War on terror: many causes

IDEOLOGICAL extremism leaves its bloody signatures on our history almost every day now. No place is sacrosanct and no institution is immune. It is ubiquitous and indiscriminate. South Asia has a gory past of communal violence which climaxed in ethnic cleansing on a massive scale as imperial Britain withdrew from it in 1946-47. Ethnic strife still erupts in one part of the region or another from time to time.

The causes are complex but they generally fit into historical struggles for power between contending groups and communities. The rising level of intolerance in our own society does not lend itself to a neat and comprehensive explanation though a whole range of social, economic and political factors are rightly cited by our analysts.

Most of these factors are amenable to remedial strategies insofar as they can be formulated as issues of governance and economic polity. A deep sense of alienation and disenfranchisement makes people prone to lawlessness. At least in theory, governments can be held accountable for acts of omission and commission and, therefore, confronted with policy choices that need to be made. What is, however, particularly disturbing is that some of the causes of the present violence emanate from processes which are simply beyond the jurisdiction of the nation-state.

Evidence is piling up that men of violence in our midst, including the suicide bombers, are frequently driven by a self-image of participating in a larger, almost global, struggle in which their nation state, in their judgment, is aligned with the forces of evil. They believe that their faith, culture and values are under a relentless external attack which is facilitated by a complicit ruling elite. They target institutions of state and society in the hope of breaking that nexus. In this sense, violence is part of an insurrection that transcends national boundaries.

Current strategies to overcome this insurrection fail everywhere partly because the dominant analysis is one-sided and partisan. Efforts to widen the discourse are often snuffed out with the allegation that they are tantamount to rationalising and justifying the Islamists’ criminal behaviour. It is by now a cliché that resort to violence by Muslims reveals a deep crisis within contemporary Islam and that it is, first and last, a testimony to Islam’s failure in its encounter with modernity.

This judgment is usually not challenged by Muslim thinkers who have been preoccupied with this encounter for more than a century. For them, it is a valid framework to discuss the state in which Muslim societies find themselves. What remains unacknowledged most of the time is that there is a parallel crisis in western thought, particularly in its way of looking at the rest of the world. Somewhere along the line, it started losing its acceptance of diversity and began acting as if history had truly come to an end and what remained to be done was to ensure a universal adoption of western values and institutions.

There are enough people in the West who know it as a false over-simplification but they find themselves displaced from the centre of power. Power belongs to those who are only too eager to use it to reconstitute the world according to their own gospel.

The Islamic world is particularly vexed because in its case historical veracity has been simply abandoned. Much of its energy today is expended in setting the record straight.

Not very long ago, we had the Regensburg address of Pope Benedict XVI. The controversy generated by it is behind us and must not be rekindled. But it stays in memory because it was constructed on the facile assumption that unlike Christianity, Islam did not enter into a creative interaction with the great Greek tradition of reason. Unwittingly, the Pope had thrown his weight behind a determined campaign to portray Islam as a primordial dark force.

A more helpful and historically accurate approach would have been to recall that Islam had its Hellenic moment much earlier than the Christian West. Ironically, there is a long tradition of Islamic writings that attributed the triumph of Islam and the decline of pre-Enlightenment West to the fact that the West had put an absolute taboo on Greek sciences and learning. The Muslim historian and cultural commentator had no inhibition for a long time in acknowledging a debt to the impressive industry that had sprung up from one end of the Muslim world to the other to translate Greek texts into Arabic.

What needs to be studied jointly is how this Muslim tradition overreached itself and invited destruction at the hands of orthodox forces. Such a study will almost by definition lead to the recognition of heroic efforts made during the last 100 or so to reconstruct Islamic thought with a view to making it compatible with the flow of time. It will also place the so-called crisis in Islam in our times in an altogether different perspective.

What we get most of the time is a polemic that trivialises every Muslim thinker, every movement in the Muslim world. The basic trick is to disconnect it from its historical context, especially the relationship with imperial conquest of Muslim lands. It is a trick of denial and derision used even by the best of commentators. In October 2006, the distinguished novelist, Martin Amis, published a long essay on extreme Islamism in London’s Sunday Observer. Amongst other things, he offered a critique of the impact of Sayyid Qutb.

In Sayyid’s native Egypt as, indeed, in most Muslim countries his philosophy and political activism continue to generate controversy. This dialectical debate about his work is an essential part of intra-Islamic disputations. But Martin Amis had no time either for his ideas or for any purposeful discussion of Egypt’s long struggle against foreign occupation and then against Israel.

Having made a most perfunctory reference to this aspect of Sayyid Qutb, he went on to ridicule him almost entirely in terms of his presumed frustrations in dealing with liberated western women during his travels and study in Europe and North America. Martin Amis’s essay is an excellent example of the crisis in western approach to Islam which mirrors and amplifies the Islamic crisis. It is just one more variation of the theme of a clash of civilisations or the later prophecies of a struggle with Islam spread at least over one whole generation.

Another example of western intellectuals who marginalise the Muslim liberal and fuel the fires of Muslim extremism is found in a bizarre essay that James Kurth, professor of political science at Swarthmore College wrote under the title ‘Splitting Islam’ for the September 26, 2005 issue of The American Conservative. Contemplating the best options to defeat the “global Islamic insurgency directed at the United States, its allies, and the West more generally”, the learned teacher recalled how the United States had used “the most consequential splitting strategy directed at the Sino-Soviet bloc” and then went on to discuss in detail the benefits of encouraging a Shia-Sunni split strategy.

Such cynical outreach of realist analysis provides a perfect backdrop for the counter-analysis that comes from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. One should not be surprised that in his address to the intellectuals during his just concluded visit to Sudan, the Iranian president saw the sinister hands of the United States and Israel in the great tragedy being enacted in the Middle East. The Kurth essay may be read by some as intellectual prescience but many more will see it as a manifesto of what has actually happened in Iraq under American occupation.

This mindless global confrontation by extremists from both sides - a veritable clash of rival discourses - greatly complicates the security situation of a country like Pakistan. It has to be recognised as an ingredient in the explosive mix threatening more and more parts of the country. I remember writing in this space several months ago that Pakistan would not be allowed to opt out of this confrontation by the powers to be. The recent visits of Vice President Dick Cheney and British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett to Islamabad and Kabul only underlined Pakistan’s dilemma.

An article by Michael Vlahos in the American Conservative discusses in detail how the “great Muslim war” replaced the story of globalisation and how American insistence on “you are either with us or against us” is now promoting counter-movements all over the globe. This war sustained by unbridled passions on both sides is already upon us and the feeble glow of our state-sponsored enlightened moderation is being fast overwhelmed by this new darkness.

Hundreds of our soldiers, policemen, simple worshippers in mosques and seminaries, innocent citizens including a woman minister in the infancy of a promising political career have already perished. All we have on our Nero’s fiddle is the dying strain of a swansong called “war on terror”.

The real challenge is how to extricate ourselves from it in every sense of the word. Lt-General Douglas Lute told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington recently that he has all the authority he needs “to pursue, either with (artillery) fire or on ground, across the (Pakistan-Afghan) border.”

Those pursued by his forces will have no compunction in retaliating anywhere in Pakistan as they are doing increasingly. It is time that we put aside our parochial political contests for some time and develop a national exit strategy. The longer we remain engaged under duress in the “great Muslim war” of President Bush’s imagination, the greater would be the threat to Pakistan’s existence. The perils to us cannot be dismissed by the empty rhetoric of the state any more.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Not pushing Pakistan too far

AMERICAN Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recent visit to South Asia was not what one could call a rousing success. Cheney, the real power behind the Bush administration, arrived at Bagram air base, formerly the nerve centre for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Today, it plays the same role for the US occupation. A suicide bomber attacked the base’s main gate, killing a number of soldiers and civilians and hugely embarrassing Cheney.

Worse, the 60km “secure” highway between Bagram and Kabul has become so dangerous that Cheney could not travel by road through this region which is deemed highly secure by US and Nato forces to meet with the American-installed figurehead leader, Hamid Karzai, who is constantly surrounded by up to 200 US bodyguards.

Anti-western forces are quickly gaining ground in Afghanistan. What Washington and its Nato allies keep claiming is an “anti-terrorist operation” against a handful of Al Qaeda fighters and the Taliban has, in fact, turned into fast-growing Afghan national resistance to foreign occupation.

Were it not for the US air force’s might and ubiquitous presence, US, Canadian, and British troops would soon be driven from southern Afghanistan. The respected Senlis Council, which closely monitors Afghanistan, reports half that nation is now under Taliban control or influence.

The fast-deteriorating situation there is provoking furious finger-pointing. Washington and Nato are angrily blaming Pakistan for sheltering and abetting Taliban and its allies. Pakistan blames the feeble Karzai regime which can’t control its own territory. Now, US intelligence reports that Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself in spite of President George Bush’s so-called $690 billion “war on terror”.

Cheney went on to Pakistan to threaten President Pervez Musharraf, with a cutoff of US aid - and perhaps much worse - if he didn’t crack down further on Pashtun tribesmen in the frontier areas who were aiding the Taliban and other Pashtun and nationalist resistance groups. The western powers are following India’s lead over Kashmir by accusing Pakistan of “cross-border terrorism”.

This is untrue. The 40 million Pashtun, the world’s largest tribe, have never recognised the British-drawn 1893 border between Pakistan and Afghanistan that cuts their traditional territory in two. They cross it at will and maintain close links with relatives and clansmen on the other side of the border who strongly support the Taliban and its allies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I explored and became fascinated by the wild, lawless, then little-known frontier tribal agencies of North and South Waziristan, Khyber, Mohmand and Orakzai. Their warlike, fiercely independent tribes joined Pakistan in 1947 under constitutional guarantee of total autonomy that excluded government soldiers from the tribal agencies.

Intense US pressure forced Musharraf to violate Pakistan’s Constitution by sending troops into the tribal territories. The army shamefully launched heavy attacks, killing over 3,000 civilians. Outrage across Pakistan forced Musharraf to back down and withdraw some troops. “Fight India, not your own people,” cried the press. It was one of the darkest days for Pakistan’s army.

Many Pakistanis oppose the US occupation of Afghanistan, support their old anti-communist ally, the Taliban, and think better of Osama bin Laden than George Bush. Many in the military and intelligence services, feel similarly and are bitter at Musharraf for abandoning the Taliban and resistance groups fighting to oust Indian rule in divided Kashmir.

Musharraf is thus caught between Washington’s growing demands and his own people who increasingly accuse him of being an American tool. Washington simply does not understand it has pushed the isolated, unpopular Musharraf too far already. If he is blown up or overthrown, Pakistan and its 40-60 nuclear weapons, could turn into an even bigger and more dangerous hotbed of anti-western activity. The next army corps commander who takes over may not be as amenable to Washington’s demands as Pervez Musharraf.

Meanwhile, Washington is increasingly blaming its Afghanistan fiasco on whipping boy Pakistan, just as the Vietnam defeat was blamed on infiltration from Cambodia and Laos. Recently, a remarkably ill-informed Canadian defence minister foolishly proposed sending Canadian troops into Pakistan’s tribal agencies to “fight terrorists”.

Picking a fight with old, loyal ally Pakistan is both morally wrong and fraught with untold dangers. The US has forgotten how it forced another compliant military ruler, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, into policies his people hated. He was assassinated, to national joy.

Negotiating a deal with Taliban and other Afghan resistance forces is the only way out of the current morass, not undermining Pakistan or expanding a war that is already lost. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

Concerns over presidential succession

SINCE Sept 11, 2001, the speaker of the House has been required for security purposes to take government planes for official business. The White House rightly called “silly” recent criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desire to have a plane that could fly to her San Francisco district non-stop, which would be larger than the plane her predecessor used. But this flap raises a more serious issue - that of presidential succession.

Pelosi takes a military plane because the speaker of the House is second in line to succeed the president, behind only the vice-president. That’s what drove the Department of Homeland Security to demand the extra level of security for then-Speaker Dennis Hastert. But should the speaker of the House even be in the line of succession?

Who succeeds a president (after the vice-president) is set by law, not fixed in the Constitution. The process has been addressed seriously three times. In 1792, Congress put the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House, in that order, in the line, behind the vice-president. It added no others. After the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, there was a lengthy period with no vice-president and no congressional leaders - and therefore no one in line to succeed President Chester Arthur. An 1886 act took out the lawmakers and put in cabinet officers, starting with the secretary of state.

In 1946, President Harry Truman, who had recently taken a dangerous trip to Potsdam with his secretary of state and was aware that with no vice-president the line of succession was thin, pushed hard for a new order. The act was revised in 1947 to put the two top lawmakers back in and included after them members of the cabinet in order of the creation of their offices. We still have that process today.

When the Second Congress enacted the first presidential succession act, it was highly controversial. Congress was dominated by Federalists; they did not want Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, a leader of the rival Democratic-Republican Party, to be next behind the vice-president. They turned to their own congressional leaders, a solution that was immediately challenged by James Madison, among others, as unconstitutional.

The Constitution says Congress can create a line of succession from among “officers” of the United States, clearly meaning executive branch officials. But it also says that no one except the vice president shall serve simultaneously in the executive and legislative branches. The congressional majority brushed aside that argument. But it is a position accepted by most constitutional scholars.

Truman knew the constitutional arguments, but he believed strongly that more legitimacy came to a president who was not elected if that person had been previously elected to another office; thus, the top congressional leaders, national figures both, were restored to primacy. The constitutional issues, and any serious questions about the overall process, were pushed to the back burner and have remained there since.

But having congressional leaders in the presidential line of succession is wrong for more than constitutional reasons.

First, congressional leaders frequently are of the opposite party and viewpoint of a president; if a president and vice-president were to die at the beginning of a term, the country would have four years of a president representing the opposite of what it voted for - a situation made even worse if the change in direction came as a result of a terrorist action. Southern pro-slavery insurgents actually plotted to kill everyone in the line of succession to Abraham Lincoln.

Second, congressional leaders have a built-in conflict of interest. When Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House and tried in the Senate, he escaped removal from office by one vote - and among those who voted against him was the Senate president pro tempore, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, who would have succeeded Johnson had he been ousted.

The president pro tempore of the Senate, traditionally the most senior member of the majority party, poses another problem: He is usually the Senate’s oldest member. For several years, Strom Thurmond, in his 90s and clearly not up to the job of president, was nonetheless third in line for the post.

A suitcase nuclear bomb downtown or an attack at a presidential inauguration could wipe out everyone in that line and leave a vacuum in leadership at the worst possible time. A better option would be to include top cabinet members, such as the secretaries of state, treasury and defence, and then allow a president to designate several others.

It won’t be easy for Speaker Pelosi and President Pro Tem Robert C. Byrd to agree to take themselves out of the succession queue. Doing so would be a great act of statesmanship. It would even be worth keeping the military plane.

—Dawn/The Washington Post Service

The impact of Blair’s exit

RELINQUISHING power is agony for a leader who has grown used to office. It gets harder the closer the moment of loss comes. “From now till the ‘day’,” Winston Churchill’s daughter Mary wrote in March 1955 of her father’s impending resignation, “it will be hard going. He minds so much. It’s the first death.”

A shockingly accurate insight. And mythically convincing, too. Even the resolute Odin hesitates on the threshold of powerlessness because he knows he will die when he steps across. Naturally Shakespeare says it magnificently too. Death holds court within the monarch’s hollow crown, Richard II reflects. At the last, he punctures regal pomp with a little pin - and farewell king.

It is hardly surprising that few prime ministers have walked cheerfully out of the door of No 10 for the last time. Most have gone grudgingly, like Churchill, defeated, ill, or, in Campbell-Bannerman’s case, dead. In the past century, only Harold Wilson and Stanley Baldwin could claim to have been masters of their own exits, and only Baldwin stopped to tell the man on the Downing Street door: “I am now a gentleman of leisure.”

Tony Blair is therefore on the verge of doing something unusual and very difficult. Down the years, he has often said he feels no inner need to cling to office. Yet as the actual day of departure nears and the reality of what he is about to lose becomes more real, he gives little sign of being mentally or emotionally prepared for the trauma that awaits him. He hasn’t got it yet.

To those around him this is how it should be. Let the shock hit him afterwards; until he leaves he must go on governing at full tilt, they say. Outwardly, and perhaps to himself, Blair gives the impression of doing this. But as the days tick by, the outward show is merely that. The Downing Street policy review persuades few - and certainly not the group surrounding the website 2020Vision. The talk of major new initiatives rings ever more cracked. Blair’s insistence on being at this or that summit in the summer feels increasingly an act of vanity.

It is strange, drifting time, in some ways more like the final days of a long-reigning mediaeval monarch than the playing out of a democratic political process. Nothing can happen until he goes. But no one is pushing him to leave. The Brownite passions of 2004 and 2006 have abated. The government is segueing into post-Blair mode. You were the future, once, David Cameron taunted him a year ago. Now he is very nearly not the present either.

We are nevertheless on the verge of a most delicate and potent piece of political choreography. Labour’s medium-term future as a governing party rests largely on whether it works. The arrangements are now being put in place for Britain’s first-ever party plebiscite to select a prime minister. Two weeks from now, on March 20, Labour’s national executive will be asked to approve a set of rules for the contests to succeed Blair and John Prescott. The details of those rules are being secretly drawn up in consultation with Labour officials and Brown’s advisers. Not everything is finalised but their likely shape can now be discerned.

Shortly after the May 3 elections, Blair and Prescott will officially announce that they are stepping down. This will trigger a two-stage transition. In stage one, which most officials think will last for around two weeks, candidates will try to collect the nominating signatures of 44 Labour MPs. In stage two, which will last for around six weeks, the three equal parts of Labour’s electoral college - MPs, ordinary members and union levy payers - will conduct ballots whose results will be announced at a short special party conference.

The timing is in Blair’s hands. He is desperate to attend the G8 summit in Germany from June 6-8, which will discuss climate change, and the EU summit in Brussels on June 21, at which France’s new president may signal a new initiative on the EU constitution. Brown appears disposed not to interfere with these plans. Presumably Blair will want to report to MPs after Brussels. If Labour chooses to hold its special conference in London at a weekend, then my best guess - and it really is no more than that - is that Blair will cease to be prime minister on or around Saturday June 30.

Many unknowns remain. It is still possible, for instance, that before May 3 Blair may pre-announce his intention; opinions in No 10 are divided on this. The date of the official announcement may vary too. Brown thinks No 10 will leak to the Murdoch press on May 3, attempting to wipe the expected bad election results off the Friday front pages and news bulletins. No 10 talks of a midweek announcement when MPs return to Westminster after the May Day bank holiday.

And what happens if only one person, presumably Brown, is nominated? Hours of agonising have been devoted to this question. Officially, that candidate can only be declared elected at a special conference, so on cost grounds this moment is likely to be deferred until the conference at which the new deputy is elected. Earlier talk in No 10 of a confirmatory ballot for a one-nomination leadership contest is receding. But Brown could find himself prime minister-elect, and ready to form a government, from as early as mid-May.

That would be a novel constitutional situation. The bigger innovation, though, whose implications have barely been thought through, is that a prime minister is being chosen by an electoral college in which trade union members hold a third of the votes. This will matter little if Brown is unopposed. Yet imagine a scenario in which Candidate A wins a majority among MPs, while Candidate B wins a majority among union levy payers and party members and thus becomes prime minister.

Either way, the political impact on the wider electorate of Labour’s controversial voting system has yet to be tested. However, with the public sector unions in revolt over the chancellor’s pay restraint policy, the timing of the contest could be awkward for Brown. A divisive election of this kind would be a great political gift to David Cameron. It is another hint that the strange political transition on which we are embarked may be less a shift from Blair to Brown and more a swing from Labour to the Conservatives.

— Dawn/The Guardian News Service