ASIF Ali Zardari was in America a week or so ago. I happened to watch a television talk show in which the host asked several prominent Pakistani observers how they assessed the significance of his visit.

They wanted to emphasise that this was not an official visit to the United States, and that he had come to address the United Nations General Assembly. I have no idea what he would have done during an ‘official’ visit that he did not do this time.

The participants in this TV show thought his address to the General Assembly, one of 32 delivered by visiting heads of government that day, did not go well. He mentioned Pakistan’s major problems only in passing. He wanted to talk mainly of himself and his family. He placed a large picture of Benazir Bhutto on the rostrum where all could see it, spoke of his abiding love for her and his dedication to her legacy. He announced, to the puzzlement of his listeners, that only the ‘Benazir doctrine’ (of which they had never heard) could solve the world’s problems in the 21st century. He said he had come to the United Nations looking for justice which must be done by the appointment of a commission to investigate Ms Bhutto’s assassination. This was a bad speech, unbecoming of a president, and one that did nothing for his country.

During this visit to the UN and other places, Mr Zardari took on the mission of introducing himself to world leaders who happened to be present. Second, he wanted them to know that democracy had arrived in Pakistan, that the country now had a democratic government, that the transition to democracy had been completed with his own election as president, and that all of this should be good news to the world. The interviewees on the talk show thought he should also tell his audiences about Pakistan’s central role in the war against terror, and the fact that its economy was close to collapse, and that the world must come to its assistance.

There is no convincing explanation of why Mr Zardari came to address the General Assembly. As far as I can tell, presidents who are heads of the executive back home came but those who are heads of state did not. Manmohan Singh came as prime minister, not president, of India. Many other prime ministers were present, and in some cases lesser officials represented their countries.

That Mr Zardari got to shake hands with a certain number of foreign dignitaries may have made him feel good but it cannot be said to have brought any gains to Pakistan. Government officials as well as the people of important western and Asian countries may have some interest in Pakistan, but it is unlikely that they want to know Mr Zardari (unless his lavish praise of Gov Sarah Palin’s beauty and his offer to embrace her tickled their fancy). Note also that several of our heads of state (Nazimuddin, Ghulam Mohammad, Iskander Mirza, Chaudhry Fazal Ilahi, Farooq Leghari and Rafiq Tarar) were little known outside Pakistan and no harm resulted to the country from that fact.

Democracy has come to Pakistan primarily because the generality of its people, print and electronic media, lawyers and judges, and other organs of civil society wanted it. Mr Zardari has had nothing to do with its arrival. Pakistan has done itself good by readmitting democracy, but in doing so it has not done the world a favour over which it should rejoice.

Mr Zardari does not have the credentials to present himself as a champion of democracy. He makes all of the important decisions for the PPP, and the party notables do his bidding. He advocates the supremacy of the constitution and sovereignty of parliament. In a parliamentary system the prime minister and his cabinet propose policies to parliament and manage the government’s day-to-day business. But Mr Zardari directs this country’s governance in violation of its constitution. If he is a democrat, he is one in some weird sense of the term unknown to most of us.

Mr Zardari asks the world to help Pakistan in its fight against terrorism. The world knows that terrorism poses horrendous threats to this country’s peace and security. The government has a very tough time combating it. American incursions into Pakistan’s tribal territory to hit the Taliban’s hiding places are condemned as violations of its sovereignty. The government and people of Pakistan want these American moves to stop. America should leave it to the Pakistani security forces to eradicate the militants operating in its territory. This sounds reasonable. If American intelligence agencies have information about the militants’ location on Pakistani territory, they could share it with their Pakistani counterparts, who would then go and hit these hideouts. American officials are reluctant to go this way because, as some of them have said publicly more than once, they suspect that there are pro-Taliban elements in the Pakistani intelligence agencies that will pass on this information to the militants. The latter will then move away to other places.

The presence of pro-Taliban elements in the ‘agencies’ is something to which Pakistani newspaper commentaries have also periodically referred. Mr Zardari should determine the truth of this matter. If pro-Taliban elements do exist but cannot be thrown out, the position being taken with the Americans should perhaps be reconsidered. Alternatively, Mr Zardari’s government may want to re-evaluate its modes of participation in the war against terror. These aspects of the situation should frankly and truthfully be placed before the parliament and the people. Will Mr Zardari do it?

The world is being asked to pull Pakistan out of its currently disastrous economic situation. Its spokesmen say it needs an immediate infusion of $10 to15bn, and that is to start with. The country is incurring huge budget and trade deficits. Mr Zardari has no expertise in economic management that would enable him to identify the follies that have brought the country to the brink of a ‘meltdown’. Nor does he know specifically what his government must do to help the nation’s economy recover beyond any help that the outside world may give.

His recent visit to America, with an entourage of some 60 persons, must have cost millions. It would help if he cancelled all planned foreign trips. The hazards to the country they carry would reduce if he just stayed home.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts.

anwarsyed@cox.net

PAKISTAN’S successive governments, both civil and military, faltered on many counts but fell flat — each one of them — only when they were unable to maintain law and order or failed to protect, in the words of the Quaid-i-Azam, “the life, property and religious beliefs” of the people.

The reason for this failure can be put no better today than it was by Justices Munir and M.R. Kayani way back in 1954 in concluding their monumental report of enquiry into the causes of disturbances in Punjab a year earlier. Prompted by “something that they call human conscience”, the two judges set out their dilemma thus: “whether in our present state of political development, the administrative problem of law and order cannot be divorced from a democratic bedfellow called the ministerial government which is so remorselessly haunted by political nightmares. But if democracy means the subordination of law and order to political ends — then Allah knoweth best”.

What the learned judges then observed is more relevant to the present state of our political development than it was in the first decade of independence. Since then whether the government was ministerial or military, or a mix of both, the necessity of politics has been prevailing over both peace and justice.

The two judges noted that had the agitation then launched by some religio-political elements been “treated as a pure question of law and order without any political considerations one district magistrate and one superintendent of the police could have dealt with it”. The rioting was confined to Lahore and a few other towns. The damage to property was slight and casualties were few. It took the troops just three days to put it down and return to the barracks after a quick exercise in bazaar sanitation and cycle rides at night without lamps. Yet the Munir-Kayani tribunal (it represented an ideal combination of legal and liberal values) took a year to examine scores of practitioners of religion, politics and administration to produce the marvel of a report drawing lessons that were never to be learnt.

The past 18 months in our lives have been marked by death and arson in proportions which would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. The tribunal then spoke of “divorcing” law and order from ministerial government. To the contrary, ministers and advisers now handle law and order directly. District magistrates have ceased to exist and the downgraded superintendents of police now get their orders from what the tribunal termed as their “democratic bedfellows” — the nazim, the minister and the party boss.

On all the four occasions that bode tragedy and turmoil — arrival of Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and bombing of Benazir Bhutto’s procession in Karachi and later her assassination in Rawalpindi and, more recently, the attack on the Islamabad Marriott — ministers and advisers took direct control of the situation and blundered through the aftermath as the world watched. Islamabad has a district magistrate and a chief commissioner to boot but neither was to be seen or heard. It was not merely the “subordination of law and order to political ends” that Munir and Kayani dreaded. Politics determined the course and purpose of administrative action on each of the four occasions.

Not just in the grave situations of the kind recounted above, even in day-to-day workings appointments and promotions in all cadres dealing with law and order are made on the direction of the ministers or their hirelings. It is not a new but a creeping phenomenon from the Munir-Kayani days that has now reached stifling point. It sounds excruciatingly funny when the political parties and politicians in the opposition complain of growing crime and disorder. In fact all of them have taken turns to undermine the authority and will of the officials entrusted with checking crime and maintaining order.

It is not administration alone that has succumbed to politics. The political inroads made into the judiciary have greatly impaired its capacity to administer justice which is equally crucial to the maintenance of law and order. The investigation agencies and the courts are no longer trusted to impartially determine how Benazir Bhutto was assassinated and who conspired to kill scores of people on the day Karachi was barricaded to stop Justice Chaudhry from reaching the high court.

What Munir and Kayani felt “Allah knoweth best” is now known to all of us mortals. Today all parties and their leaders have their partners among the career civil servants — serving or recalled from retirement and exile — that ensure conformity down the line. The neutrals are a dying breed. A few who remain are sidelined.

The cost paid for the “subordination of law and order to political ends” has been heavy but is still reversible. Keeping the administration out of politics would benefit not only the common man but also the politicians. An Arbab Ghulam Rahim wouldn’t then be going into exile, nor would a Ghous Ali Shah be returning from exile. Both would be living at home in peace when not in power — if only they were to let their opponents live in peace when they are themselves in power. The more telling examples of Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari need not be recounted here, but by a quirk of fate both are now in a position to put an end to the cycle of hubris and humiliation that they enjoyed and suffered in equal measure over the past two decades.

There can be no quick fix for a deep-rooted problem. But if the principle of the separation of politics from administration is conceded, parliament can be called upon to constitute a commission to recommend how a beginning in that direction can be made. Parliament’s intervention is not only warranted it is essential, if only to drive home the magnitude of the problem even if a plausible solution doesn’t immediately emerge out of its deliberations.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

ISRAELI Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was well aware that he resembled the generals who join a peace movement as soon as they retire. “I have not come here to justify my actions over the past 35 years,” he said. “For a large portion of that period, I was unwilling to look reality in the eye.”

Olmert, who has resigned but will stay in office until a new government is formed or an election is called, gave a valedictory interview to the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on September 29, and said something that no previous Israeli prime minister has said. He declared that if Israel wants peace, it must withdraw from almost all the lands it occupied in 1967. Unfortunately, it’s probably too late.

Not only is it a bit late for Olmert to tell the Israeli public this harsh truth, since he is leaving power now. It’s also too late for Israelis to act on his advice, even if they accepted it, because the situation has changed.

That isn’t Olmert’s own view. What he says is: “We have an opportunity that is limited in time, in which we can perhaps reach a historic deal in our relations with the Palestinians and another historic step in our relations with Syria. In both cases, the decision we must reach is a decision that we have been refusing to accept for the past four decades.”

If Israel wants peace with Syria, he says, it must give back all of the Golan Heights. If it wants peace with the Palestinians, “we must...withdraw from almost all of the (occupied) territories, if not all of them. We will maintain control of a certain percentage of the territories (where the big Jewish settlements are), but we will have to give the Palestinians a commensurate percentage of our land, because without this, there will be no peace.”

Not only that, but Olmert now says that Israel must let go of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, which the Palestinian Authority wants as the capital of its future state. A “special creative solution” would get around the question of sovereignty over the disputed sacred sites in the Old City.

If Israel had been willing to make such a peace deal in the 1990s, it could have worked, but the only Israeli leader of that era who might eventually have offered such terms to the Arabs was Yitzhak Rabin. Since Rabin was murdered by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995, no other Israeli prime minister has been willing to go so far — including Olmert during his two and a half years in power.

But the new reality, which Olmert does not acknowledge, is that no Israeli leader will be free to make that deal in the next five or ten years. It is the right deal to make in Israel’s own long-term interests, but only if the Arab partners can guarantee that Israel will get permanent peace in return for giving back the land. They cannot guarantee that, because they don’t even know if they will survive.

Consider Syria. The old dictator died in 2000 after a mere thirty years in power, and his son still rules there eight years later, but the country is much less stable than it used to be. Many elements in Syrian society have been sharply radicalised by the American invasion of Iraq and the flood of refugees from there. Nobody knows if Syria is heading for a revolution, but the possibility certainly exists.

If there were a revolution in Syria, the winners would almost certainly be Islamists who reject any peace with Israel. So what Israeli leader in the next five or ten years could sell the public on a peace that returned the Golan Heights to Syrian control? A few days of violence in Damascus could turn that peace into a nightmare that sees a hostile Syrian army back on the heights that overlook northern Israel.

In the case of the Palestinians, the Islamists of Hamas are already in control of the Gaza Strip, and there is no single Palestinian authority for Israel to make a peace deal with. The notion of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement in the current circumstances is purely a fantasy that is maintained to indulge the Bush administration.

Even Egypt, whose peace treaty with Israel is almost thirty years old, is not a reliable partner any more. If there were to be a truly free election in the next five years, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably form the next government — and they have already said that their first act would be to hold a referendum on the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. It would probably be rejected by the voters.

So even if Israeli voters were willing to listen to Ehud Olmert in principle, they would not dare to act on his advice now. Perhaps in time the likelihood of Islamist regimes coming to power in Israel’s neighbours will shrink. Perhaps there will then be a majority of Israeli voters who are willing to back the kind of deal that Ehud Olmert has just outlined. But not this year, not this decade, and probably not this generation.

— Copyright Gwynne Dyer