Public Safety Commission

THE establishment of the National Public Safety Commission (NPSC), announced by the Interior Minister on Monday, has been slow in coming. It had been envisaged by the Police Order 2002 as a watchdog of the citizens’ civil rights but could not be set up for nearly four years because the reforms inherent in it provoked considerable controversy. The delay has significant implications. Will the NPSC be really effective in policing the police? The changes in the police were announced in 2002 ostensibly to insulate the force from political interference, enhance professionalism and make it improve the law and order situation. But the reforms have been introduced in bits and pieces. In June 2004 a large number of amendments were introduced, presumably to pacify some critics. Now that the commission has been formed, one hopes that the implementation process will go full-speed ahead.

The commission which has been set up is to oversee a number of other police bodies such as the FIA, the Anti-Narcotics Force, the Frontier Constabulary and the Pakistan Highway and Motorway Police, most of them not noted for being people-friendly. But how effective a role the Commission will be allowed to play by the government is not certain, as apparent from the skepticism has been expressed on this count. For instance, the performance of the Frontier Constabulary in Balochistan is nothing to be applauded. But the interior minister was reluctant to reply to a question on this subject at the press conference where he announced the formation of this body. Much would depend on whether the vested interests who have been frequently interfering in the functioning of the police for political and other reasons will be prevented from doing so. Since more than half the membership of the National Safety Commission comprises political leaders, it is difficult to believe that they will not try to exert pressure on it or queer its pitch for various political reasons. The Citizens-Police Liaison Committees, which it will establish and oversee, should help redress public complaints against the police, but again their efficacy will depend on who the CPLC members are and how powerful they prove to be. Karachi’s CPLC has clearly established the fact that it can be effective only if it is allowed to act independently.

One function of the NPSC is supposed to be to present a report to the government every year on the law and order situation and the performance of the police. It will also recommend reforms for the modernisation of police laws and procedures in respect of police functioning, prisons, prosecution and probation services. One hopes all these will be implemented efficiently and not put on the backburner. It is also important that these reports are made public when they are presented to the government because in that event the Commission can benefit from a wide spectrum of advice and opinion on the various aspects of crime control and other related matters. So far the police reforms have made no impact at all, especially in improving the law enforcement agency’s image in the public eye. The police order speaks of the responsibility of every police officer to behave with decorum and courtesy with the members of the public, protect their rights and liberties, and enforce law and order. If the NPSC can provide a fillip to the overall performance of the police, it would have served a useful purpose. But if it ends up being just another agency among the plethora of bodies formed from time to time that are not very effective, not much would have been achieved.

Suicides at Guantanamo

FAR from being a “good public relations move” for the “jihadi cause”, as one US State Department official dubbed it, suicide by three prisoners at the US detention centre in Guantanamo speaks of the level of despair felt by the inmates. Of the current 460 prisoners, only 10 have been formally charged so far, although they have been there since 2002 when the first batch of inmates arrived at the notorious prison camp. Their trials have yet to begin and many do not even have access to lawyers. Harsh interrogatory tactics are common and torture is inflicted to extract information. The Geneva Conventions that outline the treatment of prisoners of war have been deliberately bypassed by Washington so that the inmates remain in a legal black hole. To call attention to their plight and to demand a fair hearing, many inmates, fearing indefinite detention, have resorted to hunger strikes. There have been frequent suicide attempts as well. Faced with mounting international criticism, Washington has lately been vacillating on the issue. But it appears clear from the on-going construction of a $30 million prison project in Guantanamo that Washington is not planning to shift the detainees to the US mainland, where legal help would be easier to access, any time soon.

In such a situation, the international community can only keep up the pressure on Washington to treat the inmates more humanely and less brutally than now. American allies, like Britain, that had hitherto refrained from criticising Washington on the Guantanamo issue, are now deploring the situation there. This is one hopeful sign in a bleak situation. It is in this context that Pakistan has made the right move in deciding to send a delegation to Guantanamo to ascertain the conditions of Pakistani prisoners there and to procure their release if possible. In any case, Islamabad, which had so far been reluctant to confront the US on the issue, must step up its efforts to obtain all information about the prisoners of Pakistani origin from the US authorities and do a background check on them. This would help determine which prisoners are being wrongly held.

Tension in Bara

THE authorities are mistaken if they think that by blowing up a shopping plaza in Bara as they did on Monday, and also apprehended 24 tribesmen, the tension in the area can be effectively tackled. If anything, the strife there is likely to escalate, given the near breakdown of law and order over the past few months. This is despite the presence of the Frontier Constabulary which has been unable to deal with the situation. Paramilitary troops deployed a few days ago are so far keeping the area calm but violence can erupt at any time. The problem goes back to nearly a year ago when a dispute between two rival groups of clerics over illegal FM radio stations was not properly dealt with by the authorities. While the clerics were expelled from their respective villages some time ago, the aftermath of their attacks against one another has contributed to much of what we are witnessing in Bara today. But the blowing up of a plaza, owned by one Haji Mangal Bagh, who is seen as a successor to one of the expelled clerics, was done to punish the gentleman and his followers for creating a law and order situation in the area. Mr Bagh claims that he is trying to set up a peace committee for Bara to address the area’s many problems.

By using the archaic Frontier Crimes Regulation as a legal cover to blow up the plaza, the authorities have antagonised many tribesmen. They fail to realise that their own role in the face of the deteriorating law and order situation in Bara has been none too improving. If Mr Bagh is guilty of any crime, he should be apprehended and put on trial. A failure to recognise the root cause of the problem will only result in more violence and lawlessness in an already volatile situation.

Death of a bigoted Militant

TWO months ago, The Washington Post, citing “internal military documents and officers familiar with the programme”, reported: “The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq .... The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organisation responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

The Post quoted Colonel Derek Harvey, a former military intelligence officer in Iraq, as saying that Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents are “a very small part of the actual numbers ... Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways.”

The psychological operation served two purposes: apart from helping to reinforce in the United States the entirely spurious impression that the war against Iraq was in fact a logical and legitimate response to 9/11, it was also intended to spur distrust and conflict between the home-grown Iraqi resistance and volunteers from neighbouring Arab states. According to an internal briefing document cited by the Post, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt described “the Zarqawi psy-op programme” as “the most successful information campaign to date”.

“Disinformation campaign” would probably have been a more accurate description, but the point is that such assessments did not figure too heavily in western media coverage of Zarqawi’s demise a week ago, which generally elicited euphoria and was followed yet again by talk of a “turning point” in Iraq. Remember how the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein were supposed to undermine the resistance? Or how the “Ba’athist insurgency” was expected to steadily diminish following the capture of Saddam Hussein? The so-called handover of sovereignty and each successive electoral exercises has also been touted as a turning point.

This time around, the predictions have relatively subdued, with all manner of spokespeople and pro-war commentators warning against expectations that the dreaded insurgency will begin to recede following its decapitation - in many cases because they are well aware that Zarqawi’s profile was out of all proportion to his influence. He wasn’t exactly insignificant by any means, but he was in all probability a lot less significant than other leading participants in the insurgency, whose names don’t make headlines because they are predominantly Iraqis, and it is not in America’s interest to publicly acknowledge the extent to which its occupation inspires disgust among those it ostensibly “liberated”.

Zarqawi was an all but unknown operator before Colin Powell mentioned him during his notorious show-and-tell presentation before the UN Security Council in the run-up to the assault against Iraq. Powell’s purpose was to insinuate links between Al Qaeda and the Saddam regime, so he conveniently neglected to mention the not unimportant fact that Zarqawi was at the time operating from a Kurdish Islamist camp based in territory that was off-limits to the government in Baghdad. He also did not bother to inform the august gathering that in the preceding year the Pentagon had thrice proposed wiping out the Al Ansar camp, but had failed to elicit a response from the Bush administration.

Zarqawi’s elimination at that point may have helped to save some lives, but it would not have served US interests. After all, he had been picked to serve an important purpose: to show the world that Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league. It wasn’t true, but veracity has never been much of an issue for Washington. In fact, it wasn’t true on two counts: not only did Zarqawi have nothing to do with Saddam, even his links with Osama bin Laden’s organisation were tenuous.

Before he came under the influence of the Tablighi Jamaat and, later, the Salafists, Zarqawi was a petty criminal in his Jordanian home town, Zarqa. In a profile in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mary Anne Weaver, who visited Zarqa a few months ago, writes: “Everyone I spoke with readily acknowledged that as a teenager Zarqawi had been a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp in Zarqa’s underworld.” By 1989, in his early twenties, the scourge of Zarqa was prepared to transfer his talents to a different realm. He headed via Peshawar to the US-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan, but by then the Soviets were already leaving.

He returned to Jordan four years later and began to dream of overthrowing the monarchy, but was arrested when a small cache of grenades was found in his possession. The six years he spent in jail were, by most accounts, a transformative experience. Amnestied in 1999 after King Abdullah succeeded his father, Zarqawi headed back to Afghanistan, which was by then under the Taliban, and had his first meeting with bin Laden. Evidently it was mutual contempt at first sight, although Al Qaeda did give him funds to set up a training camp near the Iranian border.

Throughout this period Zarqawi refused to pledge allegiance to bin Laden and apparently wasn’t particularly supportive of the Taliban. He was, thus, pretty much an independent operator when he slipped into Iran following the US attack on Afghanistan. According to some accounts he continued to receive crucial assistance from the Iranians even after it became clear that he was at least as interested in targeting Shias as he was in attacking the occupation armies. That’s an intriguing twist, but it’s by no means the only one, and sifting facts from propaganda is a fraught exercise in the existing circumstances.

What is beyond doubt is that the high profile he acquired as a consequence of the American promotional blitz facilitated his recruitment drives and improved his cachet among the local Sunni insurgents. The Jordanian government had been following Zarqawi’s activities with interest even before he reputedly sent bombers last November to three hotels in Amman, and a senior former Jordanian intelligence told The Atlantic Monthly’s Weaver, “The Americans have been patently stupid in all of this. They’ve blown Zarqawi so out of proportion that, of course, his prestige has grown. And as a result sleeper cells from all over Europe are coming to join him now. Your government is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

There can equally be little doubt that Zarqawi was a particularly nasty piece of work even by extremist jihadi standards, and that he had no more interest in liberating Iraq than the Americans do. He is believed to have been behind some of the deadliest suicide bombings, including the attack on the UN offices in Baghdad in 2003. The extent to which he might be responsible for sectarian warfare is controversial — he may have had nothing to do with the dastardly attack on the Samarra shrine earlier this year — but his antipathy towards Shias was pathological. That and his penchant for beheading hostages (and displaying the results on the Internet) are alleged to have earned him a reprimand from Ayman Al Zawahiri — someone who doesn’t exactly believe in pussyfooting when it comes to “infidels”.

So, good riddance? Unquestionably, although one can only wonder whether a pair of 500lb bombs, delivered by F-16s, were really required for the purpose. Notwithstanding the obvious overkill, there has been some conjecture about exactly how Zarqawi met his end. Perhaps it doesn’t matter very much. It might be more worthwhile to speculate about how many kills Zarqawi would have notched up had it not been for American assistance, chiefly through the gratuitous invasion of Iraq, but also by exaggerating Zarqawi’s importance.

A decrease in violence is not a likely consequence of his elimination. His removal from the scene may, however, prove to be a boon for those elements of the resistance whose primary aim is to end the occupation rather than establish a base for Islamist expansion.

The latter aim seems like a mirror image of stated American intentions: establishing Iraq as a beachhead for promoting “democracy” and market capitalism in the Middle East. Likewise, George W. Bush and Zarqawi have been following parallel paths in seeking the Iraqisation of the conflict in that country. Parallel, but unequal. When Donald Rumsfeld described Zarqawi as the single largest threat to innocent lives in Iraq, the US army was clearly off his radar — just as when US and British leaders, without any evidence of irony, blame Iraq’s continuing troubles on “foreign fighters”. And when Bush announced in the White House Rose Garden last week that Zarqawi “will never murder again”, he forgot to add: But who’s going to stop me?

Zarqawi’s end came at a fortuitous moment for America: with the Haditha and Al Ishaqiya massacres receiving too much attention, it was desperate for a bit of balance. The targeted killing of a supposed terrorist linchpin provided the ideal diversion. But the sensation of success — which anyhow may not have made a lasting difference to Bush’s abysmal popularity ratings — proved fleeting. At the weekend, three of the 460 inmates at Guantanamo Bay apparently committed suicide.

Bush declared himself to be disturbed by the development, but not all American officials felt the same way. The commander of the illegal prison camp on occupied Cuban territory described the deaths as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us”, while to the State Department’s Colleen Graffy the suicides were “a good PR move”.

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com