STATES are supposed to wield legitimate monopoly over the means of coercion in the territory under their control. That’s what makes them states.

In Pakistan, however, Taliban militants have successfully challenged and displaced state authority in many parts of Fata and even some settled districts of the NWFP. While the image of a state collapsing before marauding Taliban militants might be far-fetched, it is not a good sign when they can routinely kidnap and slaughter security personnel with virtual impunity and openly threaten the NWFP provincial government with dire consequences if it does not call off military operations against them. And their actions across the border in Afghanistan are creating grounds for US threats of unilateral action in the tribal areas.

What is the federal government doing about all this? In view of the prime minister’s forthcoming visit to Washington, the coalition principals’ meeting held on July 23 expressed the government’s resolve to tackle militancy through political means backed by the threat of military force. But we have heard that before without much concrete progress on the ground. No doubt suicide attacks inside Pakistan have decreased in frequency since the civilian government assumed power in March. But then the militants have shown that they retain the right to strike any time, anywhere in Pakistan.

Cross-border attacks in Afghanistan have also reportedly intensified in recent months. With 45 fatalities, June 2008 proved the deadliest month for US-led forces since the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. Facing intense external pressure to plug the flow of militants into Afghanistan, the government designated the army chief as “the principal for application of military effort”, and ceded him the authority to command “the Frontier Corps and other law enforcement agencies for military operations”, and to “decide on the quantum, composition and positioning of military efforts”.

Giving the military an autonomous and expansive internal security mission only seemed to belie the government’s earlier claim that it was pursuing a coordinated political-cum-military anti-terror strategy in the tribal areas. Brute military force was tried in Fata and it failed, period. Whether it was a problem of capacity or strategy, or both, the military’s anti-terror operations carried out under American pressure did not achieve their main objective of flushing out militants from their hideouts. What is clear is that heavy use of force alienated the local populations which only helped fuel militancy.

The use of force in fact cost the security forces dearly in the form of deadly suicide attacks inside heavily guarded military installations. When faced with heavy losses, the military haphazardly struck peace deals brokered by the JUI-F with the militants. While these deals typically bypassed the civil administration, they achieved little in terms of peace.

Under the terms of the North Waziristan pact of September 2006, for instance, the government ceased military operations, released militants, returned their weapons, removed army check posts and agreed to allow foreigners to stay in the tribal areas if they renounced violence. The militants pledged that they would not challenge the state’s writ, and cease attacks on Pakistani troops as well as cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. They obviously had no intention of sticking to their side of the bargain and swiftly denied the presence of foreigners in the area. In the meantime, they continued to run Taliban-style parallel mini-states and gradually spread their influence to other tribal agencies and the rest of the NWFP. That much we know.

On its part, the Bush administration has made a mess of things in Afghanistan and, by corollary, in Fata. The administration’s diversion of military and intelligence resources from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003 allowed Al Qaeda and their Taliban and other allies to regroup, reorganise, recruit and train for the battle in Afghanistan. As America’s trusted ally, the military under Musharraf cooperated with the US in capturing Al Qaeda fugitives amid allegations that it was concurrently patronising at least the Afghan Taliban as an insurance policy against arch rival India’s growing influence in Afghanistan.

With the Taliban insurgency raging, Afghan president Hamid Karzai has been repeatedly pointing fingers at Pakistan for what largely appear to be his US-backed government’s governance and security failures. Karzai has accused the ISI of orchestrating the July 7 car bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul which left nearly 60 dead. The Indian government too has alleged that “elements in Pakistan” are behind the Kabul blast. Neither has yet furnished any evidence to back up their claims. In turn, Pakistan has blamed India for using its consulates along the Pak-Afghan border for stirring trouble in Fata (and Balochistan), again without providing any evidence.

As the India-Pakistan rivalry reaches deep into Afghanistan, it will not be surprising if attempts continue to deny India a footing in Pakistan’s ‘backyard’. There is no denying that we live in a tough neighbourhood. But because it is devoid of any serious input from the civilian political leadership or civil society, our national security policy has traditionally reflected the military’s deep organisational biases towards India rather than our broad economic and/or foreign policy priorities. But it is not the Indians alone that scare us. We are told that once the Americans are done with Iran, or even before that, they are coming for us. Their plan, apparently, is to slice up and denuclearise the only Muslim nuclear state. These are not facts, at least not as yet.

But here is an undeniable fact to consider: the tribal areas of Pakistan are being used by foreign and local militants to launch cross-border attacks on Afghan and Nato forces. And Pakistan is under international obligations to deny the use of its territory to terrorists. UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and hence legally binding, directs member states to “deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts” and “prevent those who finance, plan, facilitate or commit terrorist acts from using their respective territories for those purposes against other States or their citizens”.One can only welcome the stated determination of the coalition partners to disallow the use of Pakistani territory for cross-border militancy. But actions tend to speak louder than words. Only if the government implements its avowed policy can it reverse the perception that it has passed the buck to the military.

The writer, a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University, is conducting doctoral research in Pakistan.

as2552@columbia.edu

THERE has been a lot of PPP-bashing of late. Long on rhetoric, short on delivery, runs the general refrain. Granted that we in civil society are both impatient and volatile, it seems a little unfair to condemn the party on the basis of an initial 100-day performance, especially when measured against the thousand-day abortions of the now piously fault-finding PML-Q.

The recent White Paper notwithstanding, it has to be said that good governance is not grafted on a system but built into it. External diktat and historical compulsions do not necessarily add up to political failure. Nine years of maladministration along with certain harsh global realities have led to the impasse we find ourselves facing today. At the same time it would be ingenuous to imagine that politics is other than an exercise in bad faith or that cronyism is not a given of our ethos. Nobody including the ‘king’s men’ has been above this.

However, cronyism is not really at issue. The government is largely being taken to task for its failure to deliver economically even though many of our ills in this sphere would seem to have predated the PPP’s advent to power. The decision to reduce subsidies on wheat, oil, electricity and fertiliser by more than a quarter has, for instance, been seen as especially misguided whereas it was in fact long overdue. PPP detractors have not reckoned with the fact that, despite its commitment to its founding slogan of roti, kapra aur makan, it was not ready to go along with the Aziz-led team’s fudging of economic indicators, being quite prepared instead to take on the common man for his own long-term good. What they seem to have failed to recognise and give credit for was that there had been a salutary departure from the party’s earlier populist spin in the direction of transparency and realism.

Of course, the government is hemmed in and consequently hamstrung by fundamental disadvantages which political analysts tend to identify a little ungenerously. When elections took place on Feb 18 the nation was overcome by an extraordinary euphoria. A new day had dawned. A democratic dispensation at last seemed to be within reach. A previously unthinkable and curiously reassuring coalition between the country’s two erstwhile rivals, the PPP and the PML-N, came into being. An idealism which had never been witnessed before was in evidence. The Bhurban Declaration was signed and the one sticking point — that involving the restoration of the pre-Nov 3 judiciary — dividing the two parties seemed finally to have been smoothed away.

However, all that was gradually dissipated. The Bhurban Declaration was to all practical purposes scuppered by the PPP, giving way to a pervasive gloom. Why? The most commonly cited explanation pertains to the US-sponsored, NRO-based accommodation between Asif Ali Zardari and Gen Musharraf. If such an arrangement indeed exists, then it would have to be underpinned by an obtuseness and a narrowness of vision that one would be hard put to it to attribute to the astute PPP co-chairperson.

It would presuppose an assumption on his part that a radical contradiction of power at the top — or a continuous disjunction between authoritarianism and democracy — could in some way benefit him when it would be more likely to achieve the reverse. Let us take it then that there is more to Zardari than meets the eye, that he is a natural survivor and that his apparent dilatoriness over what has come to be known as the ‘judges issue’ is part of a well thought out strategy of attrition. He is, in other words, seeking to consolidate himself while playing for time.

There is a relevant caveat here though. Besides the fact that he is engaged in a form of political Russian roulette, time may not be altogether on his side and be favouring the more ‘conscionable’ and rooted Nawaz Sharif instead.

Whatever the case, the overall impression of the PPP government affording a purely token presence or going through the motions of governance is all but universal. There are two possible reasons for this. One is that while political change seemed to come about in the wake of elections, a disquieting gap between expectancy and fulfilment nevertheless persisted since the nation was never actually released from the chill embrace of the status quo.

The next has to do with the war on terror. This is an area with its own peculiar obscurities and opacities which no merely well-intentioned policy of ‘dialogue’ such as envisaged by Zardari after his electoral victory was going to succeed in encompassing. The appropriate protocols had long since been in place and there was to prove to be no scope for innovative headway here.

As a result, such utopian ventures as the Swat peace agreement were destined to fail from the very outset just as the operation in Bara in Khyber Agency was little more than an exercise in counter-terrorist orientation for our untutored democratic incumbents. The ‘bargaining chip’ idea had now to be accepted for what it was by these newcomers to the scene. So whereas first the PPP government was simply at sea in this particular context, today it stands effectively marginalised by our far more pragmatic military.

If, as a result, our sovereignty has become faintly porous, there is precious little we can do about it. At the same time, we can be scanning the failed states index which places Pakistan as ninth among the qualifying states in this category for 2008 and asking ourselves a few questions.

Are the criteria of the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine that conducted the survey on which these findings are based just societal and/or economic? Or are they, at some level, also inevitably systemic? And, if so, would that not then mean that the legal fraternity struggling for the restoration of the consensual 1973 Constitution and the reinstatement of the deposed judges is right after all?

THE future of the Arctic will be less white wilderness, more black gold, a new report on oil reserves in the High North has signalled this week. The first-comprehensive assessment of oil and gas resources north of the Arctic Circle, carried out by American geologists, reveals that underneath the ice, the region may contain as much as a fifth of the world’s undiscovered yet recoverable oil and natural gas reserves.

This includes 90 billion barrels of oil, enough to supply the world for three years at current consumption rates, or to supply America for 12, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas, which is equal to about a third of the world’s known gas reserves.

The significance of the report is that it puts firm figures for the first time on the hydrocarbon riches which the five countries surrounding the Arctic — the US, Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark (through its dependency, Greenland) — have been eyeing up for several years.

It is the increasingly rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice, which last September hit a new record summer low, and of land-based ice on Greenland, which is opening up the possibility of the once frozen wasteland providing a natural resources and minerals bonanza, not to mention a major new transport route — last year the fabled North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the top of Canada was navigable for the first time.

Scientists consider that global warming is responsible for the melting, with the high latitudes of the Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Environmentalists see this as a massive danger, with the melting of Greenland’s land-based ice adding to sea-level rise, while the melting of the sea ice uncovers a dark ocean surface that absorbs far more of the sun’s heat than the ice did, and thus acts as a “positive feedback” reinforcing warming. The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet has accelerated so dramatically that it is triggering earthquakes for the first time, with movements of gigantic pieces of ice creating shockwaves with a magnitude of up to three.

Conservationists are also concerned about the threat to the Arctic’s unique ecosystems and wildlife.

The Arctic countries’ governments, on the other hand, see it as a massive opportunity, and are already positioning themselves to claim stakes in the seabed of the Arctic Ocean, if — as many climate scientists now believe will happen — it becomes ice-free in summer within a couple of decades.

Just a year ago, to much media fanfare, the Russians planted a flag on the seabed some 2.5 miles beneath the ice at the North Pole, and dispatched a nuclear-powered icebreaker to map a subsea link between the Pole and Siberia, as part of an effort to circumvent a UN convention limiting resource claims beyond 200 miles offshore.

Canada said earlier this month that it plans to counter the Russian overture with “a very strong claim” to Arctic exploration rights.

This week’s oil and gas study, carried out by the US Geological Survey, does not raise the national competitive stakes appreciably as it reveals that most of the reserves are lying close to the shore, within the territorial jurisdiction of the countries concerned. Much of the oil is off Alaska; much of the natural gas off the Russian coastline. There appear to be only small reserves under the unclaimed heart of the Arctic.

“Before we can make decisions about our future use of oil and gas and related decisions about protecting endangered species, native communities and the health of our planet, we need to know what’s out there,” said the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) director, Mark Myers, in releasing the report.

The geologists studied maps of subterranean rock formations across the 8.2 million square miles above the Arctic Circle to find areas with characteristics similar to oil and gas finds in other parts of the world. The study also took into account the age, depth and shape of rock formations in judging whether they are likely to contain oil.

More than half of the undiscovered oil resources are estimated to occur in just three geologic provinces: Arctic Alaska (30 billion barrels), the Amerasia Basin (9.7 billion barrels) and the East Greenland Rift Basins (8.9 billion barrels). More than 70 per cent of the undiscovered natural gas is likely to be in three provinces: the West Siberian Basin (651 tcf), the East Barents Basins (318 tcf) and Arctic Alaska (221 tcf), the USGS said. The study took in all areas north of latitude 66.56 degrees north, and included only reserves that could be tapped using existing techniques. Experimental or unconventional prospects such as oil shale, gas hydrates and coal-bed methane were not included in the assessment.

The 90 billion barrels of oil expected to be in the Arctic in total are more than all the known reserves of Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Mexico combined, and could meet current world oil demand of 86.4 million barrels a day for almost three years. But the Arctic’s oil is not intended to replace all the supplies in the rest of world. It would last much longer by boosting available supplies and possibly reducing US reliance on imported crude, if America developed the resources.

The report did not include an estimate for how long it might take to bring the reserves to markets, but it would clearly be a substantial period. Offshore fields in the Gulf of Mexico and west Africa can take a decade or longer to begin pumping oil. But clearly, the massive amount of industrial infrastructure necessary to find the oil, extract it, and transport it to where it is wanted will come with a very considerable environmental cost. Senior US oil executives are urging the relaxation of prohibitions against offshore drilling, including much of Alaska, although Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress rejected President George Bush’s effort on July 14 to end a 25-year moratorium on drilling in most coastal waters. But change may well be coming now.

Frank O’Donnell, president of the US environmental group Clean Air Watch, said not only do polar bears and other wildlife within the Arctic Circle face losing their habitat due to global warming, they would be hurt by companies searching for oil.

— © The Independent