 billion worldwide — about half the cost the US incurs in Iraq every week.

Like the iceberg that hit the Titanic, the full costs of the war are still largely hidden below the surface. Our calculations include not just the money for combat operations but also the costs the government will have to pay for years to come. These include lifetime health care and disability benefits for returning veterans and special round-the-clock medical attention for many of the 16,300 Americans who already have been seriously wounded.

We also count the increased cost of replacing military hardware because the war is using up equipment at three to five times the peacetime rate. In addition, the military must pay large reenlistment bonuses and offer higher benefits to reenlist reluctant soldiers. On top of this, because we finance the war by borrowing more money (mostly from abroad), there is a rising interest cost on the extra debt.

Our study also goes beyond the budget of the federal government to estimate the war’s cost to the economy and our society. It includes, for instance, the true economic costs of injury and death. For example, if an individual is killed in an auto or work-related accident, his family will typically receive compensation for lost earnings.

Standard government estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death are about $6 million. But the military pays out far less - about $500,000. Another cost to the economy comes from the fact that 40 per cent of our troops are taken from the National Guard and Reserve units. These troops often earn lower wages than in their civilian jobs. Finally, there are macro-economic costs such as the effect of higher oil prices — partly a result of the instability in Iraq.

We conclude that the economy would have been much stronger if we had invested the money in the United States instead of in Iraq. Spending up to $2 trillion should make us ask some questions. First, these figures are far higher than what the administration predicted before the war. At that time, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey was effectively fired for suggesting that the war might cost up to $200 billion, rather than the $60 billion claimed by the president’s budget office.

Why were the costs so vastly underestimated? Elsewhere in the government, it is standard practice to engage in an elaborate cost-benefit analysis for major projects. The war in Iraq was a war of choice, an immense “project,” and yet it now appears that there was virtually no analysis of the likely costs of a prolonged occupation.

Could we have fought the war in ways that would have protected our troops better and cost the country less? A Pentagon study apparently concludes that better body armour would have prevented many deaths and injuries. Penny-pinching in such matters during the rush to war has led to steep long-run costs for the nation and, tragically, for the individuals involved.

Even more fundamentally, there is the question of whether we needed to spend the money at all. Thinking back to the months before the war, there were few reasons to invade quickly, and many to go slow. The Bush policy of threatened force had pressured Iraq into allowing the UN inspectors back into the country. The inspectors said they required a few months to complete their work. Several of our closest allies, including France and Germany, were urging the US to await the outcome of the inspections. There were, as we now know, conflicting intelligence reports.

Had we waited, the value of the information we would have learned from the inspectors would arguably have saved the nation at least $1 trillion - enough money to fix Social Security for the next 75 years twice over. — Los Angeles Times

Linda Bilmes, a former US assistant secretary of commerce, teaches public finance at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Joseph Stiglitz is a professor at Columbia University. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001.