The terrorism within

PRESIDENT George W. Bush and his officials used to applaud Pakistan’s role in the war on terror, but they also thought it necessary to prod the government in Islamabad to “do more” to fight extremists.

During one of his frequent recent visits to the subcontinent, David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, chose to express his government’s solidarity with India by asking the Government of Pakistan to “move faster” to apprehend and punish the militant organisations whom Indian officials have accused of complicity in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on Nov 26, 2008.

The Bush administration’s urging to “do more” meant that Pakistan should deploy additional, well-trained and better-equipped troops to stop the militants based in the Fata area from crossing into Afghanistan, and replace those of its officers who might be ambivalent about their assigned mission of eradicating the militants. Pakistan responded to these urgings by saying that it was already doing all it could, but that it would do even more if the United States provided the requisite means.

Pakistan banned some of the militant organisations such as Sipah-i-Sahaba and Lashkar-i-Taiba several years ago. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it has banned Jamaatud Dawa (which comprised some of the former Lashkar activists) and arrested and detained several hundred of its members. Pakistani investigators are interrogating the more prominent among them with the intention of prosecuting them if incriminating evidence against them is found. Indian spokesmen want the suspects they have named and their associates “brought to justice” here and now. Likewise the British foreign secretary asks Pakistan to “move fast” in dealing with the militants.

What would “moving fast” mean? Needless to say, the suspects being questioned will deny any role in terrorist activities even if they are confronted with the ‘information’ that Indian officials have supplied. The interrogators may procure confessions by torturing the suspects. They will then have to find judges willing to convict the accused on the basis of evidence that is normally inadmissible. The accused can then be hanged.

This procedure and outcome may satisfy Mr Miliband and Mr Mukherjee. But in another situation six months from now these gentlemen, and many others, may see fit to berate Pakistan as a country where human rights are violated, suspects are tortured, the judiciary is perceived as corrupt, and there is no rule of law.

Fortunately, this is not how this case will go. The accused will have competent attorneys to represent them. They will challenge the authenticity of the evidence against their clients and will probably have it thrown out. In the unlikely event that the accused are convicted, they are sure to file appeals all the way to the Supreme Court. It will be years before the cases are finally settled. One cannot rule out the possibility that the accused will eventually be acquitted.

There is another side to the coin we have been inspecting. Militants killed 170 or so persons in Mumbai. That was a most abominable act of savagery. But it was not anything out of this world. Militants engineer bomb blasts that kill a number of people in Pakistan every other day. India has been talking tough and down to Pakistan as if it were the terrorists’ only place of residence. India has its own homegrown terrorists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who operate both on its own territory and abroad.

Indian officials have tried to give the impression that the Mumbai incident had been Pakistan’s doing, because the culprits had been living there. This reasoning is not valid. Pakistan is a country of nearly 170 million people. It is wrong to expect that if 10 of them, sitting under a tree in one of its several hundred thousand villages, are planning to make trouble for India, this fact should be known to its government. Intelligence agents keep an eye on individuals whom they have reason to suspect. There is no way they can keep track of each and every person who may be unobtrusively sympathetic to this or that extremist organisation. That would amount to placing all of its 170 million people under surveillance.

It may be true that inadequacies of education and income have something to do with the emergence of extremism and militancy. Pakistan has not only used force to subdue the militants in its tribal areas, it has also thrown money at their communities. But they are still “alive and kicking”. Their war against the state and society of Pakistan goes on unabated.

President Obama intends to help Pakistan carry on its present campaign against militants and terrorists. It seems that he wants greater emphasis to be placed on developmental activities to reduce the incidence of deprivation in the country’s poverty-stricken tribal regions where the militants currently abound. We will have to wait and see if this approach works better than the ones followed to date.

It should be understood that extremism is also an intellectual persuasion, a frame of mind, to which some of the well-educated and well-to-do persons can be receptive. Force or money may silence them for a time but it will not convert them to “enlightened moderation”.

President Obama has placed Pakistan and Afghanistan on the top of his foreign policy agenda, because these are the places where the Al Qaeda and Taliban, presumed to pose a grave threat to America’s security, are mainly located. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that he will change his mind as further considerations are admitted and allowed to bear on his thinking. He may begin to ask what the consequences of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan would be. The answer may well be that in that event the Taliban will once again rule that country. That will not necessarily produce a repeat of 9/11. If the Al Qaeda and Taliban want to send a bunch of suicide bombers to America, they can do so from their present locations in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, that is, even while they are not ruling either of these countries.

Afghanistan has neighbours (Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and China) and non-Pakhtun populations in its own northern areas, all of whom are opposed to the Taliban. President Obama may conclude that the task of containing the Taliban can be left to these powers without detriment to America’s security or other vital interests.

The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

Mediation is the answer

PRIME Minister Gilani has been assuring his Multan home audience, and President Zardari his party’s national executive, that the government will complete its five-year term no matter what others say or do.

At the other extreme, Air Marshal Asghar Khan senses only disaster if the president and prime minister do not instantly quit and make way for an interim government selected by the deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry to hold elections within three months.

Floundering and bumbling all this while has been not just the government but the whole political system. Judged against the values and machinations that have marked the national scene for the past 10 months the people do not expect, nor would like, this sorry spectacle to go on for another 50 months. But the remedy to save the country from descending into chaos which might tempt, or compel, the army to intervene once again has to be more practical and workable than the one suggested by Asghar Khan. It must also be constitutional. His is not.

The president can dissolve the National Assembly only if he were to be so advised by the prime minister. That surely Mr Gilani wouldn’t do. Then, the caretaker cabinet which must hold elections within three months is to be appointed by the president. The interim prime minister and the cabinet that Mr Zardari appoints wouldn’t be taken as impartial by his rivals. After all, he is not neutral but partisan and all too powerful a president.

Not the PPP alone, even the other parties that have found a foothold in the legislatures and in the power structure, more particularly the MQM, ANP and JUI, would also resist fresh elections. Further, even if the polls could throw up a better leadership and a single party with a clear majority, it wouldn’t be possible for the candidates to campaign and for the voters to vote freely in the troubled Frontier region and in parts of Balochistan.

Though fresh polls would be an ideal solution to resolve the intractable political conflict it is not a practicable proposition at this stage nor, it seems, will be in the foreseeable future. Those involved in the power game and the bystanders too, the most worried being Asghar Khan, must not deny the facts but be guided by them.

A fact too obvious to deny is that despondency is setting in fast. By the prime minister’s own reckoning 10 months may be too short a period to judge the performance of his government. But it is long enough for people who expected the political atmosphere and their lot to improve radically after the elections. Instead, they have seen these deteriorate by the day.

It should be obvious by now that neither the government nor the other institutions of state — parliament and the judiciary — can work smoothly till some conflicts are resolved. Most bizarre is the one surrounding the judiciary. It is hard to recall another instance in a modern constitutional state where the sitting chief justice is pilloried by a vast body of lawyers and politicians while the one whom they consider legitimate is leading mobs in the streets.

The row, as we all see to our mortification, has put the highest court of the land at centre stage of politics. The leaders of the country’s second largest, and also perhaps the most popular, party — Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif — refuse to appear before the Supreme Court even though it is a matter of their survival in public life because they question both its legitimacy and independence.

The dilemma is how and by whom a dispute of constitutional legitimacy can be brought to a conclusion when the highest court of the land that should be resolving it appears party to it. The constitution provides no remedy. The lawyers have finally determined that it can be done only by laying siege to Islamabad in numbers large and menacing enough for the government and the judges to give in. In that, the lawyers seem assured of support by elements of civil society and, more importantly, by the PML-N. Whatever the outcome of the sit-in, and even if it fails, the dignity of the court would be dealt a greater blow. The aspersions cast on the Supreme Court and the Islamabad High Court would have persuaded even a magistrate of yesteryear either to quit or punish the contemners.

In the absence of a legal authority that may be invoked to end this demeaning public wrangle involving the judiciary there is no alternative but to call upon some elders to help. That is the tradition of our society where moral force can outweigh state authority.

The proposal here is to request some retired judges who have not been openly siding with one or the other party to mediate. Some names that come to mind are Shafiur Rehman, Javed Iqbal (Allama Iqbal’s son), Mamun Kazi, Ajmal Mian and Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim. The president, representatives of the agitating lawyers (Aitzaz Ahsan, Ali Ahmad Kurd) and the judges deposed and serving should agree to abide by the advice of the suggested panel of five or any other on whom all might agree.

With the judicial row out of the way, the extent and timing of the promised constitutional changes can be divided into two parts. All political parties that matter should immediately agree to divest the president of his discretionary power to dissolve the National Assembly. The remaining amendments relating to the executive powers of the president, provincial autonomy and other contentious matters like discrimination on the grounds of religion should await national consensus or, failing that, an alliance of parties whenever it is able to muster the required majority.

Lastly it must be said that seeking to bar Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif from parliament through a court whose legality they contest would be political folly. It would be better for the ruling coalition to face them in the assemblies rather than in the streets.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

Move it, gentlemen

NO matter how much you love your city there are days when you wish you were somewhere else. Saturday, Jan 24, 2009, turned out to be one such day in Lahore. The prime minister had come calling, as he usually does on weekends, to visit his camp office. The chief justice was in town to address lawyers and there was a Pakistan-Sri Lanka game at the Gaddafi which was quite a procession in itself and was actually rounded off with a protest by angry Pakistan supporters.

The prime minister had to rush to the stadium as chief guest at the prize distribution ceremony when the home team packed up at 75 and decided to retire early. The lawyers and their countless supporters have a point. In the reign of another judiciary, the commotion emanating from such events would certainly have been a case fit for suo motu notice. After all, the traffic was clogged on many avenues of the city for long hours adding to the general frustration.

Alternatively, these were the moments to enjoy and absorb. There was at last ‘some’ international cricket in Lahore. The prime minister, even though he has been unable to go much beyond his ‘parliament is supreme’ refrain so far, had every reason to fly down and see how things were shaping up in the capital of the biggest and by most accounts the decisive province. (Not too good, Mr Prime Minister unless you are in sync with Salesman the Teaser on this one).

The lawyers and the political workers who had come out to greet the chief justice had to make a big show of it here since Lahore is recognised generally as their stronghold. It was the combined intensity of the events that made one uncomfortable though.

Small price for living the luxuries of the metropolis, many would say. After all, the impression is that ‘Lahore has been eating up the shares of so many in the name of its development’. True. Why don’t you take away the capital? How about moving the action to Multan? But then one knows that saints in central Punjab would never approve of the shift. Rawalpindi? No, that would be too close to Islamabad and the true democrats amongst us would be extremely upset with the confrontation that it would most definitely lead to between the centre and the province.

Faisalabad would be a good idea, if its inhabitants approve. It would save them the trouble of driving down to Lahore so often. The textile city could lay a strong claim purely on the basis of the leading personalities it has provided to Punjab politics as well as to Islamabad in recent months. Abid Sher Ali, PML-N lawmaker and the head of the National Assembly’s standing committee on education, belongs there.

A true measure of just how much influence Faisalabad wields is, however, provided in the crucial positions its sons occupy in Punjab. Rana Sanaullah, certainly the most vocal and perhaps the most important minister in Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s cabinet, hails from Faisalabad as does Raja Riaz, the parliamentary leader in the Punjab Assembly of the PPP. The PPP’s provincial leadership has recently been entrusted to Rana Aftab, another politician from you know where. Another well known PPP man Qasim Zia is from Lahore but after losing in his home constituency in the general election last year, he had to contest and win a Faisalabad seat to enter the Punjab Assembly.

The PML-Q is the third largest political party in the provincial assembly after the PML-N and the PPP. It may have views entirely different from the ‘big two’ on a variety of issues, but when it got down to selecting its parliamentary party leader in Punjab, it stuck to the existing formula. PML-Q’s parliamentary leader in the Punjab Assembly is Chaudhry Zaheeruddin (and if you are looking for a change) from the Lyallpur of old.

This leaves out Mian Shahbaz Sharif. But then the man loves to travel and is actually not a member from Lahore. What’s more his absence will be to the relief of so many — hospital administrators, bureaucrats, tandoor wallahs, et al — in the current metropolis whose case for demotion is being presented here.

If the convenience of all these gentlemen from Faisalabad is not enough reason for the rulers to seriously consider the move, let’s remember that the city is a favourite with the top leadership to end or begin their campaigns with a flourish. It was here that Asif Ali Zardari had his last rally before the 2008 election. It was here that Mian Nawaz Sharif last month addressed rioters who promised a movement.