THE seven-million Muslim community in America is quite apprehensive about Barak Obama’s cold attitude towards them.

By snubbing two women wearing head scarves he recently reinforced mounting scepticism about his promises to be fair and accommodating vis-à-vis the community. Immigrants do not feel so reassured by Obama’s message of ‘hope’ and ‘change’. The Democratic Party’s candidate has not been vocal about his immigration policy. Neither has he articulated his views on a foreign policy sensitive to American Muslims’ concerns or a civil rights position that addresses hate crimes and Islamophobia. He has not spelt out an inclusive road map to American unity.

Unsurprisingly Obama did poorly amongst immigrants during the tough primaries. He faced defeat in states with higher immigrant and Muslim populations, such as California, New York and Texas. Hillary Clinton won convincingly in these states, primarily because of her appeal amongst immigrant and blue-collar voters.

“Obama should visit a mosque. He has repeatedly shown his courage during this campaign; Americans have responded to his intellectual honesty. One of the important things about him is the knowledge his Kenyan and Indonesian experiences have given him of Islam as lived, rather than Islam as turned into monstrous specter. This enables him to break the monolithic, alienating view of a great world religion that is as multifaceted as Judaism or Christianity,” respected columnist Roger Cohen counselled Obama in a June 26 article in the The New York Times.

The image of Muslim Americans in mainstream politics has been portrayed in a poor light and the front pages of magazines like The New Yorker have satirised them unfairly. Many blame the ultra-right media for pushing Obama to the wall in his relations with Muslims by their negative projection. In an unrelenting media campaign, Republicans are portraying Obama as soft on terrorism. Fox-affiliated radio stations are propagating an unmistakable message inferring that Al Qaeda will not attack America before the elections because it wants Obama elected.Such insinuations have made Obama overly on the defensive. Representative Keith Ellison, America’s first Muslim Congressman, was the first prominent Muslim to receive a veiled snub for his enthusiastic support for Obama. Ellison was stopped from canvassing in mosques for Obama by his campaign. Several Muslim groups also report that their requests for meetings with Obama are being ignored.

Obama’s message of change will be incomplete without his embracing American Muslims. He needs to court Muslim voters before they turn away disappointed and dejected. Obama’s stakes are high as political fortunes are changing. Both McCain and Obama are aligning themselves to the popular mood and adjusting their foreign policy outlooks accordingly. Not surprisingly, they share an almost identical vision about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — an assurance to bring down troop levels in Iraq, and building up troop strength in Afghanistan.

The only difference is that their time frames vary. Obama is promising US withdrawal from Iraq within 16 months of his presidency. McCain says he could complete the withdrawal by the end of his first term in office, but strictly depending on the security conditions in Iraq. In fact McCain’s new agility on Iraq is being attributed to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s undeclared endorsement of Obama’s withdrawal timeline.

Obama is also coming to terms with the realities in Pakistan. Like McCain, his approach has become more conciliatory following his visit to Afghanistan. Instead of approving of military strikes on Pakistani territory, Obama now wants Islamabad to destroy militants’ bases on its territory. In his July 20 interview with CBS News, he presented a watered down version of his assessment of Pakistan’s role in the war on terror, displaying greater pragmatism and understanding of ground realities. Obama’s apparent shift on Pakistan has brought him closer to McCain’s advocacy for a stronger partnership with Pakistan.

But the two still differ on strategy. Obama wants to “press Pakistan hard” to act against the militants, while McCain advocates a replay of the strategy adopted to stabilise Iraq’s Al Anbar province where the US armed the local population to fight insurgents. As the debate moves to the specifics, American voters might confront a choice between experience and inexperience for the implementation of competitive but broadly identical foreign policies. Though foreign policy alone will not decide the election, it could influence results in swing and battleground states. Thus both candidates ought to be sympathetic to the concerns of all voters, including the Muslims.

Roger Cohen so rightly sums up the popular Muslim sentiment: “Fear-mongering about Islam is a global industry. It thrives on ignorance. Obama has a unique power to break the cycle, not least by emboldening moderate Muslims to denounce terror. Nothing would do more in the long run for the security of the world.”

John McCain hopes to benefit from the immigrants’ disenchantment with Obama. The Arizona senator carries respect amongst Muslims, not just because of his service to the nation but also his ability to cross community lines on important issues. Muslims welcomed McCain’s decision in May to reject the endorsement of Pastor Rod Parsley of Ohio, who referred to Islam as an “anti-Christ religion”. Bridget McCain, his teenaged daughter adopted from an orphanage in Bangladesh in 1991, has also earned McCain a measure of veneration within the Muslim community. But all this will not ensure massive votes for him because it is feared that McCain’s presidency could be an extension of George Bush’s term in office.

Will Obama break his silence on his relations with American Muslims and lay the foundations of an all-inclusive America by bringing them into the mainstream, or will he offer the Muslim voting bloc to John McCain on a silver platter? Or will both the discerning candidates discourage Muslims until they are pushed out of the political mainstream into the files of great American tragedies?

The writer is a US-based journalist.

mjehangir@aol.com

PRESIDENT Bush observed recently that the single most important issue on the agenda of the next American president will be Pakistan, ahead of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The presumptive nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties agree with this assessment.

Seven years on, the top leaders of Al Qaeda are still at large, the Taliban are resurgent and radicalism is on the rise. Both presidential candidates have concluded that the war on terror is not going well. Both are entertaining proposals for sending more troops into Afghanistan and, yes, possibly into Waziristan.

While there may be some merit in raising troop levels in Afghanistan, sending them into Waziristan would be tantamount to invading Pakistan. It is difficult to imagine how it would be anything other than an unmitigated disaster.

In the days following 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan and deposed a widely disliked regime. However, as the evidence of collateral damage surfaced, there was an upsurge in anti-American sentiment among radical Pakistanis. However, anti-Americanism did not stay confined to the radicals.

In the years that followed, continued US support for an increasingly unpopular general-turned-president led to the rise of anti-American sentiment even among moderate Pakistanis. Today, 83 per cent of Pakistanis would like to see Musharraf removed from office but US support for Musharraf remains firm. Increasingly critical voices are being raised against US policies even by senior military officials in Pakistan ever since a US attack killed several Pakistani soldiers.

How did we arrive at this juncture? To understand the answer, we have to view US-Pakistan ties through the long lens of history. Whenever the White House has been occupied by a Republican president, it has often been the case that the President House in Islamabad has been occupied by the army chief.

This happened first during the Eisenhower administration, was echoed in the Nixon administration, happened again in the Reagan administration and is happening now under the Bush administration.

Massive arms supplies to the Pakistani military in the mid-1950s were the primary reason that Gen Ayub was able to declare martial law in 1958. Sure, the political leaders had been playing musical chairs since the early deaths of Jinnah and Liaquat. But had the democratic process not been disrupted, it would eventually have yielded a robust polity.

Ayub violated his own constitution in 1969 when he handed over power to his army chief, Yahya. Two years later, Yahya refused to hand over power to the party that won an absolute majority in parliament. This was no surprise since he had earlier declared his intention to rule for 14 years. The ensuing civil war, which pitted 45,000 troops against 75 million disenchanted citizens, was — to quote Henry Kissinger — “worse than a crime, it was a blunder”.

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Zia became a hero in the West, no longer an evil hangman in uniform. The US provided F-16s to the Pakistani air force and the CIA funnelled billions of dollars to the mujahideen through the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

Mauled badly by Stingers, the Red Army withdrew in 1989. But this was a pyrrhic victory for Pakistan, to whom it bequeathed a guns-and-drugs culture. During his visit to South Asia in 2000, President Clinton snubbed Pakistan’s fourth coup-maker, Pervez Musharraf, when he made a five-hour stopover in Islamabad on the heels of a five-day visit to India. After 9/11, by pledging “unstinted cooperation” in the war on terror and making a U-turn on the Taliban, Musharraf became Bush’s best friend.

He moved 80,000 troops into the area bordering Afghanistan and the ISI turned over hundreds of suspects to the US. But things nosedived last year when a lawyer’s movement forced him to suspend the constitution and fire the full bench of the Supreme Court. In the following elections, Musharraf’s party was defeated decisively but he did not step down.

The opposition parties formed a coalition government but failed to honour their electoral pledge to restore the judges. Asif Zardari, unelected to any seat and holding no government post, took on the mantle of politician-in-chief.

Earlier he had accused the military government of murdering his wife and talked of presidential impeachment. Now he speaks of the need to move on.

The US brought tremendous pressure on the coalition government through Zardari not to pursue the restoration of judges or the impeachment of the president. Senior US diplomats and flag officers paid frequent visits to their Pakistani counterparts with the same message: Don’t rock the boat.

Buttressing these sentiments, Henry Kissinger wrote that it was never a good idea to hold elections in unstable polities such as Pakistan’s. Ironically, at the same time, US Secretary of State Condi Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs that every good thing that had happened in Pakistan since 9/11 was because of the US commitment to democracy.

To the contrary, the Taliban have opened a new franchise in Pakistan. During the past 12 months or so, they have mounted a series of increasingly well-coordinated and lethal attacks on both civil and military targets, taken over the Red Mosque in Islamabad and almost seized Peshawar. In a single firefight on July 13 in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, they killed nine American soldiers.

The increased militancy of the Taliban comes at a time when most Pakistanis see hypocrisy in US policies toward the country. It is time for the US to make a U-turn. What Rory Stewart says in the current issue of Time magazine about Afghanistan is valid even more so for Pakistan. More troops are not the answer, since bombs and missiles have only exacerbated the problem. For every person who is killed, 10 rise in his or her place.

For decades, the US has focused its energies on developing one institution and on propping up one man in Pakistan. Only failure unrelenting has flowed from this policy. But should the US invade Pakistan the failure will be compounded.

The next US president should emphasise human development and focus on the building of schools and hospitals, the digging of wells and the building of roads, the creation of jobs and the provision of food.

This will enable the US to reinvent its image with the 164 million Pakistanis who are not in uniform. The ensuing goodwill may help turn around the war on terror.

The writer is an associate of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford.

Faruqui@pacbell.net

LITERATURE on the nuclear thresholds of individual nuclear weapons states is very limited and insufficient to undertake comparisons.

The 2005 US Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations states: “If the US clearly defined conditions under which it would use nuclear weapons, others might infer another set of circumstances in which the US would not use nuclear weapons.”

According to the Russian draft Military Doctrine released in 1999 and approved in 2000, “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction against it and (or) its allies, as well as in response to large-scale aggression utilising conventional weapons”. An all-encompassing Russian escalation strategy does not spare any nuclear power. “For the nuclear deterrence strategy as a means of ensuring Russia’s national security to be effective, each of the other nuclear states should be vulnerable to Russia’s nuclear forces under any conflict scenario.”

For Pakistan, the only referenced account of its nuclear threshold has been cited in a 2002 report by the Landau Network. In this document, the director general of the Strategic Plans Division of Pakistan’s National Command Authority is said to have outlined four hypothetical threshold scenarios in which Pakistan could contemplate the use of nuclear weapons. At the time these thresholds were as follows: if “India attacks Pakistan and conquers a large part of its territory (space threshold)[;] India destroys a large part either of its land or air forces (military threshold)[;] India proceeds to the economic strangling of Pakistan[; and if] India pushes Pakistan into political destabilisation or creates a large scale [sic] internal subversion in Pakistan”.

Though these nuclear thresholds are not absolute, and may have been part of the signalling by Pakistan during the 2001-02 stand-off, they do provide researchers with an avenue for an academic discourse. In addition to the four thresholds listed above, two more clearly need to be added — technological and diplomatic. The technological threshold could be invoked if the adversary acquires a qualitative or quantitative edge over Pakistan’s nuclear capability to match or counter the enemy (e.g. sophisticated means of delivery, mini-nukes or a ballistic missile defence system) coupled with aggressive provocation such as threats of annihilating Pakistan. The diplomatic threshold could be invoked in the event of provocation or signalling by the adversary that is aimed at mobilising the international community into forming a coalition of the willing against Pakistan.

This past decade has witnessed the triumph of Pakistan’s strategic ambiguity with regard to its nuclear red lines, the alert status of its strategic forces, its take on deployment strategies, second-strike capability, nuclear use doctrine and, most importantly, the ‘minimum’ number needed to ensure credible nuclear deterrence. A decade later, the most significant of all remains the adversary’s perception of Pakistan’s capability. Pakistan is perceived as a risk-acceptant state and that worked well in our favour in both the 1999 Kargil conflict and the 2001-02 stand-off with India. Signalling from time to time will remain relevant in terms of sustaining the credibility of deterrence.

While strategic ambiguity remains important, explicit political will is essential to the credibility of deterrence. Pakistan needs to identify the space between conventional war/low-intensity conflict and an all-out nuclear war, thereby providing some clarity regarding its likely threshold. For this, Pakistan will have to either work on a quantitative conventional force build-up or qualitative conventional force modernisation to express our resolve that conventional offences will be met with conventional defence — and that nuclear arms are weapons of last resort, when deterrence fails.

Most analysts believe that Pakistan did not signal the resolve to fight an all-out conventional war with India during the Kargil and 2001-02 crises and resorted to the threat of using nuclear weapons much too soon. Thus Pakistan was seen as a state with an appetite for a low threshold, thereby reducing the possibility of a political solution to the problem.

According to an Indian think tank, India’s conventional ‘Cold Start’ doctrine “seeks to disarm Pakistan’s nuclear ‘first use’ option through the possibility of a nuclear exchange restricted to Pakistani soil.” This obviously makes India more “venturesome”.

Gradual escalation through appropriate statements at appropriate intervals is thus needed for crisis stability. A decade after overt nuclearisation, this ambiguity that now vacillates somewhere between a low or high nuclear threshold — because of inadequate signalling in crisis situations — needs to make way for an unambiguous escalation strategy signalling a firm resolve that no gains can be secured below the threshold.

Furthermore, the illusion needs to be put to rest that India will be in a position to gain either a conventional or nuclear edge over Pakistan because no doctrine (Indian or any other) has, or ever will have, the capacity to restrict a nuclear exchange to Pakistani soil. Once detonated, nuclear weapons do not discriminate between adversaries and geographical boundaries.

Having an effective and workable operational strategy to ensure that weapons will work when needed is an essential part of effective deterrence. This strengthening of deterrence will enhance strategic stability.

The writer is a doctoral candidate in defence and strategic studies at Quaid-i-Azam University.

rabiakhter@gmail.com

SAY WHAT you like about China, its human rights record, or even the karmic implications of its policy towards Tibet; you can’t fault the country’s ability to put on a show. On August 8, Beijing’s new National Stadium will host what’s being confidently billed as the greatest public spectacle in history of mankind: the opening ceremony of the 29th Olympic Games.

There will, we are told, be bicycles, flying acrobats, dancing dragons, and giant pandas. For three hours, a crowd of 100,000 will be entertained by more performers than the entire cast of Ben-Hur. Between two and three billion will watch on television, and seats are currently changing hands for between (pounds sterling)5,000 and (pounds sterling)15,000 on eBay. According to the show’s director, a Chinese film-maker called Zhang Yimou, proceedings will simmer towards their climax at 11pm, when 35,000 fireworks will turn the “bird’s nest” stadium into a cauldron of pink, white, orange and red. Finally, a barrage of pyrotechnics of an intensity last seen at the Somme will fill the night sky with 2008 smiling faces, representing the cheery people of today’s world.

The event, Yimou said following last week’s dress rehearsal, will be “technically very demanding”. Tens of thousands of performers, who have all signed confidentiality agreements, are “praying for good weather.” And it is hoped that local restaurants will remember that all those dogs they’ve just been forced to take off the menu should be safely locked indoors.

Yet for all the razzmatazz, one of the biggest stars of this Greatest Show on Earth will be invisible to the world. His name is Ric Birch, and he’ll most likely be watching from the sidelines with a security pass around his neck. It will bear the Mandarin equivalent of “Access All Areas” and quietly announce a pertinent truth: Ric Birch is the most important Olympian you’ve probably never heard of.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Birch has produced, directed or otherwise pulled strings on the majority of memorable ceremonies for major global events. He was at Los Angeles in 1984, Barcelona in 1992, and Sydney in 2000; he did the Commonwealth Games in 1982, and the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006. His firm, Spectak Productions, has offices in Los Angeles, Milan and Sydney and bills itself: “the world’s pre-eminent major events producer”.

This year, Birch, a low-profile, middle-aged Australian, is consultant to Beijing, and (though Yimou is its public face) is the man who, according to those in the know, really masterminded the coming ceremony. He is first among equals in the high-stakes, high-pressure world of superstar event impresarios, alongside such visionaries as Yves Pepin, Peter Minshall, and Don Mischer.

Though far from famous (their trade is below-the-radar and occasionally secretive) these four men — often working in collaboration with each other as well as with local organisers — have brought to the world some of the most memorable spectacles of the past 25 years. For them nothing, no feat of synchronised human theatre or dance routine involving tens of thousands of amateur volunteers, has ever been impossible.

Sometimes they work together; occasionally alone. Their job is to provide technical expertise, and big event experience to assist the event’s lead visionary, who is often a film director or musician from the host city.

In Barcelona, Birch and Minshall recreated a map of the Mediterranean Sea on the floor of the Olympic Stadium, using costumes with a moving collar that shimmered in the afternoon sunshine. With Mischer, they built an enormous Temple of Zeus in Atlanta, from which Celine Dion belted out a string of hits. Four years later, Mischer and Birch turned Sydney’s athletics arena into a virtual beach, before recreating the landmark Sydney Harbour Bridge in sparklers.

Few individuals now have the creative expertise to pull off an Olympic opening ceremony. And if you haven’t “done” an Olympics, then your firm won’t ever get the really, really lucrative commissions, like being asked to mastermind America’s Superbowl half-time shows. With every passing Olympics, the stakes get bigger. Barcelona cost (pounds sterling)10m, Atlanta (pounds sterling)15m, Sydney spent (pounds sterling)20m, and Greece more than (pounds sterling)35m. China (cost unknown, but rumoured to be more than (pounds sterling)100m) is faced with the prospect of being expected to blow all of them out of the water.

Minshall, who hails from the Carribbean, is a costume designer who honed his trade as creative director of the carnival in his native Trinidad. Pepin is a technical whizz. He projects cinematic images on public buildings and monuments, or drapes them in mist and lasers. Once, he turned the Eiffel Tower in Paris, his own capital city, into a soaring inferno.

Mischer is expert in creating a spectacle that actually manages to reflect the host city’s desire to portray itself in a sympathetic light.

For years, the opening ceremony of the Olympics involved athletes parading around a half-empty stadium, before a torch was lit, to mild applause. The turning point came in 1984, in the show-business capital of the world, Los Angeles.

In Beijing on August 8, in a year where international politics is threatening to overshadow sport, organisers will therefore be hoping that the world is again dazzled by the Olympic ideal, and will once more allow itself a sharp intake of breath.

— © The Independent