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| February 03, 2007 | Saturday | Muharram 14, 1428 |
Opportunities for the Baloch
Protecting ancient sites
That’s right, blame it on the left
NICK Cohen must have been feeling down in the dumps last weekend as hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets in Washington and other cities to demand an end to the war in Iraq. Who, you may justifiably inquire, is Nick Cohen and what does he have to do with antiwar protests? Well, he happens to be a British columnist who is implacably opposed to peace marches, at least in the context of the war in Iraq.
Having shed tears publicly — literally and figuratively — over Pakistan’s Sept 5 deal in North Waziristan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is now sending peace feelers to the Taliban. This is an extraordinary reversal of policy. Among foreigners who had reacted most negatively to Pakistan’s deal with the militants even before the ink had dried, Mr Karzai occupied the place of honour. The most unqualified support for him came from sections of the western media, which interpreted the agreement with the Taliban as being tantamount to providing a safe haven to the militants. Concerns about the consequences of the deal were voiced not just in the British and American press but also by respected Pakistani journalists. The fears of the latter were confirmed shortly thereafter when the Taliban set about creating a parallel administration in North Waziristan, issuing edicts, imposing taxes, and taking on the mantle of judge and jury. The Taliban also failed to honour two key components of the peace deal — checking cross-border infiltration into Afghanistan and expelling foreign militants from Pakistani territory. Their recruitment drives also appeared to pick up pace after being handed virtual control of an entire agency. Although the British command in Helmand ultimately also came to a limited understanding with local tribal leaders — an agreement which has collapsed in recent days — their pact was different from the Pakistani peace deal which involved the Taliban themselves with the elders acting merely as interlocutors. Still, subsequent reactions by the American and British governments suggested a softening of position. At least publicly, US and UK officials seemed to show an understanding of Pakistan’s position and the reasons behind the Sept 5 deal.
Now Mr Karzai’s government is not only willing to talk to the Taliban, its offer of amnesty includes even such hardened Taliban fighters as Mullah Omar and Gulbadin Hekmatyar. On Monday he abruptly decided on a negotiated settlement to the insurgency by deciding to “open the door of talks… with our enemy”. A day later, he received unqualified support from the US State Department, whose spokesman said Mr Karzai’s move was “laudable” because it sought to bring the militants into the political process. As the Pakistani experience has shown, this route is not without its pitfalls. The Waziristan deal was struck not from a position of strength but weakness after the military approach had failed — many called it a capitulation. Similarly, bluster and bombardment did not produce results for Mr Karzai and he too is now opting for a negotiated settlement. He too is not in a position to dictate terms. After battle, that is the sole privilege of the victor.
Irrespective of what Mr Karzai does, Pakistan must pursue its own interests, the foremost being the need for peace in the tribal belt. This can be done by denying the foreign militants and their local supporters freedom of action, and the best way to do that is to temper force with negotiation. The key lies in convincing the Taliban through their interlocutors to expel foreign fighters from the tribal areas. At the same time, the Pakistani authorities must do more to check the two-way movement of militants across the Durand Line. Those on the other side have failed miserably in this regard and Islamabad must tackle the situation on its own.
IT is understandable why the Baloch mindset is beset by a growing sense of alienation. Balochistan’s history of militant nationalism, dating back to the post-independence regency days, is directly linked to the neglect it has suffered at the hands of the centre. Islamabad’s long disregard for the welfare of the province has suited the powerful sardars whose own interests are best served by keeping the people backward. By pandering to the tribal chiefs, governments at the centre have indirectly endorsed this subjugation. As a result, there is a shocking dearth of education and economic opportunities in an otherwise resource-rich province. Army operations have only made matters worse, fuelling the feeling that the Baloch are treated like aliens — if not enemies — in their own country.
The key to instilling a sense of belonging as well as of well-being lies in the creation of educational training and employment opportunities for the Baloch people. It is said that ‘outsiders’ are hired for jobs in Balochistan because there is a lack of educated or skilled manpower in the province. Irrespective of whether there is merit in this argument or not, it cannot be used indefinitely as an excuse. This practice further breeds resentment in an already deprived region. The recent decision to set up vocational and computer training centres for women is a welcome move; gradually, its scope should extend beyond Quetta to the rural areas. If Balochistan is to progress, educational and vocational institutes must also be created throughout the province. The prime minister’s October 2006 ‘Vision for Balochistan’ programme envisages an outlay of Rs19.5 billion. As such, there should be no shortage of funds if the right priorities are adopted and followed scrupulously. Here, the official proclivity for the grandiose must be avoided. Instead of large projects, the answer lies in grassroots schemes tailored to the needs of a specific area. This is particularly important in a province where many people cannot afford to travel to distant locales and where the road network leaves much to be desired. Given honesty of purpose, much can be done to win back the confidence of the Baloch.
THE photograph carried by this newspaper the other day of the derelict ruins of Jhukarjodaro, a pre-historic archaeological site spread over some 40 acres near Larkana city, is proof of the low priority that the government attaches to the upkeep of ancient monuments and sites in the country. Archaeology officials have failed to combat the menace of waterlogging and salinity in the area that is harming the ruins or to stop encroachments around the site. Other than listing historical sites as “protected”, neither the federal nor the provincial government seems to care much about taking even basic steps to ensure that such sites are well maintained and protected. The public, taking its cue from this apathetic attitude, hardly raises its voice against the neglect of national treasures, and is quite often responsible for defacing relics. What is also worrisome is the widespread smuggling of historical artefacts to international markets where they have immense monetary and cultural value.
Funds are a perennial problem where the upkeep of such sites and relics are concerned, and it is feared that once the federal government hands over a number of sites, currently under its guardianship, to the provinces, matters will only get worse. But the shortage of funds, equipment and qualified technical staff is not the only aspect of the problem that needs to be addressed. Even more important is the question of raising awareness among the people about their cultural heritage. They should be made to feel proud of owning some of the world’s most ancient and advanced civilisations. Judging by the current state of neglect of historical monuments and sites, it would seem that the government has no immediate plans for promoting national consciousness on the subject. Unless it does so soon, Pakistan’s historical and cultural treasures may disappear for good.
That is hardly an extraordinary position: after all, a broad cross-section of his colleagues might feel the same way. The difference is that Cohen considers himself a man of the left, and he firmly believes that the broader left has betrayed its traditions by taking a stand against the war. Going by the two lengthy extracts that appeared in The Observer earlier this month, that is the crux of Cohen’s forthcoming book, What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way.
It is a sufficiently intriguing line of thought to merit an argument. Cohen is not alone: a handful of other journalists, writers and intellectuals, some of them with respectable left-wing credentials, were sufficiently disoriented by 9/11 and its aftermath to accept the US government’s self-image as a civilising force. Unmoved by the invasion of Afghanistan, they stuck to their guns in the run-up to the assault on Iraq, even as public opinion through much of the West underwent a transformation. In their view, it was knee-jerk anti-Americanism returning to the fore. Like a sizeable proportion of their conservative counterparts, some of them are bound to have had second thoughts. Others, like Cohen, soldier on.
In his view, the left may have been mistaken on certain issues in the past, but it had a coherent and broadly defensible worldview until Iraq popped up on its radar and everything went awry. However, the examples Cohen picks upon to illustrate this contention are telling: they hint at thought processes that were tilting towards the right long before Iraq.
For instance, he says that the British left of the 1980s “was clearly in the wrong ... over unilateral nuclear disarmament” because it was “dunderheaded to believe that dictators would abandon their weapons systems if Britain abandoned hers”. Unless he’s simply being facetious, that’s a disingenuous claim: the dominant argument behind the push for unilateral nuclear disarmament was that it would make Britain a less likely target in the event of a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers (which did not seem to be all that far-fetched a prospect with Ronald Reagan in the White House). It was a valid rationale, not least because there have consistently been doubts about the alleged independence of Britain’s so-called nuclear deterrent.
He also seems uncomfortable with the inability of his ex-communist (but evidently anti-Stalinist) parents to accept a moral equivalence between fascism and communism. The tendency to equate the two on the basis of totalitarian tendencies and mass extermination campaigns is fairly common, but it fails to take cognisance of a crucial difference. Nazism was based on a philosophy of corporatism and racial superiority; militarism, forced labour and concentration camps were its natural outgrowth. Bolshevism was theoretically about empowering the working class and transforming the relations of production; gulags were not a necessary consequence of these ideals.
This crucial difference helps to explain why the defeat of Nazism was a historical necessity, while the failure of Bolshevism was a tragedy. Cohen might disagree, but he does concede that its “consistent anti-fascism added enormously to the left’s prestige in the second half of the 20th century”. The problem as he sees it is that the left squandered this legacy in the 21st century by refusing to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, even though a couple of decades earlier it was the left that had agitated for an end to western support and weapons for Baghdad, while the right tended to gloss over evidence of Saddam’s outrages.
There is certainly a point to be made in this context, but Cohen completely misses it. He claims that Saddam’s confrontation with the US made him a hero to the left. It is therefore with considerable vitriol that he castigates the tens of millions who marched in European capitals and elsewhere on February 15, 2003, “to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime”.
This is a load of nonsense. It is, at best, mischievous to cast aspersions on the multitudes who sought in vain to stall an illegitimate and inevitably destructive war. It is perverse to construe this as support for Saddam’s regime. Cohen also wants to know why the left could not bring itself “to oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over”. Such ridiculousness barely requires a riposte. Would George W. Bush be trying to pour more troops into Baghdad if the war was “over”? Besides, there is a prerequisite for every counter-revolution. It’s called a revolution. Invasion and occupation don’t exactly add up to one.
The anti-war movement was never about saving Saddam, it was -- and still is -- about saving lives, Iraqi as well as American. Given his born-again zeal for imperialist initiatives, it is hardly surprising that Cohen sees the Iraqi resistance through neo-conservative blinkers as essentially an Al Qaeda-Baathist nexus. The reality has always been considerably more complex and, inevitably, murky. The insurgency has undoubtedly been brutal, reflecting the nature of the occupation. It is easy to unequivocally deplore the burgeoning civil war, but it makes little sense to ignore the conditions that engendered it. Or to overlook the comments of neo-con theoreticians who envisaged the prospect of Shia-Sunni violence with a degree of complacency, believing that it would take the heat off American troops. It wasn’t their first miscalculation.
Cohen repeats the discredited argument that a smooth war gave way to a mismanaged aftermath. It doesn’t seem so smooth if you start counting the dead. More to the point, were there any sensible grounds for assuming that military aggression by the US would pave the way for an exemplary Middle Eastern democracy? Was this assumption based on any comparable precedent? Furthermore, can Cohen remind us when, in the second half of the 20th century, did the left’s opposition to fascist regimes involve advocacy of an invasion? Was anyone agitating for a military offensive against Francoist Spain or Portugal under Salazar? In the case of apartheid South Africa, did sympathy for the disenfranchised majority spill over into arguments for military strikes rather than sanctions? Why should it have been any different in the case of Iraq?
One can only wonder whether his book will contain a list of further targets for the Pentagon to focus on. For if it was justified to destroy Saddam’s Iraq, surely there must be other deserving candidates? I shall also look forward to flicking its pages in search of any passing reference to a country called Vietnam.
There is, however, one point on which the likes of Cohen are on less shaky ground. There is a tendency among sections of the left to swallow wholesale the sob story about Muslim victimhood and to regard with equanimity even the most illiberal and deleterious aspects of Islamist philosophy. This is a grave error that betrays symptoms of an affliction similar to Cohen’s: it could be summed up as an inability to not take sides when faced with a pair of more or less equally unpalatable alternatives.
To his credit, the far-right American ideologue Dinesh D’Souza is able to recognise a common thread between his soulmates and some of the views espoused by Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his view, the response to Bush’s conclusion that “they hate our freedoms” should be to curtail or abolish those freedoms, to purge American culture of liberal and secular influences. The idea of a khilafat stretching from the Mideast to the Midwest doesn’t, thankfully, excite very many Americans, and D’Souza’s latest publication, The War at Home, has been ripped to shreds in the US press for suggesting that Hillary Clinton and Hollywood are worthier enemies than anyone in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. Much of what he says is, of course, utterly absurd and deliberately, but he is not completely off his rocker in identifying the religious right in the US and the religious right in the Muslim world as potential allies.
The same cannot be said for Paul Dacre, the editor of Britain’s Daily Mail, who recently launched an extraordinary attack on the BBC, accusing it of “cultural Marxism” and of trying to impose its left-liberal worldview on listeners. The trouble with people such as Dacre and D’Souza is that they are so far to the right that from their vantage point everything -- from abortion clinics to the BBC -- begins to look like a left-wing conspiracy. And if this is the sort of company Nick Cohen wants, he’s on the right track.One can only wonder, meanwhile, what any of them -- particularly Cohen, given his background -- would make of the figures released last month by a UN research institute, according to which the richest one per cent of adults across the world own 40 per cent of global wealth, while the poorest 50 per cent own about one per cent. Ninety per cent of this wealth is concentrated in Europe, North America and a few countries in the Asia Pacific region, notably Japan. Might these unsustainable disparities have something to do with the omnipotence of the free market, or would it be easier to blame it on (a) the international left, (b) western moral decadence and (c) the BBC?
Email: mahir.worldview@gmail.com