War on terror & census

A COUPLE of weeks ago 18 children, all teenage boys, were reported missing from their homes in a small town in the restive Swat district. The children went to their seminaries in the morning and did not return home until late in the evening.

The distraught parents reported the matter to the authorities and the news was splashed in the media. One of the fathers was pictured showing a photo of his two sons, concern written on his old, wrinkled face. These boys went missing at the same time as two girls at a seminary in one of the southern districts of the NWFP also disappeared. The two sisters were recovered by their father with great difficulty. They had been captured by some people who reportedly intended to train them as suicide bombers.

These are the two latest incidents of their kind in the fast worsening law and order situation in the country, in the Frontier in particular. A number of suicide incidents during the last couple of years have been linked to young children. Television pictures of the militants also show a majority of the combatants being young children. Most of these fighters have at some stage been the students of religious seminaries and have successfully undergone rigorous indoctrination.

The extreme views these gullible children hold on religious issues will shock even their strongest supporters. Of immediate concern is the identity of these thousands of youngsters, their parentage and the regions to which they belong. Given the wide television coverage they have received, by now at least some of them should have been exposed. Why didn’t some of the parents come forward and express concern about the safety of their young ones? This should ring alarm bells.

Where does the government figure in this conundrum? The authorities woke up to an unexploded time bomb in its backyard after 9/11. They attempted to register and regulate the seminaries. By then it was too late, or so it was thought. The move was immediately branded as one motivated and orchestrated by the United States. The religio-political parties doubted official motives and threatened to pre-empt the move by provoking religious sentiments. The government dithered and the issue remained in limbo.

The critics of the so-called reforms did not raise their voice out of any sympathy for the inmates of countless seminaries. They had their own axe to grind. The students were to form their front lines in their march to the corridors of power and in the worst-case scenario act as cannon fodder. It needs just a visit or two to a seminary to observe the pathetic conditions that those milling crowds of students, nay the destitute, are languishing in. They go through rigorous courses not easier than those taught in any university of the world to find themselves ending up dependent on charity, or at the most competing for one of the very few posts of low-paid seminary teachers or that of a prayer leader in a mosque owned by the Auqaf department.

The government failed to wrest the initiative from the clergy by not taking the public into confidence. The government seems to be repeating this mistake by not enlisting popular support in the fight against militants. A dangerous situation was created by confusing the issue of registration with that of changes in the syllabi. It did not strike the right chord and resultantly met an anticipated end.This lapse of judgment and foresight cost the government dearly in Swat. People with a deep knowledge of Swat seriously doubt the domicile of the insurgents. Incontrovertible proof existed of how Swat would become a battleground in the chaos that was expected. There were at one time more than 50,000 unregistered motor vehicles plying on the roads in the six districts of Malakand and the provincially administered Malakand tribal area.

Such vehicles are still there on the ridiculous ground that the Customs Act has not been extended to the area. The government’s indecision is attributed to the involvement of vested interests. Had this not been the case wouldn’t the government have seized the opportunity presented by the current military action to at least get the unregistered vehicles off the roads?

Yet another opportunity, and a crucial one at that, will be presented to the government in the form of the forthcoming national census. The chief census commissioner has already announced that all arrangements have been finalised for the count which according to the constitution must take place every 10 years. The census was last held in 1998.

These are not ordinary times for Pakistan. The entire country is at war with an invisible and extremely unpredictable enemy and the whole edifice of the country is threatened. The census commissioner would thus be required to gear up for what should be an extraordinary exercise with extraordinary attention to detail. Every house, shop, business premises, mosque, church and dharamsala and every standing structure whether built of concrete or mud must be counted through the most scientific methods. The government must enforce fully the existing birth and death registration laws.

The present situation is not a temporary phenomenon and calls for a long-term strategy to deal with the fallout of the war. The enemy will keep reappearing after every drubbing it receives. The count is crucial for it is no longer required only for the announcement of the National Finance Commission award. The census document must be shared with the law enforcement agencies down to the level of the respective police stations to enable them to weed out the aliens. According to some estimates there are over 10,000 foreigners actively engaged in militancy. How could such a large number evade the prying eyes of the pursuing agencies if the pursuit is earnest?

The government should also come down hard on non-registered vehicles and must urgently extend official cover to the seminaries, not with the idea of keeping a tab on their inmates but with the resolve of providing a respectable livelihood to those passing out of these institutions. Reforms could come later.

Finally Pakhtuns living in Pakistan and Afghanistan will have to read the writing on the wall vis-à-vis the Durand Line. Reality must overtake emotions. The areas adjoining the line are no longer manageable even with the help of state-of-the-art satellite surveillance. The mayhem on the line has cost the Pakhtuns heavily. The Durand Line will have to be fenced and let the fencing be done by the one most willing to do it, which must be the United States. Let the stigma be washed off and the dirty linen hung on the line once and for all.

Identifying the donors

HOW can the proposal for a $40bn five-year programme to be funded jointly by the community of donors and by the Pakistani government be turned into reality?

The first step needed is the identification of the donors who should be approached jointly by Islamabad and an agency that should take the lead in this effort. The obvious choice would be the World Bank that has a record of helping Pakistan deal with some very difficult situations in the past. The example that comes to mind is the role it played almost half a century ago when it convened a group of donors and persuaded them to provide funding for the large Indus water replacement works project. Billions of dollars were placed by the donors in a special fund administered by the World Bank.

The circumstances then were somewhat similar to those Pakistan faces today. On both occasions Pakistan faced a serious threat to its integrity as a state. In the early fifties India had threatened to stop the flow of water into Pakistan from the eastern rivers of the Indus system. It could do that because Lord Louis Mountbatten at the very last minute had caused the border that was to partition Punjab to be drawn in a way that the canal head works fell on the Indian side. That Britain’s last viceroy had done that was always suspected by Pakistan. It has now been established by a number of historians that that indeed was the case as they study the partition records that have been declassified by the authorities in London.

The Pakistani government headed by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan treated the Indian threat extremely seriously. The prime minister appeared in the balcony of his Karachi house and said that his young country would go to war if India went ahead and stopped the flow of water into Pakistan. The world took note of the situation and mustered enough will to finance a multi-billion-dollar programme based on dividing the Punjab rivers between Pakistan and India. The donor-assisted programme successfully dealt with the threat of war. The Indus Water Treaty has stood the test of time. It survived two wars India and Pakistan fought after the treaty was signed.

Pakistan is now once again at the centre of another situation that threatens to explode into a nasty conflict if the world does not act urgently and imaginatively. If the Pakistani economy is allowed to seriously slow down, if the suffering of the poor increases palpably, and if the economic gap among the provinces widens further, the only winners will be the extremists who are gathering strength in the tribal areas and in the Frontier province.

Economic stabilisation and economic growth must be an important component of the strategy that needs to be put in place to deal with the worsening security situation. The saner elements in Washington’s policy circles have begun to recognise that providing economic assistance to Pakistan must be an important part of the approach the world must adopt to address the difficulties Islamabad now faces.

The donors who will be prepared to help Pakistan include not only the three large development banks who have been active in the country — the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Islamic Development Bank — but also a number of bilateral donors who have a strong interest in not letting the country’s economic situation deteriorate to the point where political chaos would ensue. Among these countries are the United States, China, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE.

After a programme of economic reform and development has been worked out in terms of clearly laying down a strategy that the country must pursue to be able to receive this large infusion of capital, and after a group of potential donors has been identified, the next step would be to convene a donors’ pledging conference aimed at distributing the effort among the countries and the development agencies that have been closely associated with Pakistan. Such pledging sessions were the norm some years ago. Called the Aid to Pakistan Consortium, they were held every year (mostly in Paris) and were chaired by the World Bank. The staff work was done by Pakistan’s Planning Commission with some support by the World Bank. The consortium was replaced by the Pakistan Development Forum which is convened every year in Islamabad and is chaired by Pakistan’s finance minister. The PDF is not a pledging session; it is a discussion forum in which the Pakistani team presents its development strategy for comments by the donors.

These meetings have lost their significance since they don’t discuss concrete plans to which the donor community would indicate specific commitments. It may be appropriate to go back to the consortium type of arrangement in which the Government of Pakistan would be required to submit detailed annual development plans within the context of the five-year effort proposed by me in this series of articles. The annual plan would be more than a collection of donor-funded projects. It would focus on government policies aimed at bringing about structural reforms whose absence has continued to adversely affect the performance of the economy.

The next step would be to set up a monitoring mechanism for overseeing the implementation of the five-year effort. The donor community should have a significant presence in this mechanism. There is a long record of poor implementation by Pakistan of large donor-assisted programmes. The Social Action Programme in the nineties is the most recent example of a wasted effort that involved billions of dollars provided by the donor community. The money was wasted since the country did not have strong enough institutions to make use of it in an efficient way. The funds provided for educational and health activities were largely squandered. The promised results did not materialise.

The same can not be allowed to happen again. Included in the programme should be the strengthening of the Planning Commission in Islamabad and the planning and development departments in the four provinces. Since Pakistan at present does not have the skills needed for developing large multi-sectoral programmes and implementing them, these skills should be provided by the donors while domestic capacity gets built.

The crisis Turkey’s AKP faces

RECEP Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister has made an impassioned plea for national peace and reconciliation before a crucial court decision that could see him banned from politics, his party shut down and Turkey plunged into political crisis.

‘If there are mistakes and tensions, we need to restore social peace,’ Erdogan told the right-wing newspaper Hurriyet in an interview. ‘What is important is to live together under this sky in unity.’

The statements are seen as a last-minute bid to avert a ban that could spell political disaster for the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). The judgement could come as early as Tuesday.

Most analysts predict that the country’s constitutional court will accept state prosecutors’ argument that 71 members of parliament, including Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, are trying to impose a strict Islamic regime on Turkey which, despite its overwhelmingly Muslim population, is a secular state.

The court case comes against the background of a bitter struggle for power between secular nationalists strong in Turkey’s military and judiciary, and a populist, largely pro-European, moderate Islamist government with support among new elites, and particularly the urban middle class.

‘Everyone is playing for very high stakes,’ said Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey at the Chatham House foreign policy think tank in London.

A dissolved AKP could relaunch under another name, but the ban on individuals would hit hard, analysts say. ‘Politics in Turkey is about people, not parties or institutions, and the AKP is very much Erdogan,’ said Hakura. ‘If he goes, it is likely that the AKP will be very seriously weakened.’

Turkish courts have banned a series of political parties over the last two decades, but none with such popular support or led by such a well-liked figure as Erdogan, who has been prime minister since 2003. At an election last year the party won 47 per cent of the vote and a second five-year term.

Hurriyet reported that the prime minister had avoided directly commenting about the coming case but had criticised ‘the elitists’ who ‘want Turkey to follow what they want in spite of the will of the people. The problem is . . . [before] . . . the elitists managed to make people do what they want them to do, but this is changing now. There are election results,’ Erdogan was reported as saying.

Senior officials in the AKP have sought to calm speculation over early elections in the event of a ban. ‘There is no election on Turkey’s agenda,’ Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek told the state-run Anatolian news agency last week. The party has told members not to speak to the press about the issue, citing fears of prejudicing legal proceedings. Akif Beigi, spokesman for the prime minister’s office, refused to comment, saying the court case did not involve the position of prime minister but Erdogan as an individual, and the AKP.

The crisis has its origins in a move by the AKP, which has followed a largely pro-European moderate line since coming to power in 2002, to amend the law and allow women to wear headscarves in universities. Nationalist conservatives loyal to the secular vision of Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, saw the change as a bid to fundamentally alter the state. The legal amendment was blocked by the constitutional court.

Tension has also been increased by the arrest of scores of serving and retired army officers, lawyers and journalists accused of belonging to a shadowy right-wing network called Ergenekon. The group was alleged to be trying to overthrow the AKP government by fomenting a coup. The indictment published last week alleged that conspirators had targeted the Turkish Nobel prize-winning author, Orhan Pamuk, among others.

Some experts, however, believe that the court will avoid banning the party and the MPs, possibly opting to withdraw state funding. They point to the rejection of a bid by prosecutors to shut down a party representing Turkey’s Kurdish minority earlier this month. The judgement was based on a ‘pure human rights argument’, said an observer. The court’s legal counsellor has also advised that the prosecution case against the AKP is flimsy.

Hugh Pope, an Istanbul-based expert with the International Crisis Group, said: ‘It will be a huge relief if there is no ban. It means the development of a democratic, pluralist society that Turkey has seen in the last 25 years will continue and that a milestone will have been passed.’

— The Guardian, London