Beyond the ‘surge’ in Iraq

LESS than a month ago, there was much optimism about a substantive review of Washington’s Iraq policy in the light of the electoral verdict of the American people and the bipartisan assessment contained in the Baker-Hamilton report. And yet, one weighed the factors underlying this optimism against the determinism of President Bush’s psychological attitude towards the Middle East and came to the pessimistic conclusion that he would instinctively opt for the alternative of committing larger forces — the proverbial last throw of the dice — just as it happened in Vietnam.

This is what the otherwise bruised neo-conservative analysts were increasingly recommending both as the new strategy for an elusive victory and also as a shield to cover an eventual disengagement from Iraq.

While presenting his new policy on January 11, President Bush took full responsibility for mistakes but steered clear of the lessons that had generally been drawn from the events of the last three years. In fact, his version of them heightened concern for the future of the region. First, the new strategy showed that American democracy makes only a limited impact on foreign and security policy; presidential executive authority overrides public opinion and congressional majority on issues of war and peace. Secondly, at the end of the day, a quantitative approach to force levels dominates strategic thinking warranting a sizeable “surge” of troops.

Third, when it came to deeper causes, the president implicitly attributed instability in Iraq to American tolerance of the Iraqi government linking up with sectarian militias in addition to resistance from the usual Sunni enemies of democracy and liberty. Bush clearly held the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki responsible for the aggravation of sectarian conflict and served notice on it that it would have to discipline Moqtada Al-Sadr’s army through all possible means.

Fourth, in the same context, the president reverted to a hard stance towards the alleged involvement of Iran and Syria in the Iraqi violence. Fifth, he came out in support of the recent American diplomacy of encouraging long-term confrontation between the moderate Arab states and Iran.

There are notable initiatives afoot in the Congress to restrain the executive power of the president as the commander-in-chief when the nation is legally at war. Bush has incessantly talked of bipartisanship but has also calculated, probably quite correctly, that in the present crisis the Democrats would never use the only device that can block commitment of an additional 21500 troops, namely, denying financial appropriations for the so-called “surge” in Iraq. The Democrats are not an anti-war movement and they cannot risk the charge of being dubbed as unpatriotic when the army is embattled in a distant land. Even the November election has not taken away that fear.

They face a difficult political choice: they can try to restore a system of checks and balances eroded over several presidential terms by making it extremely difficult for President Bush to launch and sustain the “surge’ or opt for the safer course of exploiting present and future failures of the president with victory in the next presidential election as the ultimate prize.

If the administration can muster the logistics to launch the ‘surge’ quickly, the Congress would regard it as a fait accompli, fight a calibrated rearguard action and safely retreat into the second option. It is significant that even as Bush claimed to be sensitive to the opinions of his military commanders, he replaced those who did not support the injection of more combat troops by others willing to make one more military effort.

The most striking impact of the Iraq debate was seen in a noticeable shift on the sectarian issue. Surrogate regimes created by an occupying army usually come to have a strong vested interest in prolonging the occupation.

The government of Nuri al-Maliki has been no exception but it has also faced growing criticism in the United States for its sectarian partisanship, its failure to become a government of national unity.

The media, in particular, have accused it of using its putative links with Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia to turn the new Iraqi national army into a “sectarian force”. The vividly recorded degeneration of Saddam Hussein’s hanging into an execution by a sectarian lynch mob dramatised this aspect of current Iraqi politics and probably acted as a catalytic agent in the unambiguous package of expectations from Maliki that Bush outlined with unusual clarity. In fact, this package — benchmarks by which Maliki’s performance would be judged — is an inseparable part of the “surge”.

Maliki has been told in no uncertain terms that US support is not open-ended. Bush is committing more troops and “reconstruction funds” conditionally to help Maliki implement the new strategy for national reconciliation. It would mean a more equitable distribution of oil revenues to mitigate the pervasive sense of economic deprivation in the Sunni-dominated provinces. Maliki will be required to bring about long overdue constitutional amendments to win back Sunni confidence.

The new policy has to clarify whether Iraq, as a project of political re-engineering, is heading for a multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian state with a viable central authority or is simply disintegrating into three unstable statelets. The onus of neutralising Shiite extremists falls squarely on Maliki’s shoulders. Insofar as it applies to the 60,000-strong Mahdi army, he faces the formidable challenge of changing the politics of groups that have provided him with his own power base.

Washington has tried to help him politically by talking to Aziz al-Hakim whose Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq would not presumably want sectarian polarisation to threaten the independence and unity of the country. But Maliki would have to work much harder with Moqtada al-Sadr.

Washington does not rule out a military showdown with him. Maliki will need total loyalty from the Kurdish brigades, the peshmarga, if it ever comes to that and, therefore, he would be rightly expected to find a quick solution of the present ethnic cleansing spreading to more and more districts of the capital. In short, many problems created by the invasion have now become the responsibility of the Iraqi government.

President Bush has resisted the emerging consensus in the American strategic community that he needs to open an altogether new chapter in relations with Iran and Syria. Iran, he alleged, was providing material support for attacks on American troops and therefore, the United States would disrupt these attacks and interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. These are harsh words calculated to pre-empt the growing pressure for developing a regional policy that includes these two countries derided by Bush for six long years.

Juxtaposed with Washington’s fresh initiatives to play up Arab fears of Iran’s emerging power in the region, Bush does not seem to have been converted to the view that his final legacy should be of a peace-maker in the Middle East. In fact, it faces greater instability than ever before. The Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt are all convinced that the American invasion of Iraq has disturbed the regional balance of power and that Iran has been its main beneficiary. Turkey has never concealed its unease with the Kurdish march to freedom in northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, Washington’s indifference to the growing demand from the Arab-Islamic states that it should use its leverage with Israel to promote a sustainable two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian issues continues to radicalise opinions at the popular level. Syria is in no position to moderate this trend that helps Hamas and Hezbollah without the return of the Golan Heights to its sovereignty. The much-awaited Bush speech has done little to assuage apprehensions on these and other regional concerns.

There is a danger that Maliki will simply fail to implement the new “even-handed” sectarian policy of the Bush administration. The “surge” includes 4000 American troops that would pacify Anbar and adjacent territories where the Iraqi Sunnis have a firm foothold. If it turns out to be a costly proposition, the present interest in this even-handed policy may simply fade away with the United States once again juggling a policy of encouraging so-called ‘Shia hegemonism’ in Iraq with a confrontation with Iran.

President Bush has a limited time frame for the basic elements of the revised Iraq policy. Its main elements — additional troops, relentless pressure on the Iraqi government, money for reconstruction and isolating Iran further if it does not help advance the American agenda in the region — have a brittle side to them and may still lead to a protracted conflict, direct or by proxy, perhaps involving more regional states. As I write these lines, Tony Blair is summoning his great eloquence in Plymouth to highlight yet again his vision of a war against Islamist radicals for at least a generation.

Just as Bush was pre-empting a congressional re-think on Iraq, Blair seemed to be engaged in foreclosing Gordon Brown’s options for reviewing a strongly interventionist British policy backed by what Blair calls “hard power” exercised in a permanent partnership with the United States.

That the emerging scenario has serious implications for Pakistan too has just been underlined by John Negroponte’s confident allegation that the leadership of Al Qaeda has found a secure hideout in Pakistan.

He saw terrorism radiating to Middle East and beyond from this mythical centre of Al Qaeda’s revival. This is a grave allegation and one would need to return to its implications for Pakistan in a follow-up article.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

A hundred years of radio

THE percentage of people listening to the radio in this country these days has dropped. Perhaps it’s because television has managed to spread its tentacles into regions previously considered inaccessible. Or because other sources of receiving news, like the internet or the mobile phone have surfaced.

But there was a time when the square box with the circular top and the rotating knobs, tucked away into the corner of the drawing room, was the only source of instant news, information and entertainment, and the only meaningful contact with the outside world. This was certainly the case in pre-Partition Bhopal where The Times of India arrived a day late and was read with next day’s breakfast.

How well this writer remembers as a child, towards the close of the Second World War, those nights in the central Indian city with the two lakes. One was cocooned from the rest of the universe by a cloak of mosquito netting. And the only light in the impenetrable darkness came from the bright green dial on the Czechoslovakian radio. The wireless became a close and trusted friend.

Night after night as the selector needle was eased from left to right one was able to pick up all sorts of exotic stations Manila, Djakarta, Honolulu. One could hear the swish of the surf and the wind rustling through the palm trees when they played ‘The song of the islands.’ And one could picture a group of native maidens, garlanded with leis of hibiscus and gardenia, dancing the hula on the sand.

That was the great thing about radio. It gave one the opportunity to use one’s imagination, and to create what Walter Lippman referred to as ‘counterfeits of reality.’ Since a person was using only one of his senses after tuning in, and was not seeing what was actually taking place, it was possible to imagine a scene as it unfolded. This was especially the case when listening to a play, a short story or a whodunit.

The early years in Pakistan were no different. The radio kept one in touch with what was happening in the wide, wide world, and what was taking place just around the corner on the hit parade. How one looked forward to those broadcasts of western music by Edward Carrapiard and Fawzia Maung who provided an aural conduit through which people kept in touch with one another in that precious half hour. Those were the days when one could hear Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony one week and Mexicali Rose the next.

It was therefore with pleasurable anticipation that this writer turned up at the two-day conference on radio held towards the end of last month at the Karachi Arts Council. The conference had a somewhat long-winded title — ‘100 years of Radio: the voice of our times: yesterday, today and tomorrow.’ But every minute that was spent in the auditorium, listening to the participants conjugating the rigours of their calling and regaling the audience with delightful accounts of the past, was worth it.

The audience was made up of a galaxy of veterans, as well as the younger breed of broadcasters. There were also media specialists, scholars, journalists, academicians, civil society activists, and people who just dropped in to find out what it was like in the good old days. It was an assembly of individuals from places and disciplines that had never interacted with each other in Pakistan to such a profound extent. The speeches and references were simply drenched with nostalgia and a jolly good thing too, for in a country that seems to have lost its moorings, the only thing it has left is memories.

The conference was the brainchild of Javed Jabbar, former senator, minister, film maker and author, a writer of repute and a leading voice in Asian media. What struck one was the wide interest the conference had evoked.

There were at least 250 participants, many of whom were plucked from far flung parts of the country like Ghotki and Sukkur, Tharparkar, and Dadu, and around 200 guests.

Jabbar set the tone of the conference when in his introductory speech he pointed out that radio was the first communication medium in human history to truly democratise access to information and knowledge.

He said that this change led directly to a new level of mass political awareness around the globe and inspired the worldwide revolutionary movements against colonialism leading to independence of occupied nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

What distinguished this forum from others was the fact that the chief guests in the inaugural session were not high-profile ministers or government politicians, but low income radio listeners, some of whom travelled over 600 kilometres by truck and bus to share their experiences of how their participation in workshops on ‘radio and women’s empowerment’ organised by Baanhn Beli during the past few years, had given them a new sense of self-esteem. There were also blind listeners and blind radio presenters like Bilal Shafi and Kashif Ahmed as well as a few disc jockeys on FM stations.

The piece de resistance on the first day, was a memorable seven-minute tape by Azeem Sarwar, a former senior official of the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation. The tape contained 31 clips of sounds from the history of radio and included among other vignettes, the voice of George Bernard Shaw, the terrible boom of the first atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima, the voices of Mr M.A. Jinnah and Mr Liaquat Ali Khan, and flashes of song from three of Pakistan’s greatest classical singers, Roshan Ara Begum, Noor Jehan, and Mehdi Hasan.

There was never a dull moment during the two-day conference. A procession of distinguished personalities, a sort of who’s who of Pakistan Radio, ascended on to the stage and gave brief glimpses of the role they played in the history of this great medium.

One of Pakistan’s pioneer cricket commentators and a distinguished international diplomat, Jamshed Marker, recalled the early days when the commentators’ box was first located on the ground before it was moved to a wooden machaan. He dilated on how he and his colleague, the late Omar Kureshi, tried to capture in words the sights and sounds and the excitement of the sport. Munir Hussain also spoke about how he introduced Urdu cricket commentary.

Then came Zia Mohyeddin, a national treasure, who recounted how he began professional work as a radio broadcaster and was a witness to some interesting episodes; like the time when some officials tried to ‘Islamise’ the names of classical music ragas. Z.A. Bukhari, the first DG of Radio Pakistan, would have nothing to do with such “absurd attempts to mutilate music”.

Zia was followed by Khwaja Shahid Hussain, a former director general of the PBC, and a former ambassador to Unesco in Paris, who specially flew down from London; Jehan Ara, chief executive of Enabling Technologies, and Dr Altamash Kamal, a specialist in advanced IT and former editor of Spider magazine; Amir Uppal and Sohail Hashmi, who hosts a popular daily programme on FM89. The veteran Agha Nasir, a former director general of PBC who wrote a large number of acclaimed radio plays, and author-broadcaster Sabih Mohsin also made an appearance and lamented the decline of radio’s role in fostering the richness and resonance of language.

Others who spoke were Anwar Maqsood and Moin Akhtar who presented a hilarious 15-minute skit on a fictitious minister of information and broadcasting, the representatives of three major global radio networks — the BBC, Deutsche Welle and the Voice of America, civil activist Syed Abid Rizvi from Quetta, Owais Aslam Ali, secretary general of the Pakistan Press Foundation and Iftikhar Rashid, chairman of the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority.

Two brothers, Humayun Ansari and Azmat Ansari, described the ideal requirement for being good listeners and the pleasures of broadcasting and listening to western classical music on Radio Pakistan.

Nihal Ahmed, a former PBC director and author of ‘A History of Radio Pakistan’ referred to an interesting passage in the book which pertained to the death of he founder of the nation.

Mr Jinnah passed away at about 10.55 pm on September 11, 1948. In those days Radio Pakistan used to end its daily transmission at 11.00 pm. By the time the news about Mr Jinnah’s demise had reached Radio Pakistan, the transmission had already concluded. And so it wasn’t until the morning of September 12, 1948, that the people of Pakistan heard about the death. It was an interesting epitaph to a very successful conference.

Another symptom of madness

FORGET November’s congressional elections, which showed a huge increase in the American public’s disillusionment with the war in Iraq. Set aside the polls which show that a majority of Americans — as well as Iraqis — want an early pullout of US troops.

Those who take the key decisions in Washington are determined to keep US forces there for the long haul. That is the grim message, not just of George Bush’s speech on Wednesday night, but of the Democratic party’s dithering response so far. It would be nice to think the president’s plan to send more troops into the quagmire of Iraq was just another symptom of the madness of King George. One might then hope for sanity to be restored under a new administration in 2009.

There is scant evidence for such optimism. John McCain, the current Republican front-runner, is more hawkish than Bush when it comes to believing military power can solve complex political and socio-economic conflicts.

On the Democratic side, most bigwigs fear being tarred as “unpatriotic”. They are trying to create rhetorical distance between themselves and the White House, but without rocking the war-boat.

Only Senator Edward Kennedy, who long ago forfeited any chance of becoming president, has had the courage even to demand that the White House require congressional authority to support an increase in the US contingent in Iraq. He is not calling for an end to funding the war itself.

So we will have to wait until the campaign for the presidency starts in earnest next year to see if the remorseless rise in US casualties and the continuing chaos in Iraq push the contenders into serious end-the-war mode.

Meanwhile we are left with a president who was never going to admit failure. His speech-writers touched a few new buttons on Wednesday. There was vague acknowledgement of mistakes, a promise that America’s commitment was not open-ended, and even a mention of possible American defeat.

But Bush continued to insist on “victory” and avoided any reference to a withdrawal timetable. He may claim to have a “new strategy”, but his course remains unchanged.

Tactical shifts are a different matter. The policies announced last week were picked from various sources, including the study group chaired by former secretary of state James Baker, as well as Pentagon advisers.

The notion of a surge in US combat forces to try to stabilise Baghdad and speed up the training of Iraqi units was endorsed by Baker.

So was the idea — initially the brainchild of the military — for US troops to be embedded with Iraqi units. Baker and Bush also agree that the US should make extra military and financial help conditional on a sustained effort by the Iraqi government to promote national unity by making concessions to Sunni politicians on de-Ba’athification and guarantees of a share in Iraq’s oil revenue.

The bits of Baker that Bush has not adopted are the call for dialogue with Iran and Syria, and the recommendation that any dispatch of extra US troops must be short-term and part of a larger commitment to pull most US combat troops back to bases by the spring of next year. Instead, Bush is adding extra troops on the same vacuous how-long-is-a-piece-of-string basis that he and Blair have always used.

In military terms, 20,000 extra troops cannot make a difference, as the outgoing US commander, General George Casey, recognised. He declined to argue for this, which is why he is being replaced.

The Baker report pointed out that previous combined US and Iraqi offensives in Baghdad, including this summer’s Operation Together Forward, did not work. Violence increased by 43 per cent, as insurgents slipped away before security sweeps and filtered back later.

The Project on Defence Alternatives, a respected US thinktank, points out this week that, to have even a small chance of conducting a successful “clear, hold and build” strategy, the US would have to double its troop commitment to 300,000 and keep it in Iraq for 15 years at a cost of at least another 8,000 American lives. This is an investment that the Pentagon cannot afford, and which would drive the American public from electoral protest to outright mutiny.

As for Bush’s effort to hand more power to Iraq’s security forces, it is undermined by their increasingly sectarian loyalties. Large sections of the army as well as the police are controlled by commanders with partisan agendas.

Four days of fierce fighting last week by US and Iraqi troops in Baghdad’s Haifa Street, less than two miles from the Green Zone, are undermining a Sunni area for the benefit of radical Shias, as well as causing heavy destruction.

The most disastrous part of Bush’s plan is his pressure on the Maliki government to let US troops enter Baghdad’s 2 million-strong Shia district, Sadr City, with all-out force, in order to smash Moqtada al-Sadr’s militias. This could produce a civilian bloodbath of colossal proportions, dwarfing the massacres in Falluja in 2004. The US plan to bring Kurdish peshmerga units into Baghdad is equally dangerous. They may provide an element of professionalism and neutrality, but they are outsiders who do not know the terrain or the language, thereby ensuring they will quickly acquire the image of foreign occupiers that already dogs the Americans.

Iraq today presents the US with even more of a lose-lose situation than it did in 2003. Adding more troops only compounds the original mistake. The country’s 15 Arab provinces are engaged in a deep struggle for power between fundamentalist Shias and disempowered Sunnis, with Baghdad as the central prize, and the US can do nothing to influence the outcome.

In spite of repeated promises to find a national consensus, the Shia-led Maliki government showed its true colours when it rushed to execute Saddam Hussein and turned the occasion into a sectarian lynching. With allies like these, what enemies does Washington need?

Iraq’s chaos can only be resolved by political means. Even at this late stage, Shia and Sunni political and religious leaders could reach a national consensus through dialogue and compromise.

They alone have the ability to control their own militias and end the violence. Bribing or bullying by Washington will not help. Outsiders cannot resolve other countries’ civil wars.

A full and early US withdrawal is long overdue. It will not bring an immediate end to Iraq’s tragedy, and in the short term the killing may get worse. But that is the ultimate cost of an invasion that should not have happened, and which most Iraqi Arabs never wanted.—Dawn/Guardian Service