The moment has arrived

THERE are moments in a nation’s history when its leaders must look at their performance and also around themselves, take stock of the situation they and their country face, and, if need be, adopt a new course. For Pakistan such a moment has arrived. It was long time in coming but a number of defining events occurred in October and early November that suggest that the country stands at a crossroads. My view is that the time has come to adopt a new course and follow it steadily till the past has been left comfortably behind.

October began with a devastating earthquake that exposed Pakistan’s many weaknesses. Among them was the government’s inability to quickly gauge the depth of the crisis it faced and organize itself to provide relief to the affected population. The earthquake has already claimed at least 74,000 lives but the estimate of those who died continues to increase. Three million people are homeless and as winter approaches the number of dead will increase. The country does not have the resources to pay for rescue, relief, and rehabilitation and the world community has proved to be ungenerous. How will Pakistan deal with this crisis and what will be the medium-and long-term economic and political consequences?

However, the earthquake produced some positive developments, however. India offered $25 million in assistance to Pakistan which Islamabad gratefully accepted. It also made available its helicopters but Pakistan, understandably, was not prepared to let their pilots fly them over sensitive areas in its part of Kashmir. On October 29, India and Pakistan agreed to open five points in the Line of Control to permit traffic from both sides. This was the first manifestation of the appearance of a “soft border” that President Pervez Musharraf had spoken about on many occasions. Could the acceptance of such a border ultimately lead to the resolution of the long-enduring Kashmir problem?

Three weeks after the earthquake hit Kashmir and Pakistan’s northern areas, a coordinated attack by a group of terrorists killed 60 people in Delhi’s busy markets on the eve of Diwali and Eidul Fitr. There was a clear message behind these attacks. Their perpetrators were not prepared to let human tragedy be the reason for allowing India and Pakistan to come together. The extremist Hindu parties in India were no less relenting; they pointed their fingers at Pakistan and accused it once again of fomenting trouble in their country.

For once, both Islamabad and New Delhi handled the situation with maturity. The government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was reluctant to formally involve Pakistan in this unfortunate incident. Nonetheless, in a telephone conversation with the Pakistani president, the Indian prime minister said that “he was disturbed and dismayed at indications of the external linkages of terrorist groups with the October 29 bombings”. He wanted Islamabad to be more resolute in confronting the menace of Islamic extremism.

The Kashmiri dissidents, if they were involved in the Delhi bombings, continued to press ahead with the show of militancy. On November 2, they struck in Srinagar and used a suicide bomber to kill five people. The intended target of the attack was Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress party who was being sworn in as chief minister of Indian administered Kashmir. He had replaced Mufti Muhammad Saeed of the People’s Democratic Party who had governed the troubled state for three years as a part of the power sharing arrangement with the Congress Party. Will the militants succeed in disrupting the slow progress Pakistan and India are making in bringing a degree of normalcy to the state?

These negative developments notwithstanding, all South Asian states decided to go ahead with the 13th Saarc summit scheduled to be held in Dhaka in mid November. This twice postponed summit — once because of the tsunami and the other time because of India’s reluctance to sit at the same table as the Nepalese monarch who had assumed executive authority in his country — is expected to put the final touches on the South Asia Free Trade Area before it is formally launched on January 1, 2006.

Several — but not all — of these developments constitute trouble for Pakistan. Will they set back the country economically, politically and socially or will they be treated as challenges to be overcome en route to strengthening Pakistan, providing it with a firm institutional foundation on which to erect a sturdy political, social and economic structure.

Before taking a look at these developments, I’ll pause for a moment and discuss how Pakistan over the years has slipped into the category of nations that, simply stated, don’t excite the world or are considered worthy of respect. These are hard words to say about one’s own country but we must confront the truth. The way President Pervez Musharraf handles the events in October and November will shape not only the future of his presidency. It will define Pakistan’s future. The stakes are terribly high.

For some time now I have been working on a book I have tentatively titled Pulling back from the abyss: Musharraf’s Pakistan. I keep postponing the book’s completion for the reason that internal developments keep on occurring and the world around Pakistan keeps changing that force me to reformulate my opinion about how the country has changed since October 1999. I also keep on revising my view of the trajectory Pakistan may follow in the future.

I started out with the assumption that Pakistan was rapidly moving towards a political, economic and social disaster when the military under the command of General Musharraf decided to intervene. In fact, the situation Pakistan faced then was grimmer than was the case in October 1958, March 1969, and July 1977. On these three previous occasions the military leader of the day claimed that he was stepping forward to save Pakistan from collapse, or disaster, or some other unpleasant fate. But history viewed from heightened hindsight provides little justification for these interventions.

Looking at all those events with better knowledge of what was happening then, a historian can reach the conclusion that the country would not have fallen into an abyss had the military not intervened in October 1958. Although I continue to admire President Ayub Khan’s dedication to developing Pakistan into a modern state and a rapidly developing economy, it is certain that had he not thrown out the civilian government and not abrogated the constitution, Pakistan may have resolved some of the political issues that continue to bedevil it almost six decades after achieving independence. The “decade of development” may not have happened then but growth may have arrived later had Pakistan resolved some of the difficult social and political problems it then faced.

This was what India did; following decades of what was called the “Hindu rate of growth” — a growth rate of three to 3.5 per cent a year in GDP — the country was able to change course and accelerate the rate of economic growth. It is now variously described as the next economic giant, the coming superpower. India did not deliberately follow this grand strategy of first letting institutions develop that could handle its enormous diversity before pressing the economic paddle to the ground. It just happened that India in 1947 and for a decade and a half after that was led by people who had enormous faith in democracy as the only way of handling diversity. That belief paid off handsomely.

Pakistan, on the other hand, followed a different but tortuous course. During Ayub Khan’s decade of development it appeared that Pakistan had made the right choice, putting economic growth ahead of political development. In terms of income per head of the population it overtook India during this period. It also seemed set to become one of Asia’s miracle economies. However, when a political crisis came its institutions were not strong enough to deal with it. The military was ready to act once again.

In 1969, when the military moved in for the second time, its intervention proved to be disastrous. When General Yahya Khan stepped in, his predecessor was on the way to negotiating an accommodation with the opposition. But some opposition leaders — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto among them — believed that they needed another military interregnum to facilitate their rise to political power. That turned out to be the right calculation on his part but then Bhutto’s ascendancy followed Pakistan’s split into two states. Bhutto had seen, once again correctly, that he did not have the chance to govern Pakistan if the country remained united. Demography stood in the way of political ambition. He engineered the country’s split to ensure his own domination of the political scene.

The third takeover by the military was also poorly timed; in fact, the country would have benefited from the political accommodation that seemed on the way between the government headed by Bhutto and the forces of opposition. Was it political ambition that propelled General Ziaul Haq to take over power? Or, had the military’s senior command, given the rapid deterioration of law and order on the street, become too restive to be ignored by the chief of staff.

The Zia administration succeeded in some areas such as bringing growth back to the economy but, in retrospect, his legacy was extremely negative. Zia’s one contribution was to bring fundamentalist Islam to the country that had lived comfortably for centuries with a considerably more benign form of the religion. Pakistan is still dealing with the plants that sprouted from the seeds sown by General Ziaul Haq.

Once again, viewing the past with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Zia’s 11 years rule left a terrible legacy for the country. It created serious fractures in society, made it less willing to tolerate dissent and religious differences, and allowed Islamic extremists to organize themselves into groups that were to eventually acquire not only religious salience but also political and economic power.

This quick overview of three military takeovers leads me to conclude that the men in uniform intervened in politics at the time the country seemed to be making progress in political development. Does this conclusion also apply to the intervention by General Musharraf on October 12, 1999? I will return next week to this and other questions raised above.

Freedoms under attack

A CRUCIAL division of opinion is opening up in Britain between the party of civil liberties and the party of authoritarianism. Liberal Democrats are on the side of civil liberties. Labour — which had a proud libertarian tradition when Roy Jenkins was home secretary in the 1960s — is now the party of authoritarianism. The prime minister embodies a shift that is becoming a defining issue of our politics.

We take for granted our freedom in this country, but at our peril. Walter Wolfgang, who heckled the foreign secretary at the Labour party conference, was ejected and detained under terrorism legislation. Had he said “nonsense” twice, he could have been charged under the Protection from Harassment Act.

Our judicial system is based on certain presumptions - the first of which is the presumption of innocence. The onus is always on the prosecution, not the defence, to prove its case. Second, anyone accused of a crime has the right to be judged by his fellow citizens on a jury. Third, no one should be detained for more than a very short period without being charged. And fourth, judges are there to interpret the law independent of interference from the executive.

These are safeguards that have developed over hundreds of years in order to secure our individual rights. It is customary, in a democracy, to assume our elected leader will uphold them together with the independence of the judiciary. Yet Tony Blair — a lawyer — has attacked them all. He has questioned the principle of innocent until proved guilty, promoted the concept of summary justice and now wants to lock people up without charge. His attitude appears to be that the judiciary should be an arm of government — there to do his bidding.

Meanwhile, his ministers attack judges whose decisions they do not like. I am confident that they will resist such intimidation. But the day that judges start to act on the instructions of politicians is the day when we cross the line from a free society to a totalitarian state. This authoritarianism is wrong-headed and dangerous.

The current legislation going through parliament — ID cards, religious hatred and the anti-terrorism bills — highlight how Blair, faced with a threat, instinctively seeks to curtail rather than preserve our freedom. He says the anti-terrorism legislation is a vital response to “the new terror threat”.

Certainly, the July 7 bombings highlighted some legal loopholes that need to be plugged. That is why we are supporting the proposed new offence of acts preparatory to terrorism. But the prime minister doesn’t stop there. He is trying to push through imprisonment without trial for 90 days and an offence of “glorification”.

Neither of these is necessary. Once the other new offences are in place, the police will have sufficient powers to hold suspects. And what on earth is the preposterous offence of “glorification” as a means of incitement? How do you define it? It’s a gratuitous attack on our freedom of speech.

The prime minister argues that the threat of global terrorism is justification enough. But the crystal ball is an unreliable guide and he would be wise to consider historical precedent instead. In 1940, when a German invasion was imminent, parliament did indeed introduce Regulation 18B allowing the government to detain anyone considered to be a danger to the national interest.

But those detained appealed through the courts and when the immediate danger of invasion was over, in 1943, we released the detainees - including Britain’s fascist leaders, such as Sir Oswald Mosley. The then prime minister, Winston Churchill, was deeply unhappy about Regulation 18B. To detain a man at the wish of the executive was, he said, “in the highest degree odious” and the foundation of all totalitarian regimes.

Since then, the only peacetime attempt to introduce detention without trial has been in Northern Ireland in 1971. It proved a ghastly failure, convincing the Catholic population that the British government was its enemy, and was one of the best recruiting sergeants the IRA ever had.

Our political opponents try to suggest that the Liberal Democrats’ passion for civil liberties somehow makes us “soft on terror”. I totally disagree. Certainly, we may find ourselves defending the rights of very small and unpopular minorities - those accused of terrorist crimes, those seeking asylum, those seeking to avoid deportation.

But all of us are in a minority at one time or another. All of us could be wrongly accused of a crime we did not commit. All of us could express views or do things the government of the day does not like. All of us do unpopular things or utter unpopular thoughts. And we all need the protection which the impartial rule of law gives us.

Although some would like to turn the clock back, we live in an increasingly diverse society, which is both multicultural and multidenominational. A diverse society means a greater diversity of views — which is healthy and we should welcome it. Go back to the 1950s and you might find a greater moral consensus, but it was also a decade of stifling conformity. Of course, diversity doesn’t confer the right to maim or kill fellow citizens, but it does mean we have to think about how we ensure that those who express unpopular views or follow unpopular courses of action can rely on proper protection under the law. Our tradition of balance and tolerance should not be sacrificed to Al Qaeda.

—Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats party.

China’s war on terrorism

TRAGEDY does at times bring adversaries closer together, even those with vastly different ideologies. But who could have possibly predicted that 9/11 would have gotten George Bush and the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin to sit at the same side of the table. The reason for the dramatic change in the political landscape at the time was that Beijing recognized the fact that the United States had a new enemy — and it wasn’t the Peoples’ Republic of China.

In fact, President Jiang, who reportedly watched the attacks on the World Trade Centre on CNN immediately called a politburo meeting and then became one of the first world leaders to offer his condolences to President Bush. President Jiang had apparently chosen to ignore the incident the previous April when a US spy plane went down after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet; or George Bush’s comments during his campaign for the presidency, when he described China as ‘a strategic competitor.’

This was certainly less friendly than President Clinton’s reference to the Asian giant as being ‘a strategic partner.’ He had also chosen to ignore the fact that Bush had urged the development of a national missile defence shield which Beijing interpreted as a hostile move and had approved the biggest arms sales to Taipei in more than a decade.

After that historic phone call President Bush subsequently declared in his State of the Union address that the United States was cooperating with China in ways they had never done before, and made it sound almost as if China was now an ally. In a demonstration of friendship China did not object when Japan expanded the role of its military to provide assistance in the war on terrorism.

At another time such a move by Tokyo to deviate from the pacifist laws put in place after its defeat in the Second World War would have raised a storm of protest and raked up memories of the horrors of the war. To please Washington Beijing also used its long standing relationship and influence with Islamabad to defuse rising tensions between the two nuclear-armed South Asian countries, which would have certainly undermined the military operation in neighbouring Afghanistan.

But in spite of that demonstration of solidarity, the September 11 attacks and the subsequent crisis also created a dilemma for the Chinese leadership. On the one hand the onslaught offered an opportunity to the government to endorse its battle with the separatists of Uighur, by treating it as part of a larger international struggle against terrorism. And on the other, the American campaign in Afghanistan raised a host of uncomfortable issues among which was the violation of the sovereignty of another country. That is probably why the Chinese response to the United States’ war on terror whilst appearing spontaneous was somewhat muted.

Beijing is on record as having supported two UN Security Council resolutions that condemned global terrorism in general rather than specific terms. But since then China has remained notably silent. This is seen as a reflection of its ambivalence. The dilemma has another significant dimension for the Chinese leadership. While America’s fight against the Al Qaeda is seen as helping to safeguard the authority and sanctity of national governments, the politburo has nevertheless worried about the legal and diplomatic repercussions which would emanate from sanctioning what Chinese policy makers see as a clear violation of state sovereignty as in the case of the American invasion of Afghanistan.

China, however, has been fortunate in one respect. There has been no UN resolution seeking to ratify the legality of the US led military campaigns. Had there been one the Chinese leadership would have been in a highly embarrassing position. A vote against such a resolution would have been interpreted by the US as an unfriendly and perhaps provocative gesture. The thumbs up sign, on the other hand, would have been regarded as setting a precedent for legitimizing the kind of jingoism indulged in by the European powers in the 19th century and the United States in the 21st — something which China has generally opposed.

It would have also looked like a terrible let down in the eyes of the smaller Asian countries which have a healthy respect for and look up to the world’s second super power. The third option, sitting on the fence and abstaining, would have been regarded as an endemic weakness and indecisiveness in the fight against global terrorism.

The territory on which the international spotlight has been falling for the last so many years and which has caused Beijing no end of worry, is the north-western province of Xinjiang, which is bordered by Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Xinjiang has a population of 18 million people. The province produces one-third of China’s cotton and has the country’s largest oil and gas reserves which are at present largely unexploited. It is in this area that Beijing has launched its own ‘war on terror’ against separatists who refer to the region as Eastern Turkestan. The government considers these activists as part of a network of international Islamic terror with funding from the Middle East and combat experience in Chechnya and Afghanistan.

The perception in the West, however, is that the separatist violence in Xinjiang is not driven or fuelled by holy warriors from outside but rather by the unravelling of the former Soviet Union which inspired nationalist movements in Central Asia. The position in Washington remains more or less the same as it did at the time of the attack on the Twin Towers. This is that the Chinese authorities have failed to discriminate between peaceful and violent dissent in their fight against separatism and religious extremism.

In fact, the Bush administration has been reluctant to equate the fight against terrorists ‘with global reach’ with what they refer to as ‘domestic crackdowns’ against separatists in China or elsewhere. The Chinese authorities, on the other hand, continue to issue horror figures which demonstrate that Uighur separatists have been responsible, during the last five years, for around 250 attacks which have taken the lives of over 200 people and injured three times that number.

The Chinese government sees tremendous potential in the region and has plans to invest more than 12 billion dollars on 70 major projects over the next four years — mostly to improve the infrastructure. The railway connecting the remote city of Kashgar to the rest of Xinjiang has proved to be a boon and has made the hugeness of this territory graspable. In fact, recent reports in the Chinese press suggest that the regime is considering using foreign investment to construct oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia across the Taklamakan desert. This will bring its own rewards.

The problem, however, is that attempts to develop the west over the years brought in its wake a mass migration of Han Chinese into Xinjiang, exacerbating tensions. At the time of the establishment of the communist regime in China the region was almost 90 per cent Uighur. Today that figure has dropped to around 48 per cent, making the Uighur a minority in his own province.

The regime certainly has a problem, and one can only hope the new enlightened leadership will come up with the right solutions. As a first step, however, the regime must respect Muslim customs and allow the free functioning of mosques and religious schools, interfering only if they are found to be breeding or harbouring militants. The Chinese constitution guarantees religious freedom and the regime must respect the right of a person to worship in the manner he pleases.

Pandemic planning

PRESIDENT BUSH has called it a “crash programme.” Mike Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, used the word “blueprint.” Unfortunately, the administration flu pandemic plan released this week is neither of those things.

On a general level, the plan and the funding request accompanying it show that the administration is taking preparedness seriously. Particularly important is the president’s recognition that the United States needs to learn how to speed up production of vaccines, because they offer the best hope for protection against any pandemic.

By far the largest chunk of the president’s $7.1 billion funding request is devoted to vaccine and antiviral drug research and building up vaccine stockpiles, and rightly so. Nevertheless, the earliest date by which the government could meet its goal of having the capability to produce a vaccine for every American within six months of the beginning of a pandemic is 2010 — hardly a “crash programme.”

In the meantime, the flu plan mainly consists of a long list of things that local governments and public health officers should be doing, such as building surge capacity in laboratories and hospitals, carrying out “preparedness planning” and identifying potential isolation and quarantine facilities.

But there is only a small slice of funding for such measures, and no real explanation of how they will be implemented. At times, the plan seems divorced from reality, such as when it points out that people could, in case of a pandemic, be asked to remain at home for a certain period. But does that include utility workers? Grocery store workers? Is any locality really in a position to feed and care for a quarantined population — and if not, should that even be an option under consideration?

—The Washington Post