The Holbrooke mission

PRESIDENT Barack Obama has departed in a number of significant ways from his predecessor George W. Bush’s style and substance in managing external affairs. Even in the case of intractable problems the US faced in the global arena, the former president famously relied on his gut feeling rather than deep thought and analysis.

When policymaking is done through gut and feel, there is little need for expert advice. Whereas a number of previous occupants of the White House had appointed “special envoys” to help in the making of policy in difficult areas, President Bush let the established bureaucracy take the lead with some broad guidance provided by him. President Clinton, like some of his predecessors, relied on special envoys. Two of these were remarkably successful in carrying out their assigned missions.

The first of these was former Senate majority leader George Mitchell who worked on the Irish problem that had festered for decades. By being patient and showing willingness to understand the points of view of both sides, Mitchell was able to bring together the rivals. The ground was laid on which it was possible to build a political structure that has since become durable. The other envoy was Richard Holbrooke who worked on the Balkans and was able to have the many contestants agree to what has come to be called the Dayton Accord. That agreement has also served to bring peace to a very difficult area.

Both Mitchell and Holbrooke have been summoned back to duty by President Obama. Mitchell will be the “special envoy” working on the Middle East while Holbrooke has been assigned the task of dealing with the problem created by the resurgence of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and in the border areas of Pakistan.

Richard Holbrooke begins his mission to Afghanistan and Pakistan at a particularly difficult time for the two countries. Much has been said and written about Afghanistan; relatively less on Pakistan. I will attempt to fill the gap for the latter. At this time Pakistan is faced with a perfect storm: its political system and the structure of its economy are in tatters. Both need to be fixed. Doing one without the other won’t work. I will begin with politics.

The free and fair elections held in February 2008 and the successful outcome of the prolonged struggle to send President Pervez Musharraf into retirement created the hope that the country would be able to put in place a political system that would have people’s elected representatives in charge. The transition from military to civilian rule was completed in September with Asif Ali Zardari becoming president.

While the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League, the two main political groupings in the country, had cooperated to force Musharraf out of office, they began to drift apart once Zardari announced his intention to seek the presidency. Zardari won easily. There is considerable political uncertainty at this time with Zardari attempting to consolidate the power of the presidency while the Sharif brothers, Mian Nawaz and Mian Shahbaz, are pushing for a system in which executive authority would be with the prime minister answerable to parliament.

Embedded in this conflict are issues that Pakistan has not been able to resolve for more than 60 years. There are basically four questions to which answers have to be found. The first one relates to the choice of the place from which executive authority should be exercised. There was enormous concentration of power for 44 out of the 61 years that the country has been independent. This was the case when the military was directly or indirectly in power — the years of Presidents Iskander Mirza (1955-58), Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan (1958-71), Ziaul Haq (1977-88) and Pervez Musharraf (1999-08). Even some of the elected prime ministers — for instance, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — freed themselves from the control of parliament.

There are two ways of resolving this tension. One is to fully restore the constitution adopted in 1973 to its original form. This would mean doing away with the 17th Amendment introduced by Musharraf that concentrated political power in the hands of the president. The 17th Amendment was based on the Eighth Amendment introduced by Ziaul Haq before he allowed civilian leadership to share power with him. The Eighth Amendment was repealed by the National Assembly when Nawaz Sharif returned to power as prime minister in 1997. This is what the Sharif brothers want to do with the 17th Amendment. The other option is to go back to the drawing board and remove the ambiguity that exists by adopting a presidential form of government.

The second question concerns the distribution of power between the central government and the provinces. When strong men governed the country there was an understandable trend towards centralisation. This was the case in particular when the military ruled. It is a strong believer in centralised command and control. However, a country the size and complexity of Pakistan cannot be efficiently and effectively governed from one central point. No matter which system of government eventually evolves, there has to be greater autonomy granted to the provinces and to the institutions of local government. The fact that Pakistan has tried five different systems of local government is one more indication of the state of flux in politics.

The third unresolved issue relates to civil-military relations. What kind of role, if any, should be allowed to the military, particularly in foreign affairs? The military has used its self-perception as a guarantor of national security to repeatedly insert itself in politics. It is unlikely that the armed forces will completely walk away from politics unless the two other issues discussed above get resolved.

The fourth question concerns the role of the judiciary in governance. There is a tradition in the country going back to the mid-1950s when the executive called upon the judiciary to provide ex-post legal cover to its clear defiance of constitutional provisions. It started in 1954 when then Governor General Ghulam Muhammad sacked the National Assembly and had his action endorsed by the Supreme Court under the “doctrine of necessity”. It includes the two attempts made by Musharraf to use unconstitutional means to assert his authority by first firing the chief justice in March 2008 and then imposing a state of emergency in November. The role of the judiciary is now being used by the PML-N to challenge Zardari.

How could Holbrooke help the country make progress in developing a system of governance that is durable and meets the wishes of the people? He could possibly play the role of an intermediary for different political groups. However, as I will suggest in this space next week, it is in economics that the United States could be really helpful.

Threat to ethnic history

RECENTLY I read in the newspaper of the city government’s plan to demolish a number of historic Sindhi goths in Karachi: Yousuf Sahab Goth, Faqeera Goth, Jamali Goth and Mulla Essa Goth in Gadap Town; Madhoo Goth and Juma Khan Goth in Gulshan-i-Iqbal Town; Kandhoo Goth in North Nazimabad Town; Mawach Goth in Keamari Town; and Yousuf Goth in Baldia Town.

Apparently the City District Government Karachi is denying that the order was given by the nazim to destroy these goths, but opposition members in the city council insist the CDGK is grabbing land from Sindhis, raising the spectre of ethnic discrimination.

Any land or goth that has been given a lease to be regularised up until March 1985 cannot be legally demolished, but those not listed in the regularisation formula are considered illegal and can be removed by law. We all know how easy it is to produce or hide documents as needed, so whether or not the goths are proved illegal is really only a formality if there’s a determined effort to get rid of them.

Doing so would be a crime against the city, however, as these villages date back to the time of the British, some as old as 1917. Besides that, demolishing these villages could displace hundreds, if not thousands, of Sindhi, Baloch and Makrani citizens of Karachi, throwing them out of areas that they’ve been living in for generations.

I’m not all that familiar with the goths, but I once received a letter from a Karachi-based reader of my columns on Sindh, who described so beautifully to me the way his life was enriched by having Sindhis living in close proximity to his neighborhood in the 1960s. “Around Lasbella Chowk there exist many old Muslim Sindhi settlements (where the people) lived in true native style in all their glamour, and speaking Sindhi in their goths. The Sindh women from these scattered goths worked as domestic help in the locality as well as in our home.”

He wrote to me of the joy he felt on Eid Day, seeing the little children of the goth dressed in their Eid finery, and of the neighbours who came to share with his Memon family the traditional Gujrati dishes prepared for the festivities. “I fondly remember sharing joy with many, sharing in their happiness, to celebrate the joys of Ramazan nights, Eid mornings, and a chance to see Sindhis in their native dress, to imitate a few words of Sindhi, the smiles, the joy, and the hearty laughs we learned to share. Sindhis coming from the nearby old goth were treated like a novelty.”

If these goths are demolished, Karachi will lose something that can never be replaced: a vital part of its culture and history. We all know Karachi was originally made up of a myriad of tiny fishing villages, where Sindhi and Baloch fishermen eked out a living at the edges of the Arabian Sea.

Even Gizri, where the richest citizens of Karachi cross a dozen times a day to leave Defence for the rest of the city, was once a fishing village under a separate administration until it was absorbed into the rest of the growing city.

Today, Karachi’s all about modernisation, catching up with Dubai, the Far East and the West. But do any of us ever stop to think about what Karachi would be like for the people that still live in these hamlets and old villages once they have been forever excised from the map?

Instead of demolishing the goths, why not preserve some of the goths, and turn them into historical quarters of the city, the way it’s done in so many other cities all around the world? In Europe, Prague recently received funds from the European Union to regenerate its very rundown historical centre; today it stands as a major tourist site and source of revenue for the city. Bucharest is following suit, learning from Prague’s example.

Closer to home, in Dubai, skyscrapers and luxury hotels abound, but they haven’t forgotten that their own city too was once a fishing village in a sleepy port. Every sightseeing tour of Dubai includes visits to their Heritage Village at the mouth of the Dubai creek. Here, potters and weavers practise traditional crafts and there are exhibits and demonstrations of pearl diving and other ways and means that fishermen earned their living from the water. Visitors to the city are able to forget the madness of the malls and instead see Dubai as it was at its most humble beginnings.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do the same thing in at least a few of our city’s Sindhi goths, cleaning them up, making them beautiful and turning them into tourist sites for the visitors to our city who long for a bit of culture to remember about their trip to Karachi?

Imagine ajrak weavers and potters and tile-makers setting up stalls and studios in these goths, practising their crafts and selling them to tourists. Imagine cultural centres where the musicians and poets of Sindh can entertain guests with the Sufi music and songs of our heritage. Imagine Sindhi residents employed as guides and entertainers, dressed in traditional clothes, telling stories and legends of Sindh to all those who want to experience the mysticism of the region here in Karachi.

The transformation of the goths into heritage villages could create jobs and bring in tourist revenue that could change the way the city is seen by the rest of the world.

However, this scheme will only work if there’s anything of the goths’ original character left. If, on the other hand, these tracts of land are known as goths but are actually masquerading as city slums, with few of the original residents left, the issue is not actually one of ethnic discrimination, as it has been suggested in the city council, but a case of land-grabbing for profit.

The authorities must find out how many Sindhis and Baloch are living in the goths, carry out the necessary inquiries, and make their findings transparent to the public before any decision is made on the future of the goths and the people who live in them.

The writer is a novelist.

binashah@yahoo.com

US failure in the Middle East

WHEN the Americans displaced the British in the Middle East after the British Suez debacle a half-century ago, they seemed to promise a new era. The United States would sort out the conflict between the Arab states and Israel, and help bring prosperity and peace to all in the region.

President after president, from Eisenhower on, applied himself to these tasks, certainly difficult, but surely not beyond the reach of a resolute superpower. All failed, some miserably. It is the most dismal chronicle of incompetence, ignorance, ineffectiveness, indecision and inefficiency imaginable, and one that, in the light of recent events, must be very vivid in the mind of the new leader of the US.

In the rush to get books on to the president’s bedside table, Patrick Tyler’s account — A World of Trouble — of how Obama’s predecessors and their advisers not only missed their chances but made things worse by an increasing partiality for Israel, a vendetta with Iran and a bungled invasion of Iraq deserves to be on the top of the pile. It is an anthology of cautionary tales for a new president — a compendium of how not to do it, and, if only obliquely, a guide to how to do better in the future.

If Obama ends his first term without registering some considerable success in the Middle East, the last chance for a moderate order in that region may pass. It falls to him, in other words, to turn round the long record of American failure.

Success may in many areas come from doing less, from more modest aims, and from retreating from the attempt to control the affairs of others. But if more modesty is the general prescription, the exception is the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, where both sides need American mediation, and where one side, Israel, needs to face the reality that it cannot indefinitely dominate its neighbours by drawing on American weaponry and resources.

Tyler is interested in moments — moments when confused and angry leaders and their counsellors swear at one another, weep, get drunk, or tell outrageous lies.

Moments such as the one where Bill Clinton, still just president, rang Colin Powell, the incoming secretary of state in George W Bush’s new administration, to tell him that Yasser Arafat was “a goddamned liar” who had destroyed the chances of peace.

The blame for the failure at Camp David, as Tyler writes, belonged to Ehud Barak and Clinton rather than to Arafat but, cheated of the achievement that might have balanced the Lewinsky scandal, a self-righteous and self-deceiving Clinton was intent on “poisoning the well”.

Or moments such as the one where Henry Kissinger, entrusted with a message from Nixon to Brezhnev calling for joint superpower action to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then proceed to a just settlement of the Palestinian question, simply decided, in mid-flight to Moscow, not to deliver it.

Nixon’s message, Tyler writes, “threatened to undermine the record Kissinger was seeking to create; that he and Nixon had run the Soviets into the ground and they had protected Israel”.

The truth was that the Russian leaders had reacted cautiously and moderately when war broke out, and that Nixon himself had a statesmanlike grasp of what was necessary. But a joint US-Russian initiative “would have thrust Kissinger into the thankless and perilous task of applying pressure on Israel”.

So he simply dumped the message. He later encouraged Israel to violate the ceasefire that was supposed to end hostilities so that it could better its military position.

— The Guardian, London