THE 52-year old ‘alliance’ with Pakistan has probably seen more fluctuations than any other relationship that the United States entered into in pursuit of its global security agenda. Periodic mutations of this alliance have been intensively discussed in both the countries under the rubric of an unstable partnership, a union of unequals, and in Pakistan as an example of Washington’s inherent opportunism.

Notwithstanding recurrent disenchantment with each other, the Pakistani ruling elite has never given up efforts to revive the partnership and Washington has responded positively whenever Pakistan provided a useful platform to carry out its political and military intervention in the region.

Each time the US returns, the Pakistani hosts claim that a framework for eternal cooperation has finally been established. The present military-dominated regime in Pakistan has, since 9/11, run a more Washington-centric policy than ever before. Washington has played along by maintaining that its interest this time aims at a long term transformation of Pakistan’s polity. This is a big agenda that encompasses, amongst other things, the reordering of India-Pakistan relations and a fresh determination of the role of religion in Pakistan’s domestic policy. Since no quick fix is available in the projected transformation, the United States is willing to remain generously engaged with Pakistan for a long time.

Since Richard Armitage held out the dark prospect of bombing Pakistan into the Stone Age, the administration in Washington has been viewed by our decision-makers as endowed with superhuman powers, an almost divine outreach, that can change governments and national maps at will. One would be hard put to finding any reflection in the Pakistani discourse that the American people could change the coalition of power that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of the past crises in bilateral relations have been routinely and wrongly attributed to the Democratic presidents’ bias in favour of India. As to the possibility of their return to power, the Pakistani mind simply blocked it out.

Meanwhile, time has moved on. Now when the Democrats once again control the House and the Senate, the US India policy has a bipartisan consensus; the traditional hyphen between India and Pakistan stands equally discarded by both sides of the aisle and, if at all, the Democrats want more substance to the Indo-US collaboration. Sensing it, the US administration has got the nuclear cooperation agreement with India through the Senate with a huge majority. Pakistan’s repeated pleas of an evenhanded approach in the nuclear context have not made more impression than in the aftermath of the nuclear tests of 1998. What may highlight the discrimination further is the US pressure on China not to sell more nuclear reactors to Pakistan.

If the United States has an entrenched perception that peace in South Asia is promoted by Indian military preponderance in the region and that for this purpose Pakistan has to be discouraged from playing the role of a challenger, its alternative vision of Pakistan has to be defined with clarity.

First, there is an almost open-ended problem that the United States has with the Muslim world. A conjunction of factors has regrettably cast Muslims in a role antagonistic to the US security policy built around Israel as the pre-eminent proxy power in the Middle East. The Muslim resistance expresses itself increasingly in asymmetrical armed struggle by non-state actors. By its very nature, it also challenges the larger project of globalisation as defined by the West. Washington expects Pakistan to weigh in on its side. It trusts the rulers but not the people of Pakistan.

This brings us to the second consideration. The glaring disconnect between the government and the people in Pakistan is often attributed to the religious factor in Pakistan’s polity. The lifestyle liberals of Pakistan who have little time for a study of the inter-related movements for the revival and reconstruction of Islamic thought have turned a slogan-driven superficial secularisation of society into a profitable enterprise. What used to be the fruit of a lifelong intellectual quest for a true interface between faith and modernity has largely been supplanted by products of the communication industry and fashion houses. They flash the so-called “soft image” but lack meaning and substance.

In our own tradition of modernistic Muslim scholarship, the last determined effort to break new ground was that of late Fazalur Rahman whose profound scholarship and innovative interpretation of revelation fell foul of our ulema and he had to live in perpetual exile. His heterodoxy, based on the essentialist centrality of the Quran, got eventually focused on a left-liberal insistence on social justice. The core values of Islamic sovereignty and egalitarianism run through the entire canon of our revivalist thought. Washington wants to transform Pakistan but on lines that would have been rejected both by Iqbal and Fazalur Rahman.

When the ruling elite glibly talks of Sufism, its latest fad, it forgets that our dominant heritage is of Iqbal’s dynamic and activist mysticism. It was derived directly from the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) who stood one moment wrapped in the terrifying silence and loneliness of revelation and, in the next moment, in the market place or the seat of temporal power translating the fathomless energy of the divine message into human affairs. The slogan of “enlightened moderation” is empty as it has no organic relationship with the great exegesis of Islamic scripture and tradition in several countries straddling the arc from the Maghreb to Indonesia over a hundred years or more.

The transformation that the United States seeks in Pakistan has so far run a negative course. Its present policy undermines democracy and social justice alike. Yoked to the chariot of a mythological war against terror, which has no recognisable end, Pakistan has sunk deeper into practices that destroy civil liberties, deny democratic rights, exacerbate social disparities, pervert the purpose of education and trivialise culture. Pakistan has become a land where according to Asma Jahangir up to 600 persons have simply “disappeared”. The number of people literally sold into the torture chambers of an alien power without due process of the law is, of course, much larger. The question at this juncture is if the Democrats have the farsightedness, inclination and will to change the objectives of the US ‘transformational diplomacy’ vis-a-vis Pakistan.

Washington’s Pakistan policy is heavily influenced by the raging conflict in Afghanistan. It is complicated by the perception of western leaders that the future of Nato as an alliance is bound up with its victory there. President Karzai cannot bring the well-being of his own people to the centre-stage. Pakistan has made some feeble efforts to help change the nature of conflict in that benighted country by launching the idea of peace agreements with tribes. But the United States aims at using the Pakistani military only as a mercenary force and has little interest in its accumulated experience and wisdom; this was the inescapable message from the tragic destruction of the Bajaur madressah. Fortunately, there are saner voices too. Tom Koenigs, the chief of UN mission in Afghanistan, has reminded the world that this kind of insurgency cannot be overcome by international troops.

The Iraq policy is under intense scrutiny. Can the war in Afghanistan be conflated into the same policy review? A head of steam about getting the troops home has been building up in the UK and the other significant European members of Nato. The Democratic Party’s rationalisation of American military commitments abroad may actually intensify the European demand for a greater say in waging imperial wars in distant lands. The Bush administration would want to exclude Afghanistan from the wars virtually delegitimised by the large anti-Republican vote. But several factors militate against this exclusion. There is, indeed, a consensus on international cooperation in counter-terrorism but also increasing scepticism about the grand tale of a global war against terrorism. By deconstructing the myth of a global war, the Democrats can open a new chapter of relations with the Arab-Muslim states. Instead of parroting the neo-conservative cliches, Pakistan should help Washington undertake that process.

The question most debated in informed circles today is if Pakistan and the other regional states are poised to take advantage of the policy review that the new configuration of political power in the Congress would force upon the US administration. At present, the helplessness of the Kabul regime is shared by Pakistan. For reasons intrinsic to the present government in Islamabad and also for reasons of its sheer inability to influence decisions taken on the other side of the Durand Line, Pakistan cannot help create a more positive dynamic in the Afghan conflict. It would, however, be difficult to keep Afghanistan out of the policy adjustments that the United States must make. If Pakistani diplomacy can engage the Bush government and the reconfigured Congress proactively, there would be a spin-off for Pakistan in terms of an enhanced freedom to take its own sovereign decisions. The script for Washington’s transformational diplomacy in Pakistan has to be written afresh.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

IN 1789, George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation. After giving “sincere and humble thanks” for the many blessings our young country had enjoyed, he urged Americans to “unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions.”

If Washington were alive to express those sentiments today, he’d be pilloried by Bill O’Reilly as a member of the “Blame America First Club.” National transgressions? Who, us?

But, yes, even the USA screws up sometimes. The invasion of Iraq, for instance, will go down in history as a national transgression of epic proportions — and our original screw-up (an unjustified invasion based on cooked intelligence books) was compounded many times over by our failure to plan for the reconstruction of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

I visited Iraq in August 2003, back when it was still possible to believe that some good would come out of the US invasion. True, we hadn’t found any weapons of mass destruction — but Hussein was out, and ordinary Iraqis were eager to embark on a freer and more prosperous future. On the pedestal that had once supported the famous statue of Hussein (toppled in April 2003 by jubilant Iraqis, with a little help from US troops), an Iraqi graffiti artist left the Americans a pointed message, written in blood-red paint: “All donne go home.”

We should have done just that.

Even then, just five months after the invasion began, it was clear that the window of opportunity was closing for the United States. In most of Baghdad, the electricity was on only a couple of hours a day. Crime was surging, and tempers flared in the 130-degree heat. The Iraqis I met all asked me why the US. the sole superpower — couldn’t manage to reestablish basic security, or at least get the lights to work. It was a good question.

On my last day in the country, I got a small taste of the Iraq that was to come.

Bandits forced our car off the road as we drove through Falluja. With a gun barrel inches from my nose, I obediently handed over my wallet. After relieving us of our cash, the bandits sped away, leaving us shaken but unhurt.

We were lucky to get away so lightly. The day after we got back to the States, a truck bomb destroyed the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy to Iraq. Just a few days earlier, I had sat in De Mello’s office, chatting with one of his staffers, and had imagined that I was safe.

Back at home, I watched as that window of opportunity slammed shut. Kidnappings, executions and car bombs became routine. People died in so many different ways: helicopters were shot out of the sky; mutilated bodies turned up in rivers and alleys; dozens were killed at a time by suicide bombs. The ceaselessly escalating carnage was shocking, then appalling, then numbing.

For a long time, I remained ambivalent about whether the US should pull out of Iraq. However foolish the invasion had been, however negligent the post-invasion planning had been, didn’t we have a responsibility to stay and make things right again?

But at this point, our presence is manifestly making things worse. Ask the Iraqis, who ought to know. In a poll released this week, 78 per cent of Iraqis told researchers that the US military presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing”; 71 per cent said they want US. troops out within a year; 58 per cent said they think inter-ethnic violence will diminish if the US. withdraws; and 61 per cent think that a US. withdrawal will improve day-to-day security for average Iraqis. We should listen to them, this time.

And no, adding another 20,000 or 30,000 troops won’t magically turn the tide. It’s too little, too late. Adding another 200,000 to 300,000 troops might make a difference, but troops don’t grow on trees. They grow in families, and this war has already damaged thousands of those.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

THE destruction of a reputation through the media is a tactic we have seen before when serious police errors have come into the public domain.

Duwayne Brooks, the witness to Stephen Lawrence’s murder, suffered years of arrests, on charges from rape to stealing a car (his own), but they were always dropped or thrown out of court. It is no surprise then that Mohammed Abdul Kahar, shot last June in his home in Forest Gate, east London, by police looking for a dirty bomb, got the full treatment.

The family was reported as living it up in expensive hotels before the police let them move back into their home; Mr Kahar had reportedly spat at soldiers in their barracks, saying he hoped they would “die in Iraq”; then he was arrested on suspicion of making pornographic pictures of children on the computer he had bought second hand to study maths and English. The decision at the end of last month not to bring any charges received none of the tabloid fanfare that greeted the original claims. Mr Kahar has been unjustly branded first a terrorist and then a paedophile. His whole family has suffered “irreparable damage”, his sister Humeya told me.

Mr Kahar today is traumatised, struggling with lost confidence, sleeplessness, flashbacks and guilt for his mother’s distress. Until June he was a cheerful young man working for Royal Mail, where he had been through a vetting procedure and signed the Official Secrets Act as a driver/collector of material from such places as banks and police stations. He was able to manage this workload despite being dyslexic.

The media and the police were looking for an Islamist extremist far from Mr Kahar’s profile. “I’m Asian, with a long beard; that’s all they had against me,” he told me this week. “I prayed at work and at home, hardly ever went to the mosque, and my friends are mainly non-Muslims, schoolfriends and neighbours.”

Mr Kahar’s life changed dramatically when 15 officers in chemical suits burst into his home and shot him. The bullet entered his chest and exited through his shoulder, and the wound is still very painful, restricting his movement. But the Royal Mail has been loyal to him, and he is on sick leave.

Mr Kahar and his brother were released without charge after a week of questioning about extremist groups they did not recognise. At a press conference Mr Kahar described how a police officer shot him at close range, and he was then kicked, hit on the head and dragged into the street before being given first aid. Hours after the press conference, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Andy Hayman issued an apology.

But today Mr Kahar regrets the press conference, and feels it sparked police and media persecution of his family. The child porn allegations retraumatised him, he says, and he feels paranoid and vulnerable. He rejects the Independent Police Complaints Commission report into the shootings, which his solicitors have criticised. Two IPCC reports into aspects of the raid are pending. The porn allegations also need an inquiry. Mr Kahar’s libel lawyers stalled negotiations with two newspapers about their coverage of the raid when the spinning of the child porn allegations began. The negotiations will now be reactivated.

Seven years after the Macpherson report found the police to be institutionally racist, this case deserves the personal attention of the Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair. As for the intelligence services, who gets demoted for the shoddy work that led to Forest Gate? MI5 says it is investigating 30 major terrorist plots. With Forest Gate as an example, it can expect scepticism. —Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is the co-author, with Moazzam Begg, of “Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back.”

IT was the phrase ‘The mother of all elections,’ uttered in all sincerity by the president at a recent function, that did it. It simply knocked me off my breakfast stool.

One had heard of painters or musicians passing on their special talent to their progeny through some sort of cultural osmosis. But this was the first time since Desert Storm that anybody in a position of responsibility in this country had taken a bite at one of the many prophetic sayings of the Iraqi dictator that had entered the ether over Islamabad.

A sweet old lady, the type who invariably owns a couple of scrips of an enterprise listed on the stock exchange and asks the most awkward questions at the shareholders’ meeting, was also present at the function. She found the talk a little sonorous, but nevertheless credible. After the ceremony was over she suggested, somewhat coyly, that the president should have spoken of the next battle over the ballot as ‘the father of all elections,’ rather than the mother, possibly with the intention of distancing our country from the two bears that have helped to shape our foreign policy for the last 59 years.

She certainly had a point. The Indians and the Russians speak of their respective countries as Mother India and Mother Russia — while the Germans prefer to call their patch of turf The Fatherland. This writer has never heard anybody refer to the land of the pure as Father Pakistan, though anybody who spends a week in the blue Baloch hills, or that rugged strip of terrain between Peshawar and Charsadda would be sorely tempted to do so.

Besides, all the sociological indicators are there in this country — machismo, boorishness, alternative judicial methods for settling disputes, anarchist tendencies, the belief that the female was created solely for the pleasure of the male, admiration for the hirsute rebel who regularly takes the law into his own hands — and an inviolable sense of destiny. All these collectively point to an essentially patriarchal society. So, in order to uphold the male chauvinist traditions in this country, Ballot Box 2007 will henceforth be referred to as the father of all elections.

Coming back to the quote under reference, one doesn’t quite know what the president meant by the phrase, other than that he was expecting a really huge turnout at the polls — the sort of attendance that would, by comparison, make the 2002 election look like a mela at Toba Tek Singh. Perhaps he was also implying the eclipse of the religious parties, or the possibility that the PPP and the PML-Q might swap positions in the finishing line. It’s time one of the news channels got him into the glass bucket and asked him.

People, who have a habit of reading between the lines, believe he was also suggesting that the next election will be completely transparent and fair and devoid of the sort of thing that took place the last time the nation went to the polls, when the establishment worked against the interests of the PPP and made sure that the MMA ended up as the third largest political force in the country.

An extract from an article that appeared in the September 2002 edition of a local monthly journal puts it rather nicely. “...Heavy arm-twisting by the ISI, as well as the administration forced many to switch their loyalties. Never before had the spy agency, despite its notoriety, been used so rampantly for political manipulation.”

The thinking man in this blighted republic cannot possibly quarrel with what the president has to say when he urges the voter to take a stand against the forces of bigotry and extremism. Contrary to what the men of the cloth would have us believe, much of the popularity they might have once enjoyed when they took a principled stand against the head of state wearing two hats, has been eroded.

This is especially true after the many protests they orchestrated against the passing of the women protection bill and the frequent threats they have made to resign. It is now generally perceived that the holy fathers will be marginalised at the next election.

Historically, the role of the Islamists has been that of a client of the armed forces. Whilst invariably adopting the posture of an opposition party, they have played their part throughout the decades by trying to incite the military to overthrow elected governments — either for their perceived weaknesses, or for their capitulation to the West and for playing a subsidiary role to India. And Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Farooq Leghari have dutifully obliged. But after 9/11, the status radically changed. They began to see the military as pro-western, even anti-Islamic, which meant the holy fathers now had to confront their own patrons.

The president must have, nevertheless, deeply regretted the role the establishment played in ensuring that the coalition of Islamist political parties won such a large share of seats in 2002. This was partly attributable to the rigging by the establishment, and also because the MMA was the only party that was campaigning on an anti-Musharraf, anti-US platform.

Their showing was strongest in those areas with large Pathan and Afghan populations like the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan and certain cities in the Punjab and Sindh. Those who voted for the MMA were basically expressing their resistance to Musharraf and the US war on terror.

Coming back to the father of all elections, it is not very clear how the establishment intends getting the masses to the polling booths, especially when large numbers of voters still don’t have computerised identity cards, manifestos appear to make the same promises and politicians are generally held in low esteem.

In the period between 1947 and 1958, there were no direct elections held in Pakistan at the national level. Provincial elections were occasionally held, but a glance at the report of the Electoral Reforms Commission of the Government of Pakistan published in 1956 described the provincial elections held in West Pakistan as “a farce, a mockery and a fraud upon the electorate.”

The first direct elections held in the country after independence was for the provincial assembly of the Punjab between March 10 and 20, 1951. The elections were held for 197 seats. As many as 939 candidates contested the election for 189 seats, while the remaining seats were filled unopposed. Seven political parties were in the race. The election was held on an adult franchise basis with about a million voters. The turnout remained low. In Lahore, the turnout was 30 per cent of the listed voters and in rural areas of the Punjab it was much lower.

On December 8, 1951, the North West Frontier Province held elections for provincial legislature seats. In a pattern that would be repeated throughout Pakistan’s electoral history, many of those who lost accused the winners of cheating and “rigging”. Similarly, in May 1953, elections to the provincial legislature of Sindh were held and they were also marred by accusations of rigging. In April 1954, elections were held for the East Pakistan Legislative Assembly, in which the Pakistan Muslim League lost, and Bengali nationalists won.

In the country’s first general election held in 1970, under the military regime of Yahya Khan, which was trumpeted as being fair and transparent, the government claimed that there had been a high level of public participation, and a turnout of almost 63 per cent. Since then, every subsequent public voting exercise in this country was supposed to have been rigged. And irrespective of who wins, the losers have always cried foul.

Actually, even the 1970 elections were not altogether kosher. The late Manzar-ul-Hasan, a former editor of The Leader, informed this writer in the early 1970s that he had evidence that sections of the bureaucracy in the western wing had already been instructed to ensure that the Pakistan Peoples Party achieved a thumping majority in the western wing.

It is also not very clear how the establishment is going to tackle the voter in the tribal and feudal belt where serfdom is widely practised. Even if on election day the rural hinterland is crawling with soldiers in battle fatigues, flexing their muscles at the posters of the local mafioso and making eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the goons of the sardars and the waderas, the peasant will still do as he is told. He doesn’t really have a choice. But then, the president might have something up his sleeve. The national might yet live to see the father of all elections.