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| August 30, 2006 | Wednesday | Sha'aban 5, 1427 |
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Funding for madressahs
Conservation, not beautification
Bush’s flawed Iraq policy
WITH 3,438 civilian fatalities (roughly three times the number of civilian deaths in Lebanon during the month-long assault by Israel), July was the bloodiest month in Iraq since the American-led invasion. There are dozens of killings every day. Sectarian violence has steadily been rising in recent months: individuals, gangs, militias, death squads, they’ve all been busy dipping their hands in blood.
THE revelations contained in the UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Development Report 2006 about Pakistan’s low standing in the region in textile exports — even compared to Bangladesh, a non-cotton-producing country — are shocking beyond belief. While Pakistan earned less ($5.39 billion) than Bangladesh ($6.99 billion) in 2005 through the export of textile and clothing, it exported nearly 200 million kgs more than Dhaka. This is not all. Pakistan’s main rivals in the region, India and China, which are cotton-producing countries themselves, have been exporting more in volume and are also earning far greater amounts in dollar terms from these exports. Going by the reassuring rhetoric heard day in and day out when the cut-off date for the end of the Multi-Fibre Agreement was approaching, one could have been certain that Pakistan would be able to substantially increase its earnings once the deadline had passed.
Of course, Pakistan is supposed to have invested as much as over five billion dollars to improve the value-addition capacity of its textile industry in the period immediately before and after the quota regime ended in 2002. But still, it was India and China which took the lead and captured the maximum space created after the quota system was over. Now it seems that Pakistan is way behind these three regional countries in the export of goods where it had some distinct advantages. Even the small gains that it has made so far in the world market have come more because of the concessions the rich importing western countries accorded to Pakistan’s textile and clothing exports in appreciation of its role in the war on terror and the world campaigns against drug trafficking.
But the race in a highly competitive and freer world textile market remains yet to be fought and won. To start with, Pakistan must first find out the reasons which had retarded its progress badly, despite enjoying so many commercial advantages in this sector. Those responsible for this failure — from the official economic managers to the textile tycoons — must be held answerable for their commissions and omissions. Indeed, both these parties have had all the relevant experience and ample time while the textile exporters had both the monetary space and the acumen to gear up the country for the challenges of a quota-free world market. They could do so by concentrating on the cost and quality of textile products which are the main determinants in the world market. Of course, the private sector can come up with a lot of excuses like pointing out the so-called concessions that the three competing countries of the region are supposed to be providing to their textile industry and demand the same for themselves here. They could ask for a downward revision of the exchange rate. But this would only be attacking the symptoms, not the disease, because the Indian and Chinese currencies are much stronger than the Pakistani rupee. As mentioned earlier, the solution lies in more efficient cost and quality management — a task that can be accomplished by the induction of professional managers well acquainted with changing tastes in the importing countries and the demand for quality textile products of superior design.
GIVEN the sharp differences between the federal government and madressah associations, one should not be surprised by the report in Tuesday’s Dawn that a sum of no less than Rs65 million meant for madressah reforms in Sindh has lapsed. The money has been lying with the Sindh government since 2004, and is part of the Rs6,500 million given by the federal government to the provinces in connection with its madressah reform policy. Sindh’s share in this federal grant came to Rs92 million in two instalments, and the money was to be utilised on hiring new teachers and purchasing textbooks, computers, stationery, furniture and sports goods. However, according to the report in question, the issues are, first, a madressah’s willingness to accept government funding, second, security clearance and, third, the madressahs’ physical inspection. According to the report, of the 193 madressahs which sought government aid, security agencies cleared 101, while the authorities were able to carry out the physical inspection of only 26 seminaries. But not even one madressah received the promised money. The provincial government cannot be held responsible for this state of affairs, because Federal Education Minister Javed Ashraf Qazi told the National Assembly recently that no money was given to any madressah in 2005-06 and that this would continue to be the policy unless madressah boards signed an agreement with the government.
The truth is that there is a lack of trust between the two sides on many issues, including the presence of foreign students. The reason for the madressahs’ indifference to the government’s offer of help is that they have their own sources of funding, mostly domestic. They look the authorities in the eye because they know it is not easy for any government to crack down on the madressahs for non-compliance with rules and requirements. Any ill-planned move will only boomerang on the government, because the madressahs are part of a long-established tradition and they serve the community’s needs by turning out imams and religious scholars. To consider them all as sources of militancy and terrorism is wrong. If the government wants to proceed with the reform process, it must do so with the madressah managements’ full understanding and cooperation.
THE ‘beautification’ of prime national heritage monuments such as the Lahore Fort and the Shalimar Gardens is an ill-advised move that must be dispensed with. Lahore’s Parks and Horticulture Authority (PHA) is spending Rs17 million on beautifying the two monuments listed by Unesco as world heritage sites when what they really need is better upkeep than has been their fate. Two years ago the federal government washed its hands of the custodianship of the fort and the Shalimar, handing them over to an ill-equipped provincial archaeology department that had little expertise in taking care of historical sites. The situation since then has been unsatisfactory in terms of the desired level of maintenance and conservation that both monuments have been badly in need of. Since the PHA has been trusted with the task of ‘beautifying’ the two sites, there has been little progress made and much heartburn caused between it and
the provincial archaeology department; in the end, it is the two monuments that have suffered further neglect and decay.
The PHA, right from its inception under the previous Punjab government, has been a commercially motivated entity. Over the years it has thoroughly commercialised Lahore’s many public parks, the food streets and the city’s pride of all festivals, Basant. The genie of the public-private entrepreneurial model has been its sole driving force: big businesses have taken over parts of public parks, hijacked cultural festivals to exploit them for commercial gain and rented the premises of historical monuments for holding functions. The last practice is being followed in violation of court orders which prohibit such use of heritage sites. This has got to stop before more damage is done to historical monuments, whose beauty lies in conserving their original character and not in decking them up to attract commercial interests.
The frequency of attacks against the occupation forces has also increased: improvements in armour have resulted in less fatalities, but the number of Americans injured almost doubled between January and July. Seventy per cent of the 1,666 explosive devices detonated in July were directed against foreign troops and 20 per cent against Iraqi security forces, while 10 per cent struck civilians. Amid all the talk of a civil war, it would appear that the conflict is still primarily an anti-occupation struggle.
Yet the continuing carnage no longer commands the column inches it used to. Bomb kills 50 or 60 in Baghdad? Many newspapers across the world relegate it to a single column on an inside page. The shock value of multiple deaths in Iraq has sharply diminished. We’ve either got used to it or learned to turn it off. We’ve subconsciously started subscribing to the Donald Rumsfeld school of thought: “Stuff happens.”
Hardly anyone expects any good to come of it anymore. Even George W. Bush appears to have his doubts. As The Washington Post’s Peter Baker noted last Thursday, “Of all the words that President Bush used at his press conference this week to defend his policies in Iraq, the one that did not pass his lips was “progress”. For three years, the president tried to reassure Americans that more progress was being made in Iraq than they realised. But with Iraq either in civil war or on the brink of it, Bush dropped the unseen-progress argument in favour of the contention that things could be even worse.”
Two days earlier, Eugene Robinson, also writing in the Post, noted his disappointment at hearing Bush deny that he had been taken aback by pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in Iraq, because that sort of reaction would have meant “the Decider was admitting novel facts to his settled base of knowledge and reacting to them. Alas, it seems the door to the presidential mind is still locked tight.” Responding to Bush’s contention that he didn’t “remember being surprised; I’m not sure what they mean by that”, Robinson went on to say: “I’m guessing ‘they’ might mean that when you try to impose your simplistic, black-and-white template on a kaleidoscopic world, and you end up setting the Middle East on fire, either you’re surprised or you are not paying attention.”
There was some evidence, however, of a rethink. Bush admitted, for instance, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. “Nobody,” he said, not entirely truthfully, “has ever suggested that the attacks of September 11 were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding ground for terrorists.” The latter sentence could be construed as a self-indictment. “Resentment and the lack of hope”, among other things, have indeed turned Iraq into a “breeding ground for terrorists”. But that, of course, happened after the invasion.
The president added: “We’ll complete the mission in Iraq”, although “I can’t tell you exactly when it’s going to be done”. It appears no one deemed it fit to remind him that it’s already been done, supposedly. Remember that day early in May 2003 when the leader of the free world, dressed in a pilot’s uniform, landed on an aircraft carrier anchored in American waters and announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq? Remember the banner behind him that proudly proclaimed Mission Accomplished? That was three years and four months ago. What’s the mission now?
Who knows? But here’s one indication: a couple of weeks ago, The New York Times quoted a military affairs expert as saying that senior administration officials had acknowledged to him “that they are considering alternatives other than democracy”. The obvious alternative to a puppet democracy is a puppet dictatorship. Which is more or less what Iraq had until March 2003. The trouble, of course, was that Saddam Hussein wasn’t an ideal puppet. A puppet who develops delusions of grandeur isn’t much good. The task, then, must be to find a more suitable replica, perhaps a Shia ex-general with a Baathist background, and equip him suitably.
Which, like so much else in Iraq, is easier said than done. It would also make mockery of Bush and his team’s frequent pronouncements about spreading democracy — but that shouldn’t matter much, given that cluster bombs have already proved to be a pretty shoddy means of popularising representative rule. At last week’s press conference, Bush announced a discovery of sorts. “What’s very interesting about the violence in Lebanon and the violence in Iraq and the violence in Gaza,” he said, “is this: these are all groups of terrorists who are trying to stop the advance of democracy.”
There can be little doubt about who bears primary responsibility for the violence in Gaza and Lebanon, but it’s unlikely Bush was referring to Israeli troops as terrorists. His restricted intellect cannot conceive of Hamas and Hezbollah as anything other than unacceptable, so their support at the ballot box simply doesn’t register. As for Iraq, it shouldn’t be too hard to understand that democracy cannot possibly flourish under foreign military occupation — which, as we’ve been told, isn’t about to end anytime soon.
What’s more, a western military presence there might be semi-permanent. The Guardian recently quoted senior defence sources in London as saying that a contingent of about 4,000 British troops will remain stationed in Iraq for an indefinite period, ready to act to “protect the investment” made by British and US forces. That has an ominous ring to it, and the Americans are hardly likely to leave the British in charge: the open-ended American presence will probably be even larger. This implicitly goes beyond “staying the course”, which is a nebulous enough commitment as it is. It suggests Anglo-American military forces will stay put until they are driven out — which, of course, could happen sooner than they expect.
The gradually rising clamour in the US for a timetable of withdrawal, with a few Republican legislators beginning to join Democrats in questioning the conduct of the war, is essentially a response to a popular drift away from support for the military presence in Iraq. In some cases, the legislators are responding to shifts in public opinion as a means of winning re-election in November. In others, the change of heart may be less disingenuous. There is a chance, although not a particularly high one, that the elections will sufficiently change the complexion of the US Congress to give the Bush administration occasional palpitations.
However, even in that event it would be unrealistic to expect Bush to see the light or give up the fight. He is almost as unlikely to heed the warnings of senators and congressmen who have, to subvert a neo-con cliche, been mugged by reality as he is to pay any attention to the anti-war protesters who dogged his visit to Kennebunkport for a family wedding at the weekend, with slogans such as “We have nothing to fear but Bush himself” and “Liar, liar, world’s on fire”. It might be worth a try, on the other hand, to remind him of the opinions expressed in a comparable context by a famous American preacher — an infinitely wiser, better respected and more eloquent man that George W’s reputed mentor, Billy Graham.
About 40 years ago, this preacher, who had spearheaded with some success the civil rights movement to win equality for African-Americans, decided “to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart” to tackle — much to the consternation of the Johnson administration — the single most important issue that faced the nation in those days: the war in Vietnam. “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos,” announced Dr Martin Luther King Jr, “without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
The attention of Bush, supposedly a God-fearing man, should particularly be drawn to the following passage: “Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America, ‘You are too arrogant, and if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name.”
King spoke of shifting “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society”, because: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” What’s more, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
He also knew that: “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.”
Perhaps more than ever before, America today cries out for a clear moral compass such as Martin Luther King. And, God knows, so does the muddled and often misguided Muslim world.
Email: mahirali1@gmail.com