Tackling the power crisis

THE government has only itself to blame. On Monday, while outlining plans to install new thermal power plants in Punjab, the Wapda chairman failed to mention one simple home truth: the current energy crisis could have been averted had the policy-makers in Islamabad shown more foresight during the last seven years. As the country’s finance minister and later head of government, Mr Shaukat Aziz wasted no opportunity to praise his economic policies, pointing out — with some justification — the robust growth that Pakistan has lately achieved. However, it required neither an economic wizard nor a far-seeing planner to predict what would come next. Heightened industrial activity and expansion in the telecom and services sectors naturally led to higher energy use, creating a surge in demand that the country’s generation capacity could not meet. To be sustainable, economic growth required a sizeable investment in power generation, but this simple logic was lost on the government and that too at a time of plenty. The benefits of a booming economy may not have trickled down to the people but the government has been flush with revenues in recent years. Instead of looking ahead, Islamabad chose to live in the present, in the process ignoring one of the most basic infrastructure requirements of a growing economy and a burgeoning population. Today, generation capacity is only 10 per cent higher than what it was in 1999 while demand has been rising by more than eight per cent a year and now exceeds supply by nearly 3,000MW. It is estimated that this yawning gap will widen to 5,000MW in two years’ time.

Difficult problems call for tough measures. In the short term, despite rising petroleum prices, there is no alternative to installing new thermal power plants and increasing capacity at existing units. Thermal plants can simply be imported, installed and hooked to the national grid in a relatively short time. However, this should be seen purely as a stop-gap solution that can only lessen the impact of the energy shortage, not resolve the crisis ahead. Work must begin immediately on longer-term projects which will require more than just cash. Large hydro-power projects are politically sensitive and also raise serious questions about their potential impact on the environment as well as the people who will be displaced from their homes. If such projects are to be undertaken, impact assessment studies must be assigned to an independent organisation that is free of political predisposition of one kind or another. Equally important is the need to develop a consensus on large dams such as Kalabagh which tend to elicit more emotion than reason. In this scenario, small dams and micro-hydroelectricity projects are a less controversial and time-consuming option. Again, the time to act is now.

The situation today is so desperate that an argument may even be made for coal-fired plants, even though they pose the problem of pollution. Sindh has vast coal reserves that can be exploited to produce relatively cheap electricity. Any significant increase in gas-fired thermal plants will depend on imported gas. In this connection, it is imperative that moves are accelerated to conclude at least one of the three pipeline deals — Iran-Pakistan-India, Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan and Qatar-Pakistan — that have been on the table for a long time but are making no progress. The long-term solution, of course, lies in wind and solar power. The key factor is renewable energy and that is the direction in which the country must move.

Olmert’s refusal to talk

ISRAEL’s refusal to talk to Syria is in keeping with its avowed policy of relying on force rather than trying the diplomatic option. Speaking on Monday — a day after the Israeli foreign minister announced the setting up of a ministerial working group for Syria — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that his government would not talk to Syria because of the latter’s alleged support for terrorism. The last time Israel and Syria talked was in 2000 during the closing period of the Clinton presidency. Since then talks have remained frozen, basically because Israel has illegally annexed the Golan heights in clear violation of all the UN resolutions, including 242 and 338. Tel Aviv also wants Damascus to recognise Israel, which obviously no Syrian government can do so long as a piece of Syrian territory is under Israeli occupation. Mr Olmert has also adopted an uncompromising attitude towards the elected Hamas government and has subjected Gaza civilians to atrocities, including the bombing of the Palestinian prime minister’s office and the kidnapping of the deputy prime minister and several lawmakers. This has frozen the Palestinian peace process.

The Israeli prime minister’s statement coincided with the beginning of the probe by his country’s comptroller’s office into the way the Olmert government conducted the 34-day war with Hezbollah. Already, his approval ratings have gone down, with large sections of the public and media demanding a probe into a war which even Israel’s friends in the West say it has lost. The two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah were not recovered, the Islamic resistance group’s military strength remained intact till the very last minutes of the war, and Israel lost 118 soldiers. Mr Olmert has rejected the call for a probe, and while it is true that the findings of the comptroller’s office are not binding, the prime minister’s keenness to develop a tough-guy image in the mould of Mr Ariel Sharon has evaporated in the battlefields of south Lebanon. Since the use of force has not helped, perhaps he may try the diplomatic option and discover that negotiations, not battles, are a better way of living with one’s neighbours.

A desperate act

THE incident of a father abandoning his four daughters — aged 11 years to nine months — at Data Darbar in Lahore is a grim reminder of the economic helplessness afflicting so many people in the country. The children, who are now in the custody of the Child Protection Bureau, say that they lived with their father in a rented place and were evicted when he was unable to pay the rent. He brought them to the shrine and never returned. Mercifully, the children are in safe custody, for economic distress due to unemployment led to some ghastly murders of young children by their fathers in Karachi in April last year. Then three gruesome incidents occurred in a span of 11 days, with each father citing his inability to provide for his family as the reason that led him to kill his children. That the girls in Lahore were spared this cruel fate is hardly likely to bring them respite but one hopes that their father will be able to pick up the pieces of his life and return for them. But what of the scores of other unemployed parents who are just not able to cope with the burden of supporting a family? What are they supposed to do when economic hardship becomes overpowering?

Incidents like these are also reminders that the much-touted economic turnaround has not meant much to the vast majority of the people, particularly the poor. The government has failed to control prices or create job opportunities on a big scale, and actions like suicide are ample proof of the lengths people can go to in desperation. It must take up the issue of poverty alleviation in right earnest and ensure employment for the poor.

Nasrallah’s arsenal of surprises

IN THE end, Ehud Olmert got more or less what he wanted. But things did not quite work out the way he expected them to, and his days as Israel’s prime minister may now be numbered.

Writing in The New Yorker earlier this month, Seymour Hersh cited two sources — a Middle East expert and a US government consultant — as saying that Israeli officials on trips to Washington were seeking a green light for a “bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation” well before the border skirmish that sparked the latest bout of Israeli aggression against Lebanon. The Israelis, Hersh was told, “repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve”. According to the government consultant, the Israelis said to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “You did it in about 70 days, but we need half of that — 35 days.”

Evidently the US and Britain kept the request in mind as they successfully strove to delay a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council, despite overwhelming evidence that the Israelis were raining death and destruction predominantly on Lebanese civilians and that children accounted for at least one-third of all casualties. A shaky truce came into force on the 34th day of the conflict, long after it had become clear that the Israelis had been flummoxed by Hezbollah’s resilience: the armed wing of the Shia movement kept a steady barrage of relatively crude rockets flying into northern Israel throughout the war (intriguingly, although Israeli civilians suffered, the majority of casualties were military), amid reports that the most potent weapon in its arsenal — the Iranian Zelzal, reputedly capable of reaching Tel Aviv — was never deployed.

This was a novel experience for Israel: the rain of Katyushas may have helped to underline the official pretence that the assault on Lebanon was part of an existential struggle, but at the same time it shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility. In previous military confrontations with the Arab world, Israel had little trouble in routing its foes within days. The bloody conquest of Lebanon in 1982 succeeded in one of its primary purposes: the PLO was driven out. This time, after nearly five weeks its claim of having substantially degraded Hezbollah’s war-making capabilities is greeted with scepticism even within Israel and is undermined by all the speculation about a second round of warfare. The ceasefire resolution more or less leaves it up to Israel to decide when its forces should leave southern Lebanon, which is supposed to come under the joint control of the Lebanese army and a heavily boosted UNIFIL, although the composition of the latter remains unclear, as does its mandate. Neither the army nor the UN force has any interest in trying to disarm Hezbollah: Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, says it is a resistance movement rather than a militia, hence Beirut is not obliged to strip it of its weaponry under Security Council resolution 1559 of 2004.

Before the recent conflagration, it was widely assumed that Hezbollah was a more formidable fighting force than the Lebanese army. Having withstood the Israeli assault, it has made itself even more unassailable. One of the reasons behind Israel’s targeting of Lebanese infrastructure and residential areas was to stir loathing for Hezbollah among Sunnis and Christians. Even this part of the plot backfired: an opinion poll some two weeks into the conflict suggested that up to 80 per cent of Christians and Sunnis (and 100 per cent of Shias) backed Hezbollah’s actions.

Back in the 1980s, Israel attracted collaborators — particularly the Phalange militias that pulled the triggers at Sabra and Chatila under Israeli supervision, but also among other sections of the community that resented the PLO’s presence. That scenario is unlikely to be repeated. As a fighter for Amal, a rival Shia party, told a reporter: “I hate them, those Hezbollah; they are arrogant and they believe they are holy because they fought Israel. Look at them walking the street as if they have liberated Jerusalem ... But if your town is attacked by the Israelis, everyone will fight, whether they are Amal, the communists or the nationalists.”

The terrorist label applied to Hezbollah by the US and Israel has never had much currency in Lebanon, and over the past month the organisation’s stock has inevitably risen throughout the Arab world, not least in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, whose governments (all of which, not coincidentally, enjoy close relations with Washington) lashed out against Hezbollah at the outset of the conflict. The organisation’s cadres are now at the forefront of reconstruction efforts and are offering generous (presumably Iranian-funded) handouts to all those whose dwellings were reduced to rubble. It has been suggested that Hassan Nasrallah’s regional stature has risen to a level not witnessed since the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Whether or not that is an exaggeration, there can be little question that Hezbollah bears no more than a passing resemblance to the Islamist monolith of popular western caricature: at the political level it operates in alliance with Christians, Sunnis and communists. Charles Glass, who was kidnapped by Hezbollah back in 1987, writes in the latest edition of the London Review of Books: “In the interval between its founding in 1982 and the victory of 2000 ... it jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an Islamic republic and spoke of Christians, Muslims and Druze living in harmony. When it put up candidates for parliament, some of those on its electoral list were Christians.” Glass is also impressed by the fact that in 2000, when Israeli troops finally vacated southern Lebanon, Hezbollah did not murder the collaborators it captured: it handed them over to the government in Beirut.

Meanwhile, in an interview earlier this month with the Turkish Labour Party daily Evrensel, Nasrallah acknowledged: “What most of the Muslim states could not do has been done by [Hugo] Chavez, by the withdrawal of Venezuela’s ambassador to Israel.” He went on say: “We salute the leaders and the peoples of Latin America. They have resisted the American bandits heroically and been a source of moral strength to us. They are guiding the way for the oppressed peoples. Go and wander around our streets — you will witness how our people have embraced Chavez and Ernesto Che Guevara. Nearly in every house you will come across posters of Che or Chavez.”

These sentiments, again, don’t quite conform with the Islamist identikit, notwithstanding Nasrallah’s clerical garb. At the same time, lest they be too readily seduced by such images, leftists would do well to remember that while the Tudeh party and other socialist groups participated enthusiastically in the anti-Shah movement in Iran alongside the clergy, once the mullahs had consolidated their power, it was the secular radicals who bore the brunt of the Islamist dictatorship’s repression.

That’s an unlikely scenario in Lebanon, of course, and Hezbollah isn’t quite as tightly controlled by Tehran or Damascus as George W. Bush would have us believe. It is interesting that in the same Turkish interview, Nasrallah — coincidentally or otherwise — invokes the Israeli-favoured Yugoslav analogy by saying: “The imperialists of the West are seeking to make a second Kosovo out of Lebanon and our region.” Intriguingly, Olmert, when faced with mild European criticism of his army’s actions, hurled Kosovo back at his detractors, citing a hugely inflated number of casualties.

Olmert’s arrogance may have been bolstered by the fact that almost all Israelis (including some prominent “doves”) supported their country’s aggression against a weak neighbour. Many of them are now demanding his head along with that of the blustering defence minister, Amir Peretz, for their failure to score a victory. Unfortunately, the likeliest alternative to Olmert and Peretz is even worse than this scandalous pair: Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu. An enlightening explication of the broad Israeli mentality, meanwhile, can be found in an essay by Yitzhak Laor in the aforementioned London Review of Books. “We now appear to be a lynch mob culture,” he writes, noting that “the army — which has always been the core of our state — determines the shape of our lives and the nature of our memories”. Although he does not designate it as such, Laor’s scathing analysis captures the essence of an entrenched fascist state.

In the early days of the war, some analysts ascribed Hezbollah’s provocation to a desire on Iran’s part to divert attention from its nuclear ambitions. What’s even more likely is that one of the factors behind the timing of the war was Israel’s anxiety to avert the international gaze from the atrocities it continues to commit in Gaza. That ploy may have worked temporarily, but Hezbollah’s attitude has once again served to underline the fact that the region will remain mired in mistrust and violence for as long as the Palestinian question remains unresolved. If Condi Rice indeed wants to witness the birth pangs of a new Middle East, it shouldn’t be hard to work out where to start. Unfortunately, in some respects not much has changed in the 40 years since Nasser described the US as “the chief defender of Israel” and Britain as “America’s lackey”.

If the US was counting on Israel to provide a template for an attack on Iran, it’ll have to think again. In unconvincing “mission accomplished” mode, Bush says Hezbollah has lost. He’s welcome to add that to his list of fantasies. One can only hope, though, that he won’t have the impertinence to look at the Lebanese and wonder out aloud, “Why do they hate us?”

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com