Hezbollah comes out stronger

FOR the second time in six years, Hezbollah has won a resounding victory. In 2000, Hezbollah forced a humiliating withdrawal on Israel from southern Lebanon after Tel Aviv suffered hundreds of casualties in the so-called “security zone”. Now, six years later, Hezbollah’s brave fighters have made Israel accept the UN ceasefire resolution without Tel Aviv achieving any of its military or political objectives in 34 days of heavy fighting. Israel had two broad objectives in attacking Lebanon: one, to cripple Hezbollah militarily; two, to humiliate and destroy Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and his group as a political force in Lebanon. As guns fell silent on the morning of Aug 14, Hezbollah was very much holding its ground, for there was no let-up in the rockets it had continued to fire on northern Israel until the very last moments of the war. As these lines were being written Israeli troops had begun their withdrawal. Politically, Sheikh Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s prestige has never been higher. In fact, Hezbollah has now become a source of pride and inspiration for the entire Muslim world, for it has shown how dedication to a cause can defeat forces of tyranny and falsehood in spite of the latter’s overwhelming superiority in men and material. Israel also failed to recover the two soldiers Hezbollah had captured on July 12. Instead, it lost at least 114 soldiers, with a large number of tanks, armoured cars and at least one helicopter destroyed.

Hezbollah’s victory lies in smashing the aura of invincibility that had surrounded the Israeli military. The first to break the myth was, of course, Anwar Sadat, whose forces surprised Israel in 1973 by crossing the Suez canal, breaking through the Bar-Lev line and making the Israelis retreat. Soon the Israeli army regrouped, crossed the canal and was at one stage threatening Cairo when the ceasefire went into effect. But the Egyptian offensive was backed by a million-strong army and 2,000 tanks, besides a range of surface-to-air and anti-tank missiles. This time, Hezbollah had neither the Egyptian army’s numerical strength nor the variety of weapons; it had mainly Soviet-era Katyusha rockets and a small force of guerrillas. Its victory is therefore a stunning surprise.

Now President George Bush has outclassed himself by claiming victory for Israel, though he did admit that Tel Aviv had not knocked out the guerrilla group, while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he had succeeded in destroying the “state within a state” that Hezbollah had become. Whatever Mr Olmert may claim, he knows his political career has been seriously jeopardised: the sacking of the general in charge of the northern command was proof that things were not going Israel’s way, and that his government and the Israeli army had made blunders in their handling of the war. However, Israel did kill over 800 Lebanese civilians — including a massacre that history will call Qana II — destroyed their homes, pulverised Lebanon’s infrastructure and made 750,000 people homeless. There is no doubt that what has been achieved is a lull, for fighting will resume sooner or later in the Levant. But we agree with President Bush when he says that the war was a battle between freedom and terrorism. Yes, the issue is Palestinian freedom, to destroy which Israel has resorted to every conceivable form of state terrorism.

Attack on Pakistani diplomat

MONDAY’S explosion in Colombo, ostensibly targeting Pakistan’s high commissioner in Sri Lanka, Bashir Wali Mohmand, is yet another sign that the Tamil Tigers are prepared to take their battle to new fronts. While the Sri Lankan rebels have denied carrying out the attack, the envoy, who escaped unhurt, has indicated that he could have been targeted because of Pakistan’s military support to Sri Lanka. “We are against terrorism everywhere,” he said. Pakistan contributes significantly to the Sri Lankan military hardware. According to reports, it is in the process of working out an arms deal for the island’s defence forces. Although this is the first time the rebels have attacked a member of the diplomatic community in Colombo, there are a number of recent developments which show that they want to widen the sphere of hostilities by targeting outsiders who are seen to be supportive of Colombo in the conflict. The attack on the offices of the Nordic peace mission, the refusal to deal with ceasefire monitors from countries that have banned the Tigers and the killing of aid workers (the army and the Tigers are accusing each other of the crime) employed by a foreign agency support this observation.

Unfortunately, in this scenario of escalating conflict, the goal of peace on the island has been sidelined and the civilian population, which has been caught in the crossfire, remains the worst sufferer. The casualty toll is rising every day as is the number of displaced people who are fleeing their homes out of a sense of deepening insecurity. Education institutes are being affected as the government has closed schools because of the looming threat of Tiger attacks. The economy has taken a pounding because tourists are wary of holidaying in Sri Lanka. While it is true that the government has no choice but to counter Tiger attacks by military means, it must also look for ways to save the 2002 ceasefire from total collapse. This is not merely the job of the Nordic monitors. It needs active input from Sri Lankan parliamentarians who have so far shown themselves to be a fractious lot on the issue of peace.

Dengue fever alert

DENGUE fever is back in the news again with around 15 of the 40 cases of haemorrhagic fever having been reported in Karachi in the last three months. Unlike another haemorrhagic fever, the Congo virus which is caused by the bite of a tick found on cattle, Dengue fever is caused by a mosquito bite; both have been found in Pakistan and both are curable if diagnosed in time. However, this does not mean that the health authorities should take it easy or wait for the number of cases to go up before taking any action. Nor should they adopt their usual stance of denying there is a problem and therefore not informing the people about the viruses. Precautions are important given that of the 40 cases detected so far, five were diagnosed as Congo virus while the remaining ones could not be identified. The health department must ensure that its hospitals and staff are adequately equipped to deal with any outbreak

Given that after the rains Karachi is dotted with stagnant pools of water and filth which are a breeding ground for mosquito-related diseases, it is imperative that the local government carry out extensive fumigation in all parts of the city. This should be done throughout the year as most people living in Karachi are surrounded by the most unsanitary of conditions. It is equally vital to educate doctors on how to identify the diseases in question as many of them may be unfamiliar with the symptoms or the treatment required. Of paramount importance is to spread awareness about the two diseases through the media so that people know when and where to seek medical help. There must be a clear realisation that timely action alone can prevent suffering and loss of life.

Islamist flights of fancy

ALONGSIDE a hefty helping of fear, last week’s events in Britain have spawned a host of conspiracy theories. These fall into two categories: inevitable speculation about the purported plot to blow up several commercial airliners during transatlantic flights on the one hand and, on the other, remarkably widespread suspicion that if the entire sordid scenario isn’t a figment of someone’s overheated imagination, at least significant aspects of it are more likely to be fiction rather than fact.

Hyperbole from British officials hasn’t helped. On the day before the dawn raids that netted 24 suspects, Home Secretary John Reid was quoted as saying that Britain hadn’t been under a greater threat since the Second World War. And in announcing the success of a pre-emptive police operation, Scotland Yard’s deputy commissioner Paul Stephenson spoke of “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”, a phrase that has been quoted more or less everywhere, with only a few commentators bothering to challenge its implications. Stephenson clearly hasn’t spent any time in Iraq over the past three years.

It has also been alleged that the timing of the raids was calculated rather than fortuitous: it took the heat off the Blair government amid a growing backlash, particularly within the Labour Party, against its indefensible stance on the war in Lebanon. The counterpoint to this particular charge is the claim that although authorities had been keeping an eye on the suspects for several months, information received from Pakistan suggested that the attacks were imminent. Hence the sudden decision to swoop — even though not one of the suspects had thus far booked a seat on a flight to the United States.

The scepticism is obviously not unrelated to the fact that Scotland Yard has in the past been prone to serious error. In the immediate aftermath of the July 7 atrocities last year, its counter-terrorism goons gratuitously executed an innocent Brazilian engineer on the London Underground. More recently, an equally innocent Briton of South Asian origin was shot during a raid on a Forest Gate residence that was based on seriously flawed intelligence, much like the claims about the contents of Saddam Hussein’s armouries.

For all that, there is a thread of plausibility running through what has been revealed about the plan. There are a host of unanswered questions, plus a number of contradictions between accounts being leaked by British, American and Pakistani intelligence agencies. In all three cases, there is bound to be a degree of self-serving propaganda woven into the revelations. And there is no basis for assuming that all of the 24 people taken into custody in England last Thursday are necessarily guilty of terrorism-related activities.

One of the suspects has already been freed, and Britain’s track record in this sphere does not inspire a great deal of confidence: as Reid himself noted last week, of the nearly 1,000 people taken into custody for terror-related offences over the past six years, only 154 have been charged.

However, none of the foregoing detracts from the likelihood of a plan to blow up airliners packed with passengers. It is far from clear how far advanced the plan was: there is no suggestion that any tickets had been purchased, even for a dry run, nor have the British security services revealed whether they have come across any materials that might substantiate the suspicion that innocuous-seeming liquid explosives were to be used in perpetrating the atrocities.

A similar plot was apparently aborted more or less by accident in Manila 11 years ago, about two months after Ramzi Yousef had tested a nitroglycerin-based device on a Philippines Airlines flight to Tokyo.

Last year’s suicide bombings on London transport alerted Britons to the lethal risks posed by the existence among them of Islamist extremists of the nihilist variety. Like the July 7 killers, the suspects arrested last week appear for the most part to be young Britons of Pakistani origin, alongside a few converts. Their culpability is yet to be determined, but the pattern appears to confirm that second-generation immigrants in their teens and twenties are particularly vulnerable to being led astray by the preachers of hatred and violence.

The proportion of young British Muslims who fall prey to fanatical fantasies is probably not very different from the proportion of Britons who are attracted to racist organisations such as the British National Party: the anger that stems from alienation and marginalisation does not automatically translate into a faith-based urge to commit mass murder. But there can be little question that conditions have changed drastically over the decades; they have undoubtedly been exacerbated by international developments during the past five years, but the seeds of deadly extremism were sown much earlier.

For those of us who subscribe to one form or another of rationalism, it is rather difficult to discern the precise motivation behind the destructive impulse. The Irish Republican Army’s acts of terrorism, however wrong-headed they may have been as a tactic, were aimed at achieving an objective. You did not have to agree with that objective to understand the motivation. Much the same could be said about the Tamil Tigers. The consequences of suicide bombings in Israel are often mortifying, yet they are open to interpretation as acts of resistance: they may be no more justified than the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians by the Israeli state, but they are not altogether bereft of logic.

On the other hand, what were the London Underground bombs aimed at achieving, beyond the maximum possible loss of life? They sowed fear — but to what end, from the point of view of the perpetrators? By the same token, what exactly would have been achieved, apart from a great deal of gratuitous bloodshed and a temporary disruption of everyday routine, had the plotters succeeded in smuggling explosive fuels and detonators aboard a bunch of outbound flights at Heathrow?

Is revenge the driving force behind the murderous impulse: the urge to replicate on some scale the ongoing meaningless loss of life in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine? This may well be the biggest contributory factor: those to whom evil is done, as the poet put it, do evil in return. The obvious counter-argument that no evil has been done to British Muslims flounders in the face of the fact reiterated by a recent poll that the majority of them — a larger proportion than in any country other than Pakistan, evidently — see themselves primarily as Muslims and only secondarily as members of a society in which many of them feel they don’t have much of a stake.

Only a minority — hopefully a very small minority — are willing to kill their compatriots without compunction, and there are bound to be other factors that feed into this mindset. Fanatical devotion to a peculiarly ruthless interpretation of the Islamic faith is presumably a crucial component. The yearning for houris in the hereafter may well be no more than a conveniently colourful caricature, but there cannot be much doubt that most of those willing to blow themselves to bits in the process of claiming as many other lives as possible perceive themselves as potential martyrs rather than mass murderers. They need to be disabused of this absurd notion. A concerted effort by the scholars and preachers who purportedly represent mainstream Islam could go some way towards achieving this. Its absence serves only to reinforce the demonisation of Islam as a faith that is somehow beyond the pale.

In the aftermath of the arrests in Britain, a bunch of Muslim representatives, including members of parliament, wrote a letter to Tony Blair suggesting that changes in his government’s foreign policy would reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks. They are not completely off the mark: Blair’s embarrassingly servile devotion to the demonstrably counterproductive neo-conservative ideals that emanate from Washington has almost certainly played a role in inflaming passions conducive to mindless acts of violence. However, as Roy Hattersley, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, pointed out in his column in The Guardian on Monday, Blair’s foreign policy ought to be opposed on the basis that it is wrong, rather than because of the increased threat it guarantees.

There are plenty of civilised means of countering the utterly misguided hegemonistic zeal that Blair endorses, and a large number of Britons are mortified by the consequences of direct and indirect western intervention in the Middle East. They sympathise with the victims not because they are Muslims, but because they are fellow human beings.

The ranks of such Britons are unlikely to be swelled by the knowledge that some of their neighbours harbour dreams of blowing up trains or aeroplanes. In fact, such intimations are likely only to encourage the prejudices of those who suspect Enoch Powell may have been right when he foresaw rivers of blood. As has amply been demonstrated over the past five years, extremists feed off one another.

No one in their right mind can for a moment doubt that if a plot to blow up airliners — regardless of when it was intended to be put into action and various other details — has indeed been foiled, this is a profoundly gratifying achievement. Pakistan appears to have played a significant role, which has prompted a round of self-congratulatory utterances from various officials. The pride is somewhat misplaced: Pakistan’s involvement serves as a reminder that it continues to reap the whirlwind. The attempts to point the finger at Al Qaeda in Afghanistan may well backfire. Intelligence sources quoted by the American press are once more wondering whether their so-called war on terror is being waged in the wrong places. If last week’s events have prompted soul-searching in Britain, there should be plenty of that going on in Pakistan as well.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com