Afghanistan ties under stress

WITH its outer structure still in ruins, the Indian embassy in Kabul reopened on Sunday, almost a week after the callous suicide attack on July 7.

Although 58 lives were claimed by the assault, the new-found Indo-Afghan amity has apparently emerged even stronger. In contrast, the mercurial Pak-Afghan relationship is once again on a roller coaster amid a new round of recriminations.

True to form, Afghan authorities immediately pinned the suicide bombing on Pakistan’s premier intelligence organisation. The Inter-Services Intelligence, Kabul charged, has been active for decades in Afghanistan, particularly since the US-sponsored jihad against the occupation Soviet forces. A security report released on Tuesday alleged that terrorists stole into Afghanistan after receiving training and logistical support from across the frontier — a clear reference to Pakistan. “Without an iota of doubt, the terrorists could not have succeeded in this act without support from foreign intelligence agencies,” was the assessment that came hours after the interior ministry also suggested an ISI link.

At the highest level, Pakistan scorned the allegations. Its slothful embassy in the Afghan capital, however, stayed mum. In a chat with journalists in Kuala Lumpur, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said: “We want a stable Afghanistan. Why should Pakistan destabilise Afghanistan? A peaceful Afghanistan is in our interest. We desire stability in the region,” he remarked.

No group has so far accepted responsibility for the suicide car bombing. Taliban insurgents often move swiftly to claim suicide attacks and bomb blasts across the country. But their spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid says the rebel movement does not know who conducted Monday’s assault. The Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), led by former premier Eng Gulbadin Hekmatyar, is taking the same line. The HIA had no role in the incident, its spokesman Eng Haroon Zarghoon insists.

With the mystery still persisting, Afghan Foreign Minister Dr Rangin Dadfar Spanta blamed the massacre on peace deals the Pakistan government recently signed with local Taliban. He told a special UN Security Council meeting on Afghanistan that Taliban and Al Qaeda militants enjoy sanctuaries outside his country.

India wasted no time in joining Afghanistan and the United States in excoriating the peace agreements. “We can’t succeed if we send mixed signals through bargains for temporary and local peace while the rest of us contend with the consequences of such deals,” Indian Ambassador to the UN Nirupam Sen observed.

It was the morning rush hour. A sizeable crowd had just queued up in front of the heavily fortified Indian embassy. People including those who wanted to take their ailing relatives to India for treatment waited for visas. There was a huge bang and the main gates of the embassy, a street from the interior ministry across the busy tree-lined road, were blown away. Blood was everywhere and charred body parts, wrecked cars and shredded clothes and footwear were strewn all over the place.

The fatalities included Indian Defence Attaché R.D. Mehta and Counsellor Venkateswara Rao. The powerful blast tossed Rao’s body over the roof. It comprehensively damaged buildings inside the compound. Parts of the passport office, the adjacent Indonesian embassy and a number of nearby printing presses were damaged or destroyed. Two Indian security guards were also among the dead and at least two Indonesian diplomats suffered injuries.

Shortly after the attack, President Hamid Karzai met with the Indian ambassador, who had escaped unhurt. At his meeting with Jayant Prasad, the Afghan leader expressed his deep sympathies with the government and people of India over the deaths.

Pakistan has long been leery of India’s involvement in Afghanistan. Islamabad believes Indian consulates in the border provinces of Nangarhar and Kandahar are behind unrest in Pakistan. Equally distrustful of New Delhi’s presence in Afghanistan are the insurgents, who have often targeted Indian offices and projects around the impoverished country. The Border Roads Organisation came under 30 rocket attacks last year.

As part of its commitment to Afghanistan’s reconstruction, New Delhi has spent over $750 million on building a strategic road in the south-west. It has also rehabilitated dams and erected a new parliament building in addition to training Afghan civil servants. Some 4,000 Indians are currently working in the country.

A senior aide to President Karzai said in rather indecent haste: “The sophistication of this attack and the kind of materials used as well as the specific targeting all have the hallmarks of a particular intelligence agency that has staged similar terrorist acts in Afghanistan in the past.” The atrocious assault, like other attacks and explosions in recent months, has left behind evidence and witnesses, claimed Hamayun Hamidzada.

After being tipped off a fortnight ago about a possible terrorist strike, the Indian embassy beefed up security by installing huge dirt-filled blast walls in front of its entrance. Police also stepped up security measures including individual frisking and vehicle searches at both ends of the road, a stretch measuring less than 500 metres.

Besides raising disquieting questions about the effectiveness of US-led coalition troops, the terrorist act exposes the credibility of the security measures taken by Afghan forces in the wake of the intelligence warning and also reflects the Taliban’s ability to strike targets even in the most secure neighbourhoods in the heart of the capital.

Of late, the guerillas have shifted their warfare tactics, moving away from brainless violence to attacks on significant targets that may put the western-backed government under greater pressure. Audacious assaults on the luxury Serena Hotel, a public meeting addressed by President Karzai, the Indian embassy, a couple of Afghan National Army buses and a US base in Kunar illustrate the tactical change.

The ominous resurgence of the Taliban is amply underlined by the killing of 46 American and allied forces in June alone — a death toll higher than in any other month over the last seven years. The grim statistics suggest that more than 50,000 Nato and 24,000 coalition troops have been unable prevent a resurgence of the fighters, much less bring security to Afghanistan.

The writer is a senior Pakistani journalist currently based in Kabul.

Let’s bury hope

HOPE is this nation’s enemy. If it wasn’t for hope and its distant cousin, inshallah, Pakistan would be a very different country today — a better, more agreeable land.

Why, you ask? How Scrooge-like to turn on hope? The trouble with hope is that it delegates, leaving the real, hard work of getting things done to others. Hope is the black box in which we place all our problems and then wait for them to emerge resolved. With hope there is no need for planning, let alone a Plan B. God willing, Pakistan will be a democracy. We hope that CJ Iftikhar will fix this nation. We hope to provide kapra aur makaan to the people. Hopefully Pakistan will be a prosperous nation.

Innocuous, innocent, cuddly hope has infected this land for so long that, though we may not realise it, we are beyond hope, a nation of no-hopers dreaming of success and achieving failure. But if we were to do away with hope we would be left with nothing, right? Wrong. Do away with the romance of hope and what you will be left with is a will to succeed.

Nothing focuses the mind as knowing that there is no one to rely on other than one’s self. Tough choices would be made pragmatically and forthrightly, instead of shoving them in the hope box in the hope that answers will emerge. What our country needs is a hypodermic needle full of realism punched straight into its heart. For too long the placebo of hope has made us think that Pakistan will get better while its innards have slowly vanished. Not convinced?

The evidence abounds. After Feb 18, we hoped that a new day had dawned. Paeans to democracy were sung, the people’s will was admired, and everyone hoped that things would be better. Except the few who glanced at the numbers in parliament and then at Asif, Nawaz and Musharraf and scratched their heads and wondered how it would work.

Undeterred, the country rode the wave of hope. Then the cabinet split and the hope brigade was beached. Floundering in anguish, the hopeful have wondered why they have been betrayed again. We hoped that the politicians had learned their lesson, they cry. Yet, in their hearts they are still hoping things will get better.

The problem is that the politicians also drink at the well of hope and sometimes hopes collide. Asif signed the Bhurban Declaration in the hope that Nawaz wouldn’t pull the plug on a government that the League was a part of. When Nawaz did opt out, Asif had no Plan B. So he has decamped to Dubai and visited Turkey and Greece, no doubt hoping to come up with a new plan.

Nawaz is of course the purveyor of hope par excellence. What if Asif didn’t really mean to restore the judges by a parliamentary resolution, as many suspected. Well, good ol’ Nawaz hoped Asif would or else, well, he still doesn’t know because he had hoped Asif would do as he promised. So now we have a situation where the government is limping along and the cabinet is denuded while Nawaz works out whether he wants to remain a part of the coalition or not, no doubt still hoping that Asif will join him in the hope that CJ Iftikhar will return to vanquish Musharraf.

Or the epic monument to hope that was built by the lawyers’ movement on the back of the heroic resistance of CJ Iftikhar. All well and good, but few paused to consider if it was advisable to use a supreme court to try and oust a dictator when no one who mattered was listening. A million people outside the president’s front door would have been a more direct, and perhaps successful, attack against Musharraf.

The militancy crisis too has been infected by hope, with disastrous consequences. The politicians are hoping that the army will pull us out of the morass of militancy. The army is hoping that the Americans won’t attack us for our policy of distinguishing between Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban. And Musharraf authored that nonsense policy in the hope that the Pakistani Taliban would be nice to us if we gave them room and board.

There’s more hope. On the economic front, the operative paradigm is based on the hope that wealth will trickle down. It hasn’t, but there is no inclination to fix structural impediments, just the hope that more of the same will work. Now the government is hoping that the world will come to our rescue, banking on the moral hazard that we are too big to fail. It’s good that the Saudis don’t hold grudges — remember how we vilified them for interfering in our affairs when Nawaz was sent back to Jeddah like a chastened schoolboy last September? No one is accusing the Saudis of interference now that they have offered us six billion dollars. For that kind of money, we should be glad that they didn’t ask for our souls.

What would we do without hope? We would get things done. Look at any portrait of Jinnah. Does he look like a man who was lifted to greatness on the wings of hope? His austere demeanour suggests otherwise. BB wasn’t one for hope either. Determinedly working her contacts in Washington she dragged herself from political oblivion to the threshold of power. Yes, the stars may have lined up in her favour as Washington looked to tweak its Pakistan script, but she didn’t wait for luck to come knocking at her door. Make what you will of her politics, but she had a fierce spirit.

The indefatigable Shahbaz does not reek of hope, which is the secret to his success. A methodical, no-frills chief minister, Shahbaz sets about his work and soon produces results. If only other politicians learned from his example, especially Nawaz, the sinner-in-chief when it comes to hope. Shahbaz may look a little unsure nowadays, but anyone would if they didn’t know if they would have a job tomorrow.

So let’s stand up to hope, which for too long has seduced this country and held us in its deadly embrace. What we need is a slap to the face, a bucket of cold water over the head or a kick to the shins — something to make us sit up and take notice of our plight — rather than the generous libations of hope that have dulled our senses. Is there anyone to lead us out of the desert of hope? Step forward, brave one. You will have at least one follower.

cyril.a@gmail.com

An exercise in escapism

THE G8 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan, proved to be an exercise in escapism. The final communiqué issued by the G8 leaders offered little besides the recycled rhetoric of broken promises. Held in the midst of financial, fuel, food and climate crises, the summit failed to recognise the gravity of the situation. The G8 leaders’ posturing will not help solve problems such as hunger and injustice, and the grouping will lose all credibility as a forum for developing viable solutions.

The original grouping of rich industrialised nations, the G7, emerged in the context of the oil crisis of the 1970s. Now after almost thirty years and with the co-opted Russia on board, the G8 faces the challenge of addressing the looming finance, fuel and food crises. The balance sheet of the G8 clearly shows that as an institutionalised process it has failed to provide any meaningful solutions to the problems that confront the world: poverty, war, inequity and injustice.

While the rich countries have managed, with the strategic use of World Bank and IMF conditionalities, to impose the neoliberal policy paradigm on the developing world and poor nations, they have not been able to do anything substantial in terms of dealing with trade inequities, aid diversion and debt traps. In fact, instead of tackling these issues, the G8 leaders have often used their summits to push forward the interests of the rich countries — with lots of window dressing and rhetoric about poverty reduction thrown in of course.

In 2005, they promised to write off debt and double aid to Africa to address issues of poverty, disease and sustainable development. After three years, these leaders stand exposed in the graveyard of broken promises.

Though a new grouping of G5 countries — India, China, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico — now features on the periphery of the summits, it has failed to influence the agenda or outcome of the G8 process. So it is high time the G5 countries pondered the very validity of being on the sidelines of the G8 summit and thereby legitimising the agenda-setting role of the rich and powerful countries.

Instead of playing second fiddle to the American-European axis and a co-opted Japan, it is time for the G5 to explore the option of reviving the G20 process to adopt collective measures aimed at tackling the issues that confront humanity and the world. This will require both imagination and political will on the part of the G5 leaders.

Though the G8 leaders claim that they constitute a grouping of democratic and developed nations, the irony is that theirs is one of the most undemocratic of global processes. They neither discuss key issues in their legislatures nor do they involve citizens or civil society in deciding the agenda for their summit meetings. The public ratings of many leaders, especially George Bush and Yasuo Fukuda, is at their lowest ebb.

The fact that the G8 summits are held in remote luxury resorts shows that the leaders want to be insulated from the people. This year an estimated US$250m was spent by Japan on security alone. The leaders addressed the press through videoconferencing facilities instead of facing the journalists. Why should ‘leaders of the world’ be afraid of people on whose behalf they are supposed to take decisions? Doesn’t it reflect their lack of democratic credentials and bring into question their right to take decisions on behalf of the people of their countries? Authority without accountability and transparency is essentially anti-democratic in its very content and form.

Only three short years after the G8 pledged to “make poverty history” at Gleneagles in 2005, spiralling food and fuel prices are ‘making poverty’ across the globe. The G8 has done nothing to stop it. The ranks of the hungry swelled to 950 million this year and it is estimated that another 750 million are at risk of falling victim to chronic hunger. As many as 1.7 billion people, or one in every four persons in the world, may now lack basic food security. In fact the so-called food crisis is a symptom of a deeper crisis involving the world of finance and the speculative commodity market.

In the last 20 years, under the neoliberal structural adjustment programmes imposed on the developing world by the G8 and the WB/IMF, most marginal farmers and small agricultural producers have been slow poisoned through the systematic withdrawal of support systems and subsidies.

Food prices are rising partly due to the new appetite for biofuel. The corn needed to fill up a car tank with ethanol could feed a hungry person for a year. This in effect makes biofuel the new poison that can undermine the food security of millions of people and steal their food and lives. It is imperative to stop all subsidies for biofuel and declare a moratorium on the diversion of agricultural land to biofuel monocropping.

Though there has been a lot of discussion about climate change, the G8 leaders failed to walk the talk. The G8 countries’ failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is already wreaking havoc on agriculture through severe floods, droughts and rising temperatures. The carbon dioxide emissions from the G8 countries account for up to 40 per cent of total global emissions. And yet only 13 per cent of the world’s population lives in the G8 countries.

Not only are the G8 nations responsible for large-scale pollution, they are also failing to compensate poor countries that are bearing the brunt of the problem. Though the G8 countries have promised that they will reduce emissions by half by 2050, the deadline is too far in the future to be called a commitment to tackle climate change.

So the promise of 2050 is more of an escape act or a stalling tactic rather than a real commitment to act. While the environmental and economic viability of nuclear power generation is increasingly being questioned in the developed word, it seems the G8 is again espousing nuclear power as a response to the climate crisis. When we locate this in the context of the proposed civil nuclear deal between India and the US, it is clear that many G8 countries seem to be more keen to peddle their old reactors in emerging markets.

Hence the Hokkaido G8 summit was more of a regressive step. The final communiqué thoroughly exposed the lack of policy as well as political will and imagination. It also highlighted a moral deficit and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the so-called leaders of the world. So the question arises, is the G8 part of the problem or part of the solution? The Hokkaido summit suggests the former may hold true. The world requires a more accountable, imaginative and multilateral process to address the issues of injustice, poverty and environmental degradation.

The writer is Actionaid’s international director for Asia.

Guessing Iran attack

THE Iranians have clearly concluded that all the American and Israeli threats to attack them are mere bluff. Israel could not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear facilities unless it was willing to drop large numbers of nuclear weapons on Iran. The United States could do the job using only conventional weapons, but in reply Iran could close the Gulf to tanker traffic and cause a global economic crisis. So the US and Israel must be bluffing, unless they are crazy.

This explains the bravado of Iran’s little propaganda show on July 9, when it test-launched a number of ballistic missiles, including one that has the ability to carry a nuclear weapon and the range to strike Israel. This elicited the usual veiled threats of an attack on Iran from both Washington and Jerusalem, but the Iranians don’t believe them any more.

The Shahab-3 missile that the Iranians tested has flown before, and it could indeed reach Israel. However, it lacks a proper guidance system, and probably could not penetrate Israel’s anti-ballistic missile defences. More importantly, as the US National Intelligence Estimate of last December affirmed, Iran has no nuclear weapons, and closed down its programme to develop a nuclear weapons capability in 2003.

The main purpose of the tests was to strengthen the position of hard-liners in domestic Iranian politics. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the organisation that carried them out, wants to keep the confrontation with the United States and its allies alive because it fears that other elements in the regime might bargain away Iran’s right to enrich nuclear fuel for civilian use.

If neither the United States nor Israel intends to attack Iran, this is a cost-free strategy: you win the domestic political struggle and nothing bad happens to you internationally. If you miscalculate, however, you get a war out of it. What are the odds that the Iranians are miscalculating?

President George W. Bush seems to have convinced himself that something must be done about the “Iranian threat” before he goes, but he faces the almost unanimous opposition of the US military and intelligence establishment, who are horrified by the prospect of an unwinnable war against Iran. Last December’s National Intelligence Estimate was a deliberate attempt to undercut the Bush administration’s relentless propaganda about the “Iranian nuclear threat.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s coalition government in Israel might collapse if he chose to attack Iran alone, and the Israeli military are clearly divided on the feasibility of such an attack. Besides, Israel could not do such a thing without Washington’s approval — Israeli aircraft would have to fly through Iraqi airspace, which is under US control — so it all comes back to what Bush decides.

He probably doesn’t know himself yet, and his main concern must be that senior soldiers and spies in Washington would go public to oppose such an adventure. In circumstances like these, I generally consult the International Institute for Discussing Current Affairs Over Dinner, whose advice can be had for the price of a good meal.

Membership is limited to myself, my wife and my many talented children. Like me, they are experts in everything, and one of our most effective analytical tools is an exercise called Setting the Odds. A quorum of the Institute’s membership is currently on holiday in southern Morocco, and we deployed this technique at dinner last night.

I offered my colleagues two-to-one odds that neither the United States nor Israel would attack Iran this year, and they laughed in my face. Their response was the same at odds of four-to-one. At six-to-one one showed a mild interest, but still declined the offer. From which I deduce that for all the huffing and puffing in Washington and Jerusalem, an actual attack on Iran this year is extremely unlikely. The Revolutionary Guards are right.

You may object that this technique lacks scientific rigour. I would reply that so does everybody else’s, and at least you get a nice meal out of this one. Moreover, we have a good track record, mainly because we assume that while individual leaders may lose the plot, large institutions like governments and armed forces are generally more rational in their choices.

There are occasions when whole countries are so traumatised by some shock that truly bizarre decisions become possible — the United States after 9/11 was like that for a while — but this is not one of those times. The US military have been war-gaming possible attacks on Iran since the 1990s, and they have never managed to find a scenario that resulted in a credible US victory.

Some people in the White House have convinced themselves that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow their government as soon as the first American bombs fall, but the professional soldiers in the Pentagon don’t believe in fairy tales. Six-to-one says that there will be no US or Israeli attack on Iran this year.

—Copyright Gwynne Dyer