DAWN - Opinion; July 11, 2007

Published July 11, 2007

Kabul: what we need to do

By Najmuddin A. Shaikh


IN my last article I had pointed out that Pakistan’s interests in present-day Afghanistan are negative rather than positive and that Islamabad’s policies have to be directed towards eliminating or minimising adverse consequences for Pakistan resulting from developments in Afghanistan. While I will outline the steps that need to be taken, we must ask ourselves a fundamental question: do we have the capacity and capability to take the needed measures?

At the time of writing, the Lal Masjid siege was continuing. The only admirable aspect of the government’s Operation Silence has been the restraint shown and the maintenance of the stance that a peaceful resolution can only come about if Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his cohorts surrender and agree to be subjected to a judicial process.

In all other aspects, the operation suggests that the administrative machinery has broken down in the civil and military sector and that our ability to handle a crisis is poor. Consider:

— Even though the government had more than six months to prepare contingency plans no plan was put together that would enable cutting off utilities including gas, electricity and water to the Lal Masjid compound without affecting the rest of the sector. No plan appeared to exist to evacuate the buildings and houses that were in the immediate vicinity of the mosque. It was as a direct consequence of this that the Lal Masjid militants, when they emerged on the roads, seemed to have the support of local inhabitants.

— No plan had been prepared to prevent the vandalising of nearby buildings, the obvious target of any breakout by Lal Masjid militants.

— Six months after the present crisis erupted, our much vaunted intelligence agencies that are held responsible for every terrorist incident in India and Afghanistan had no idea about the number of people inside the mosque or the type of weapons they possessed.

The opportunities for recruiting informers were legion. The vigilantes of the mosque had been readily available during their raids on video shops and so-called brothels and there were no restrictions on their movement even up to the end of June. Even today we have to rely on aerial surveillance to determine what is going on in Lal Masjid and have no human intelligence on the spot. Nobody seems to know if there are foreign militants in the building.

— A raid on Jamia Fareedia was carried out only three days after Operation Silence was launched. The seminary’s students had provided the muscle for the raids on video shops and had more than once rushed to the defence of Lal Masjid during the last six months. This institution should have been targeted immediately along with the 18 madressahs in Islamabad that the president identified as dens of militancy during a media workshop.

The Jamia Fareedia was said to have 2,000 students. Statements by the raiding party, which met no resistance in establishing control, suggested that there were between 55 and 60 students in the madressah when it was taken over. Even allowing that some students had gone home during the vacation it is difficult to believe that the militants had left at a time when the Lal Masjid clerics wanted students to stay around to provide reinforcements.

The delay was inexcusable. It is to be hoped that the records of the seminary were found intact and are being used to trace the students, particularly those who participated in the raids on the video shops, for interrogation.

As the siege of Lal Masjid continues, the government must ensure that the concerns of parents of the children trapped inside the mosque are addressed. They must be kept as comfortable as possible and provided with at least a minimum of their creature needs. They must ensure that any military action they take to increase the pressure on the militants in the mosque causes minimum collateral damage.

The government must recognise that the tide of public opinion is turning against it. As the stand-off continues, the Ghazi propaganda machine will continue to paint a gruesome picture of the situation within the mosque. The man is deranged but possesses the gift of gab and can arouse fears about the fanaticism of his cohorts for whom he is demanding safe passage without saying where they would go.

The press is increasingly becoming a mouthpiece for whatever emanates from the mosque. The media wants to be responsible and, for the most part, recognises the danger that an unhappy denouement would pose to Pakistan’s polity. The problem is that if its efforts to seek out and report developments is frustrated it will vent its ire to the detriment of the government and undermine the public support that the government desperately needs as it endeavours to resolve the problem with minimum loss of life.

There is no point in telling the media that in undertaking advocacy reporting they are exceeding their journalistic functions. There is no point in telling them not to subscribe to conspiracy theories or not to publicise the ranting of Ghazi. Such pleas will not be heeded but reporting patterns will change if they are briefed more frequently on what is happening.

A fully briefed government spokesman must remain available to contradict what is put out from within the mosque and must be able to do so with the aid of visuals and documents. Helicopter gunship and UAV reconnaissance flights must be yielding a wealth of information about the current situation inside the mosque.

Some of this should be shared. The electronic media should be persuaded to set up a pool system whereby one cameraman and one reporter are allowed to stay and report from the vicinity of the mosque and share this with all channels.

There is a battle here for establishing the writ of the government. But an equally important battle is maintaining the level of public support and ensuring that only those in the mosque are subject to the siege which should not be allowed to continue to paralyse the whole of the G-6 sector. Security precautions must be taken but they must not be overdone.

This has been a rather long digression from the main subject of this column but my purpose was to highlight the problems that we will face in implementing the policy recommendations on Afghanistan unless our administrative machinery and our planning register improvement.

We need to be more resolute. Policies, once they have been carefully considered (with all contingencies having been catered for) and decided upon must not be abandoned because there is opposition or because there are unpalatable consequences. Just as we cannot afford to be a “soft state” in the Lal Masjid crisis so too we must be firm in our Afghan policy.

Careful regulation of cross-border movement is the first step that we need to take. If a resident of a refugee camp goes across, his re-admission should not be automatic. Refugees once they enter Afghanistan should be deemed to have returned to their country and should not be allowed to come back unless they have regular travel documents and have obtained a visa from one of our consulates.

The acknowledged refugees in Pakistan represent only one part of the Afghan population. Thanks to the laxity of the registration authorities many others have acquired Pakistani ID cards. They must be identified and moved into refugee camps.

The refugees in the camps must be persuaded to return to Afghanistan. We can refrain from coercion as a gesture of goodwill to the hard pressed Afghan government which has shown an inability to cope with the 100,000 refugees expelled from Iran in the last two months. But they must be moved, as has already been planned, away from the vicinity of the border.

Demonstrations by refugees must not be allowed to stand in the way of such transfers which have been agreed upon by the Pakistan and Afghan governments and endorsed by the UN refugee agency.

After what one has seen at the Lal Masjid one is inclined to believe that the authorities really do not know the number or whereabouts of the Afghans who are using Pakistan territory to plan and equip the Taliban for activities in Afghanistan. Clearly, a much greater effort needs to be made by our intelligence agencies to identify the Afghan Taliban living in Quetta, Pishin, Peshawar, Miramshah and other cities in the NWFP and Balochistan.

The Lal Masjid crisis has shown how dangerous their presence can be and how much they can do to destabilise our own polity. They must be deported if they continue to engage in such activities.

In cooperation with the provincial Special Branch and other agencies our premier intelligence agency must also pinpoint Afghan-owned properties in Pakistan and the Pakistani “benaamis” in whose names these properties are held.

We need to substantiate current rumours that every member of the Karzai cabinet and most members of the Northern Alliance own properties in Pakistan, many in the heart of Islamabad and many in Peshawar’s Hayatabad. Many of the properties in the quarter of Quetta city that is inhabited by the Afghan Mujahideen are also said to be owned by them. This information can be a vital tool.

A truer census needs to be carried out of madressah students throughout the country, particularly in Karachi and Islamabad. This may reveal that a large percentage of students who are supposed to hail from the tribal areas are, in fact, Afghans from across the border.

Today we hear rumours that the Jaish-i-Mohammad militants are part of the group in the Lal Masjid that is holding students hostage. The antecedents of Masud Azhar are well known. He grew in stature because the threat he posed was ignored. Today, we have meetings in Quetta where packed audiences, including prominent politicians, listen in silence to audio recordings of the fiery speeches of Mullah Dadullah’s brother and his anointed successor as commander of the Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan. If this is not stopped this Taliban commander will make speeches in person. This has to be stopped even if local politicians do not cooperate.

The borders have to be sealed against smuggling that is bringing narcotics and other contraband goods into Pakistan. Venality and corruption at border posts will have to be checked by handing out exemplary punishments. Corruption elsewhere is eating away at the vitals of our economy but at this border it carries the danger of doing much more. The Chinese in tackling corruption — and they admit that it is rampant in their country — have prescribed and enforced the death penalty on those who loot the state. Perhaps we can do so for those who allow the violation of our borders.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

APC and a sense of déjà vu

By Zubeida Mustafa


PAKISTAN’S political leaders, it appears, can show a semblance of unity only in the face of adversity. Nothing else concentrates their minds better than the fear of a military leader or a political opponent entrenching himself indefinitely in office. They are then prepared to sink their differences — but only to an extent — and join hands to overthrow him.

It was this common purpose that brought the leaders of 37 opposition parties to London to attend the conference convened by the exiled Pakistan Muslim League (N) leader, Nawaz Sharif, over the weekend.

This is not the first time that opposition parties in Pakistan — so disparate ideologically and usually at each other’s throats — have joined hands in a bid to unseat an army general or a strong and popular political leader. This phenomenon is indicative of the fragmentation of Pakistan’s politics where parties split at the drop of a hat and where one party has multiple namesakes with an initial added to identify them.

The elaborate meeting conducted in London with great decorum brought with it a sense of déjà vu. Such political alignments to forge united fronts against a strong leader have been a familiar feature of Pakistan’s politics. Remember 1968, 1977, 1983, 1988 and now today when a diverse array of squabbling parties seemingly set aside their differences to come together to challenge a strong leader.

Unfortunately, they never succeeded in the past and in the case of a uniformed leader when the day of deliverance did come the factors proved to be something other than the alliance that had been formed.

In 1969, the unseating of Ayub Khan was on account of a palace coup while his successor, another army general, Yahya Khan, was forced by his colleagues in the armed forces to step down in 1971 on account of the ignominy of defeat suffered in East Pakistan at the hands of India. Ziaul Haq departed in a mysterious air crash that was not the job of any grand alliance. Civilian leaders have been toppled invariably by military intervention and not through an honest political process.

Given the past performance of our political parties, not surprisingly few hopes were pinned on the London gathering. It was widely expected that there would be a lot of loud talk of sound political principles and high moral grounds but no tangible plan of action would materialise.

This has proved to be true. All the right things have been said, though not always by consensus. Some parties expressed reservations on issues that were then cloaked in ambiguity to give the appearance of a consensus having been arrived at.

The APC declaration includes the mention of “carrying on the struggle within and outside the parliament for the restoration of the 1973 Constitution as on October 12, 1999.” But some changes introduced by General Musharraf, such as lowering the voting age, enhancing the numbers of assembly seats and reserved seats and reverting to joint electorate, are to be retained, the reservations expressed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the JUI chief, notwithstanding.

There is also the demand for the “immediate resignation of General Musharraf to pave the way for the holding of fair and free elections.” The commitment has been expressed to struggle for the formation of a caretaker government, repeal of discriminatory election laws, appointment of a neutral election commissioner and the dissolution of the local bodies. But the parties did not spell out the strategy they planned to adopt for the achievement of their goals.This is understandable. At this stage, no party can afford to show that the APC had failed and not enough homework had been done to bridge the differences in the thinking of various parties to find a minimum ground of agreement. Hence they were careful not to touch issues which could have caused the façade of unity to crack. Nothing would have boosted the military regime’s standing more.

At the moment, the dissenting note has come from the Pakistan People’s Party, whose leader Benazir Bhutto did not attend the conference although she was present in the British capital. Makhdoom Amin Fahim led the PPP’s delegation but was in touch with Ms Bhutto when sensitive decisions had to be taken.

This definitely conveyed a message to the others that the party with the largest vote bank would prefer to discreetly distance itself from all the items on the agenda of the APC.

The failure of the conference to adopt a clear cut strategy was largely on account of the PPP having its own political agenda. Rumours have been doing the rounds for the past several months of a PPP-Musharraf deal being on the cards. Benazir Bhutto has been fudging words in an unconvincing attempt to deny the rumours.

Hence would one be surprised that there was no consensus on issues such as resigning from the legislatures if President Musharraf tried to seek election from the incumbent assemblies? The decision on the line to be adopted if this eventuality actually occurs was left to the future — “through a consensus collective action, including the option of resignations from the parliament and the provincial assemblies.”

When the APC is seen against this backdrop, one can understand why no roadmap indicating deadlines and milestones was worked out. Neither could the participants draw up a plan of action spelling out measures to be adopted by them. In other words, the London moot has proved to be a grand declaration of noble intentions and no more.

Nothing can be said at this stage what course politics will take in Pakistan in the coming months. With so many dramatic events taking place at the same time in Islamabad — notably the judicial crisis and the Lal Masjid episode — the APC and its decisions seem to be the least significant in determining the shape of things to come.

The people & their strength

By Hafizur Rahman


SOMETIMES, they say, wisdom also flows from the mouths of babes and fools. Similarly your enemy may say something that is good for you. Salman Rushdie has been universally branded as an enemy of Islam for his blasphemous writings. But I liked the words he has used for the masses of the subcontinent in his novel “Midnight’s Children.”

He says, “These poor people. A power of some sort, a force that does not know its own strength which has perhaps decayed into impotence through never having been used.”

You can’t really blame the people for that. Take the case of Pakistan. The people have an abiding faith in Islam and a soft corner for anything religious. So what happens when a military dictator, claiming to be their saviour, offers them the Quran with one hand and points a gun at them with the other?

What can they do? It is futile to expect them to stand up to the dictator and tell him that he is nobody to force them to make a choice.

The choice was made by them on the 14th of August 1947, and it was made for ever. Only power hungry politicians and autocrats made blind by ambition would refuse to accept that the will of the people expressed on that date must prevail as long as Pakistan is there.

Ever since the last martial law faded out unwillingly in 1985, some so-called responsible politicians have been asking for it now and then. For them it is the solution for all the nation’s problems and its ills. They are like the ignorant patient from the village who insists that only the sui, an injection, can cure him.

Martial law means the dictatorship of the top military boss. It is not collective military rule. The chief of the army staff becomes the supreme ruler, of both the defence forces and the people. The monarch of all he surveys. He may be kind and wise. He may like to do good and accept every useful suggestion. The only thing he does not relish is being told to go back to his real job.

I often wonder why dictators have to cheat and tell lies. Why don’t they plainly say, “This is the top job in the country? I like it here. And by God I’ll move heaven and earth to remain here. After all, somebody has to be your ruler. It might as well be me. And if you are crazy about democracy let us have a referendum. I know how to deal with that too.”

If personal piety be the measure of statesmanship, if helping the widow and the orphan from state funds (and never from one’s own pocket) be the test for political leadership, if seeing visitors to their cars be the claim to overlordship of the country, I want to offer myself for the post of President/PMLA under martial law.

I promise to say the tahajjud prayer every night and visit the holy land every month at government expense. I will turn indigent widows into women rolling in gold and appoint orphans as ministers. I will see visitors to the outside gate of my house – even to the next crossing on the road. The smile shall never leave my face. Only don’t expect me to keep the country together or to respect the people’s political aspirations.

The people of Pakistan have never had a fair deal from their rulers. Right from the day of independence to October 1958 general elections were not held. Then General Ayub decided that he could rule the country better than the politicians. He promoted himself as Field Marshal but demoted the country to basic democracies. That was the time when the power of the people began to decay into impotence through not being used.

When the people did rise against the one-man rule and in favour of democracy, Ayub Khan conveniently handed over the baton of power to General Yahya and went into retirement. The first proper general elections were held by Yahya Khan. How? Why? Nobody knows. Except that he extracted a promise from the politicians that he should remain in the presidential saddle – the saddle strapped to the people’s backs.

The holocaust of 1971 shattered his dream as well as the country. Though the people’s dream of democracy did come true for some years.

These few years, from December 1971 to July 1977, were in a way, the most vital period in the history of people’s democracy in the new Pakistan. For the first time they realised that they were not impotent. That period was a landmark for them in the best meaning of the word. They learned to stand up for their rights before the rich and the feudal.

And when the deluge came in July 1977, the people began to be told that democracy was a farce and that Islam had no place for it. For the first time in 1400 years Islam was made out to be an enemy of the people’s free will. There was no strength left in the impotence to counter this invidious propaganda.

This thesis found many supporters, even among journalists and politicians who had remained in the forefront of the fight for democracy. They now wanted the last ounce of the strength of the people to decay into incurable impotence. Their wish would have been granted if the Almighty had not intervened on August 1, 1988, and frustrated their plans through an air crash. Who says that God had abandoned Pakistan!

Since then the people have been trying a number of variations on the theme of democracy. Turn by turn they have given a chance to two leaders to see if either of them can live up to their expectations.

The two did some good in some fields and proved a sad disappointment in others. But whether good or bad, the two were elected by the people and that is what is most important. The power of the people, of the masses, has to be saved. But is it strong enough to rid the country of the present pseudo-democratic military rule?

We must use our strength to fight the pseudo-democrats who are basically a remnant of one or the other martial law. An atmosphere must be created in which nothing but unalloyed democracy is tolerated. The inherent strength of the people must never again be allowed to decay into impotence.

Justice and Gitmo

ACCORDING to Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley, "The Supreme Court follows th' ilection returns." The court may also follow the proceedings of Congress, which has yet to enact legislation restoring habeas corpus rights to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. There, Congress' indolence appears to have roused the court to action, a welcome development in a complex struggle among the branches of our federal government to safeguard the rights we trumpet to the world.

The fates of the detainees hang on that debate, but the outcome also will determine whether America's most basic freedoms withstand the combined pressures of the war on terror and the neglect of the president responsible for protecting them.

The Bush administration long ago established its place in this struggle: It took the view that foreign terrorism suspects are not entitled to basic American rights, and it tacked sharply away from history in order to abridge civil liberties. As a result, debate on these issues has moved to Congress and the high court, as each attempts to right the administration's wrongs.

On the day after the last official day of its term, the high court reversed itself and agreed to consider whether the Constitution affords the Guantanamo detainees habeas protection. In action that required the votes of five justices, it fast-tracked an appeal of a decision by a federal appeals court that alleged enemy combatants did not have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. In April, the justices had refused to do so.

The justices' initial reluctance to intervene in the habeas dispute was characteristic of the caution with which they have approached legal issues raised by the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 policies. For example, in ruling in 2004 that inmates at Guantanamo were entitled to habeas protection, the court grounded that right in a federal statute. But Justice John Paul Stevens also noted that habeas corpus is a "writ antecedent to statute … throwing its root deep into the genius of our common law."

Unfortunately, in enacting legislation supposedly designed to bring the detention system into conformity with the court's ruling, Congress stripped the inmates of habeas protection. Instead, it provided it only for circumscribed judicial review of decisions classifying detainees and military combatants and of war-crimes convictions by newly established military commissions.

That would have changed with enactment of the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter, the panel's ranking member.

But while habeas legislation has cleared the Judiciary Committee, there is no sign that Congress as a whole will approve it. Even if it did, President Bush could veto the measure.

Restoring habeas is the beginning, not the end, of necessary reforms in the Military Commissions Act approved by Congress last year. Important as it is, habeas only gets a prisoner into the courtroom. It doesn't provide judges with detailed guidance about whether a particular prisoner has received due process.

The problem is that Congress, in collusion with the Bush administration, has provided only a bare-bones process for determining whether an inmate is indeed an unlawful enemy combatant.

––Los Angeles Times



© DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2007

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