A jirga under alien shadow

KABUL has just hosted an unusual Pakistan-Afghanistan jirga with a show of traditional Afghan hospitality. Pakistan sent its prime minister who said all the right things there while the world speculated wildly on the reasons for and implications of the initial absence of General Pervez Musharraf.

After a telephone call or two from Washington and some undisclosed reappraisal in Islamabad, the general who commands the huge Pakistani force fighting the so-called war against terror along the common border, too, went and delivered a speech urging the two Muslim neigbours to overcome their mutual mistrust.

This was a relevant theme after well-orchestrated diatribes by prominent Afghans against Pakistan during the plenary session of the grand assembly and the committees appointed by it.

Pakistani participants have generally confirmed that their Afghan counterparts were well prepared and well-rehearsed while they had gone without participation in similar preparatory meetings. The representative character of the Pakistani contingent was compromised somewhat because of the decision by many “notables”, whose presence would have been beneficial, to stay away.

The Afghan side made sure that it comprised delegates from various nationalities and that it reflected the new ethnic and tribal balance established by the American invasion of 2001. This balance remains controversial as many Pakistani participants felt that some non-Pashtun leaders of Afghanistan were constantly manipulating the work of the jirga.

The Kabul jirga produced three notable trends in the analysis surrounding it. On the eve of the jirga, the mood in Kabul was reported to be pessimistic and the basic Afghan strategy was described as designed to “turn the heat on Pakistan to reinforce (the Afghan) position that home-grown terrorism did not have the strength and resources to prop up an uprising in a country with a sizable foreign military presence.”

Considering that a vastly larger and better equipped occupation army is being worsted by an indigenous insurgency in Iraq, this was a highly disingenuous approach.

Pakistani comment was clearly divided. Part of it focused on the growing coordination between the Karzai government and the United States to shift the emphasis from the military, political and economic failures inside Afghanistan to the interference in the ethnic and ideological tussle in that country from Pakistan’s “Texas-sized” tribal belt.

The latest National Intelligence Estimate made a dramatic change in the semantics of allegations against Pakistan by replacing the resurgence of the Taliban in safe Pakistani sanctuaries by connivance in the resurrection of Al-Qaeda in the mountain fastnesses of north western Pakistan. Hence a torrent of threats to invade Pakistani territory.

Some Pakistani analysts whose forte is to write endlessly about Afghanistan without ever factoring into their analysis the cardinal fact of an alien invasion and what looks like an open-ended military occupation feared that the jirga might end up as a “farce”.

Once President Musharraf had addressed the jirga and the declaration was known to contain a provision for the establishment of a bilateral 50-member mini jirga to launch an initiative for reconciliation with insurgents including the Taliban, Pakistan went through de rigueur optimism.

This is now giving way to a more carefully assessed perception that the jirga did not even obliquely address the question of an eventual disengagement of Nato, the American special forces and air force from Afghanistan and that the reconciliation process does not hint at any ceasefire or even a partial curtailment of military operations such as reprisal raids and attacks by the air force that cause considerable civilian deaths.

The main thrust of the proceedings of the jirga remains the greater enlistment of Pakistan in the counter-insurgency operations, an argument now enforced by President Musharraf’s frank admission that the Taliban are able to operate from both sides of the border.

This is understandable but one cannot fail to note that singularly inadequate attention has been paid to the factors that fuel insurgency: inadequacy of the Nato forces, reaction to the excesses of the US air force and the special forces, half-hearted reconstruction campaigns, growing popular support for the Taliban and an undying Afghan intolerance of the presence of foreign troops.

In fact, several questions remain unanswered: are the Americans and Nato allies willing to modulate their policy towards a militant Muslim outfit and let it come into the mainstream of Afghan politics as a legitimate political force? Will the Taliban put any credence in the negotiators unless the initiative is backed by an agreement in principle that foreign forces will leave in the foreseeable future and that Afghanistan would not end up with permanent military bases that dominate a crucial region that includes Central Asia, Iran, Gulf, Pakistan and China? Similarly, can the Karzai administration come up with a more effective strategy to curb drug-related warlords who have a stake in permanent warfare in the country?

It is not as yet clear how the work of the jirgas — the 50-member Pakistan-Afghan jirga and the local tribal jirgas that may be held on either side of the border — would interface with the political and bureaucratic structures of the two states.

An Afghan ministry has, at least in theory, greater jurisdiction on the Afghan border lands than any comparable authority on the Pakistani side. Political agencies in Pakistan have actually undergone stresses unknown in the last hundred years and the prime source of power in them today is the army with its intelligence services.

Afghanistan has a time-honoured tradition of convening a loya jirga (council of elders) at considerable intervals of time to settle momentous issues of war, peace and the constitutional organisation of the state, especially the state that Ahmad Shah Abdali formed in the middle of the 18th century on the basis of the dominance of the Pashtun tribes.

Decisions of the loya jirga effortlessly translate into national decisions. One is not sure of this traditional finality of an Afghan jirga especially under foreign occupation.

Across the eastern border, the British empire and its successor state, Pakistan, respected the tribal tradition of jirgas of wise and experienced men to resolve diverse kinds of problems in tribal “agencies” constituted differently than the so-called “settled districts” of the adjacent province of the state.

The agenda is usually more mundane though jirgas that have met to declare hostilities against the British hail the idea of Pakistan, oppose Indian occupation of Kashmir and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

An entirely new dimension has been added to the tradition by holding an unprecedented inter-state Pakistan-Afghanistan grand jirga in Kabul. Its need has largely arisen from the American pressure to maintain an Afghan-Pakistani coalition to assist President Bush’s Afghan war.

If Pakistan can exploit the mechanisms offered by it to persuade the occupying powers to seriously consider alternatives to the unsuccessful military policy of exterminating the resurgent and tenacious Taliban resistance, it would have made a major gain by experimenting with a cross-border tribal consultative process.

Failure to do so may, however, erode the linkages of the tribes with Pakistan and carry the risk of creating a new dynamic which one day may threaten the integrity of Quaid-i-Azam’s Pakistan yet again. So far President Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto are competing in framing the issues in belligerent terms. This is probably their current political need but it is not the best investment in Pakistan’s future stability and integrity.

Washington and Islamabad frame the Afghan question as moderate Islam vs militant political Islam. It is a valid debate which needs to be conducted with much greater gravitas, knowledge and insight than being demonstrated at present. It is, however, only part of the story.

The rest is another great game that is being played ruthlessly by governments, oil and gas multinationals and intelligence services. Pakistan’s dream of becoming an energy corridor of the region depends heavily on Afghanistan becoming a peaceful, stable and strong land bridge between Central Asia and South Asia.

Pakistan’s support for the Taliban was widely misconstrued as a threat to the established order in Central Asia and eventually even in Xinjiang. Several countries including India and the fraternal country of Iran joined hands with Russia and the Central Asian states to ensure that the Taliban would not win in Afghanistan.

Frustrated in battle, the Taliban became a self-destructive force which the international community finally tried to wipe out. Washington is not averse to Afghanistan becoming an energy and trade hub as long as it can exclusively control this long overdue transformation of this landlocked country into a major highway of regional economy.

Once again, Pakistan is being perceived as a mercenary state subordinate to the vainglorious ambitions of the United States to be the only power that matters in an energy-rich region that can be stabilised only on the basis of a multilateral equilibrium.

When Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri emphatically rejects a review of Pakistan’s foreign policy, he is perhaps unwittingly revealing the tunnel vision of the institution he presides over. One can only hope that the present democratic upsurge in the country will correct this vision.

In the final analysis, peace in Afghanistan may depend on an eventual willingness to withdraw foreign forces from the country. This would mean a redefining of war aims and perhaps a deliberate decision to keep Afghanistan out of the structure of power projection by the United States in the Eurasian landmass, the Gulf, South Asia and China.

It has the technology to do without Afghanistan in the military sense but it does not have the sensitivity and wisdom that the builders of the British Empire showed in the late 19th and early 20th century.

President Karzai does not have the independence and subtlety of Amir Abdul Rahman and the present regime in Pakistan cannot visualise its survival without a direct American umbrella. These inherent weaknesses may yet make the new-fangled jirgas of the Hindukush non-events.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

It’s the economy, stupid

THE most famous cliche of modern politics holds that elections are about the economy, stupid. So it follows that no issue should matter more than the economy to an opposition party seeking to oust a government from office.

In Britain, Common sense therefore has a pointed retort when the Conservatives choose to launch a 200-page policy document on the economy in the middle week of August, with party politics suspended and the collective mind on the beach. Either the Tories are mad - or else they have something to hide.

These are certainly the options that newly confident Labour would like one to believe in. Option one: the Gordon Brown bounce has panicked the Tories into lurching rightwards with an irresponsible core-vote agenda of deregulation and tax cuts. Conclusion: stick with Labour. Option two: the David Cameron revolution was always only cosmetic, concealing the right’s enduring grip and the leader’s own Thatcherite instincts, now showing through the gloss. Conclusion again: rally behind Brown.

I don’t think either of these alternatives will suffice as an analysis. The events of the past week have involved risk to the Tories. But they do not yet tell us that the Tories have abandoned the centre ground or that the Cameron strategy is either faltering or, more importantly, wrong.

Start with the process factor. This is a policy review, not an election manifesto. The two are only the same thing if the review is a sham. But there is no evidence that the Tories are conducting a sham. A proper review requires them to behave exactly as they are doing: to consult, to raise options and to put forward proposals that not everyone will agree with.

Such an open process naturally entails political risk –– as debates do –– especially on electorally charged issues like tax. Even so, the review still only provides an a la carte menu for party leaders to pick from. George Osborne used very carefully chosen words yesterday to stress the point. It is clear that Cameron will not swallow it whole.

Then there is the Redwood factor. In some eyes the mere presence of the former Welsh secretary at the head of yesterday’s competitiveness review condemns the whole exercise as a neo-Thatcherite ramp.

A more careful judgment, seeking to apply the wisdom of the late John Biffen, might say that parties always have to be coalitions and that, while Redwood has lost neither his convictions nor his capacity to spook, he could be an asset as long as he is in the right role. Whatever else it may be, his report is not stupid.

Even so, the Redwood risk is obvious and acknowledged. "John can come up with 10 policy ideas on any subject you care to name," one Cameronian told me yesterday. "Four of them will be good and the other six may be no bloody good at all. You want him on board but not in the shadow cabinet." Not exactly a wholehearted endorsement, I scribbled in my notes.

Fundamentally, though, there is the review’s context and substance. If everything about modern Britain was thrumming along gloriously on all fronts, then the Tory party’s policy review might be more easily dismissed. However, after 10 years of concentrated Labour effort, it is self-evident that there is lots about Britain that is not working, and thus plenty of room for thoughtful, honest policy alternatives.

This is not to give the Tory reviews a free pass. But it is to say they mostly address real questions. The foreign policy world has been rightly impressed with many of Pauline Neville-Jones’s policy review proposals on security and foreign policy.

I have lost count of the number of people, only a minority of them Tories, who have said they are impressed at the seriousness and depth of Iain Duncan Smith’s work on social exclusion. So it would indeed be odd if Redwood’s competitiveness review was useful merely as a punchbag.

There is little doubt that Redwood remains at heart the supply-side, libertarian anti-European conservative that he always was. But it is also true that the economy should be performing better than it is. The Redwood report is striking at times for its pragmatism, for its willingness to be constrained by the Cameron-Osborne mantras on tax cuts, and also for its policy breadth.

There is a lot in it. The report does not focus on EU regulation or on inheritance tax to the extent that leaks have implied - though, if it did, the Tories are probably on the populist side of both issues. The report ranges from transport to pensions to energy policy, with serious (as well as silly) things to say on them all. There is much challenging of pieties, always useful.

And even though it does address tax and regulation, these are hardly straightforward subjects. The complexity of Labour’s legacy on both has been staggering and shocking. Only those with a bureaucratic self-interest can defend it. Those of us who believe that tax and regulation are socially virtuous must be careful not to slip back into the discredited belief that more is better and less is worse –– because it isn’t true. There is nothing wrong in principle with lower taxes or less regulation. What matters in each case is the purpose, the practical effect and whether you trust the intentions of those in charge.

Which is why this week involves calculated risk for the Tories. The risk lies in raising issues that appeal passionately to the Tory party but that, in the past, have frightened the undecided and galvanised the other parties. Cameron and his advisers think the risk had to be taken sometime and was worth taking now. My guess is we won’t see much more of Redwood in the frontline now.

That is partly because the Tories do not intend to fight the election on detailed tax cuts next time. A shift to green taxes, away from taxes on families is the priority. Avoid complexity or too many numbers are the watchwords. The Tory hope is that promising tax cuts from the proceeds of growth will prove a strong enough pledge for the faithful and a robust enough reassurance for the sceptics.

Cameron has persuaded himself that mending social breakdown - the Duncan Smith agenda not the Redwood - is the change for which Britain will ultimately vote. The centre ground strategy remains but the chosen terrain is no longer the economy. It may sound stupid - but it could just be smart.

–– The Guardian, London

Safety of nuclear assets

PAKISTAN has dismissed the concerns raised by certain inspired and tendentious reports in the western media about the safety of its strategic assets. These reports are highly controversial and belie the ground realities.

Pakistan, being a signatory to the Convention of the Nuclear Safety, is fully committed to enforcing the internationally recognised safety measures for its nuclear assets. It has, therefore, made a conscious effort to ensure the safety of its nuclear stockpiles and devised a well defined Command and Control System. Well trained commando units are deployed to guard the nuclear installations and other related sensitive areas which foreclose the possibility of unauthorised persons gaining access to nuclear weapons.

In 1998, when Pakistan became an overt nuclear weapons state, the question of the safety of its nuclear assets assumed crucial importance. Accordingly, while planning for the development of nuclear human resources, emphasis was laid on the training of scientists and engineers in the field of nuclear safety. These highly qualified personnel continue to be an essential part of all nuclear establishments in the country. Pakistan has an impeccable record of custodial safety and security, free of any incident of theft or leakage of nuclear material or technology.

It may be pertinent to mention that a report by the United States prime anti-proliferation organisation, the Institute for Science and International Security, published in 2005, has also endorsed Islamabad’s claim that Dr. A. Q. Khan’s network that is believed to have sold nuclear technology in the black market was a transnational organisation and not a Pakistani set-up.

The apprehension in the western world that the existing political instability in Pakistan could put a big question mark on the effectiveness of the command and control of Islamabad’s nuclear assets as the Islamic extremist groups may form alliances with the pro-Islamic elements in the army that controls the country’s nuclear programme. This may jeopardise the safety and security of its fissile material and nuclear installations.

These concerns are, however, over-stated as, despite the growing tendency for Islamisation among its ranks, the Pakistan army essentially remains a professional force and the emphasis on Islam is merely ideological and inspirational and has no political connotations. Therefore the army, as an institution, will, under all circumstances, protect the country’s vital interests.

It is also pertinent to point out that the nuclear states generally keep their nuclear weapons in an unconstituted form for security reasons and therefore only a highly trained manpower can reconstitute them. It is therefore extremely unlikely that extremists and terrorists, even if they are able to lay hands on such weapons, will be able to reconstitute them for detonation. This negates the possibility of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of undesirable elements as a result of the domestic political instability.

Some political analysts are of the opinion that Washington believes that Pakistan has become a centre of violent terrorist movements and is insufficiently equipped to guard its nuclear assets or stop these from falling into the hands of terrorists and, therefore, it might be planning to neutralise its nuclear programme. One cannot rule out this possibility altogether.

Joseph R. Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has recently confirmed that President George W. Bush is consulting senior leaders on plans to neutralise Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities if President Musharraf’s regime collapses. The US, however, must realise that if it acted to implement its plan it would lead to a very serious situation in Pakistan with serious consequences.

It would also ignite public anger against the United States not only in Pakistan but throughout the Islamic world. Indeed, nothing can be more ominous than a coercive attitude being adopted by the United States towards its trusted ally in the latter’s time of difficulties.

Pakistan struggled for a quarter of a century to promote a nuclear-free zone in South Asia. However, after having failed in its efforts, it was obliged to exercise its nuclear option to meet its security concerns. The Bush administration could have reversed the nuclear proliferation in South Asia only by pursuing a coherent and non-discriminatory non-proliferation policy. Instead, it has concluded a nuclear deal with India exempting that country from the non-proliferation norms and has thus moved closer to accepting it as a nuclear state.

Regrettably, the United States is not willing to sign a similar deal with Pakistan as it has done with India. This illustrates how Washington perceives its nuclear policy in South Asia. In any case, Pakistan is now a nuclear state which must maintain a minimum deterrent in the overall interest of its security and territorial integrity.

The US policymakers should, therefore, take a longer view and, instead of contemplating to neutralise Pakistan’s nuclear capability, should rectify the situation that has been created as a result of their partisan attitude in favour of India.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Slow forward

WILLIAM GIBSON invented the word “cyberspace” (in his debut novel Neuromancer in 1984), which gives him the right to pontificate about the future.

He has been right about bits of the future, too, in the way that science-fiction writers often are, especially about the ways that new technologies interact with human beings. But he can be very wrong about the present.

In a recent interview by Tim Adams, published in “The Observer”, Gibson confessed that he had stopped writing about the future because new technologies were happening too fast. “What I grew up with as science fiction is now a historical category,” he said. “Previous practitioners, HP Lovecraft, say, or HG Wells, had these huge, leisurely ‘here and nows’ from which to contemplate what might happen. Wells knew exactly where he was and knew he was at the centre of things.”

Whereas we, poor orphans, are adrift on a heaving ocean of constant change, living our jump-cut lives in a state of constant uncertainty. Etc., etc. If you haven’t heard this line of argument before, you are presumably a cave-dwelling hermit. Every generation dramatises its own experience of the world, and talking about how hard it is to live with endless, unpredictable, high-speed change is the favourite indoor sport of the Western intelligentsia. It is, of course, nonsense.

We do not live in an era of major change, neither in the technologies that shape our environment nor in the social values that shape our lives. That kind of experience is still available in the developing world, when villagers move to the cities, but in the rich countries change has slowed to a crawl.

Between 1825 and 1875, people had to get used to railways, steamships, and the telegraph: the average speed of land travel increased fivefold, and information now passed between continents in minutes, not weeks. Cities of over a million people proliferated, and the deferential social order of the countryside began to give way before the onslaught of egalitarian values. Revolutionary ideas like Darwinism and Marxism changed the whole way that people looked at the world. That really was high-speed change.

In 1875, gas lighting was the big new thing that made the streets safe and the evenings at home several hours longer. By 1925, gaslight was gone and electricity was everywhere. Horses were replaced by cars, aircraft were becoming commonplace, and the richer homes had radios, telephones and fridges. These were genuine mass societies, complete with their own new forms of education, entertainment and politics — but they also developed mass warfare on an unprecedented scale.

H.G. Wells didn’t inhabit a huge, leisurely “here and now” from which to contemplate what might happen when he wrote “War of the Worlds” in 1898. He was recently divorced, living with a former student in a rented flat less than a kilometre (mile) from where I am sitting now, in the midst of a London that had grown tenfold in population in less than a century. What made the book sell was that it echoed all the secret fears of a society that was shocked and dazed by the speed of change.

Between 1925 and 1975, the pace of change was still high, but it was slowing. The major new technologies, like electronics and nuclear fission, provided better radio (it’s called television) and bigger explosions, but it was mostly incremental change that did not transform people’s experience of the world. Antibiotics revolutionised medicine, however, and the gender revolution fundamentally changed the relations between the sexes. If you were born in 1925, the world you lived in when you turned fifty in 1975 was still a very different place.

Whereas if you were born in the developed parts of the world in 1975 — or even in 1955 — you have seen very little fundamental change in your lifetime. You travel in basically the same cars and trains and planes as your parents and even your grandparents did. You have the same domestic appliances and roughly the same social values as the previous generation, and modern medicine has not extended your predicted lifespan by even five years. Even popular music is an unbroken continuum since the 1950s. The only truly major new technology that has permeated the whole society in this whole period is computers.

Which, of course, was precisely the technology that William Gibson fixed on as the basis for his dystopian futures, but despite all the hype the “IT revolution” really isn’t enough to redefine the way we live. We inhabit a period that has seen no more by way of fundamental technological change, and considerably less intellectual and social upheaval, than the latter half of the 18th century.

We should probably be grateful for that, because high-speed change, however exhilarating at the start, really is disorienting and exhausting if it lasts over a whole lifetime.––Copyright