Taliban’s ties with media

TALIBANISATION is a carefully designed package comprising an assortment of soft and hard parts. Both are used as it is against the rules of the deadly game to nurture one category while ignoring the other. No one understands this better than journalists working in the north-western conflict zones of the country.

During the last four years the media and the militants were not averse to one another, with extensive coverage being given to the subversive activities of the Taliban. In fact, the media earned a controversial reputation for glorifying villains as heroes. But the honeymoon period is over now, making it hard for those reporting on the conflict to perform their duties without fear or favour.

Previously, when Talibanisation was still in its infancy in Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies, information was accessible to media personnel. Militants would call the media’s more prominent members and accept responsibility for deeds carried out in the darkness of the night. Such calls were responded to with alacrity, and hefty media coverage was ensured, helping Taliban leaders establish an identity and a sense of direction. However, this also made the Taliban dependent on journalists. Some shrewd reporters served as the Taliban’s advisers and sympathisers to gain access to new information, which earned them prestige and honour among their colleagues along with monetary benefits.

Anecdotes deepen one’s insight into this relationship. A Taliban leader once asked his journalist friend whether or not he should cover his face before the TV cameras. The journalist responded, “No, Haji sahib, this would eliminate the awe factor.” In August 2007, the Taliban occupied Haji Sahib Turangzai’s mausoleum in Mohmand Agency and invited journalists to take note of their maiden appearance. In the face of harsh questions being posed by the journalists, a nervous Taliban commander, Omar Khalid, said, “If the media personnel are not happy with us, we will quit this mausoleum.”

Thanks to the apathy of the state security apparatus, the 33-year-old Omar Khalid gathered enough militants to extend his rule in the agency and beyond. He also kept the local journalists happy by keeping them updated and co-sponsoring their excursions to Lahore by sending them money.

However, a paradigm shift is visible now. While the security forces have never been an ally of the journalist community, the militants too have turned their guns on it. This development has been a source of immense worry for media personnel in the NWFP and Fata. Half a dozen have already been killed in the line of duty, many others are being threatened and the remaining few are ready to fall in line to avoid the Taliban stick. Everyday brings unreported stories of kidnapping or harassment, making it hard for professionals to report without compromising their journalistic values.

It is intriguing to note that the Taliban, otherwise seen as mediaeval-minded, are as media savvy as any in this modern age. They regularly monitor the media — both local and international — and revert to the journalist in question after taking note of minor ‘slants’ in his report. This makes the journalist more conscious about the importance of his choice of words and of inserting the Taliban view in every report.

A close relative of a Peshawar-based journalist working for international radio was called to a madressah by the Taliban in his native Hangu district and was made to listen to a recorded report. Then he was asked to warn the journalist to “toe the [Taliban] line or face the consequences”. As a result, the journalist stopped reporting from Orakzai Agency.

A couple of senior journalists in the NWFP are facing a fatwa issued by a Taliban shura. One prominent journalist reporting on the conflict was kidnapped from Peshawar after being invited to interview Taliban spokesman Maulvi Omar. A group of journalists on their visit to South Waziristan to interview the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan chief Baitullah Mehsud were disconcerted when the Taliban asked for a senior journalist who had allegedly called them “miscreants” in radio reports.

Another senior journalist from Peshawar was spared after he appeared in the ‘court’ of militant commander Mangal Bagh and tendered an apology for an editorial written in the newspaper’s headquarters in Lahore. In the troubled Swat valley, journalists never forget to carry a gun when in the field. This is how militancy and journalism coexist in the conflict zones of Pakistan.

Part of the problem lies with the journalists themselves. Until now, many media personnel working in Pakistan’s conflict zones and areas adjacent to the latter have failed to adequately distinguish their journalistic role from the sensitive nature of the ongoing conflict. They report from the world’s most dangerous areas but are unaware of their own role in the war. This is partly because, caught up in the events of the day, many journalists fail to take note of anything except that the situation is unusual and worth reporting.

The lack of professionalism on the part of some is also due to the absence of proper training and education, and a missing capacity to understand the magnitude of the problem. Moreover, many are exploited by the media organisations they work for. These organisations appear more concerned with breaking news and less about the safety and well-being of their employees.

High-ups in the media organisations sitting in their cosy newsrooms in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad always push their front-line reporters to capture the heat of the conflict in their reports. In this vicious media circus the ongoing cut-throat competition has set a criminal trend where visuals are more important than the life of a reporter.

In the short span of a week, the staff of a newly launched TV channel was twice targeted in Swat. But the bosses were more concerned about the good performance of a rival channel than the safety of their own staffers. When a cameraman became unconscious after recording executions carried out by the Taliban in Mohmand Agency, his bureau chief proclaimed him a coward ignoring the fact that his cameraman was suffering from trauma.

It is understood that reporting in the conflict zones of Fata and the NWFP is getting tough with each passing day. Growing insecurity because of the increasing influence of militants in the tribal belt and the NWFP is a major reason, but sensitising TV channel bosses to the plight of underpaid and untrained conflict reporters working in sensitive tribal agencies and the conflict-ridden districts of the NWFP is another serious issue that needs to be dealt with immediately.

The Holbrooke mission

RICHARD Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has begun his mission. It is disappointing that it does not include India.

When he wrote on ‘Renewing America’s Leadership’ (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007), then US Senator Barack Obama spoke of the need to “encourage dialogue between Pakistan and India to work toward resolving their dispute over Kashmir and between Afghanistan and Pakistan to resolve their historic differences….”

Then came the clincher: “If Pakistan can look toward the east with greater confidence, it will be less likely to believe that its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban.” By seeing the problems that affect the three countries through a single lens, Senator Obama showed keen insight into the subcontinent’s most enduring problem. But just as he raised hopes in Pakistan, he raised hackles in India. Regardless of which party has held sway in New Delhi, the stance has been that Kashmir is not on the table.

From Nehru on, Indian leaders have contended that were it not for Pakistani interference, Kashmiris would live in peace. Since 9/11, periodic reminders have emanated from South Block that borders cannot be redrawn with blood. One of India’s leading national security analysts, C. Raja Mohan, exulted in the fact that India had “fobbed off” Holbrooke but said the threat still hung in the air. He warned the US against “any high-profile intervention” in Indian affairs, diplomatic-speak for mediating on Kashmir.

Another national security figure, Brajesh Mishra, stated undiplomatically, “India is not going to relinquish control of Jammu and Kashmir. That is written in stone and cannot be changed.”

Such truculence is nothing new. Objective observers such as US analyst Daniel Markey know that “Intellectually, it is impossible to disentangle these problems from each other.” However, even Markey concedes that “the smartest thing is to work on this behind the scenes.”

Well, working behind the scenes has been tried for decades, going back to the time of President John F. Kennedy, who sent veteran diplomat William Averell Harriman to the region for exploratory discussions. Harriman, who had negotiated the Nuclear Test Ban treaty with the Soviets in 1963, failed to make any headway with New Delhi. The time to work behind the scenes has come and gone. A new approach is called for since the problem is still very much there.

The US should rethink its policy on the subcontinent. While India is unquestionably the bigger power, Pakistan is a large, strategically located country with strong ties to the Middle East and China. It is impossible to imagine South Asia realising its full potential if the Indo-Pakistani conflict is allowed to fester.

Historically, US ties with Pakistan have been marked with expediency. To paraphrase Brookings’ Steve Cohen, time and time again, the US has rented out the Pakistani Army to fulfil its regional objectives. It has shown little interest in resolving Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policy objectives. Pakistan’s insecurity vis-à-vis India has led it to adopt a strategy based on asymmetrical warfare emphasising the use of guerillas in Kashmir and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. India is viewed as an existential threat by the Pakistani establishment, a view originally espoused by the army and now widely accepted throughout Pakistan.

Pakistani fears reached an all-time high in 1971, when India militarily facilitated the secession of East Pakistan. The creation of Bangladesh accelerated the nuclearisation of the subcontinent. Pakistan has a new concern now as it evaluates India’s attempts to convert Afghanistan into a client state. At various times since the partition of British India, various Afghan governments have questioned the validity of the Durand Line which serves as the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and divides what would otherwise be an ethnically unified Pakhtun nation.

Secessionist movements in the NWFP have often found an ally in India. India’s recent completion of a billion-dollar highway from Afghanistan to Iran has raised eyebrows among Pakistan’s national security elite which sees it as a stratagem designed to encircle Pakistan.

It is that prolonged sense of insecurity that has led Pakistan’s military intelligence agencies to recruit, train and arm myriad militant groups. They were intended to serve as a strategic reserve against an Indian invasion. But as time went by, the militants began to view themselves as the vanguard of a holy war against an infidel state.

A big gulf now separates the interests of the militants from those of the Pakistani state. The militants have turned on their master whom they regard as complicit with the ‘infidel’ Americans. Partly as a result of this reverse Frankenstein phenomenon and partly because of the war in Afghanistan, the so-called federally administered tribal areas would almost seem to be separate from the Pakistani federation.

The surge of militant violence is not limited to the tribal areas. As much as 80 per cent of the Swat valley appears to have gone the way of the Taliban. And there are few places in the country that can be perceived as immune from suicide bombings and kidnappings, and brutal forms of militant ‘justice’. Asked who is to blame for this orgy of violence, most Pakistanis would name the Americans. India comes in second and Al Qaeda and the militants a distant third. Bruce Riedel, a former US intelligence officer, summed up Washington’s predicament: “Anytime you are outpolling India as the bad guy in Pakistan, you’re in deep, deep trouble.”

Much of this anti-American sentiment can be traced to the US presence in Afghanistan and to the firing of Hellfire missiles from unmanned US aircraft in the tribal areas. Both have led to a large number of civilian casualties. President Obama should declare a moratorium on these attacks and engage in an open dialogue with the people of Pakistan. He has a short window of opportunity in which to win them over.

If he does not radically change the Bush administration’s widely disliked policies, Pakistanis will write off Obama as just another American president, not as the transformational figure they came to admire during the electoral campaign in the US. Obama should commit to a regional approach for bringing peace to South Asia and expand Holbrooke’s mandate. The problems are triangular in nature and cannot be solved if Holbrooke walks along the three-sided periphery. Kashmir holds the key and it lies in the heart of the triangle. Unless Holbrooke goes there, nothing will change. n

The author is an associate with the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford.

faruqui@pacbell.net

Commercialisation of medicine

A FRIEND’S wife who recently had her baby at a private hospital in Karachi spoke excitedly about the room she stayed in as well as the general decor of the hospital. She described the hospital as a “five-star” facility and her consultant’s room as “out of this world”!

The fact that her bill was in six figures was of little consequence, as her husband’s multinational company took care of it. And this is in a country where thousands of women die during childbirth every year. Of course, none of their husbands are executives in multinationals.

Medicine in Pakistan has become a highly commercialised business, where the bottom line is about profits and money. In Pakistan, there is little or no regulation of medical practice or accountability for physicians. The absence of an effective public-funded health system has been one of the major factors that have contributed to our poor healthcare and the commercialisation of medicine. Equally important is the lack of professionalism and integrity among physicians in Pakistan.

Today, physicians work in a world where the challenges imposed by the marketplace and self-interest are overwhelming. In the past, we spoke of patients, doctors, illnesses and compassion; we now speak of clients, consumers, providers, products, contracts, volumes and services. Simultaneously, advances in medical technology are enabling healthcare professionals to diagnose many conditions with modern investigative tools and to cure potentially fatal diseases with a pill or a laser beam. The physician’s involvement in this treatment is often only a technical one.

What are the implications of commercialisation of medicine for the kind of care provided to patients? Are physicians obliged to adhere to a system of virtue and ethics that often requires selflessness when other professionals such as bankers, businessmen, stock brokers, etc pursue self-interest and profit in an unprecedented fashion? Or, has the kind of care outlined in the Hippocratic Oath become obsolete? Have we reached the point where patients are viewed as articles to buy, trade and compete for? Have we become so focused on profits that we have forgotten that illness requires caring which, in turn, relates to a demonstration of compassion?

Pakistani medicine is facing a serious crisis today. Every health indicator makes sorry reading. We have one of the highest rates of infant and child mortality, tuberculosis, hepatitis, rabies, hypertension and diabetes in the developing world. More than a third of our adult population is estimated to suffer from depression.

Successive governments, both military and civilian, have paid only lip service to improving the health status of the population. National health policies are not worth the paper they are written on; the annual health budget is less than one per cent of the overall budget. Whatever little is allocated is eaten up by rampant corruption, poor governance and gross mismanagement. There is neither an understanding of nor the political will to invest in the health of the population. Most healthcare is out-of-pocket expenditure and government hospitals are accessed by only the poorest sections of society.

In the absence of a public-funded health system, private medicine has flourished in Pakistan and has now become a huge moneymaking enterprise. There are thousands of private clinics, maternity homes and small and medium-sized hospitals all over the country. Private medicine in Pakistan is totally unregulated and hospitals and physicians can charge what they like and are not accountable to any authority. A few physicians and hospitals pay the right taxes while sporadic stories about ‘stolen kidneys’ or ‘death during delivery’ reported in the press are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Everyday, millions of patients undergo unnecessary blood tests, CT and MRI scans, angiograms and endoscopies that place a heavy financial burden on patients but enrich laboratories and physicians. Many physicians get kickbacks from laboratories and radiology centres for referring patients to them and numerous specialists charge over Rs1,000 for a five-minute consultation. A senior neurologist charges Rs3,000 for a five-minute initial visit, at the end of which a buzzer goes off and every minute beyond the allocated five minutes is charged at the rate of Rs1,000 per minute.

A psychiatric hospital is well known for its liberal use of electroconvulsive therapy on every patient who is admitted there. IVF centres (fertility facilities) charge hundreds of thousands of rupees for procedures on young women, when many can conceive naturally with proper counselling, and regulation of their menstrual cycles. None of these centres are regulated by any professional body in Pakistan.

Medicine in Pakistan has become a business in the truest sense of the word. Physicians in Pakistan operate with impunity, knowing they are not accountable to anyone. While the General Medical Council (GMC) in the UK strikes a few doctors off its register every year for reasons of incompetence, negligence or unprofessional behaviour, rarely has the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) cancelled a registration.

On a personal level, no physician has the moral right to live extravagantly, driving gas-guzzling four-wheelers or luxury cars. They must remember that they do so at the cost of thousands of patients; many of whom break their backs to undergo expensive medical treatment in private hospitals. Living modestly, being role models and remembering that medicine is a moral venture, rather than a business enterprise, should be the enduring ethos of all physicians, especially those working in poor countries such as Pakistan.

Ultimately, both our understanding of and personal approach to the patient-physician relationship depends on our perception of what it means to be human and of the purpose and meaning of human life. If there is any profession that requires its practitioners to be truly altruistic, it is the profession of medicine. As the medical historian C.E. Rosenberg once said, “Medicine became distinguished when specialised knowledge was used for the benefit of the patient. It became noble when the needs of the patient held sway over the interests of the practitioner.” n

The writer is a professor of psychiatry at the Aga Khan University Hospital.

muradmk@gmail.com

Worldwide tax avoidance

THE Cayman Islands — Caribbean territories under ultimate UK control — are currently the target of reformers. The UK finance minister (chancellor) Alastair Darling was on Friday challenged in the UK House of Commons over allegations that UK banks have been using the Caymans for massive tax avoidance schemes.

Barack Obama, before he reached the White House, was one of the senators who singled out the islands as a blot on the US fiscal landscape which ought to be investigated.

The whistleblower’s documents have been seen by the Guardian. They record the names and transactions of hundreds of companies, trusts, funds and wealthy individuals — information protected by local and Swiss secrecy laws.

Some of the paperwork concerns legal tax avoidance structures. Other files are alleged to point to potential illegal tax evasion by individuals around the globe.

The thousands of pages come from Rudolf Elmer, chief operating officer for the Julius Baer Swiss bank office in Grand Cayman until he was sacked in December 2002. Elmer, 53, and the bank have been involved in a long dispute. The bank accused him of forging documents and making violent threats. Elmer has accused the bank of hiring private investigators to harass him.

Elmer says his documents include all the back-up data held on Julius Baer’s computer server in the Caymans at the time he was sacked, including accounts, correspondence, memos and resolutions dealing with 114 trusts, 80 companies, 60 funds and 1,330 individuals.

The bank says Elmer inappropriately obtained some documents as part of “a misguided campaign” against them. They reject his allegations as baseless and say their activities complied with all applicable laws and regulations.

In September 2005 the Swiss authorities held Elmer in custody for 30 days. They have indicated that they intend to charge him with breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws and with sending threatening messages to two Julius Baer officials.

Last year Elmer posted some documents on the Wikileaks website, which specialises in material from whistleblowers. Julius Baer got the site closed down for alleged breach of confidence, but Wikileaks had the California court order overturned on appeal.

The legal action drew the attention of the US Internal Revenue Service, who contacted Elmer. He is cooperating with the IRS, and with financial specialists in the office of Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney of New York; and with the powerful sub-committee on investigations chaired by Senator Carl Levin, which has a track record of probing offshore havens.

Elmer’s disclosures follow the emergence of similar whistleblowers. One recently testified in the United States against the Swiss bank UBS, and another sold British and European authorities the contents of computer files from Liechtenstein bank LGT. Elmer says his interest is in the network of tax havens.

“People don’t know how the system works. They may hear of some case, but the big picture always disappears into bank secrecy, professional secrecy with lawyers and accountants, and tax secrecy. But they need to know that this is a system which undermines our society, our democracy.” He has lodged copies of files with Jack Blum, a veteran lawyer in Washington DC and an outspoken critic of the behaviour of tax havens.

Blum told the Guardian: “What Elmer is doing is extremely valuable in the process of educating people of the need for major reform. This is a system for enabling a certain class of people to avoid their societal duty, which is to pay tax.”

We found and interviewed Elmer, now 53, at his new home on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. He used to be a part-time captain in the Swiss army, and is an accountant and auditor by training, and a lover of ballroom dancing.

He told us that originally, in 1987, he was proud to join the Zurich headquarters of Julius Baer, one of Switzerland’s oldest and most respected private banks, handling some $38bn of assets, mostly for wealthy individuals.

But Julius Baer told the Guardian that Elmer had inappropriately retained documents when he was sacked by them in December 2002. They said many “were altered to create a distorted fact pattern or supplemented by forged documents”.

— The Guardian, London