Now it is South Waziristan

PAKISTAN has once again been caught between the devil and the deep sea that underlines its dilemma in the war on terror being fought alongside the Americans. The missile attack on Tuesday on a cluster of compounds — described by the security officials as a militant hideout — left 20 or so “foreign miscreants” (as the government calls them) dead and many injured in Zamzola in South Waziristan. As has happened on earlier occasions, this led to an angry reaction from the local population who staged protest demonstrations. It may not be easy to sift fact from fiction, given the government’s decision to keep independent observers and the media out of the disturbed areas which are also geographically remote and relatively inaccessible. But it is now clearly established that militants have been operating in the tribal areas of Pakistan and there may be some truth in the allegations made by the Afghans and the Americans that cross-border infiltration is taking place from Waziristan.

The attack on Zamzola in a way amounts to Islamabad conceding what it has consistently denied when talking to the Afghans. The problem lies on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line as much as in Afghanistan’s turbulent regions. The militants supportive of the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been operating in the border areas. They have been indoctrinated to undertake suicide missions believing this to be the highest form of jihad against the non-believers — in this case, the Americans and their supporters. For its own survival, Pakistan will have to address the problem rather than shove it under the carpet. If there are training camps in these areas, they must be uprooted and the cross-border infiltration stopped. Obviously this is not an easy task considering the porous nature of the 2,500 kilometre Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The government has entered into agreements which it said were with the tribal elders in North and South Waziristan. These were meant to prevent the Taliban from using Pakistan territory for launching attacks on the Afghan side. But apart from stopping attacks on the Pakistan army, the accords could have done little else. If anything, they gave a free hand to the Taliban to operate from the tribal areas.

If these areas have to be pacified and the sanctuaries they provide to the militants wiped out, Pakistan will have to acknowledge that a problem does exist and needs to be tackled firmly. It will also have to be recognised that the presence of the militants is not confined to one area on the Pakistan side of the border alone. Like many tribes, ideology straddles the Durand Line and Afghanistan is also plagued by the Islamist militants based on Afghan territory. It is not that Pakistan alone can root out the problem. The two countries will have to adopt a bilateral approach if the Taliban have to be rooted out effectively. Sporadically they have tried that — for instance, in the trilateral commission of which both are members along with the ISAF and the jirgas they are planning to hold — but what is needed is a more concerted effort and closer cooperation between them, especially at the strategic and geopolitical level. If they enhance their interaction and the frequency of their engagement, it might also become easier for them to preempt the assaults by the militants by denying them the sanctuaries and the support they badly need to remain in operation.

Threats to Iran

EVEN though the White House has denied that the US intends to resort to military action against Iran over the nuclear issue, the tone and tenor of American leaders’ utterances bear a frightful resemblance to what happened before Iraq was invaded in March 2003. Two of Bob Woodward’s books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, make interesting reading, and give an insight into the working of the Bush administration before and after 9/11, the neocons’ success in sidelining the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, the doctoring of the intelligence data, and the deception that kept the world guessing as to America’s real intentions vis-a-vis Iraq. The significant part of the White House denial on Tuesday was the spokesman’s assertion that the US was not planning to “invade Iran”. Of course, it is difficult to invade and occupy a territorially large country like Iran, especially at a time when American ground forces have been stretched thin from Afghanistan to Iraq. But denying an invasion plan is not the same thing as denying a possible resort to force. In 1981, Israel did not invade Iraq, but it scuttled Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions by destroying Osirak, Iraq’s sole nuclear reactor, in an air strike.

Earlier this month, President George Bush announced that he was sending one more aircraft carrier battle group to the Gulf and ordering the deployment of Patriot missiles to protect America’s allies against possible rocket attacks. As he told Fox News, he was determined to “seek out and destroy” any networks sending weapons or fighters into Iraq. More threatening was Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said Washington would not allow Iran to become a regional power and termed Tehran “a multi-dimensional threat”. One hopes the neocons have learnt from the disaster that Iraq has become for America, and refrain from repeating the folly. An attack on Iran will find the US involved in war in a greater part of the Middle East, and this will only play into the hands of the extremists, who will claim that the US was committing aggression against the Muslim peoples in a war theatre stretching from the Durand Line to the Iraq-Jordan border.

Fire tragedy in Karachi

AT LEAST eight people — six of them fire-fighters — have been confirmed dead in Monday’s blaze that engulfed a garment factory in Karachi’s SITE area. However, it is being pointed out that the deaths were not the result of the fire itself but of the subsequent roof collapse in which several firemen became trapped in the debris. This has led to speculations that low-grade material had been used in the construction of the factory that was unable to withstand the fire or the force of the attempts to put it out. While only a formal inquiry can give a clearer picture of the factory fire, it is evident that the violation of building laws and the inadequate resources of the fire department make for a lethal combination in a city where poorly planned and illegal structures abound. One can only hope that after Monday’s inferno, the KBCA strictly enforces the rules regarding construction of buildings and fire safety across the city.

The tragedy also underscores the need for better safety and fire-fighting equipment for the fire department. It is unfortunate that services of the fire brigade go unnoticed and that little is done to provide protective gear for those brave men who put their lives at risk while rescuing others from raging flames. Often the equipment they use is defective or inadequate, and as one fireman pointed out after the recent blaze, the department is not consulted during construction or provided with building plans that would enable it to point out deficiencies. In such a situation, it is not possible for the fire department to function effectively. The fear remains that haphazard development and consistent violations of building rules in this congested city will make crisis management an increasingly difficult task for any civic agency, including the fire department.

Turning Saddam Hussein into a martyr

SADDAM HUSSEIN is more powerful in his grave than he ever was in his palace. Alive, he was a dictator. Dead, he is a martyr. The evil inherent in arbitrary power is in the process of being interred with his bones. Strong men like to associate with iron. Hence, an Iron Duke, or Iron Chancellor, or Iron Fist, an Iron Will. It is ironic that all it needs is an extra letter to turn iron into irony. If Saddam was full of iron when he ruled Iraq, his legacy is replete with irony.

To take the most obvious instance, in death he has become a symbol of justice denied. The inexplicable haste, and the brutal shoddiness with which he was hanged has become, thanks to a grainy video and millions of television screens, the final testimony in the first example of victor’s prejudice masquerading as law in this century. This is not an arbitrary interpretation. Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, to stop Saddam’s execution because of doubts about the fairness of the trial.

Alive, Saddam Hussein was helpless against George Bush. Dead, Saddam could leave Bush helpless. His memory will pour fresh fuel on a hundred existing fires. The defeat and death of Saddam is a narrative with one author: George Bush. Saddam was the quarry, Bush was the hunter. The hunter changed the rules of this jungle when every reason was exposed as an excuse. When the quarry was trapped, all rules were abandoned in the pursuit of death.

Spin, passed on to the world’s most famous “embedded” reporters, the White House press corps, now seeks to distance Bush from the crude trial, premeditated judgment and barbaric execution. It is unconvincing. Bush’s formal statement welcomed the death of Saddam as an “important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself”.

There is an implicit admission in that sentence, that a “democratic” Iraq needs a dead Saddam. Why was Saddam, in prison and unlikely to get out, considered so dangerous for Iraqi democracy? Is there a semi-hidden fear that the consuming anarchy in Iraq is breeding nostalgia for the stability and order of Saddam’s regime? Nostalgia can so easily turn into votes.

It is inconceivable that the White House was not informed about every step on the way to the noose. State-owned media like the Voice of America had begun preparing obituaries and reactions a day before the execution. Baghdad and Washington did not do themselves any favour by hanging Saddam during the great Abrahamic festival of Eid ul Azha, while millions were bowing their heads before the Kaaba during Haj, an event redolent with the spirit of sacrifice for a higher cause. Bush and his one-eyed coterie do not understand either Islam or Muslims, and will not fathom the anger that injustice generates on the street. The bars of Saddam’s cramped jail would not have melted in 30 days. In death, Saddam has become a symbol of resistance to American hegemony.

This is perhaps the height of irony, since, for most of his time in power, his enemies accused Saddam of being an American cat’s paw in the region. Facts tell a story. Saddam Hussein was trained by the CIA during his years in exile in Cairo, after the failed coup of 1959. It has been mentioned, in more than one account, that his mentors were privately pleased when he seized power from an ailing Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr in July 1979. They were certainly delighted when Saddam purged communists from the loose coalition in Iraq that was drifting towards the Soviet bloc at a time of heightening Cold War confrontation (the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan would take place in December that year).

Saddam Hussein did America an incalculable favour when on September 22, 1980, he escalated border skirmishes into a full-scale war by bombing 10 Iranian air bases.

The planes in his Air Force were not MiGs from the Soviet Union. They were brand new Mirages from France. America maintained an official distance from that war, but there was much unofficial help as well as massive funding from American allies in the region.

In December 1983 President Ronald Reagan sent a special envoy to Saddam, Donald Rumsfeld, the same man who launched the current Iraq war with the thunder of shock and awe and resigned last November, shell-shocked. American arms to fight Iran came through third party routes, and American credit more visibly. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher took the lead in re-supplying military hardware to Saddam under the cover of lies, which were exposed in the 1996 Arms to Iraq report.

Paradoxically, Saddam occupied Kuwait because of war debts, and his conviction that the Arab regimes whose interests he had served by going to war against Iran had become stingy with their cheque books once the conflict had ceased. He had overplayed a very weak hand. But his faith in Washington was surely restored when the senior George Bush refused to remove him from power after an international coalition had defeated his armies on the battlefield in 1991.

There is a great deal hidden in Saddam’s grave. Was this one reason why he was denied a trial at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a privilege granted to the Serbian butcher Slobodan Milosevic? Saddam and his lawyers would surely have had the freedom to assert a wider argument at The Hague, in a court devoid of kangaroos.

That kangaroo court in Baghdad is now an indelible America-inflicted scar across the face of the Middle East. A few lines from an editorial in the New York Times are appropriate: “Saddam Hussein deserves no one’s pity. But as anyone who has seen the graphic cell phone video of his hanging can testify that his execution bore little resemblance to dispassionate, state-administered justice… For the Bush administration, which insists it went to war in Iraq to implant democracy and justice, those globally viewed images were a shaming embarrassment. Unfortunately, all Americans will be blamed…”

It is not the defeat of Saddam, or his death, that has driven Iraq into chaos. It is a myth that Iraq needs despotism to keep it united. The Hashemite family of King Faisal ruled Iraq with a mild hand from 1921, when the state was formalised, to 1958. There was no talk of disintegration during the soft, albeit compromised, monarchy. Nor was there chaos during the two Baathist decades till 1979. The present havoc is a direct consequence of occupation, an inevitable insurrection against foreign troops on Iraqi soil, and a polity fractured by ethnic interests. The full account of this malfeasance will be written, but only after the occupation is over in a few years. “The enemies forced strangers into our sea/And he who serves them will be made to weep./Here we unveil our chests to the wolves/And will not tremble before the beast.”

As poetry that might not be the most memorable lines in Arabic, but these lines from Saddam Hussein’s last poem, written in jail, will resonate. Saddam’s grave in Tikrit has already become a memorial, where Iraq’s Sunnis are offering a prayer from wounded hearts.

“I sacrifice my soul for you and for our nation,” he wrote. “Blood is cheap in hard times.” Blood flows, and each drop becomes a seed of future war.

Perhaps such poetry will be forgotten. But a line of prose he uttered at the end will certainly live longer. Palestine, he said on his way to the gallows, is Arab.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.

Singing ambassador

LONG ago there was the Singing Nun. Then came the Singing Postman. Now, courtesy of the education secretary, Alan Johnson, we are to have the Singing Ambassador. But Howard Goodall’s job is not to sing for Britain. It is to get Britain to sing by being music’s high-profile champion.

Mr Goodall has a big job to do. The universal instinct to sing may testify to the existence of God, as some believe, or may simply be one of the great pleasures of being human.

Yet the opportunity to make the most of music is very unequally distributed and in danger of becoming more so. All the more reason, therefore, to celebrate not just the dynamism of the Music Manifesto campaign that has been trying to stop the decline but also the government’s positive response to parts of it on Tuesday.

The £10m package to boost music and singing in primary schools may not seem like big bucks, though it will be enough to pay for a new school songbook, ranging from folk to pop.

But music, like the arts generally, is one of those fields in which a relatively small sum, properly invested, goes a long way to help create a good society. Not before time, ministers have grasped that music and singing should not have been allowed to drift so far to the margins of education in the early years as they have. In many parts of Britain, music in schools has become either vestigial or even nonexistent.

Tuesday’s announcement points music back towards the harmonious mainstream, where it should always have been.

—The Guardian, London