DAWN - Opinion; November 14, 2008

Published November 14, 2008

Obama factor in South Asia

By Kuldip Nayar


SOME Pakistani television channels have called me up seeking my comments on the effect of Senator Barack Hussein Obama’s election as the US president on India-Pakistan relations.

The same question has been raised by the Indian media. The first is downcast and the second exudes confidence since it assumes that India and America are ‘natural allies’.

However, the Indian reaction to Obama’s telephone call to President Asif Ali Zardari is subdued. The general impression is that Pakistan has been singled out, along with five other countries, because it is an ally in the Afghan war.

What amuses me is the obsession in the two countries or, for that matter, in South Asia about the way America looks towards them.

They strain every nerve to catch Washington’s eye — one, to score a point on how close that country is to America than the other, and, two, to make America feel that its benevolent attention mattered to the country in its internal and external affairs.

Such thinking, speaking dispassionately, smacks of colonial slavish mentality which we have not been able to shake off even after six decades of independence. Incidentally, Bangladesh’s regret is over the defeat of Senator McCain who adopted a Bangladeshi girl.

If the US elections have proved anything beyond doubt it is that people are their own masters. They have no holy cows and they are not afraid to face any challenge.

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are sovereign countries and their strength or weakness is from within, not without. They do not have to kowtow before any foreign country, however powerful.

Washington cannot impose anything on them if they do not offer their neck. Yet the manner in which they behave gives the impression as if they are banana republics, tiptoeing for favours.

Obama has made certain observations on matters relating to India and Pakistan. Before the polls, Obama was critical of Pakistan for ‘using’ the US assistance to train and arm terrorists for infiltration into India. Indeed, India has been at the receiving end and it still is. But these terrorists have now trained their guns on Pakistan itself.

India’s resolve to have a joint mechanism is the reply to combat terrorism together. M.K. Narayanan and Mahmud Durrani, the national security advisers of India and Pakistan respectively, have held a two-day meeting in Delhi to discuss the nuts and bolts of the mechanism.

Both have been positive in their observations. This is one example to show that we are our own masters.

I did not like former prime minister Nawaz Sharif travelling all the way to Washington and using President Bill Clinton’s services for withdrawing the repulsed Pakistani forces from Kargil. Nawaz Sharif knew Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee well. He should have talked to Vajpayee on the hotline and settled the matter then and there.

Clinton did the same thing indirectly. He had Vajpayee on the phone in the presence of Nawaz Sharif, conveying that Pakistan wanted free passage to withdraw its troop from the Kargil heights.

Obama’s remark on Kashmir in a press interview, which was given in October but published now, has created a stir. He has said that he wanted to “devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there to figure out a plausible approach”.

Clinton’s name figured as the envoy. Obama’s statement is an unnecessary diversion when New Delhi and Islamabad are engaged in bilateral talks to sort out Kashmir and other problems souring relations between the two countries. Both had signed an agreement at Simla as far back as in 1972 to iron out differences bilaterally, without resorting to arms. And they have stuck to it.

A composite dialogue has been going on and some progress has been made. The fifth round of meetings is due this month. The two countries would have probably reached a fruitful stage if the valley had not acquired a religious colour after the controversial handing over of land in the valley to the Amarnath Shrine Board.

India’s precondition for any settlement on Kashmir is that it cannot demarcate borders on the basis of religion. Obama would only aggravate the situation by focusing his attention on Kashmir or appointing an envoy like Clinton who is pro-India.

The reported nomination of Ahmed Rashid as an adviser on Afghanistan to the American forces in Kabul is a welcome development. He is liberal and has many friends in India. His advice would be sober and not smack of a high-and-mighty attitude. His knowledge of Afghanistan is intimate. But why has he been given the responsibility for Kashmir as well?

I have not been able to understand the linkage between Kashmir and Afghanistan. The first problem is as old as the Partition while the second came up after 1980 when America created a Taliban force to bleed the Soviet Union to death.

Even if the time factor is forgotten, combining the two will be like mixing chalk with cheese. The Taliban aspire to convert Afghanistan into a fundamentalist state. The Kashmiris, whatever their grievance against India, want Hindu-majority Jammu to be part of their state.

If this is so the Kashmir they have in mind cannot be anything but liberal. Rashid told an Indian newspaper recently that the Taliban attacking American and European forces were operating from Pakistani soil. He suspected the hand of some elements in authority in Islamabad behind the activities of the Taliban.

Yet the bombing by America of Islamabad’s federally administered area is a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is justified in warning Washington to either halt the missile attacks inside Pakistan or face the failure of efforts to end militancy.

Zardari is said to have conveyed the same thing to Obama during their telephonic conversation.

The writer is a leading journalist based in Delhi.

Problematic decision-making

By Ayesha Siddiqa


PAKISTAN seems to be in a never-ending cycle of crisis. While some blame the people for despondency and not keeping their chins up, others find governments or the international system responsible for the mess we find ourselves in.

This utter confusion is nerve-racking especially at a time when one thought that good luck had smiled on Pakistan and a change was about to come through the newly elected government. A popularly elected political government had taken over from a much-disliked military dictator and now things would change. But don’t we always think this way only to be disappointed yet again?

The fact is that people have begun to get restless again because they do not see the country going in any positive direction. While the functionaries of the state might categorise this opinion as the work of some hidden hand or overzealousness of individuals, the fact is that no new government gets a lot of time for transition. It will not be forgiven on the score that it had to clear up a lot of the previous administration’s mess. It is important to be watchful of public perception.

A few months ago I was told off by a senior functionary of the government, known for making his bosses and all those in power happy, for airing some critical views which he labelled the useless idealism of a liberal intellectual. His point was to wait and give ample opportunity to the new dispensation. The problem with giving time is that the common man has suffered too much and for too long to wait for policymakers to catch up, especially if they are not mindful of the public perception.

The new government seems to be making a similar mistake: it doesn’t appear to be mindful of the public perception. For instance, a wise government would have understood the negative implications of the president leaving for the US hours after the blast at the Marriott hotel, a time when people needed to see him visiting hospitals and showing his closeness to the people.

Similarly, someone in the government should have realised the significance of the president or other government functionaries making even a short trip to Balochistan after the earthquake. So forget the rhetoric because now the people in Balochistan wonder if those sitting in Islamabad care at all. Someone in the government turned to explain to me that the president did not visit the quake-affected areas because there was no use going there unless he had money to give and so Mr Zardari’s emphasis is on raising money rather than visiting the victims of an earthquake.

I am sure he could have diverted some of his own money that he claims to have spent on shipping about 240 people to Saudi Arabia. It would have been a great gesture had he announced that he was giving funds from his own pocket for the earthquake victims in Balochistan.

A few months have passed since the government took over and one has begun to wonder what is happening in Islamabad. We are told that the country has got the right man to lead it. He is, they claim, gutsy and intelligent. I do not doubt any of this but courage and intelligence have nothing to do with wisdom, especially political wisdom.

The major problem that the government suffers from today in terms of creating the right public perception is the over-centralisation of decision-making. The hub of policymaking seems to revolve around one man and his coterie of close aides and friends. There are two possible situations: either the president’s aides and friends are not telling him about what’s happening on the ground and what his reaction should be to different situations, or he is just not listening to the alternative voices within the government. Authority is too centralised.

I remember attending a couple of meetings of the policy planning wing of the PPP during the days the party was in the opposition. What struck me most was the inability of many senior people to communicate contrary opinions to the party leader. Of course, I am not just blaming the party leadership for such behaviour. The fault lies with people who dared not say the right things, but then a leadership is known for the people it gathers around itself.

One of the primary issues that the government must think about is how to build trust in the regime’s policies both inside and outside the country. For instance, it would have helped had the president voluntarily surrendered his special powers under Article 58-2(b) of the 1973 Constitution. Leaving it to a committee to decide gives the impression that the top man is not interested in curbing the powers of his office. He already has lost some ground with his backtracking on the judiciary issue. The president must note that it is not about how much people like Iftikhar Chaudhry but about their new political leader’s credibility in meeting his commitments.

Externally people and governments have to have confidence in Mr Zardari’s ability to make sound policies and run the state. Appointing a banker to run the economy, as Pervez Musharraf did during his nine years, will not create that confidence. Successful bankers might know quite well how to get money out of rich Middle Eastern sheikhs or runaway dictators but they do not necessarily make good economists.

The country needs more than dependence on foreign sources of revenue generation — sound policies on agriculture and industry are required besides many other things. The fast-growing impression that members of the government and the larger coalition are engaged in financial mismanagement is not likely to help. The Chinese, Americans or the Saudis will only invest once governance gets going inside Pakistan. It doesn’t matter if most of the president’s friends who followed him to China are great entrepreneurs.

Surely, we all sympathise with Mr Zardari’s personal loss but should he hold policymaking and governance hostage to his personal tragedy? The emphasis should be on building institutions and institutional mechanisms. Mr Zardari seems keen to rebuild the PPP to his own standards but let this not just be an effort at changing faces. The party as well as the country needs a change in terms of institution-building. Running Pakistan with a centralised set-up will only bring back the worst of days and even Washington might opt to abandon the new leadership.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

An agent of change?

By Cyril Almeida


I AM not an agent of change. If I wanted to be in the business of change, I would put on my politician’s hat and go knocking on doors or knuckle down to study for a civil services or judicial exam or, since this is Pakistan, the military academy’s entrance exam.

But that does not mean I, or the public figures skewered here, am unaware of the bully pulpit that this space is — a space that can be used, to put it a touch dramatically, as a force for good or evil.

The introspection is attributable to last week’s edition of The Friday Times which in a series of articles, particularly a thoughtful piece by Moeed Yusuf, tried to conceptualise the role of the news media in the rough-and-tumble world of Pakistani politics and society. Clearly the news media is more than a clearing house of information, a fact that needs no further elaboration in a piece that will appear on an opinion page. This is not the space for contributors to report the news but to make sense of it or to shine a light in corners of the state and society that would prefer to remain unilluminated.

Yusuf’s point, at the risk of oversimplification, was that responsible journalism emphasises a two-way flow of information: from the people to the state, explaining what the people want of its government, and from the state to the people, explaining the constraints of the state at any given point in time and the necessity of sub-optimal solutions. It is one of the sharpest observations made inside the media echo chamber in a while, though destined to be drowned out by the cacophony that issues like the Lal Masjid siege, CJ Ifitkhar’s crusade and the war against Islamist terrorists create.

The problem is the tumult of the real world; away from the confines of theory you realise soon enough that you aren’t in Kansas anymore — and that Pakistan and its politics are often far uglier than what you can live with comfortably. And that’s when you may be tempted to become an agent of change.

Awarding ministries to the likes of Israrullah Zehri and Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani is simple enough to explain in Pakistan’s polity: in a culture where freelance, rental politicians are the norm, party bosses and coalition leaders need to dole out patronage to their rank and file to keep them on board. The vultures circling around the PPP and PML-N at the start of the decade and around the PML-Q today are just the flip side to the misogynists Zehri and Bijarani. If the freshly minted ministers aren’t sated, they will sniff around for other opportunities — opportunities the likes of the PML-N’s Javed Hashmi, who casually dropped a remark about there being a minority government in Islamabad, will all too happily exploit. So far so good, even if you have to hold your nose. There is a reason after all that this has been dubbed a transition to democracy — barnacles will cling to the rusting ship of democracy as it is dredged up. But there is a flip side to the appointments of Zehri and Bijarani: the question of change. With these two men on board is an improvement in the status of women more likely or less? Since rationally it would be hard to argue the former, the continuation of the status quo or the prospect of a downward trajectory is what makes it harder, at least less appetising, for the news media to act as an honest broker between the government and the people.

Support in the news media for a democratic order is predicated on the belief that such an order alone can produce sustainable reforms in Pakistan’s fractious polity. Democracy is not a constitutional adornment meant to make us feel good about ourselves. And of course the prevailing scepticism in the news media is informed by a history of let-downs and betrayals.

The government is certainly getting a lashing in the media. It is a remarkable turn of events. At the start of the year speculation centred on a sympathy wave for the PPP in the February elections. Three months ago the much-maligned Musharraf was chucked out; a move perhaps precipitated by Nawaz Sharif but clearly stewarded by the PPP. Six weeks ago we were bestowed with President Zardari. Given that the triple crisis of militancy, the economy and political turmoil was inherited by Asif Zardari’s government, there is reason for it to feel aggrieved and wounded. ‘Why don’t the people understand?’ is the refrain from the PPP camp at the moment.

But the introspection demanded from the media by the government is advice it should pay heed to itself. The martyr mode and victim complex that the government has slipped into stem from the failure to grasp a basic change in the past six months: the time for politics and posturing is over; now is the time for governance and policymaking.

Events at just one ministry illustrate the failure. Back in February the economic storm clouds had already begun to gather. Yet, or perhaps because of this, the finance ministry was tossed like a hot potato between the PPP and the PML-N until Ishaq Dar was finally sworn in as the minister for finance on March 31. Six weeks later, Dar was forced to pack his bags as the PML-N pulled out in a huff over Zardari’s refusal to reinstate CJ Iftikhar.

This is crucial because the choice to reinstate the chief justice was Zardari’s, and if he had planned on hardballing Sharif responsible governance demanded that he also think about continuity in the finance ministry. Had there been a PPP man in that job from day one and some thought given to the selection we would not have to deal with two ministers and one adviser in six months.

Hindsight may always be perfect in politics, but a little foresight would have helped. The spillover from the shuffling in the top political office in the finance ministry dramatically affected its bureaucracy. The post of secretary for finance yo-yoed between Waqar Masood and Farrukh Qayyum as their political patrons came and left. You don’t need a degree in governance to figure out the effect the changes would have on the ministry — this at a time that the country was slowly, clearly, predictably slipping towards a balance of payments crisis even before the financial crisis hit the developed world.

So I am no agent of change nor do I seek to be one. But I would be remiss if I didn’t use this bully pulpit to hold the government’s feet to the fire. When it performs better, I will carry its message to the people. Until then, while I will remind myself that it is possible to be too critical, I will remember that it is possible to be too sympathetic.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Waiting for Bonaparte

By Zafar Masud


A YEAR before he died, sword in hand and manfully defending his capital Srirangapatnam against the British forces on May 4, 1799, Mysore’s maverick ruler Sultan Tipu waited in vain for Napoleon Bonaparte to disentangle himself from his campaigns in Egypt and help him rout the invaders in the subcontinent for good.

That was not to be, for the future emperor’s travails were many and seemingly endless in the Mediterranean tip of the East that fateful year. Not quite 29 yet, Bonaparte was sent there at the head of a mighty expeditionary force aboard 300 naval vessels with the express mission of cutting off the commercial as well as the military advance of the British towards India. Easier said than done.

Early victories in quick succession at the Alexandria port and then in the Battle of the Pyramids gave heart to the French, but the euphoria vanished as a good part of their fleet was sunk by the British at Aboukir soon after.

The young French general’s Oriental adventure (from July 1, 1798 to Aug 23, 1799 to be precise) would later take him on an unsuccessful campaign to Syria and as far southwards as the city of Nazareth where Jesus had lived. In the end this enterprise would prove to be a pitiful disaster and, to make matters worse, an ensuing cholera epidemic would decimate a good part of the French army.

The aim of ‘Bonaparte and Egypt’, a richly varied exhibition that opened at the Arab World Institute in Paris mid-October, is to dispel doubts over the historical necessity of this expedition which, in the words of Le Monde, “was a political and military debacle in every sense”.

But beyond anything else the exhibition highlights the fact that the expedition was much more than a pure military adventure. Apart from the 54,000 soldiers that he commanded, Bonaparte had also carried with him 160 young men, many even younger than the general himself, freshly out of the best educational institutes of France.

A number of these, like the mathematician Gaspard Monge, the chemist Claude Bethollet, the botanist Geoffroy St Hilaire and the inventor of the graphite crayon, in other words our everyday pencil, Nicolas Conté, would later become respected names in the world of science. As many as 43 of these men would prove to be celebrated authors of more than 20 scientific books about ancient Egyptian civilisation and of 160 volumes of memoirs about their intellectually and personally enriching sojourn in Egypt.

The scientific mission, not surprisingly, required an endless number of concessions, facilities and, most of all, money. Napoleon was enthusiastically attentive to the demands of the youthful savants to such a degree that his military officers, with an unmistakable hint of jealousy, had qualified them as “the general’s mistresses”. Undaunted, the young men continued their archaeological and scientific research on the pyramids and in the Nile delta. Their preliminary studies on the possibility of linking the Red Sea with the Mediterranean would open the way for Ferdinand de Lesseps half a century later to turn the Suez Canal into a reality in 1869.

The greatest archaeological thrill for the French, however, remained the discovery of the legendary Rosetta. The debutant scientists were unable to comprehend the writing on the stone and, soon enough, lost it altogether to the British following an ambush on the French vessel that was carrying it. By that time however many prints of the Rosetta hieroglyph were successfully made by the French and the task of deciphering it would be successfully completed 23 years later by Jean-François Champollion who would discover at the same time that the ancient Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs.

The original Rosetta was never returned either to the Egyptians or to the French and remains to this day at the British museum. A high-quality replica however is part of the current exhibition, as are dozens of paintings, not only of Bonaparte contemplating the Sphinx or addressing his officers but also portraits of many Egyptian notables. A part of the show is dedicated to scientific discoveries and another to a whole era of French ceramics, furniture and objets d’art influenced by the Egyptian civilisation for many decades following the expedition.

During his stay, the youthful French general would remain reverential toward the country and its civilisation. “From the heights of the Pyramids”, he famously warned his men, “forty centuries of Egyptian history hold you under their gaze.”

A year after his arrival at the Alexandria port on his historic mission, Napoleon returned to Paris where a politically troubled Directoire awaited him; it would soon appoint him First Counsel. Less than five years later he would become emperor. The rest is history. Paris is likely to remain cold and grey and wet until March 29, 2009 the date on which the exhibition ends. But if business or just love of adventure brings you here, do not forget to visit the Arab World Institute.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

Opinion

Editorial

‘Source of terror’
29 Mar, 2024

‘Source of terror’

ALTHOUGH dealing with the presence of terrorist groups in Afghanistan is a major political, security and strategic...
Chipping in
29 Mar, 2024

Chipping in

FEDERAL infrastructure development schemes are located in the provinces. Most such projects — for instance,...
Toxic emitters
29 Mar, 2024

Toxic emitters

IT is concerning to note that dozens of industries have been violating environmental laws in and around Islamabad....
Judiciary’s SOS
Updated 28 Mar, 2024

Judiciary’s SOS

The ball is now in CJP Isa’s court, and he will feel pressure to take action.
Data protection
28 Mar, 2024

Data protection

WHAT do we want? Data protection laws. When do we want them? Immediately. Without delay, if we are to prevent ...
Selling humans
28 Mar, 2024

Selling humans

HUMAN traders feed off economic distress; they peddle promises of a better life to the impoverished who, mired in...