Border quagmire

INSTEAD of getting better, Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan seem to have deteriorated, for political antagonism looks like giving way to military clashes. The good offices of the Turkish government had aroused hopes that the Ankara summit would put an end to the blame game between the two countries. Instead, there is a sharp deterioration as can be seen in two days of clashes between Pakistan and Afghan security forces in the Paktia region, leaving 12 dead, including some civilians. On Monday gunmen fired at a convoy carrying officials after a tripartite US-Pakistan-Afghan “flag meeting” at Teri Mengal in the Kurram Agency. The firing killed a Pakistani and an American soldier and pointed to the Taliban’s ability to attack at a time and place of their choosing. Against this background, one would doubt if the Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) Ms Condoleezza Rice spoke of have a chance of ever becoming a reality. Speaking at a businessmen’s gathering in Washington, the US Secretary of State said these ROZs would consist of pockets along the Pakistan-Afghan border where goods would be manufactured to be sent to the US duty-free. These ROZs, she said, would be a major component of America’s counter-insurgency strategy in the area. However, it is doubtful if the condition along the border will make things that easy.

The war against the Taliban is more than five years old, but there is no sign yet that they are being beaten. While Pakistan is doing a lot to fight the Taliban and the foreign militants on its territory and has deployed 90,000 troops along the Durand Line, the situation across the border does not seem to hold out much hope. President Hamid Karzai has failed to deliver. He is aptly called the mayor of Kabul because his writ does not run beyond the capital city. Since he came to power, he has made no effort to put emphasis on a political approach to put an end to the slaughter going on in his country. Instead, he has left it to the US and Nato-led International Security Assistance Force to tackle the Taliban militarily. The end-result has been colossal suffering for the Afghan people, for in spite of the care which the foreign forces claim they exercise while choosing targets, the US and ISAF air strikes and ground operations continue to take a huge of toll of Afghan civilians, besides inflicting colossal material damage.

Often Mr Karzai has shed tears over his people’s plight, blaming the foreign forces for the death of Afghan civilians. But it is he himself that Mr Karzai has to blame. The other day, the Afghan senate — half of whose members are nominated by Mr Karzai — called for a dialogue with the insurgents to put an end to the fighting. It is unlikely that Mr Karzai will rise to the occasion and take meaningful steps to engage the insurgents in order to seek a negotiated end to the strife. Instead, his convenient cover for inaction is to blame Pakistan for all his trouble. He has done nothing to end poppy cultivation, thus turning Afghanistan once again into the world’s major heroin and opium supplier. Ms Rice, who has plans like ROZs, and other western officials who accuse Pakistan of not doing enough should pay attention to this aspect of the situation and make Mr Karzai realise his duty to the Afghan people by controlling corruption and establishing a broad-based government that will truly represent Afghanistan’s multi-lingual, multicultural community.

Failure to tackle crime

CRIME, both violent and petty, is on the increase across the country. It is a sad reflection on the state of urban society that almost everyone has either been held at gunpoint or knows someone who was. As yet another wedding function drags on interminably, people swap stories about banditry at their homes or those at their neighbours’ and armed hold-ups at ATMs. The shock value is gone. Such threats to life and property and gross violations of personal dignity have come to be accepted as part of urban life all over the country. The easy availability of weapons is of course a major cause of violent crime, as is the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. But social factors and the limited resources available to the police notwithstanding, poor law enforcement cannot be absolved of its due share of the blame.

A monitoring report compiled by the National Reconstruction Bureau makes for disturbing reading. Under the Police Order 2002, 110 Criminal Justice Coordination Committees (CJCCs) were established at the district level throughout the country. Their mandate was clear-cut: highlighting problem areas in the criminal justice system at the district level, finding solutions to the problems and monitoring their implementation. Of these 110 committees, 74 were found by the NRB to be either inactive or working in violation of the prescribed rules. The situation has worsened steadily over the years. In 2004, the number of districts complying with official procedure stood at 63.4 per cent — by 2006 it had dropped to an abysmal 32.7 per cent. The police are only part of the problem given that the seven-member committees also include representatives of the local judiciary as well as public prosecutors. In 2006, only 2.9 per cent of the country’s 110 districts held meetings in which all committee members condescended to participate. This is a tragic state of affairs. There is no cure-all for crime that can be distributed at the federal or the provincial level. To be tackled effectively, it has to be situated in the local context, and for that to happen the CJCCs must play their prescribed role.

Doctors needed in Fata

THE price of lawlessness in Fata has taken a toll on people’s health. The backward area is already devoid of any signs of infrastructure but whatever healthcare system there was, no longer exists today. Doctors are reluctant to work there because of security concerns, many having shifted elsewhere, especially after the threats they received. One senior doctor was seriously injured in an attack in South Waziristan recently. In February a doctor and three health officials died in a bomb explosion in Bajaur as they were on their way to providing polio vaccination. This is a reminder of the dangers doctors face in this troubled region. A shortage of doctors and medical staff means that people living in Fata have to travel long distances to get treatment. According to a report in this newspaper on Tuesday, a family in Miramshah, which lives close to a hospital, had to travel to Peshawar to seek medical attention. This is appalling. What is worse is that the Fata health director-general is asking hospitals in Peshawar to increase their capacity of patient admissions so that they can accommodate people from Fata. This cannot be a proper solution to the problem. Not everyone can travel that far for treatment, especially the seriously ill or injured.

The existing hospitals in the Fata region need to be equipped with staff and facilities to treat people living there. That can only happen when the law and order situation is normal. This should be the government’s foremost concern. While they struggle to bring a semblance of normality to Fata, they must provide security at all hospitals so that doctors feel safe to go to work there and patients can seek treatment. Doctors should also be given monetary incentives to work in Fata so that more are ready to work there and serve the needy.

Another one bites the dust

AS the war in Iraq totters on in no particular direction and, therefore, with no end in sight, it continues to exact a heavy toll. There are two dimensions to this. Four years after “mission accomplished,” dozens of deaths remain the daily norm in Iraq. On a somewhat different plane is the political fate of the politicians who led the charge.

Almost all of them have taken hits. The first victim was Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar, who joined the military misadventure in the face of overwhelming popular opposition, and then, after Muslim terrorists wreaked havoc in Madrid in the run-up to a general election, made the cardinal mistake of attempting to blame the mayhem on Basque separatists. He was out on his posterior within days.

Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi was the next to go: he had much to answer for besides his unstinting moral support for the American aggression, but the “war on terror” angle certainly fed into his unpopularity.

Meanwhile, the prime “decider” behind the Iraq catastrophe, George W. Bush, has seen his level of popular approval plummet from the high 90s to the low 30s. He is, unfortunately, going to be around for another 20 months, given that the congressional Democrats have neither the numbers nor the inclination to impeach him.

But his war wagon has lost crucial wheels, including Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and, not least, Paul Wolfowitz whose failures at the Pentagon were rewarded with the coveted post of World Bank president, a prize that he is evidently about to forfeit.

Australia’s John Howard has incurred remarkably little political damage as a consequence of blindly following the US into Iraq, partly because Australia’s deployment is minuscule, thus far more or less casualty-free. However, there is a reasonable chance that he won’t be re-elected when Australia goes to the polls towards the end of the year.

And then there’s Tony Blair. The British prime minister last week fixed a date for his departure from Downing Street. That auspicious day, June 27, is still six weeks away, and among the multitudes who feel that Blair ought to have quit much earlier, the majority attribute their attitude to his obsequious role as Bush’s cheerleader-in-chief.

However, the primary cause of his undoing — as Professor Avi Shlaim put it in The Guardian this week, “He has the worst record on the Middle East of any British prime minister in the past century” — isn’t the only reason why the end of Blair’s tenure is an unequivocally welcome prospect.

Apart from his impressive quantum of conservative and neoconservative fans, a number of liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have lately lamented the fact that the Iraq “mistake” will overshadow other aspects of Blair’s legacy, and quite a few have sought to reinforce the impression that it was a case of the wrong decision being taken for entirely honourable reasons, notably a predisposition towards “humanitarian” interventions that had already been demonstrated in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

Of course, none of them bothered to point out that the worst Serbian atrocities against Kosovars came after Nato’s bombs began to fall.

In announcing his resignation last week, Blair told his constituents: “I decided we should stand shoulder to shoulder with our oldest ally. I did so out of belief ... I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That’s your call. But believe one thing if nothing else — I did what I thought was right for our country.” He went on, excruciatingly, to describe Britain as “the greatest nation on earth”.

As a considerably greater Englishman pointed out more than two centuries ago, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Blair obviously offered no apology for the plethora of half-truths and lies that he and his colleagues conjured up to make the case for war.

But his mendacity appears not to have unduly alarmed his more determined liberal admirers. In The Observer this week, Will Hutton glibly glosses over “the Iraq mistake” to designate Blair “a good man” and “a great politician” who “left his country in better shape than when he found it and established a new political system”.

The latter is a reference to “liberal Labour”, but in fact Hutton is hailing a system in which it is increasingly difficult to make a distinction between Labour ideals and Tory fantasies.

He’s obviously at odds with Simon Jenkins, who pertinently pointed out in The Guardian last month: “Blairism does not exist and never has. It is all froth and miasma.

It consists of throwing a packet of words such as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the air and watching them twinkle to the ground ... That is not to say that Britain under Blair and Gordon Brown has lacked a guiding light, but that light has been Thatcherism ... Blair’s term in Downing Street has been the continuance of an ideological narrative that began in 1979, not 1997.”

Meanwhile, E.J. Dionne Jr, writing in The Washington Post, confessed to “a deep sadness that (Blair) tarnished a formidable legacy.” His reference was to the Third Way, a euphemism for ditching social democracy that Blair shared with Bill Clinton. It hasn’t had much of an airing since 2001.

And The Guardian editorialised: “Some progressives may celebrate his departure. But progressives who can win elections are rare. Labour, and Britain, can look back with some satisfaction on a decade when it was led by one of these. He was a winner. That is not unimportant.”

Perhaps it wouldn’t be unimportant were it indeed possible to construe Blair as a progressive. In fact, his advent as Labour leader accentuated a rightwards drift that dated back to the electoral debacle of 1983. Crucial elements in the party hierarchy pinned their hopes on it as the only realistic route to power.

However, just a few months after John Major led the Conservatives to an unexpected victory by a tiny margin in 1992, opinion polls suggested that Labour, regardless of who led it, would be heavily favoured in a rematch.

By then, Neil Kinnock had made way for John Smith as party leader. Smith died two years later, and in the battle for succession that followed, Blair outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown.

The fresh-faced and remarkably young new leader of the Labour Party was semi-mockingly referred to as Bambi, before earning the sobriquet Tony Blur, which alluded to his malleability. Once his true intentions became clearer, a new nickname was coined: Tory Blair.

Crucially, he went into the 1997 elections armed with endorsements from Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Labour won by a landslide. The Conservative rout after 18 successive years in power offered a thrilling spectacle. Unfortunately, the alternative — and this shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise — offered more continuity than change.

Sections of the liberal commentariat have tended to take a kindly view of the Blair government’s initiatives in health and education, but parallel moves towards private investment, aimed at reducing state responsibility, have tended to restrict advances in these spheres. The emphasis on faith schools holds out the prospect of a decreasingly cohesive society.

The privatisation of British Rail has promoted more chaos than efficiency. And early indications of a grubby tendency towards greed culminated nine years later in Blair becoming the first British prime minister to be interrogated by police as part of a criminal investigation: he was questioned twice in connection with the sordid affair whereby honours were allegedly conferred on rich individuals in return for their contributions to party coffers.

On the plus side, substantive moves towards peace in Ulster, launched in the Major years, have led eventually to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland; what’s more, Scotland and Wales now enjoy a measure of regional autonomy.

It’s also worth recalling the detention of the late Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, while the courts debated an extradition request from a Spanish judge: it is all but impossible to envisage that memorable episode unfolding under a Tory administration. Eventually, however, the decrepit mass murderer was allowed to get away.

Then came 9/11. And Iraq. The latter hasn’t overshadowed Blair’s achievements so much as it has eclipsed his other follies and failures. Ultimately, the vow to provide succour to Africans proved to be as vacuous as the declared project of bringing hope to Palestinians.

Professor Shlaim describes Blair’s public endorsement of the pact between Bush and Ariel Sharon that confirmed the permanence of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, as “the most egregious British betrayal of Palestinians since the Balfour declaration of 1917.”

The last straw for many Labour MPs and cabinet ministers came last year when the prime minister refused to call for a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, lest it be construed as a sign of disloyalty to the White House.

Blair now says he did what he thought was right. That suggests his ethical compass is seriously awry, which ought to have disqualified him from holding a senior political post in the first place.

There are many things to which he can plead guilty, including a disturbing fundamentalist streak in the confessional sense, but sheer stupidity isn’t one of them. His inability to be forthright clearly remains intact.

A therapeutic assignment could do wonders for his personality, apart from offering him a necessary reminder that wars have consequences. Gordon Brown would be well advised to appoint Blair as Her Majesty’s permanent representative in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The beneficiaries of his rectitude would no doubt welcome their liberator with open arms.

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