SIX years after the ouster of the Taliban regime as a result of a ruthless American bombing campaign towards the fag end of 2001, Afghanistan remains heavily reliant on foreign crutches in terms of military muscle and cash flows.

An agonisingly slow reconstruction effort, coupled with mounting civilian casualties in insurgency-linked violence and a near-total absence of basic civic amenities, is fuelling a sense of disenchantment among the masses.

Popular aspirations for a better future in the post-Taliban period have been dashed by the incumbent government’s ham-handed approach to a whole slew of challenges, which ought to be tackled on a war footing but that have received scant attention.

Law enforcement failure, unabashed administrative corruption, the continued sway of warlords over large swathes of the country, poor governance, unimpeded official disregard for the rule of law and dawdling over institutional reform have grossed out a thumping majority of citizens.

Incapable of adequately addressing these pressing problems or tapping into oodles of foreign aid, the Afghan leadership and voters are apparently not on the same wavelength on what should be their priorities in firmly putting the benighted country on the road to economic and urban renewal. As the people are crying themselves hoarse for the bare necessities of life, the overriding concern of their rulers is how to perpetuate themselves in power with help from abroad.

One manifestation of this unreasonably profound dependency on outside support came on Thursday when President Hamid Karzai pleaded with Nato and Coalition forces to stay put in Afghanistan to preserve what he called ‘positive gains’ made over the past six years. He knows full well his compatriots loathe the foreign forces’ eerie involvement in house searches in the dead of the night and the resultant civilian casualties.

Resurgent rebels, regrouping on both sides of the Durand Line, and the blundering boot of trigger-happy Afghan troops are equally to blame for the growing deaths of ordinary residents.

During a recent official trip to Britain, Karzai assured Nato soldiers — many of them struck by war fatigue — that Afghan forces would take a greater role in security operations. But burden-sharing was imperative if the global fraternity was to succeed in the war against terror, the president told a news briefing he jointly addressed with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown following their meeting at Number 10.

Granted Afghanistan is in want of assistance in overcoming its myriad woes that essentially grow out of a variety of sources like a war-crippled social sector, tattered infrastructure, intensifying suicide attacks, a burgeoning drug trade and a remorselessly high trajectory of gang crime.

Nonetheless, he did not elucidate how a ragtag security apparatus, thriving on complicity with the underworld, doing the biddings of dreaded commanders in certain provinces and unable to shoot it out with hardened guerrillas, would measure up to the exacting task of restoring normality.

Still a far cry, impregnable defence in itself does not offer long-term solutions to the troubles the landlocked country is mired in.

The presidential statement that Afghanistan being the front line in the fight against extremism should not be allowed to come again under the control of Taliban is nothing more than a commonsensical truism. Not missing a beat, Karzai referred to his offer of peace talks to Taliban and other resistance groups barring those with links to the Al Qaeda network. So far so good, but he did not cite even a single practical step taken towards setting the dialogue process in motion.

The sooner the reconciliation initiative begins, the better it will be for a terror-haunted world in general and a tumultuous Afghanistan in particular. But an unwarranted delay in getting the project off the ground has given rise to nagging doubts about the government’s sincerity, with cynics talking down the gesture as a mendacious move towards inducing divisions in Taliban ranks.

Any exercise in building bridges, they reason, ought to go hand in hand with economic regeneration and public welfare schemes.

With the Afghans frantically struggling for survival, most of the financial assistance pouring into their impoverished country is meant to keep the war juggernaut rolling. For instance, President Bush requested Congress last week for an additional $46bn to bankroll pointless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A huge chunk of the emergency war chest — driving up the 2008 price tag for the combats to $196.4bn — would be expended on military operations, bullets and mine-resistant vehicles.

Unmoved by pervasive suffering and privation in both countries, Bush appears to cling to the unpopular campaigns that enrich military contractors and their lobbyists until his last day in office. So much for his incessant talk of liberating Afghans, winning their minds and hearts and bringing democracy to their country!

Another indication of disappointment with the current state of affairs is that most of the educated youth are voting with their feet by leaving their country in droves.

Their quest for making it big in foreign climes is bound to trigger a brain drain their homeland can ill afford, but policymakers in Kabul are least bothered about the looming crisis that could take an unbearable toll on the rebuilding drive.

Much in the same way, the number of Afghans believing that their country is headed in the right direction has fallen this year to 42 per cent from 44 per cent in 2006 and 64 per cent in 2004. Around 24 per cent — up from 21 per cent in 2006 and 11 per cent in 2004 — think their country is going down the wrong path.

A US-funded survey — covering the largest population sample ever polled at one time in all the 34 provinces — reveals a third of the respondents view security issues including terrorism and violence as the single biggest problem. In 2006, only 22 per cent accorded priority to security concerns.

In order to get to grips with domestic problems, the president would be better advised to explore internal solutions by taking all stakeholders on board instead of imploring aliens to tide his administration over security-related worries and enforce its writ across the country.

With a little elbow grease as well as political acumen, he can forge a consensus on the question. Being an elected head of state, he should have issued the siren call after dispassionately considering the views of mainstream political parties on an extended foreign military presence.

The writer is a Pakistani journalist based in Kabul.

MISCHIEF is again afoot. The plan is to drive a large number of people out of politics, to abolish the institution of political rallies. This means nothing less than depriving the Pakistani citizens of an important part of their history.

A hallowed method of identifying the culprits behind any crime is to go for its beneficiaries. The indecent haste with which the establishment came out with a ban-all-rallies project, it signed itself as the primary suspect in the Oct 19 carnage case.

By asking the people to choose between security and rallies the authorities have, quite diabolically, diverted public attention from their own failings and instigated a debate on the justification for political processions/rallies. Next they will ask the people to stop travelling by buses because they are being targeted by terrorists. One wonders whether a warning against joining paramilitary forces is to be issued because their members are being kidnapped, tortured and beheaded.

One might not have suspected the bona fides of the authors of the move if one had not known of military regimes’ ingrained hostility to the people’s right to take out a procession, to hold a rally. They have been striving to end rallies with a consistency they have not displayed in any campaign against social evils.

The threat from terrorists is a post-9/11/2001 excuse. But rallies/processions have been disallowed since October 1999. There must have been something prima facie objectionable in the blanket restriction on public gatherings that persuaded the Supreme Court to take note of it (although no relief resulted). The fact is that the Ayub regime disliked public rallies.

The Zia regime could never stomach the sight of rallies, especially after that fateful rally in Lahore in August 1977 that was held as a reception for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after his overthrow; and the Musharraf regime’s dark record in this regard is too recent to need recounting. The establishment’s intolerance of public rallies has nothing to do with the terrorist threat; it is an essential concomitant of autocracy.

This anti-rally theory can be assailed on several counts. First, on the ground of criminal hypocrisy in banning opposition rallies and not preventing quasi-religious militants from doing so (and, indeed, helping them often). Secondly, suppression of politics and political activity, of which rallies form an essential part, by Ayub created a vacuum that was effortlessly filled by elements operating under the banner of belief. These elements have gained strength throughout the authoritarian regimes in direct proportion to the curtailment of democratic freedoms. And, finally, restrictions on public rallies are one of the most decisive weapons that can be used to deprive the people of their sovereign rights.

Before examining why the people must have a right to rally for their ideas/demands one may refer to the reasons (as far as they can be fathomed) for authoritarian regimes’ hostility to public gatherings.

To begin with, the very idea that the people, especially the poor and illiterate among them, should make demands, instead of obeying their superiors, is alien to the garrison code. Public rallies can give the people a sense of their power which they cannot be trusted with. These rallies can snowball, just as the recent lawyers’ agitation emboldened many a docile sheep to join the black jackets.

Above all, big rallies can spark insubordination among law-enforcement personnel, such as the 1977 incident when two officers refused to order firing on a crowd of protesters in Lahore and some other similar incidents.

How is the holding of political rallies so important to citizens that they should resist the present move to ban them? Some of the reasons can be read in the establishment’s grounds for opposing such demonstrations. Quite a few other reasons can be advanced.

Politics everywhere depends on the oral communication of ideas. This is necessary to sustain a living link between political leaders and the people. It is not enough for government leaders to issue statements on their decisions and policies; they must speak to the people either through the latter’s representatives in parliament or the media. The American president is a notable follower of this principle. (His record in this regard is being threatened by the ambition-driven Punjab chief minister who is obviously exempt from the rally ban.)

In an underdeveloped society, such as Pakistan, a large part of the population does not have access to political leaders through parliaments or media. The press reaches a small part of the population. The electronic media’s huge growth notwithstanding, a sizeable segment of society, especially the underprivileged, does not have the means or the time to benefit from its services. For all such people, public gatherings are the only channel of communication with claimants to their allegiance.

For a variety of reasons, everybody cannot go to a public meeting. A procession, a rally, is thus a means of carrying a public meeting to people who cannot get away from their homes or workplaces. If we had not had processions and rallies most Pakistani women could not have directly seen or heard their leaders.

Public gatherings, processions, rallies are important because they enable people to acquire and retain the qualities of social animals, because in Pakistan, where the space for citizen-government interaction has been greatly reduced, they offer the masses the only possibility of exercising their right to participate in governance and public life.

Rallies are the most direct means of announcing a people’s will. That is why one admires and respects the young people who face batons while protesting at meetings of the international ruling club or WTO rounds. And one can never forget the rally by the US war veterans against the Vietnam war that clinched matters, nor the recent rallies in many world capitals against the unforgivable rape of Iraq.

Rallies are an all-seasons fruit but they are most welcome and most enjoyable around election time. Although rallies have been considerably vulgarised by autocratic rulers who have been using public money to collect audiences, and the bad example is being followed by political parties, they still provide a fair measure of the caravan-organisers’ standing in public.

The myth that crowds at public rallies do not represent a party’s/candidate’s vote-purse was exploded in 1970 and it is kept alive only by the apologists of dictatorship for they have a vested interest in downgrading every expression of the people’s will. To the common citizen, election time rallies are as important as Gallup or exit polls.

This does not mean that the threat from terrorists should be ignored. There is no doubt that this is the most serious danger Pakistan faces today. Failure, even delay, in overcoming this menace will gravely imperil the state.

However, terrorism cannot be managed by extending autocracy’s lease, by avoiding or subverting elections, by banning rallies, or by abridging citizens’ other rights (for instance by increasing the period of detention pending trial). Such actions will amount to retreat before and appeasement of militants and will doubtless make both the state and individuals more vulnerable than ever.

This situation demands much more than the use of blind force. Political parties and other society elements should, of course, take precautions and organise resistance to militancy but the primary responsibility for protecting the life and liberty of citizens lies with the administration. A government that tries to cover up its ineptitude by asking the people to give up their rights will neither be obeyed nor respected.

Man lives for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic aims of humanity. — Tolstoy

LORD ACTON, in his report to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press wrote in 1896: ‘Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation, but we can dispose of conventional history and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.’

Sixty years later, Sir George Clarke, in his introduction to the second Cambridge Modern History pooh-poohed the idea of ultimate history and said: ‘Historians of a later generation do not look forward to any such prospect. They expect their work to be superseded again and again. They consider that knowledge of the past has come down through one or more human minds, has been processed by them, and therefore, cannot consist of elemental and impersonal atoms which nothing can alter… some impatient scholars take refuge in… the doctrine that, since all historical judgments involve persons and points of view, one is as good as another and there is no objective historical truth.’

The contradictory views of Acton and George Clarke about history are a reflection of the change in the total outlook on society over the interval between the two pronouncements. Acton stands for the positive, confident belief of the later Victorian age when the British Empire was at its zenith and George Clarke echoes the confusion and disillusionment consequent upon the disintegration of the Empire.

What is history? The answer depends on our position in time and the view we take of the society in which we live i.e. on the philosophy of history.

Ranke believed that the task of the historian was ‘simply to show how it really was.’ History, according to him consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. First get your facts straight, then and only then plunge into interpretations. To recall the dictum of C.P. Scott: ‘Facts are sacred, opinion is free.’ This is the common sense school of history.

What is an historical fact? This is a crucial question. According to the common sense view, there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historians and which form the backbone of history. The fact, for instance, that Pakistan came into existence on Aug 14, 1947 or the fact that the battle of Plassey was fought in 1757. But is the issue as simple as that?

For one, there is an abundance of facts and the historian has got to make a selection. For another, the historian has to arrange facts in order of priority. There is a common saying that facts speak for themselves. On close analysis this is simply not true. The facts only speak when the historian calls on them.

The facts of history do not come to us in pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. History means interpretation. One must study the historian before one begins to study the facts that he is narrating. Here the age old philosophical problem of the relation between mind and reality, between subject and object raises its head. There is no denying the existence of objective reality, but it has to be grasped by an active mind.

The historian, like all other individuals, is a social phenomenon, both the product and the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs. Before one studies the historian, one must study his historical and social environment. While some historians regard history as the biography of great men, others have emphasised impersonal forces in the making of history.

Carlyle who upheld history as the biography of great men contradicted himself when he summed up the causes of the French revolution: ‘Hunger and nakedness and nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty-five million hearts: this… was the prime mover in the French Revolution; as the like will be in all revolutions, in all countries.’

Lenin corroborated this view and said: ‘Politics begin where the masses are; not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where politics begins.’ Carlyle and Lenin’s millions are millions of individuals: there is nothing impersonal. Millions of discontented people are a factor which no historian can ignore.

If a leader comes forth who voices this discontent and guides the people to a new social order, some historians attribute this success to his charismatic qualities and belittle the role of the millions of masses, who are the real motivating force of history.

In his speech that he delivered in the German parliament in 1869, Bismarck said, “We cannot ignore the history of the past, nor can we create the future. I would like to warn you against the mistakes that causes people to advance the hands of their clocks, thinking thereby they are hastening the passage of time…We cannot make history. We must wait while it is being made…if we pluck [a fruit] before it is ripe, we will only prevent its growth and spoil it.’

While Bismarck was correct in assessing his role, it is suicidal to wait while history is being made, because it is men who make history. History has its bye-laws, but they operate through people and great men are not so much creators as midwives of history, pregnant with great events.

It is this philosophy of history which should guide us while making an attempt to understand the history of Pakistan.