Recipe for disaster

THINGS seem to be moving at last on the political scene, and realisation seems to be dawning on all politicians, including those in uniform, that without giving up their rigid positions it would be well nigh impossible to break the current stalemate. The “deal talks” between President Pervez Musharraf and Ms Benazir Bhutto are not the only indications of the military-led government’s eagerness to strike a workable understanding with the politicians. Talks are now underway even with the Sharifs. The military regime would never have talked to the politicians if it were not in trouble. Immediately after seizing power and getting the Supreme Court’s validation, the generals treated the politicians with contempt. If at all they had any soft corner, it was for the religious right.

The big break with what is now the MMA came over the change of policy towards the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Even though this was a foreign policy issue, the mistrust then grew in dimensions to include domestic matters. The recent chain of events — some of them resulting from the military’s own follies — rocked the government and suddenly, the generals find themselves isolated as all opposition parties have united on the question of the general’s uniform. The military now appears to have discovered the virtues of negotiations.

The leaders of the two mainstream parties may talk of democracy, rule of law and independence of judiciary, but the nation knows that their record in power was anything but clean. Besides, the generals — like the politicians — are a necessary evil. They are there on the scene well-entrenched, and no scheme and reconciliation can work without their nod. Therefore, while the politicians must realise that they have differences among themselves, they must not be maximal in their approach. Similarly, the generals must now be intelligent enough to comprehend one obvious truth: that each time the military takes over, it leaves the country in a greater mess when circumstances force it to quit, and that ultimately it is the elected civilian leadership that can and must rule. The reconciliation process cannot be successful if conducted in the limelight. For instance, the moment an all-party conference is held and is open to the media, the party’s representatives begin to play to the gallery. There is more rhetoric than serious dialogue. Hence the need of the hour is for the generals and the politicians to talk quietly on creating the conditions for fair and free elections. No all-party conference has ever achieved concrete results when held in such circumstances. We know the fate of the roundtable conference called by Ayub Khan just before he exited from power and the results of the multi-party conference called by Nawaz Sharif in London last month. Will a similar APC held in Islamabad prove to be any different? The subsequent weeks and months will then see a greater crisis in which things would seem to be heading towards anarchy. Let all sides pursue the on-going talks quietly with realistic aims.

Promises but no action

It is unfortunate that neither the poor, who donate their kidney for financial compensation, nor the recipients realise the potentially grave consequences of such unethical kidney transplants performed by unscrupulous doctors, more interested in making a fast buck than abiding by the Hippocratic Oath. Follow-up care is generally poor and complications can mean costly medical attention and poor health for the donor as well as the recipient. Meanwhile, it would help if a concerted campaign were launched defining the risks of organ donation carried out by unprofessional and immoral doctors. At the same time, it is important to promote the spirit of legal deceased and live voluntary organ donation. In the latter case, it need not pose a hazard to health so long as the transplant is done by skilled and qualified doctors with no commercial motives.

An apology is owed

SINDH chief minister Arbab Rahim is no stranger to controversy. This time he is in the spotlight for saying that a woman’s rule is a “curse” and should be avoided. His comments have not just angered female parliamentarians, but society at large. They also expose the sham that is the government’s “enlightened moderation” policy. Not surprisingly, Dr Rahim does not believe in a lot of what the PML-Q supposedly stands for, enlightened moderation being just one of the slogans it espouses. Just a few months ago Dr Rahim said that the summer rains that killed several hundred people in Sindh was the price they paid for their misdeeds. This kind of thinking is not what one expects from an educated leader who has studied medicine and should know better and is an elected representative of a moderate party. Dr Rahim also expressed his annoyance with the HRCP in June 2005 when it went on a fact-finding mission to Khetlari, his native village, to look into allegations that the chief minister ran private jails on his lands. Do allegations of misuse of power, narrow-minded thinking and now misogynist views sound like good credentials for a political leader?

If nothing else, Dr Rahim should be reminded that his public uttering is in contradiction to the Constitution which clearly states that a woman can lead the nation. The least he should do is tender an unconditional apology to the entire nation for his comments that are hardly enlightened. After all, no one is above the law. The PML-Q should know better when appointing its leaders, if it does not want to be branded as a party with right-wing views. It should reassess its criteria for awarding election tickets. This is a decisive election and voters need to ask what kind of leaders it wants to be represented by.

Cosmetic changes won’t suffice

THE multiplicity of candidates for the post could perhaps be construed as cause for pride: whatever Pakistan’s shortcomings may be in the political sphere, it does not suffer from a dearth of aspiring prime ministers, a number of whom have served in that capacity before.

Those who have in the past experienced a measure of independence appear not to be particularly daunted by the prospect of being on the lighter side of a lopsided balance of power.

There could be a variety of reasons for this. Their attraction to the post may be based primarily on the attendant privileges rather than any serious disposition towards exercising power for the greater national good. Else they could be harbouring the hope of manipulating circumstances to their advantage once ensconced in the prime ministerial kursi.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to draw much comfort or consolation from the lengthening queue. For one, it enhances the uncertainties that lie ahead. In itself, that isn’t necessarily a negative: not knowing precisely what lies ahead can often constitute grounds for hope, particularly when the status quo gets stifling.

That isn’t an overwhelming concern in the present context, particularly when compared with previous bouts of military rule. Yet the existing dispensation does have the aura of a dead end about it.

The khaki-mufti hybrid was, of course, never a satisfactory arrangement. Nor was General Pervez Musharraf’s coup nearly eight years ago a positive development. The fact that quite a few people greeted it as a moment of deliverance reflects poorly, no doubt, on the nature of the second Nawaz Sharif administration, and the abortive attempt to deny landing rights to the commercial flight that was bringing the army chief home from Colombo was without doubt a reckless act of crass stupidity.

Yet the cockpit coup dealt a blow to Pakistan’s dilapidated democracy. The general vowed to introduce an improved variant, but such promises mean very little when they are made by men in uniform. In Musharraf’s case, it has been honoured largely in the breach.

It’s also worth noting that however dishonourable Sharif’s motives may have been, the right of a civilian head of government to replace the country’s military chief should be incontestable, except, perhaps, in a court of law. In Pakistan, the reverse has usually been the case, and it doesn’t seem as if that is about to change.

There are rumours of secret negotiations between the government and the Sharif brothers in the wake of the Supreme Court’s logical decision against barring Nawaz and Shahbaz from their homeland. It is very hard to imagine Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif sharing power in any form, although stranger things have been known to happen.

Of course, Sharif’s bluster against military dictators — clearly an attempt to distinguish himself from Benazir Bhutto by stepping on to the high moral ground — deserves to be taken with a fistful or two of salt, given that his political sponsor and mentor was an army general considerably more baleful than Musharraf.

Meanwhile, speaking of sponsorship, it should come as no surprise that Bhutto has a penchant for the foreign variety. The approval of the British establishment matters to her, but the blessings of supposedly influential personalities in Washington are of paramount importance.

It has always been thus. Even back in the mid-1980s, when domestic displeasure with Ziaul Haq’s tyranny was at its height and the daughter of the prime minister he had executed was widely viewed as an acceptable alternative, she deemed it necessary to lobby for Uncle Sam’s imprimatur.

She has lately been at it again, possibly in the hope of exploiting the fact that Musharraf finds it hard to say no to the Americans. She couldn’t be oblivious of the fact that an American stamp of approval could prove to be something of an electoral liability in Pakistan — after all, it isn’t only Islamists of the militant variety who are allergic to the pernicious influence of the US on global affairs.

Bhutto has been selling herself in the West as a potentially more effective antidote than Musharraf to Islamic extremism, and has enjoyed a degree of success in this endeavour despite her claim being unsubstantiated by evidence of any sort.

She has managed to elicit a fair amount of sympathetic media coverage, although not every commentator has been as effusive as Roy Hattersley, a former deputy leader of the British Labour Party and a columnist for The Guardian, who described her last week as representing “Pakistan’s best hope of taking its place among the democratic nations of the free world.” He bases this conclusion, inter alia, on a speech she made in the National Assembly as leader of the opposition, excoriating fundamentalists and the attempted imposition of the Sharia.

Much like the party Hattersley represented for decades in the House of Commons, Bhutto is invariably more articulate and attractive when in opposition. She strikes a chord with Americans when she says “the war on terror must be won in Pakistan” or that it’s necessary to confront the extremists in madressahs who “brainwash our children into intolerance” — these are both instances of the conservative columnist Robert Novak quoting her approvingly in The Washington Post, after describing her as “a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, beautiful, charismatic and determined” — but nobody appears to have bothered asking her how she hopes to accomplish any of this, with or without a somewhat miffed Musharraf by her side.

It would be easier to take a mildly optimistic view of the prospect of Bhutto’s return to a position of power were she to at least acknowledge the more egregious follies and foibles of the past. A degree of contrition would, perhaps, be too much to hope for. The trouble is, she does not even appear to realise that the blots on her curriculum vitae cannot be concealed under a sifarish or two from Washington.

Minus the western recommendations, Sharif’s trajectory is not all that dissimilar. There are no grounds for implicitly idealising the dismal pre-October 1999 state of affairs. Nor is there much cause for rejoicing if Mian Sahib returns from eight years in exile with little more to his credit than a cosmetically enhanced hairline.

None of the foregoing is intended to serve as an argument for perpetuating the highly unsatisfactory status quo, which anyhow appears to have reached a dead end. Musharraf’s limited options include emergency rule or a formal declaration of martial law in the likely event of a Supreme Court verdict against the concept of a uniformed president — but his credibility is already in serious state of disrepair.

However, there is, as always, a way out. It’s been 37 years since Pakistan witnessed truly free and fair elections. It would probably do no harm to take that gamble once more. Chances are no party would obtain an absolute majority. That’s when political deals and compromises would come in handy, testing the maturity of the main contestants.

A government of national unity may be a worthwhile idea, provided it offers a functional administration rather than a facade for continued military rule by stealth. Democracy has its flaws, but it invariably provides less cause for despair than deviousness and dictatorship.

Dread of Flying

AIR travel has come a long way from a half-century ago…Now 750 million people take flight in a year and soon it will be one billion, but passengers have not found strength in numbers. Too often they have reason to be fed up…

…Amazingly, radar-based tracking is about the only thing that hasn’t changed since the 1960s. There are plans to replace it with a safer, more efficient satellite-guided system that should relieve some stress on oversubscribed air space. But the change is going slowly, and will not make trips easier any time soon.

…The Federal Aviation Administration says it has a solution years in the making, reconfigured air routes in the Northeast that it plans to announce shortly. But considering that air traffic has increased 24 per cent just in and out of Kennedy Airport since October, that won’t be nearly enough. The situation is urgent.

Consider the uncomfortably chummy air space over New York. The three big airports are among the nation’s most congested, and delays ripple for thousands of miles, backing up other airports in a chain of misery…Unless the airlines curb themselves, sufficiently and soon, the government should step in and cap the number of craft the airport can handle, as was done in the past at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and at La Guardia.

Air travellers print their own boarding passes. They check themselves in. They endure, generally without complaint, long lines at security checkpoints and the indignities that can accompany the process. They might not expect a smile, but they do expect the term “estimated time of arrival” to mean something. ––(Aug 27 )

CIA’s terror blunders

Since 9/11, Canadian and American intelligence services have been busy swapping information on terror suspects. Just ask Maher Arar, the Ottawa computer engineer who was arrested by the Americans and deported to his native Syria after being wrongly characterised as an Islamic radical with ties to Al Qaeda.

When the embarrassing truth came out in Justice Dennis O’Connor’s probe, Arar was vindicated and Ottawa paid him $10.5 million in compensation. Even so, Canadian officials scrambled to shield the US Central Intelligence Agency by blacking out sections of O’Connor’s report that identified the CIA as an actor in the sordid drama.

Bad instinct, that. As a damning report on the CIA that was released last week makes clear, Ottawa was covering up for an ineptly managed agency that bungled its own surveillance of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. The report confirms that Canadian officials had reason to be cautious, even sceptical, rather than complicit, in passing the CIA information about Arar or anyone else.

… CIA Inspector General John Helgerson oversaw the report, prepared two years ago, but a summary was released only last week. The CIA wanted it kept under wraps. In the same way, Ottawa had to be forced to reveal bits of the O’Connor report that Ottawa tried to black out to protect the CIA and other actors.

…Canadian officials should err on the side of prudence when weighing intelligence from the CIA or other foreign agencies, or passing it to them. They don’t always get it right. Sometimes they don’t get it at all. –– (Aug 27)