WHEN I wrote about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon a week ago, there was already much despondency in the air about the state of the world. Since then, the few remaining lights on the global horizon have been going out one after another and the gloom is much deeper. The descent into a Hobbesian anarchy in interstate relations brought about by the illegal occupation of Iraq has been greatly accelerated by the continued destruction of Lebanon.

Nothing illustrates it better than the determined effort by Tel Aviv and Washington to block initiatives for a ceasefire that would enable the international community to address the causes of this latest conflict in the Middle East in a relatively calm atmosphere. At the G-8 summit, the president of the United States made a tasteless remark about Syria to his staunchest ally, Tony Blair, which was relayed to the entire world by microphones that someone had forgotten to switch off.

It was an alarming indication of the large measure of truth in the reports claiming that the Israeli invasion plans had been shared with the United States at least one year ago and that Israel had been assured of an uninterrupted military campaign lasting three weeks. The paralysis at the United Nations reflected the same agonising reality that Israel was free to continue its offensives in Gaza and in Lebanon without even a proforma demand for cessation of hostilities.

Nothing, however, has shed more light on the nature of this conflict and its real objectives than the 15-nation Rome conference. Its proceedings, if available in detail, will bear scrutiny at many levels. But what already lies in the public domain reveals a distressing juxtaposition of two dominant strands: an eloquent and impassioned appeal by President Fouad Siniora for an immediate reprieve for his devastated country, Lebanon, and a granite-like resolve by the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to deny it. She said that Siniora had put a human face on the unfolding tragedy but refused to give that tragedy a higher priority than the attainment of questionable strategic objectives underlying the licence given to Israel to wage war with impunity.

Speaking for the dead and dying in Lebanon, President Siniora asked: “What future other than one of fear, frustration, financial ruin and fanaticism can stem from this rubble?” To underline the futility of this conflict, he concluded his anguished address to the conference by quoting from Tacitus: “They created a desolation and call it peace.” In the first two weeks, what Israel has destroyed completely or damaged grievously includes three airports, three ports, three dams, 62 bridges, 72 overpasses, 5,000 civilian homes and 152 commercial factories and other businesses. It is bizarre that a person of Dr Rice’s background speaks so uncritically of the birth pangs of a new Middle East.

Dr Rice knows her Tacitus as well as any historian or politician but her sights were set far beyond the wasteland of south Lebanon on Syria, Iran and any organisation in between that dare oppose the project for a new Middle East. As to the anguish of the Palestinians and the Lebanese, they should be happy that their suffering represented the birth pangs of this new order. They should also know that their pain would last a while. The Rome conference, we are told, was stuck for almost an hour on the right word in the reference to be made to a ceasefire.

Apparently, all but two participants, US and UK, wanted to say that the Rome group would work for “an immediate ceasefire”. Dr Rice insisted that it would “work immediately to bring a ceasefire”. Apparently, the work that she wants the group to undertake immediately is to devise a mechanism that would disarm the Hezbollah, ensure that it would not reassert itself, and also neutralise Syria and Iran. Apart from giving Israel enough time to cripple the military capability of Hezbollah, Washington seeks to deploy an international army that is willing to assume the responsibility of a rapid deployment force virtually with no mandate other than protecting Israel against the Hezbollah.

Dr Rice was the winner in the Rome debate but far too many elements in the situation militate against the eventual success of the policy that she forced the conference to adopt, probably with the degree of acquiescence varying from state to state. First and foremost, the military situation has turned out to be far more complex than anticipated. The nature of weapons in the hands of Hezbollah was known but what has surprised the world is its ability to hit targets well inside Israel despite being under constant bombardment from air, sea and, on the ground, by Israeli artillery and armour.

As this hostile pressure on its positions turns to desperation, Hezbollah may fire off rockets with a longer range (as it already claims to have done) that Israel says have been delivered to it by Iran.. At the time of this writing, its fighters are still imposing a high cost on the Israeli troops advancing into Lebanon.

Secondly, the goal of disarming Hezbollah may turn out to be unachievable. Opinions in the Arab world about its provocative cross-border raid into Israel at the beginning of hostilities were divided but the staggering lack of proportionality in Israel’s retaliation has obscured that split. The conflict imposes great attrition on war materiel in Hezbollah’s arsenal but it can, in the short run, be compensated by change of tactics and, in the long run, by unstoppable re-supply. A point will come when Hezbollah will return to the war of ambush and sudden attack making Israel pay an ever-increasing price.

Hezbollah has no analogy with Al Qaeda. It is a deep-rooted national resistance movement, with a strong political wing and a disciplined military arm, thrown up by the prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. If an international force pushes the disarming process too far in an attempt to secure a full implementation of resolution 1559 of the UN Security Council, Lebanon’s fragile confessional and sectarian balance will come under strain and Dr Rice will end up with another Iraq rather than a pro-western democracy of the “New Middle East”.

Third, the very idea of drafting Syria to help neutralise Hezbollah without a comprehensive Middle East settlement is a non-starter. France and the United States, not the best of allies most of the time, collaborated to bring about the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon knowing full well that it would further empower the Hezbollah leadership. Now that no Arab army other than Hezbollah has resisted the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, Syria should not be expected to compromise its position in the Arab world by weakening it except in the framework of a broader settlement. Such a settlement seems to be conceptually beyond the present US administration and an Israeli government overshadowed by the hawks in the nation’s military.

Iran’s involvement with Syria and the Shia minority in Lebanon has a long and impressive history. I have a vivid recollection of Iranian ideologues building up this relationship to preserve their self-image of a millenarian Islamic revolution when fighting Iraq, a Ba’athist Arab country. It was important for Iranians to avoid categorisation of what they called “an imposed war” as a conflict between an Arab and a non-Arab Muslim country and the Levant was a befitting theatre from where to project Tehran’s Islamic credentials.

Today, the stakes are different; a network of kindred forces in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon creates a new dynamic demanding a new balance between conservative and radical segments of the Islamic world, between nationalism and internationalist Islam. As long as the United States threatens Iran with regime change, Tehran cannot permit a dilution of its influence in the region. As in Syria’s case, Iran will have to be associated with the larger settlement.

Dr Rice has explained it time and again that the United States opposes an immediate ceasefire as it cannot let the situation return to status quo ante. She has also asked Damascus and Tehran to make their choice. As things stand at the moment, the United States, too, has to make a choice. It has to disentangle its interests, the global interests of the greatest military power in human history, from the narrower interests of the militarists in Israel.

It is in Israel’s long term interest to stop acting as the proxy power in the Middle Eastern theatre of imperial wars. The Abdullah plan that offers it security and prosperity behind pre-June 1967 borders still provides the basis for a lasting peace. For the United States, underwriting Israel’s land grab has meant a progressive loss of “soft power” to which the region would have been particularly receptive. The present conflict is another painful reminder that Washington is still held in thrall by the Jewish lobby and its allies amongst the so-called Christians for Israel.

It seems that not enough lessons have been learnt from the fiasco in Iraq. So far, the enduring legacy of the Bush presidency is chaos in everything that it has tried to reshape — from the project of peace amongst the nations of the world to global warming. Some of the most sophisticated minds in the United States tell us that a great new debate about the purpose of their country’s pre-eminence is already underway. They do not explain why this debate does not inform decision-making even in the twilight years of the current administration. As America waits listlessly to become benign on a future date, possibly the first of January 2009, hundreds of human beings perish every day as already discredited projects continue to be pursued with relentless military force. It is a depressing thought.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

IT has the makings of a perfect storm extending right across the Horn of Africa. The fifteen-year war of all against all in Somalia is threatening to morph into an international war bringing chaos and disaster to the rest of the region, and the Al Qaeda-obsessed securocrats in Washington are the ones to blame.

The Somalis have nobody to blame but themselves for their basic plight. Although Somalia has only one ethnic group, one language and one religion, its people are deeply divided by clan, and when long-ruling dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, the clan leaders were unable to unite and form a new government. Instead, the country fell into civil war and anarchy.

A US-led military intervention in 1992 tried to restore order, but after 18 American soldiers and a thousand Somalis were killed in a single day (the “Black Hawk Down” episode), US forces pulled out. By 1995 all the other United Nations troops had followed, and Somalia was abandoned to its fate as a real-life version of the Mad Max films: no government, no police, no schools, no law, just the trigger-happy troops of rival warlords roaring around in “technicals” mounted with machine-guns or anti-aircraft cannon, stealing and killing to their heart’s content.

But US interest in Somalia re-ignited after the terrorist attacks of 2001, because as a Muslim country without a government it seemed a potential haven for Islamist terrorists. At first American policy concentrated on re-creating a national government, and by 2004 a transitional regime blessed by the United Nations and the African Union and led by one of the warlords, Abdulahi Yusuf, was installed in the town of Baidoa. But he was not in the capital, Mogadishu, because the three warlords who ruled that city rejected his authority. So did most other Somalis.

Meanwhile, a different kind of authority was emerging in Mogadishu: the Islamic courts. It was an attempt, paid for by local businessmen, to restore order by using religious law to settle disputes and punish criminals. Each clan’s court has jurisdiction only over its own clan members, but it was a start on rebuilding a law-abiding society, and in 2004 they all joined to form the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). Unfortunately, the mere use of the word “Islamic” spooked the US government.

As usual, Washington’s response was mainly military. It decided that the Union of Islamic Courts was a threat, and in February CIA planes delivered large amounts of money and guns to the three warlords who dominated Mogadishu. They named themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, and started trying to suppress the UIC.

Rarely has any CIA plot backfired so comprehensively. Volunteers flooded in from all over southern Somalia to resist the warlords’ attack on the only institution that showed any promise of restoring law and order in the country. By early June the last of the warlords had been driven out of Mogadishu, which is now entirely in the hands of the UIC, and for the first time in fifteen years ordinary citizens are safe from robbery, rape and murder.

It is by no means clear that the UIC must fall into the hands of Islamist radicals who will turn Somalia into a safe haven for anti-American terrorists. Left to their own devices, the moderate majority of Somalis can probably ensure that what finally emerges is a moderate Islamic government with strong popular support. But Washington panicked, and last week it let Ethiopia send troops in to protect the isolated “Interim Government” in Baidoa. That probably means renewed war, and across borders this time.

Ethiopia has five times as many people as Somalia and has already fought two border wars with it, in 1964 and 1977. (Somalia claims most of Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, where the people are mostly Muslim and ethnically Somali.) But now it’s more complex:.

Ethiopia is a largely Christian country with big and restive Muslim minorities, and President Meles Zenawi is terrified that militant Islamists in power in Somalia might help those minorities to rebel, but this would not be happening without Washington’s consent. It is exactly the wrong response.

On June 10, Abdulahi Yusuf’s unelected “parliament” in Baidoa voted to seek foreign troops, on June 20 the first Ethiopian troops were spotted in Baidoa — and on the same day Sheikh Mukhtar Robow, the UIC’s deputy head of security, declared: “God willing, we will remove the Ethiopians in our country and wage a jihad against them.”

Just when Somalia was about to escape from its long nightmare, a new and worse one has appeared: the prospect of a war that would consume the entire Horn of Africa (for Eritrea, teetering on the brink of another war with Ethiopia itself, is already sending aid to the UIC). The entire Horn of Africa could spend the next five years going through a catastrophe similar to what the Great Lakes region of Africa suffered in the later 1990s.

Sometimes you really wish that the State Department, rather than the Pentagon and the White House, ran American foreign policy.—Copyright

DURING the last week one must have seen the president at least half a dozen times, hogging the limelight on the glass bucket whilst appearing simultaneously on different television channels.

Though he didn’t really come up with anything new, and was reproducing the same pastiche that viewers have become accustomed to, there was a marked difference from previous broadcasts. This time one noticed a certain anxiety, a certain note of desperation in his address. It was almost as if he was aware of the fact that members of the ruling party had failed to come up to expectations, and instead of lending political support to him, were now leaning on him to bail them out.

It doesn’t really matter which way one looks at the issue. The peculiar system under which we live and which was ushered in by President Musharraf a number of years ago is leaking through all its faucets. In fact, there isn’t a single department of government that one can hold up to the light and say, “Here is a shining example of efficiency and professionalism which should be followed in letter and spirit by others in the Third World.”

The record is simply littered with a succession of disasters. To start with, there are the financial scams, one of which rocked the very foundations of the Karachi Stock Exchange in March 2005, in which investors lost the equivalent of 13 billion dollars. A former head of the SECP informed the standing committee on finance and revenue in the National Assembly, that influential stock market operators with meaningful contacts in the corridors of power were responsible for the debacle.

Then there is the inept handling of the privatisation process where national assets were sold for a fraction of their real value, eventually resulting in the Supreme Court stepping in to save a national treasure. This naturally led to the widespread conviction that the Privatisation Commission did not conduct its affairs in a transparent manner and was allegedly aiding one or another industrial shogun. The flak from the sale of PTCL and KESC is still fouling the political atmosphere, and the auction of the latter is being seen as the financial fiasco of the decade. It isn’t just the denizen who has suffered — the damage caused to industrial production has been colossal.

There is also the government’s inability to establish its writ in parts of the western and northwestern parts of the country and the growing belief that the establishment is more interested in placating its allies and keeping them in harness than in implementing the rule of law. A case in point is the total breakdown of law enforcement in Karachi. A glance at the newspapers will show that there has been a regular, almost relentless and methodical drive to snatch mobile phones and to grab or filch cars and motorcycles.

A conscientious citizen, Naeem Sadiq, writing in to the Helpline website, has suggested a simple method for handling the former, and one wonders why the police in Karachi haven’t thought of it. This is the gist of his proposal.

The CPLC, or some other body, should establish on a national basis a mobile phone crime unit. This unit could act as a co-coordinator between citizens, the telecom industry, the police and other law enforcement agencies. Its task would be to gather, develop and disseminate intelligence on groups and individuals who snatch, steal, sell or export stolen mobile phones. The unit could also provide expert advice on mobile phone crime, facilitate contact between the telecom industry and law enforcement agencies, and initiate public awareness. It could also maintain a national database of all mobile phones, including those that are reported lost or stolen within Pakistan.

Once the above infrastructure has been set up and there is an agreement between the key responders, it would prove to be an invaluable asset. The system would be based on a unique 15 digit code used to identify an individual GSM mobile telephone to a GSM network — rather like reporting the chassis number of a vehicle. This code could be referred to as an international mobile equipment identity, and would be the unique feature of every mobile phone.

The writer then suggested a series of complicated steps — beginning with the insertion of a couple of digits on the keypad and ending with the advice that all customers intent on acquiring mobile phones should check and note the mobile equipment identity at the time of purchase. The upshot of it all is — the tainted phone would ultimately be rendered completely ineffective.

And last, but not least, there has been the gross overspending by the government with little to show for its efforts, which necessitated an embarrassing post facto approval by the assemblies. Democracy, even an ineffective one, has a price, and one is never quite sure if the colossal expenditure on the national and provincial assemblies and the Senate is really worth it, when no significant or meaningful improvements have been witnessed in the country.

A number of emails have been floating around the Internet which give grossly exaggerated figures for the amount spent on each member of the national and provincial assemblies and the Senate. According to reliable sources the salary of an MNA after taxes is around Rs 41,500 a month, which comes to Rs 498,000 a year. To this figure one must add a daily allowance of Rs 3,750 for the days the parliamentarian attends the Assembly. The same allowance is also admissible for the number of days the parliamentarian attends meetings of various committees.

Members of the National Assembly and the Senate have to meet for at least 120 and 100 days respectively in a year. If one adds to this another 30 days for travel, a member of parliament receives an additional Rs 562,000 under the head of daily allowance. This brings the total package to around Rs 1,060,500 — which is roughly what a parliamentarian in India and Bangladesh get, and what a middle management executive in a Karachi pharmaceutical company receives. The difference is the executive is not obliged to maintain two homes or establishments, entertain constituents, write speeches, pay for an electoral campaign and keep a secretary.

However, all is not well with the system in this country, and if democracy is to develop strong roots, a number of reforms will have to be carried out before the next elections. Otherwise the educated middle class will be permanently kept out of the race. Under the current arrangement, with the notable exception of the MQM — where supporters vote for a cause rather than the local candidate — political parties invariably give tickets to candidates who can afford the election expenses, irrespective of their political leanings or ideology — if they have one. Though the pattern was set much earlier this was particularly so in the 1970 election which was won by the Pakistan Peoples’ Party.

This writer remembers being asked by a visiting American journalist, who was a seasoned Pakistan watcher, what the philosophy was behind the PPP. It was pointed out that the PPP purported to be a socialist party and that its leader had won the election on his promise to give the masses bread, clothing and shelter.

The journalist looked wistfully at the list of successful candidates, took off his pince-nez and asked me why there were so many feudal elements and just one left-winger in the party. One has learned from experience that when it comes to Pakistani politics certain questions are better left unanswered. After all, wasn’t Friedrich Engels, the intellectual behind Karl Marx, a capitalist?