IN the chequered history of relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, there have been periods of tension that fall into two distinct categories: periods when lack of amity obstructed or delayed the fruits of bilateral cooperation but did not produce a damaging crisis and others when tensions led to serious consequences for either side.

Despite the absence of a genuine rapprochement between the two countries, Pakistan felt assured enough of Afghanistan’s good intentions in the wars with India in 1965 and 1971 to leave the common border virtually unattended. Deterioration of relations consequent upon the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, however, resulted in a protracted war-like situation. The cloud of uncertainty that hangs over bilateral relations today essentially belongs to the second category. Unless the two countries engage in vigorous diplomacy; it can have deleterious effects for both of them.

Though worthwhile in their own right the more recent diplomatic contacts have not dispelled this cloud; in fact, it thickens each time a careless statement is issued or a speculative allegation hurled across the Durand Line. This darkening of the cloud is the backdrop to President Musharraf’s next visit to Kabul and it is what invests this visit with exceptional importance.

There is, unfortunately, a mutual perception that ferments into distrust. In Pakistan, it is widely believed that elements of the erstwhile Northern Alliance continue to undermine Pakistan’s interests even if, with gradual progress in the reconstitution of the battered Afghan state, there has been erosion in the power conferred upon them by the American invasion. Many observers of the Afghan scene find President Hamid Karzai still at a disadvantage in the internal power structure when balanced against their cumulative influence on decision-making.

The pervasive fear in Pakistan is that these elements are not even rational enough to correctly read the imperative of close ties with Pakistan. The continuation of hostile propaganda against Pakistan especially in Kabul and north of the Hindukush is often cited as a serious obstacle to the creation of a climate conducive to a genuine partnership between the two countries. It is time that the leaders of the two countries face up to the existence of elements standing in the way of what should be a natural alliance between the two countries.

On the Afghan side, there is the growing problem of explaining a string of failures in counter-insurgency policies. It is aggravated by mounting evidence of a serious shortfall in plans for reconstruction and development. Dependent at present on foreign forces for its survival, the Kabul government is not free to question the wisdom of the initial invasion that overturned the reign of the much demonised Taliban. Even President Musharraf can ill-afford to do that after having anchored his foreign policy in the US-led global war against terrorism.

The poignancy of the Afghan situation is that their government cannot easily protest that the US invasion of Iraq relegated Afghanistan to a secondary level of priorities, the invasion of Iraq was the point from where the ongoing slide in military, political and economic security in Afghanistan began. The resultant diversion of resources to Iraq took place on a scale that compels many western analysts to refer to the conflict in Afghanistan as the forgotten war or at best “a side project”.

The upsurge in the armed resistance offered by the Taliban and allied groups since the beginning of this year is more easily blamed on the inadequacy of support from and vigilance by Pakistan than on grave flaws in the handling by the United States and others of the post-intervention problems. It is certainly not in Pakistan’s interest to walk away from these problems and there is, therefore, no alternative to effective engagement with Kabul. President Musharraf and President Karzai need to define and spell out the nature, scope and limits of this otherwise inescapable interaction. One has to re-state this objective as there is also a touch of exasperation in Pakistan that leads to a desire to disengage and retreat into a kind of benign neglect. This option is clearly short-sighted.

In a recent report written for Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Barnett Rubin observed that the world thus far has put Afghanistan on life support, rather than investing in a cure. In his estimation, Kabul was being dangerously short-changed in troops and funds in the shadow of the Iraq war. There are numerous other studies of the Afghan situation that trace and document the resurgence of the Taliban since 2003, the phenomenal expansion of the drug trade and the critical deficit in reconstruction work.

It is most unlikely that in the remaining period of his presidency, George W. Bush would be able to extricate the United States from the anarchy that now overshadows the Greater Middle East Project of which Iraq was to be the cornerstone. He may well spend the rest of his tenure reinforcing a great failure and thus remain constrained in his initiatives to make a success of the earlier project of reconstructing Afghanistan.

Nato has stepped in with the honourable intention of presiding over a shift of emphasis from military policy to nation-building and reconstruction. But it has tried to set the stage for this shift by supporting a major offensive designed to exterminate as many of the Taliban as possible. An increased incidence of suicide attacks is probably a desperate response to the magnitude of this new offensive.

The increased pressure on Pakistan to “do more” to curb alleged cross-border movement of the Taliban is also an extension of this offensive. There is no doubt about the considerable rise of Taliban casualties but it is difficult to conclude that resistance would be degraded to a level where the more constructive part of the Nato mission finds a congenial terrain.

The Karzai government can at present count on indigenous revenue of about $300 million; the drug-related economy is much larger. Development is almost entirely dependent on foreign assistance that can add up to three billion dollars. More recently, the government has sought much greater control of this assistance by linking it with its national development strategy. The World Bank, too, has been critical of wasteful projects launched by foreign agencies acting outside government control. There will have to be a significant improvement in the capacity of the Afghan state if the Nato plan is to get anywhere.

Professor Rubin’s report was probably mindful of the ground realities of the Afghan situation when it gave high priority to the country’s relations with the neighbours in its recommendations. This part of the report deserves President Musharraf’s attention in his parleys with Mr Karzai. It recognises the need for Afghanistan to reach a much deeper understanding with Pakistan and mentions Kabul’s relations with India in this context.

The primary task of an Afghanistan-Pakistan summit is cut out for it; it is to establish an overarching strategic partnership underpinned by mutually binding reciprocal obligations. The Karzai government’s expectations that Pakistan can be endlessly pressured by the United States to fight Kabul’s internal enemies are unrealistic. It has to discover, together with Pakistan, the true rationale of bilateral collaboration; in other words the two neighbouring states have to bow to the imperatives of history, geopolitics, faith and culture and forge a new political, economic and cultural alliance transcending past suspicions and recriminations.

Defying these imperatives for the sake of the Machiavellian politics of the early years of Pakistan — politics fuelled by Afghan revanchism and countered by Pakistani exploitation of Afghanistan’s landlocked status and political vulnerability — can only bring fresh disasters to this sub-region.

Pakistan and Afghanistan must realise that President Bush’s Middle East project is in shambles and the regional states may face a stark choice between the anarchy left behind by it or muster enough courage and imagination to craft viable alternatives in the best interests of their people. The American project relied on the availability of subalterns to manage this part of what set out to be a new kind of global empire. The interests of the people demand leaders of vision and commitment and who have a sense of history.

Pakistan and Afghanistan must not fritter away their energy in resurrecting issues that belong to the dustbin of history. They have a border which, instead of being fenced, can become one of the softest international frontiers straddled by kindred people. Their interaction need not remain confined to 19th century political machinations. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the states of Central Asia, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Iran, and last but not the least, Saarc beckon them to vaster horizons. There is even the traditional strategic spur pointing to Turkey. It is time this Muslim swathe of Asia shakes off the awe and shock of foreign invaders and scripts its own destiny.

If President Musharraf did not have this vision of expanding circles of cooperation, he would not have attached the highest priority to the Gwadar project. Consider it from any angle, it is a strategic development. The challenge now is to convert President Karzai, and more so the tunnel-visioned anti-Pakistan adventurers and war lords around him, to the great promise that awaits the region. Pakistan and Afghanistan have enough committees to address the nuts-and-bolts problems tossed up to them by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or the cavalcade of western military officers who stalk the regional rulers. A summit should live up to its name and offer the certainty of a framework of relations valid for decades to come. Millions of Afghans and Pakistanis wait for it.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Email tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

LAST week marked the latest Triumph of the Turncoats, in which Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz survived a no-confidence motion against him — almost by a whisker.

Though the faithful rallied to the war cry and lots of faces that had of late been hibernating suddenly emerged from the woodwork, the combined opposition just couldn’t muster the extra 32 votes so desperately needed to score a victory over what they referred to as the ‘artificial majority’ of the ruling coalition. And so the charge sheet against Mr Aziz ended up being impaled on the speaker’s desk.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman referred to the defeat as ‘a moral victory’ and hastened to add that though the opposition lacked numerical strength, it was at least able to accomplish one of the objectives it had set out to achieve, and that was to demonstrate the many perceived failures of the government. In making this statement the opposition had echoed the frustrations of the people and distilled the collective sense of deprivation felt by the masses.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, on the other hand, blithely described the outcome as ‘a victory of truth’ — one of the oldest clichis in the book, used by politicians and cricketers alike. Though he survived the scare, it was in many ways a hollow triumph. The treasury benches might have just managed to get away with it. But on this occasion the tide had touched its highest watermark in recent years; and the general perception now is that a change at the top is highly likely in the near future — possibly before December.

Sitting prime ministers enjoy tremendous advantages not available to members of the opposition. They are in a position to do favours and to make effective use of various instruments of persuasion, as Benazir Bhutto discovered in 1989 when she faced a considerably more potent opposition that was hellbent on dislodging her.

The no-confidence move came at a bad time for the opposition. The papers were full of the drama being enacted in Kohlu which upstaged the events taking place in the National Assembly. Opposition legislators and quite a few of the loyalists were so preoccupied with the slaying of the tribal chief in Balochistan, that they had no time to focus on some of the other sensational stories that had erupted in the press.

Like the scandal of the LDA controlled Shahalam Market in Lahore where it was discovered that only one out of 95 buildings has been legally constructed; and the partial collapse of an eight-storey building in Murree. The fellow with the rubber stamp and the official seals must have been out of his mind to have approved the erection of an eight-storey building in a hill station which is hosed down by torrential rains in the monsoon.

Coming back to the no-confidence motion, Shaukat Aziz certainly had the last laugh. A lesser man would have been disoriented and would have probably ended up groping for words and taking liberties with his syntax. But the traumatic events in the National Assembly had little effect on the prime minister. He emerged unfazed, denied any wrongdoing, and ended up by describing the charge-sheet as a conspiracy to deliberately mislead the people. Later in the day, he hopped into a plane for a four-nation whistle-stop tour to Norway, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Lebanon.

It is these excursions to the far-flung regions of the world at the country’s expense, that critics have found particularly grating. Ever since the first jaunt to the exotic grasslands of South America, undertaken by the president, which carried a planeload of well-to-do freeloaders, opponents of the regime have been clamouring for some sort of rationale and justification for these outings.

No reasonable explanation was ever offered, other than the strengthening of bilateral relations, and the improvement of prospects for trade. There was no realistic evaluation of possible benefits that might have accrued, which would have justified the expense. That is why critics continue to find these trips wasteful, improvident and an unnecessary drain on the nation’s meagre resources.

One has only to look at the numerous articles that have appeared and the letters that have been published in this newspaper and other sections of the press on the globe-trotting jaunts of the president and the prime minister to illustrate the point. But they don’t appear to have had the slightest impact on the policymakers.

The tax payer is now asking what possible benefits could have accrued from the prime minister’s recent brief stopovers, especially to Norway and Lebanon, two countries with which Pakistan enjoys a negligible trade relationship. The trip to Oslo included a meeting of the ‘high level panel on the United Nations system-wide coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance and the environment.’ It’s the sort of international gobbledygook that is being tossed around the world these days - all oyster and no pearl.

Norway with its fjords and rugged scenery is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The land has a special significance for this writer because it produced the greatest Wagnerian soprano of all times - Kirsten Flagstad. But one can’t really see this country as a huge trade partner.

The visit to Lebanon also doesn’t make much sense, unless it was to assure the Lebanese that Pakistan will always be there for the people of Lebanon — even if they are unable to provide military, diplomatic or other kinds of assistance to Hezbollah in case of another Israeli attack.

It is time the government started to employ a bit of the old tunnel vision and took a cold hard look at its foreign policy. Traipsing to all those exotic places doesn’t serve any useful purpose. Mending fences with India and strengthening the bonds of friendship with the Peoples’ Republic of China should be its top priorities. A lot of people probably don’t know this but the kind of assistance that Pakistan has received from China in recent years has not been matched by any other country, not even the United States.

The package is quite staggering. China’s total financial commitments and aid offers to Pakistan since 2001 now total more than nine billion dollars. This amount includes about six billion for a whole clutch of development schemes and an estimated three billion for defence equipment.

Much of this largesse has been poured into the country in a quiet unobtrusive way without any of the media hype that usually accompanies aid assistance from other countries. What’s more, unlike the United States and several other western countries, China has never gone back on its aid commitments to Pakistan, even when it has been under pressure from the Americans to do so and to cool it a bit.

The military list is quite impressive. Aid since 2001 includes 80 F-7 jet fighter aircraft delivered to Pakistan in two batches of 40 each, in December 2001 and December 2002, and four frigates for the navy, one to be built in China and three at the Karachi naval dockyard under a technology transfer agreement.

The non-military list is even more impressive and covers considerable territory. Some of the more outstanding contributions are: 1.5 billion dollars for doubling the capacity of the Pakistan Steel Mill; 200 million for carrying out phase one of the Gwadar deep-water port; 350 million for the further development of the Saindak project; and 950 million for building a 450MW hydel power project on the Jhelum-Neelam line.

There’s also 500 million dollars for building a second 350MW nuclear power plant at Chashma for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission; 396 million for three hydropower projects; and 600 million for small hydropower projects. The list just goes on and on. And when it is finished there will always be another list. It’s nice to know that one still has such nice friends.

THE Human Tissue Act came into force on Friday in Britain and it is to be hoped that it will go some way towards clarifying the legal position of surgeons with patients waiting for organ transplants, and, perhaps even more important, of pathologists wanting to carry out research using human tissue.

Until now, if an adult placed his name on the Organ Donor Register, his wishes, when he died, could be overridden by his relatives. This has always seemed to me not only absurd but also insulting to the person who had declared his intentions quite clearly. Why should someone else’s scruples count for more than the wishes of a competent person, with his own views about what is for the common good? His wishes ought to have absolute priority. There can be no evidence that a young man who had put his name on the register and who was killed in a car crash had changed his mind about donating organs before he died.

The new law does not go as far as granting absolute priority. Transplant surgeons are still obliged to consult relatives before using the promised organs, but they have to decide for themselves whether the objections raised by the relatives are serious and so strongly felt that the transplant should not go ahead. It is therefore doubtful whether things will change very much. For any objection to the use of the organs of someone recently dead must be based on either irrational sentiment or irrational dogma, or both; and in the nature of the case, the arguments of the surgeon may well not prevail, even if he has to go through them carefully with the relatives.

After the scandal of Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool, and the Bristol Royal infirmary — where the organs of children who died were retained without the knowledge of their parents — permission to retain organs or tissue became hard to obtain. Important research using human tissue was seriously threatened. Plainly the doctors involved had behaved carelessly, even insanely, in cases where the organs were stored and not used.

All the same, the violence of the reactions was surprising. What did those furious parents believe about their dead children? Did they think that in some way the future of the child had been compromised by the removal of the organs? If I had been such a parent I would have been angry at not being consulted. I can imagine raging against the arrogance of those doctors who seemed to believe that the child’s body was their own property, and who thought of the dead child as so much research material. But though such anger is intelligible, is it rational?

In considering the reaction, there seems to be a confusion between two different ideas. The first is that it is right to treat the death of any human being as an occasion for the formal expression of grief and respect, the public recognition of loss - and perhaps irreparable trauma, if the death of a child is involved. This is why the thought of simply throwing away the body of a dead human being is intolerable and offensive.

The second is the idea that the person who has died is somehow still living and must be kept intact in death. Yet anyone who does not believe in the literal doctrine of the resurrection of the physiological body (and that is nearly everyone, even professed Christians) must recognise that, after death, the body of their child will disintegrate, whether slowly in the earth or swiftly in the fire of cremation. How can those who object to the removal of organs from their child on the grounds that, as one enraged parent put it, “she cannot love us without a heart” also accept, as a social phenomenon, the increasingly common practice of cremation?

Cremation is still not a universally accepted way of disposing of the dead; but it is widely practised, and even encouraged, as graveyards become full. It is certainly recognised by the church. It would be far better to embrace the idea that, in death, a human being might indirectly benefit others by the postmortem use of organs or tissue than to encourage and foster the superstition that a body must be buried intact, and that otherwise the person has not been properly respected and mourned. The new law is a very modest step in the right direction, but its immediate impact may, sadly, be small. —Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is an independent peer and the author of “An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics.”

AS temperatures and sea levels have risen, glaciers receded and snowpacks melted, the governments of the world have dithered over how to save the planet from global warming. Last week, California showed them.

I started studying the economics and science of climate change in 1984 as the Republican counsel for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. I believe the legislation that California representatives sent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday not only leapfrogs the Kyoto Protocol (the international global warming agreement that former Vice President Al Gore praises and President Bush vilifies) but establishes a framework for revolutionising the way the world contends with air pollution and its threats.

With AB 32, California has become the first government I know of to attack greenhouse emissions without mandating a carbon “cap-and-trade” system. “Cap and trade” sets a standard for emissions, but it also allows companies to trade in the right to pollute up to that standard. That means companies that cut emissions can sell “emission rights” to other companies that don’t want to invest in cleaner technology. It doesn’t eliminate pollution as much as create a market in it. Despite immense pressure from businesses and outspoken support of trading by some environmental groups, the Legislature has allowed carbon cap-and-trade but refused to mandate it.

The Los Angeles Times editorialised that cap-and-trade “worked well in the context of the Clean Air Act.” Not so. The measure of success should be whether health and environmental objectives are met. The purpose of Clean Air Act trading was to restore life to lakes and streams, especially in the Northeast, that had been acidified by pollution from coal-fired power plants. But 16 years later, lakes and soils in the Northeast are still acidic and probably will remain so for another half a century.

Refusing to mandate cap-and-trade opens the door to new market mechanisms for reducing pollution. Sweden’s “feebates,” for example, tax relatively dirty polluters or their products, then rebate all the money to relatively clean polluters. The feebate used against smog-forming oxides of nitrogen caused emissions to drop 40 per cent within 12 months in Sweden.

Another such mechanism is Japan’s requirement that polluters pay lost income, medical bills and burial costs to nearly 100,000 victims of air pollution, which has resulted in the world’s cleanest power plants and refineries.

In addition to its stance on cap-and-trade, AB 32 also improves on other global warming initiatives by applying curbs not just to carbon dioxide but to “contributory” pollutants such as black carbon, or soot, and ozone, or smog.

Headlines have focused on the law’s requirement that CO2 emissions come down to 1990 levels by 2020. That’s important, because CO2, which is created by burning coal, oil and gas, will cause most future temperature increases. But the atmospheric lifetime of CO2 is 3,000 years, so reducing it provides long-term, not near-term, cooling benefits.

Contributory pollutants, on the other hand, also cause global warming, but their atmospheric lifetimes range from a few minutes to 12 years. California has long controlled these substances for reasons of public health, but now it must do more. The result: cooling will start sooner and, because smog and soot are killers — about 8,000 Californians die each year because of them — more lives will be saved.

And the good news continues. Besides AB 32, California legislators have sent five other environmental bills to the governor to sign this month. One requires that electricity production create no more pollution than that associated with one of the most advanced generating technologies. Two others boost Schwarzenegger’s “million solar roofs” plan and fuel cells which, when using hydrogen, produce only pure water and electricity, with zero pollution.

Yet another law would impose a $30 fee for each container at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to help pay for cleansing the air.

—Dawn/Los Angeles Times