Too much of loose talk

I MAY have said this before, but if I have, it will bear repeating that we as a people, and particularly our politicians and government spokesmen, talk too much. Excess necessarily makes for extravagance, and leads to loss of precision, coherence, and relevance.

General Musharraf told a group of officers in Lahore (November 26, 2006) that “temporary upheavals in the country’s security environment should not arouse public concern, because the turmoil had been caused by the government’s own steps taken to rein in anti-state elements.” He went on to say that whichever way the government settled major issues, some disturbance was bound to occur. In any case, his government intended to “take the bull by the horns.”

The general would have made good sense if he had said only that certain anti-state groups were making trouble, and that his government meant to deal firmly with them. But he wouldn’t be content with brevity and discretion. He admitted that “upheavals” had indeed erupted, and that they threatened national security. Strangely enough, he added that they were not anything for the people to worry about. Common sense will tell us that upheavals can be extremely unsettling. How, then, can anyone in his right mind say that the people, whose lives and fortunes are bound to be affected, should not be concerned about them?

There was no need for him to assert that the measures his government was taking against the anti-state elements were the force that caused “turmoil” in the country. That may indeed be the case, but why did he have to say it? He does not tell us the whole truth of so many other matters. Did he speak the way he did on this occasion because of inadequate proficiency in the use of words, or because of thoughtlessness? The latter is more likely.

It may be true that some “disturbance” is likely to develop whichever way the government handles an important issue of public policy. But not every “disturbance” is an upheaval or turmoil, capable of generating civil strife. It may produce nothing more than critical speeches and negative votes in parliament, statements to the press, a few editorials and columns

On October 30, 2006, a military aircraft, which the government of Pakistan claims was its own, but which local witnesses say was American, launched a missile attack on a seminary in Bajaur, killing 82 Pakistanis, including numerous adolescents. The government was severely condemned in many quarters for having killed, or having allowed the Americans to kill, so many of its own people. The attack was denounced as a mean and cruel act. Those who believed the plane involved had been American lamented also that the country’s sovereignty had been violated. Since much has already been written along these lines, I shall turn to another aspect of the matter.

General Musharraf and other government spokesmen claim that the seminary was attacked because it had been functioning as a terrorist training centre. How does this claim, or admission, affect Pakistan’s international image? Indian officials, as many other foreign observers, have been asserting for years that the government of Pakistan allows terrorist training camps to operate on its territory. The present Indian prime minister and his predecessors have told General Musharraf repeatedly that the peace process between the two countries cannot go forward unless his government closes down these places and eradicates the terrorists. He and all other Pakistani officials have all along denied the existence of any such centres in Pakistan.

Then comes Bajaur and the admission that, well yes, there was a terrorist training centre on Pakistani soil. It would be hard to convince outsiders that this centre was the only one of its kind in the country. In this connection, consider also General Musharraf’s recent statement that scores of terrorist camps and training centres have been destroyed in Balochistan.

In my view, the government of Pakistan should have taken the position that certain militant groups might have set up hideouts and training camps in this country, that it was doing everything possible, within its limited means, to locate and eradicate them, but that it was a huge task, which would take quite some time to complete. This position the government did not adopt. Will it adopt it now? If not, why did it say that the seminary in Bajaur was a terrorist training centre? Why couldn’t it say, instead, that the seminarians were preparing young people for a rebellion against the state (or some such thing)?

General Musharraf said in his book and on American radio and television that his government agreed to enlist in the American war against terrorism under intense pressure. Other Pakistani officials, including Mr Khurshid Kasuri, the foreign minister, have said over and over again that their government jumped on to the American wagon for lack of an option. When the American secretary of state called General Musharraf, following the terrorist attack in New York and Washington, and asked him to hop in, he could have said that the American cause was worthy, and that his government would want to support it. He could have added that the proposed stance would amount to a reversal of the policy the country had pursued for many years, and that he needed a few days to consult colleagues and others before announcing the new posture. The American secretary, I think, would have agreed. But this is not how General Musharraf reasoned. He accepted the American demand right away. It was unwise of him to have acted so hastily, but what is done is done. The question is why do Pakistani officials keep saying that, confronted with American threats, they lost their nerve, and their will collapsed. Instead of continuing to make this humiliating confession, why not say that they chose the course they did because it appeared to be the right thing to do in the larger national interest?

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain does not talk quite as much as his boss (the general), but when he does, he is second to none in the arts of evasion, ambiguity, and double talk. We can be sure that, as often as not, and like most other politicians, he does not intend to do what he says, and he will not say what he means. Let us consider one of his more recent statements. He said the other day that the bill concerning the protection of women’s rights would not be withdrawn to placate the MMA, but that it might subsequently be amended if it turned out that any of its provisions violated the Shariah. Then he offered negotiations to the MMA.

The MMA insists that the bill is repugnant to the Shariah. General Musharraf’s government and others who supported it (e.g., the PPP and MQM) are equally convinced that it is not repugnant. As head of the ruling party, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain has a pivotal position in the government, which sponsored the bill and got it passed. Why then does he even concede the possibility that it may be repugnant to Islam, and talk of amending it, when it has just been passed. And, given the convictions on both sides, why is he talking of negotiations with the MMA? As far as I can see, there is nothing here to negotiate. What is there in this case for him to offer the MMA, and what can the latter give him in return? Nothing.

It is possible that Chaudhry Sahib’s approach results from his ideological ambivalence. He has to make up his mind as to whether he stands with General Musharraf in opposing “obscurantism” and extremism. True that he has been friendly towards the Islamic political parties and worked well with them in the past. But now that they and the general have parted company, he has to do the same. He cannot be in two opposite camps at the same time.

It has become customary in certain quarters to say that they cannot come together with the MMA on any agenda, because it supported the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, and thus enabled General Musharraf to be president and the army chief. At the same time. MMA spokesmen have been protesting that they made a pragmatic concession to the general in order to secure a return to civilian rule, and that on the basis of his undertaking that he would give up his army post before the end of December 2004.

It should be understood that the MMA acted as the politicians had done in 1985, when they agreed to adopt the equally infamous Eighth Amendment to persuade General Ziaul Haq to lift martial law and restore civilian government. They did not ask him to give up his army post, and he kept it until his death, and never apologised for it. Unless memory is failing me, his uniform did not even become an issue.

In my reckoning, the MMA’s decision to make a tactical concession to General Musharraf in 2002 was well intentioned and, in the situation then prevailing, perhaps even shrewd. They did not anticipate that he, presumably “an officer and a gentleman,” would break his promise. The worst anyone can say is that the MMA was naive and made an error of judgment. Other political parties and their leaders have done much worse: they have taken bribes, allowed their cronies to plunder the country, violated the Constitution and the law, hounded and oppressed their opponents.

Yet, we do not say that one should not do business with them because they were once bad. Indeed, many of us insist that they should be allowed back into national politics. I am not saying that the PPP, MQM, and others should cooperate with the MMA. They will do what suits their interests and convenience. All I am saying is that the reason given for withholding cooperation from the MMA, to wit, that once it made an error of judgment, is a poor one, and I suspect those who advance it know that to be the case.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA
Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

How to administer Karachi?

HOW Karachi is to be administered is a perennial issue. The question comes up time and again because, truly described, Karachi is not a city like any other.

It is a conurbation that in its fast and haphazard expansion has swamped farms and fishing hamlets, creeks and backwaters, mangrove forests and even the seabed. In the past 59 years, its population has risen from less than half a million to 14 million. More people live in slums or shantytowns built more on encroached land than in planned areas.

Among the suggestions for better management of the city, the one voiced most frequently is for placing it under one all-embracing civic authority that is not only elective, that also allows the people to participate in its decision-making process under laws and procedures that are transparent and applicable equally to all citizens in all areas and in all situations.

How representative or participatory the authority should be and how justly and transparently it can be made to work is a point for later consideration but the first, almost insurmountable, hurdle is to get the concept of a single unified authority accepted. Karachi’s entire urban sprawl along with its rural hinterland is divided into a number of territorial units under various authorities defining their own jurisdictions and functions. Any proposal to bring them under the umbrella of one authority is thus bound to run into stiff resistance.

The unification of the legal and administrative codes under one authority, however, will be hindered not by the people or by vested interests in the rural, fishing or industrial settlements but by the military garrisons located across the city which are administered as cantonments by the garrison commanders under federal laws.

In the year 2001, when the National Reconstruction Bureau divided Karachi, urban as well as rural, into 18 towns with elected councils and indirectly elected nazims, six cantonments were specifically excluded from the jurisdictions of the towns and the city district. In the “road shows” preceding the introduction of the new administrative system, the explanation given by the NRB chief for leaving cantonments out of the ambit of the devolution scheme was that they too would be included in the second phase — a year or two later after evaluating its working.

It was logic turned on its head. The new experiment was being conducted on 90 per cent of the people and the area instead of on 10 per cent of the cantonments (both percentages are a rough guess). Nevertheless, now after five years, although the new system in Karachi and elsewhere has been pronounced a success and is there to stay, its extension to the cantonments and to capital territory is not even being mentioned. Quite obviously, the thinking is that soldiers and bureaucrats cannot be subjected to the indignity of being ruled by councillors and nazims. The deputy commissioner is considered a good for nothing colonial relic elsewhere but indispensable in Islamabad.

Leaving aside for a moment the hurdle that the existence of cantonments presents to the unification of Karachi, the NRB has made it doubly difficult by dividing Karachi into 18 towns. Since no physical features set apart one town from the other, inhabitants do not know in which town they live nor does it seem to bother them. In the case of cantonments, it is even more anachronistic and, on occasion, troublesome, for their territories meander in and out of the surrounding municipal areas. Barring the barracks and parade grounds the cantonments are inhabited by civilians. Even old-time residents find it hard to identify their boundaries.

Advocates of a unified civic administration for all of Karachi, among them old hands at the game Arif Hassan and Roland D’Souza, are right but unrealistic. The fate of the Karachi administration is tied up with the devolution plan on which General Musharraf has staked all his personal prestige and his regime’s politics though the principles and assumptions on which it was based have gone by the board one by one.

The councils and nazims were expected to stay out of politics and concentrate on the welfare and safety of the citizens. In practice, all of them, the district nazims in particular, are prominent members of political parties. The district governments, it was envisaged, would implement the policies and plans of the provincial governments but relieve them of the headache of implementation and supervision. But since all politics is local and about jobs and patronage, every district, and consequently every province, has become a cesspool of competing interests of the nazims and minister. By all accounts, corruption and wastage have increased.

The system was intended to insulate the administration from politics but, instead, both have blended into one indistinguishable whole. The public commissions and authorities, tribunals and ombudsmen, insaaf committees and musalihat anjumans, village and neighbourhood councils, community boards and stakeholders associations which were to insulate the administration, especially the police, from ministers and other political bosses have either not been formed or, where formed, are dysfunctional. A period of five years is long enough to judge objectively the worth of the new administrative cum municipal system. The sole criterion in making this judgment should be whether the communities and the people have indeed acquired a direct say in their affairs and feel safer and less harassed by the overbearing and corrupt elements in their daily lives than before. Public spending may have gone up — indeed it has — but the question to determine is whether its benefits are reaching the common man.

Talking to the politicians and the policemen, the bureaucrats and the councillors, the rich and the poor, the emerging sentiment seems to be that while local development and municipal affairs are better managed by the elected representatives of the people, the law and order and other regulatory administration should remain above politics and in neutral, professional hands.

It would be a tragic setback if the coming political governments were to wind up the whole system, which assuredly they will, and with that the local government institutions would once again become extinct. Thus would be lost the only positive contribution that Gen Musharraf has made to national life in his seven years.

Long march

THE creditability of United Nations Aids statistics took a hit this year when some prevalence estimates turned out to have been exaggerated. In its latest annual report on the pandemic, UNAids presents its numbers cautiously, reporting that between 34.1 million and 47.1 million people are living with the HIV virus.

But as far as one can tell from imperfect data, the news on Aids remains awful. Even though the world is spending around $8 billion a year on treatment, prevention, and the care of orphans in poor and middle-income countries, more people are dying from Aids; more people are being infected; and the number of people living with the virus is at a record level.

The clearest achievement in the battle against the virus has been to boost the number of people being treated to 1.7 million. In sub-Saharan Africa, home to three in five people with HIV, the number receiving antiretroviral medicines has jumped tenfold in three years. The World Health Organization says that an additional 5 million or so people worldwide urgently need treatment, so this is not yet a victory. And even the progress achieved so far is subject to caveats.

The early studies of treatment in poor countries suggested that supplies of medicines could be made reliable and that patients would take them as directed. But successful pilot projects don’t always work well on a larger scale: As treatment efforts expand they must face the challenges of dealing with harder-to-serve groups and of enlisting extra medical personnel without diluting quality.

Moreover, there’s a theoretical danger that the availability of treatment, particularly when coupled with food handouts or other services, might increase risky behaviour. True, the offer of treatment may induce people to be tested for HIV, and this can lead to more responsible behaviour. But on the other hand it may not — people who test negative may get the idea that they are somehow immune, while people who test positive may feel there is nothing to lose from casual coupling. This isn’t a reason to hold back treatment, particularly since Aids drugs can make people less infectious. But it’s an issue that bears watching.

Beyond the expanding and careful monitoring of treatment programmes, the big challenge is to get serious about prevention. Worldwide, 50 percent more people were infected with HIV this year than died for lack of treatment, and the need for constant vigilance is illustrated by Uganda and Thailand, two countries that had succeeded in controlling the virus a few years ago but have started to backslide more recently.

The new UN report cites some cases in which prevention efforts may have worked: Seven African countries have experienced a decline in HIV prevalence among young urban adults. In Botswana, a country that has received especially generous foreign assistance for its Aids programme, HIV prevalence among pregnant women ages 15 to 19 fell by more than a fifth between 2003 and 2005. But even Botswana illustrates how far there is to go.

—The Washington Post