The Afghan quagmire

THE Americans will do whatever they please no matter what President Musharraf was given to understand, or he misunderstood, regarding the duration of military action in Afghanistan or the targets being bombed there. To our misfortune, we are a part of the coalition against terrorism but are not a party to the operation now going on and therefore are neither responsible nor obliged to justify how the Americans are conducting their war against terrorism.

The so-called coalition, notwithstanding the high-sounding rhetoric about the whole world joining it, has now virtually been reduced to two partners — the US and Britain. The others vowing support to its cause could aptly be described as ‘sleeping partners’. The OIC did not, as usual, rise to the occasion. Its Doha session was a low-key affair. However, condemning terrorism in its all forms and manifestations, including ‘state terrorism’, the OIC called for removing the ‘roots’ of terrorism. It also warned against heavy civilian casualties in Afghanistan as well as against extending the war to other countries.

The Americans seem dead set on making a ‘horrible example’ of the Taliban before they turn their attention to sorting out other irritants. British Prime Minister Tony Blair says they have no ‘immediate’ plans to extend the war to other countries. The cryptic disclaimer reinforces the worst fears and misgivings about the US game plan as it does not exclude the possibility of enlarging the present military action beyond Afghanistan if and when it is deemed appropriate. Ironically, the Americans say they will then seek a UN mandate. Needless to say settling scores with Osama bin Laden, his accomplices and his hosts and protectors is just the beginning of what Washington calls a long drawn-out and relentless battle. There is hardly any room for wishful thinking about the Americans being judicious or reasonable in their campaign of vendetta.

The way they have carried out their bombing raids in Afghanistan makes a mockery of the claim that they were only hitting ‘terrorist training camps’ or strategic military targets. No wonder, some observers pointed out that Americans had run short of targets as there was nothing left to bomb except people, and yet they went on and on flying sorties to satisfy their grain resolve to teach a lesson to the Taliban. It would be foolish to hope that there would be no significant civilian casualties. But it was not until four security guards employed in the UN office were killed on the spot in a bombing raid that the issue of civilian victims was brought to the fore. The UN officials said the office was located in a village more than a kilometer away from Kabul and that there were no military installations in its vicinity. How many other innocent civilians have so far been killed is anybody’s guess. But the worse is yet to come.

The Americans are not likely to leave off their job half done, thereby repeating the error of judgment they made in Iraq. The Operation Desert Storm was halted on the assumption that Iraq’s humiliating defeat and abject surrender would inevitably lead to the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. The US believed that the people of Iraq would rise in revolt against the disgraced dictator once the instruments of his coercive power were destroyed. That they were made to eat humble pie by the people of Iraq is a shame the Americans have not forgotten. It is therefore logical to think that the US game plan envisages a long and indefinite military presence in Afghanistan to ensure that the Taliban were totally eliminated from the political scene.

They may have been exploring various options not only to oust them from power but to keep them out of it in the future as well, such as instigating defections or a split in the Taliban ranks, or encouraging the Northern Alliance to occupy whatever territory it can grab following the breakdown of the Taliban power structure. But the main thrust of their offensive, it seems, will be a joint US-British ground operation.

The Northern Alliance has been flexing its muscles since the bombing raids began on October 7 but is said to be waiting for a signal from the US to launch a major offensive of its own. It has also been claiming that a large number of Taliban troops and officers have defected to their side and more would follow suit once the battle begins. Whatever role the Americans may eventually assign to the Northern Alliance in creating a new political set-up, they seem to be aware of its limitations as a fighting force and as a political alternative to the Taliban regime.

In case the Americans are not prepared to leave anything to chance or let some quisling do the dirty work for them, they have to deploy their own troops in sufficiently large numbers to serve as an army of occupation. This is obviously an unequal battle. In the short run the Americans will be outright winners but what happens in the long run is another matter.

The Taliban do not have a professional army. They are neither trained nor are capable of fighting conventional warfare. There may virtually be no resistance to the Americans in the cities. But the battle for Afghanistan will be fought largely in the countryside where modern technology and sophisticated weapon may not be of much use. The US army must have drawn some lessons from its bitter experience in Vietnam. Encountering a largely invisible enemy playing hide and seek is not the same experience as the one-way traffic of striking at identifiable but defenceless targets. Therefore it is going to be a long haul for the Americans and a painful experience too, more so when bodybags start reaching America from the battle front and the people back home begin to question the wisdom of getting involved in a conflict in a distant land.

The Americans have landed themselves in a quagmire. There is no short-cut to peace and stability in Afghanistan. The US intervention has made things much worse. It was easy for the Americans to get into it but will be extremely hard to get out of the multilayered trap. Even if they refuse to play on the Taliban wicket and avoid getting bogged down in an uncertain and indefinite conflict, the end result of their mission would be strife and turmoil, besides spelling a disaster in terms of death and destruction. To prop up a new government of their choice in Kabul is indeed a tall order for the Americans. They have been assuring Pakistan that they have no intention of imposing an alternative political set-up but would back efforts to instal a broad-based, multi-ethnic, representative government in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, one can hardly trust the Americans, or vouch for their real intentions. Their principal concern is to liquidate the ‘holy warriors’ who they say pose a threat to the ‘civilized way of life’. They are prepared to go to any lengths to secure their mission, no matter what happens to Afghanistan and the Afghan people in the process.

Things have come to such a pass that no one can be tricked into believing that Americans have not declared a war on Afghanistan, but are only fighting the ‘terrorists’ they wish to put out of action. This is an invasion of an independent sovereign country, an aggression likely to inflame the anger and resentment in the Muslim world. Let us see the writing on the wall well in time to distance ourselves from the reign of terror unleashed by the Americans in Afghanistan.

There is absolutely no reason for us to justify the American actions or be seen as an apologist for their policies and actions on this score. Let us keep our cooperation strictly restricted to the publicly stated parameters and not allow Washington to take our support for granted. The government can ill-afford to overlook recurring signals of public resentment against the American action.

It would be quite legitimate for the government to sternly deal with the troublemakers resorting to rioting and violence under the cover of protests and agitations in support of the Afghans. The silent majority in the country has not been swayed by emotions to join agitational activity but there is no escaping the hard reality that the heart of the masses is on the side of the Afghan people whom they see as being unjustly victimized.

We cannot stop the Americans from doing what they are up to in Afghanistan but we need to reassure our own people that we are not a party to it. Let it also be made known to the Americans that they are playing with fire. Behind the facade of friendship and cooperation there is at the popular level a widespread and deep-rooted distrust of the US designs. A single spark can bring out the seething anger and resentment of the people in this country as elsewhere.

If the Americans are obsessed with vendetta at any cost, let them pursue their dangerous game and pay the price for their arrogance and shortsightedness. Why should we suffer in the process and isolate ourselves from the mainstream of popular sentiment at home and across the Muslim world.

Privileged animals

FROM Maharashtra in India came the news some time ago of an apology made by the state education authorities that a cow had chewed up some answer papers of a post-graduate university exam in the house of an examiner. However, I am glad the official spokesman did not suspect foul play by ISI operatives from Pakistan, or even bad motive on the part of the cow.

In India all cows, and bulls, are sacred, and imputation of anything immoral by that holy animal would amount to blasphemy and probably spark off a Hindu-Muslim riot. This was quite common when we were young Indians before 1947. The favourite pastime of some Muslims was to throw the carcass of a cow into a temple, while that of some Hindus was to dump a dead pig in a mosque — all in a spirit of friendliness, as some people would have us believe today.

The goat is not held sacred in India as the cow is. But ever since Mahatma Gandhi went along with a goat in tow (he drank only goat’s milk, and once took his pet goat with him during a visit to Britain) the animal acquired an honorary sort of veneration from Indians.

What a coincidence that the London newspaper which reported the answer-paper munching exploit of the examiner’s cow also gave out the story that in Delhi a goat had chewed up the currency notes of its master and caused him considerable loss. Goats have never been accused of corruption, but if this was not corruption what else was it?

Corruption is when you start treating other people’s money as your own. Again no motive has been ascribed to the goat in question though its act fits the Urdu idiom to a T. In Urdu when we want to describe misappropriation of funds we say “Paisa kha gya,” that so-and-so “ate up the money.” The goat’s action depicts gross indifference to its master’s financial interest, if you can’t categorize it as downright defalcation.

The Maharashtra cow’s was a one-time act, not inspired by any happening anywhere else, and decidedly not aided and abetted by other cows in the pay of the ISI. Home Minister Lal Kishan Advani can rest assured that Pakistan was not guilty of cross-border terrorism or interference in the domestic affairs of India on this count.

In our country sacred cows can get away with any amount of munching and chewing of vital national documents. There are no laws that they have not flouted, even though they were themselves instrumental in their legislation. Maybe they felt a proprietorial interest in them and thought that being authors or co-authors they could do with them what they liked.

There are no government rules and regulations which have not been broken by these sacred cows, for their own sake or for the sake of their loved ones and their cronies. Bans, prohibitions and embargoes hold no fear for them, for they are the ones for whom the exception clause is always inserted into all acts and rules prescribing legal restrictions for you and me.

Like the cow and the temple bull in India the sacred cows of Pakistan can go wherever they like and graze to their bovine hearts’ content anywhere that suits them. They can own any amount of property without paying tax on it. Allotments and permits are hung around their necks like garlands of marigold. They can ease themselves at will, and their dung is cleared away by a battery of flunkeys provided by the state. Or even left to putrefy. They are not bothered.

On their part, the privileged goats of Pakistan too are busy chewing and digesting currency notes than they can be printed. As the late Dr Mahbubul Haq was fond of saying, even when he was finance minister, these goats “eat away forty billion rupees from state funds every year.” He claimed to have a list of the most voracious among them but was somehow reluctant to name any names. Maybe some of them were friendly goats. Who knows!

Many of you will recall that President Ayub Khan was allergic to goats and promulgated an ordinance to bring about their speedy elimination. I can’t remember which goat it was that he disliked more — the one that is the enemy of vegetation and small trees or the fast-breeding one that chews up banknotes with relish. In either case he failed, and so did his successors.

Pakistan has always been an El Dorado for sacred cows and hungry goats of the breed mentioned by me. Rarely have they come to grief, and if they did it was not for long and the dreaded moments passed soon. Nowadays they somehow feel restricted because of the cow-catchers and goat-snatchers going about everywhere in uniform, but you can take it that they’ll find out ways (and means) to evade them and protect themselves, if the good word has not already been passed around how to do it.

Do you ever feel hopeful that this downward drift, symbolized by the two animals, will be halted or even slowed down. I don’t feel so, for the simple reason that nobody seems to be doing anything towards that end. It was always thought that democracy was one solution. It may not be the ideal and the absolute solution but it helps. I mean the real democracy, not the one we have been seeing during the past decade or so which itself was chewed and munched away by sacred cows and VIP goats.

In democracy there is some sort of accountability of everyone and the people have a voice of some kind in everything. Maybe this serves as a check. But if those who have the authority to hold bad hats accountable and are themselves accountable to no one and run away with the goods (as has been happening since 1988) what then? On the other hand some wise guys in the country believe that democracy is not suited to our psyche.

I wonder what exactly suits our psyche? And what is our psyche by the way? Self-destruction?

Targeting American Muslims

AS the melancholy toll of dead and missing keeps climbing, another depressing statistic continues to mount: the tally of attacks and low-level harassment directed at Arab-Americans, Muslims and anyone mistaken for a member of one of those groups.

The Washington region, with its large immigrant population, is seeing its share of the ugliness. An imam in a Falls Church mosque said a female member had been beaten in the street with a bat. Another man reported that he had been attacked and beaten by a bystander who asked him “Are you Afghani?” and, when he said “yes,” screamed “I’m going to kill you.”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee says it has collected some 300 reports nationwide of incidents large and small, including three murders being investigated as hate crimes. There are also 11 reported cases of people of Middle Eastern appearance being ordered off commercial airliners.

More than a month after the tragedy, one might expect some fall off in such outbursts of paranoia and rage, especially given the repeated denunciations of such behaviour from the president on down. Muslim organizations say federal authorities have been quick to respond to their fears about safety. After a wave of cases in which airlines put “Middle Eastern-looking” people off flights or refused to honour their tickets because other passengers expressed discomfort, the Department of Transportation issued a strong reminder that such action is not only intolerant but in many cases illegal. But top-down exhortations can go only so far.

The lack of planning evident in many attacks suggests that they are momentary bursts of rage, as in the three cases nationwide in which drivers have tried to ram their cars through the doors of mosques.—The Washington Post

Powell’s damage control mission

JUDGING by reports appearing in the foreign media, the visit of US secretary of state to Pakistan and India was meant to be in the nature of a damage control mission. President Bush’s initial reaction to the events of September 11 was one of fury. He variously described the attacks as ‘the first war of the new century’, ‘acts of war’ and so on and not merely as terrorism.

It is said that initially he even wished to go it alone, without consulting the nations of the region, like his predecessor in the White House did in 1998 when he had cruise missiles fired at Afghanistan and Sudan following the attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam.

Hawkish elements in his cabinet, such as the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, reportedly favoured such a course of action. However, the more moderate elements in his cabinet like Gen Colin Powell prevailed upon the president to try to create “a multilateral coalition of the willing” to fight terrorism. According to some strategists this would not confine the US to military action; it would also include political, diplomatic and economic dimensions.

Apparently, Vice-President Richard Cheney was also in favour of the multilateral approach. Some correspondents based in New York recall that the approach adopted during the operation Desert Storm was very similar to the multilateral strategy in the present case. It was no coincidence that both Colin Powell and Richard Cheney had played a key role in the two operations. It was against this background that Colin Powell was sent out to South Asia.

However, by his initial reaction President Bush had created a host of problems for his administration. He had antagonized the Muslims in many parts of the world. Even Sikhs in the US, mistaken for mullahs, were attacked and harassed. President Bush’s intemperate language antagonized even many of those who otherwise perceived the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as reprehensible. One only hopes that the damage initially caused has not been beyond repair. In Pakistan, as Colin Powell would have known from his pre-visit briefings, some fanatical groups resorted to strikes and agitation trying to queer the pitch for his visit. Similarly, in New Delhi a few segments of Indian opinion were not willing to extend a welcome to him. A veteran communist leader, appearing in an Indian TV panel discussion over the week-end contended that the US’s victory in Afghanistan would establish its hegemony in the South Asian region.

To complicate matters, the gulf between Indian and Pakistan at the moment seems virtually unbdridgable. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is perhaps too weak and too unwilling (because of the pressure of the extremist elements in his coalition) to resume peace talks with Pakistan for the present. President Pervez Musharraf’s telephone call to him the other day had only a very short-lived mollifying effect.

As the American air strikes against targets in Afghanistan enter their second week, with President Bush committed to a “long and relentless” operation against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, nothing appears to concern India more than its war of suppression against the freedom fighters in occupied Kashmir.

It is disconcerting that India should not feel concerned about heavy civilian casualties in Afghanistan or hundreds of thousands of Afghans being driven out of their homes to seek safety and shelter in Pakistan. Despite a clear threat to the peace and stability of the region, New Delhi remains obsessed with the idea of getting Pakistan declared a ‘rogue state’ by the world community for its alleged role as a sponsor of terrorism in occupied Kashmir.

Indian leaders have spoken of hot pursuit across the Line of Control (LoC) but they have abstained from carrying out their threat, perhaps for fear of igniting a bigger encounter with this country. They rationalize their attitude by suggesting that they do not wish to “add to Pakistan’s problems.”

Ideally, India should have adopted a joint strategy with Pakistan in dealing with the situation in Afghanistan. On the contrary, it feels frustrated that while it offered bases and all logistic support to the Americans for dealing with the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, its offer was largely ignored whereas Pakistan’s role and involvement were actively sought and secured in the context of the US’s war against terrorism in Afghanistan.

New Delhi should realize that its concern for the situation arising out of the events of September 11 can be perceived mainly in the diplomatic context. Pakistan, on the other hand, has to reckon with the reality of a 1200-mile long border with Afghanistan and its traditional religious, ethnic, economic and cultural ties with the people of Afghanistan. It cannot afford to remain uninvolved with the developments next door. It also has to be worried not only about the nature and dimensions of the US military action against Kabul and the Taliban but also of the possible long-term effect of a change of rulership in Afghanistan, including the problem of a new wave of Afghan refugees coming into Pakistan.

However, in spite of its intense lobbying with the US and other western governments since September 11, India has failed to get the world community to recognize a parallel between the attacks in New York and Washington and what has been happening in the occupied Kashmir over the last eleven years or so. Mr Vajpayee’s disappointment on this score was evident in his briefing of the media representatives after Mr Tony Blair’s visit to New Delhi earlier this month. He had tried — but failed to convince Mr Blair — that the war against terrorism should have taken into account the so-called cross-border terrorism sponsored by Pakistan.

It is obvious that this line of argument has cut no ice with the leading world powers behind the drive against international terrorism. On the contrary, a significant section of the Kashmiri people in the Indian occupied part of the state also believes that India’s attempt to equate the situation there with international terrorism is to mislead the world opinion and draw attention away from the problem in the disputed state. As they view it, the militancy in the Valley is the outcome of India’s own repressive policies and not the result of any outside interference.

It is obvious that the pragmatic policy adopted by Pakistan to deal with the crisis over Afghanistan is not without its own problems. Apart from pressure from Washington for support for its anti-Osama and anti-Taliban action, there are substantial numbers of pro-Taliban elements within Pakistan. They feel no concern about Pakistan’s extremely difficult economic problems, which can only get worse with repeated protest strikes and shutdowns.

While there cannot be any doubt about the common Pakistani people’s sympathy for the plight of the Afghan people in their hour of crisis, there is little to be gained from continued street violence or from arousing the people’s passions and anger. Such methods cannot deter the US and its allies from continuing with their operation against bin Laden and the Taliban. These can only make things difficult for Pakistan at a critical time.

It is a pity that President Bush is not inclined to accept the Taliban’s offer of handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral third country for trial provided the US provides hard evidence of his involvement in the attacks of September 11.

Maulvi Abdul Kabir, who conveyed the offer on behalf of the Taliban government, went to the extent of suggesting that “if the Taliban are provided with evidence, then negotiations can start.”

The US should have realized that this was as far as an Afghan regime could go in the prevailing circumstances. By summarily rejecting the offer, Washington has shut out the possibility of a compromise solution. President Bush must realize that despite his professions to the contrary, his war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban is being perceived by the Muslim world as a war against Islam. He had the chance of dispelling such a perception but unfortunately he let it pass.

Reviving the economy must be the key goal: A strategy for changing times — II

IN designing a strategy for the medium and long term Pakistan needs to worry about three things. It must recognize that the state has an important role to play in reviving the economy. The policy-makers must also focus on at least three groups that make Pakistan’s economic, social and political situation extremely vulnerable. Islamabad must find solutions to a number of persistent problems.

Let me start with the need to expand the economy. Pakistan’s policy-makers will probably contend that a rate of growth of around three per cent a year does not mean that the economy is in recession. They are right if we apply the definition used in more developed countries. In the United States, for instance, a recession means two successive quarters of negative growth. In the developing world, economies are considered to be in recession if the growth rate is not much more than the rate of increase in population. Since that is the situation in Pakistan, we can conclude that for the last year or so the Pakistani economy has been in fairly deep recession.

What should the government do to revive the economy? And, what kind of growth rate should Pakistan aim to achieve over the next three to five years? I have been suggesting for a while that Pakistan should adopt an expansionary policy, moving away from the contractionary stance of the last two years. I believe that the IMF, at whose insistence we put the economy through a contractionary phase, was not correct in giving this advice to the country. The IMF’s worry was that to allow the economy to expand would put further pressure on the balance of payments situation, something Pakistan could not afford to do, given the already heavy burden of debt it carried. Now, with a large flow of external finance coming Pakistan’s way, there should be less of a worry about increasing the trade deficit.

There are several ways of bringing growth back to the economy. The policy-makers should aim at returning to the growth rate achieved in the sixties and the eighties when the gross domestic product increased at the rate of over six per cent a year. As I have suggested in some earlier articles, Pakistan needs to have its economy expand at a rate of at least six per cent a year in order to reduce the number of people living in absolute poverty. How should the country double the rate of GDP growth over a three-year period? To begin with, Pakistan should go for a larger public sector development programme even if it means increasing the budgetary deficit somewhat. As I will suggest in a later article, a series of employment creating public works programmes should be given a high priority.

The second point worth emphasizing is that Islamabad must recognize the importance of working with the more vulnerable groups. The first of these are the refugees who are already arriving from Afghanistan, adding to those who have been in Pakistan since the late seventies and the eighties. Pakistan’s effort to close its northern border notwithstanding, the number of refugees will continue to increase as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates. As The Economist put it in its recent issue, “the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11th has spread from the United States to Afghanistan.”

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are once again on the move. Pakistan will shoulder the bulk of the burden that is in the process of being created by yet another large-scale dislocation of the Afghan population. Perhaps 100,000 people have already joined the five million who have fled Afghanistan over the past 23 years. Nobody has the exact count but about two million already live in Pakistan in over 200 camps, some of which were set up as long as 20 years ago.

The first priority is to feed these people and another six million who are said to be hungry but continue to reside in Afghanistan. If food does not reach quickly the hungry in Afghanistan, they too will also get up and head for the borders with Pakistan and Iran. This is the reason why the United States began to drop food supplies along with bombs and missiles on Afghanistan. Feeding the Afghans will be costly — the United Nations has estimated that in the next six months this effort will cost the international community $584 million if a major catastrophe is to be averted.

In Pakistan’s first Afghan war, the refugees were simply regarded as a byproduct of the conflict. It left the education of the refugee children in the hands of the people who were able to mould them not only into Mujahideen — the fighters the Americans needed to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan. The madrassahs in the refugee camps also created an ideology that ultimately produced the Taliban.

Given what happened in the eighties to the children of Afghan refugees, by far the most important challenge Pakistan faces during the present involvement in Afghanistan is the education of this new generation of displaced people. Last time Pakistan took care of a large refugee population, the task of education was left to the non-government organizations, many of which were financed by radical Islamic groups from the Middle East. The madrassahs set up by these groups became the breeding ground for the Taliban.

This time around, however, the Pakistani state must take the responsibility for educating the Afghan children. They should be equipped with the skills that will prepare them for entering the workforce in their country whenever the time comes for them to go back home. One way of dealing with this part of the strategy may be to set up a Pakistan-Afghanistan Education Foundation to be run by professionals with appropriate expertise. The Foundation should seek both public and private funding and use its resources to develop a curriculum for teaching the Afghan children, train teachers, provide textbooks, and build schools in the camps.

While looking after the Afghan refugees, Pakistan must also pay attention to its own poor. I have suggested in some earlier writings that the number of poor in recent times has been increasing at a rate four times the rate of population growth. Pakistan today is adding about five million people every year to its large pool of poverty of some 50 million people. The disconcerting thing about the geographical distribution of poverty in Pakistan is that the provinces bordering on Afghanistan — the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan — have a much larger proportion of population living in poverty than in other parts of the country. That there is such a large number of poor people in the border provinces living right next to the Afghan refugees is a cause for great concern.

Without a concerted effort aimed at improving the economic condition of these people, Pakistan could face an explosive situation. That the poor can be a tremendous burden on the economy is obvious. That they could be turned into an asset for the economy is also obvious. That they can feed all kinds of radical philosophies is now becoming apparent. The people who are prepared to embrace poverty to experience its terror — people such as Osama bin Laden and his associates — can motivate the poor to do extraordinary things. We have already seen that happen across the border in Afghanistan. That experience must not be allowed to be repeated in Pakistan.

And, finally, Pakistan’s large middle class needs to be served with the things it has long been denied. It must be allowed to have its voice heard. It must receive the services only the state can provide. It must have access to a legal system that protects life and property and that can be accessed easily and cheaply for resolving conflict. The middle class must be able to view the future with hope, to see that opportunities exist for the young to make progress, to have the assurance that its voice will be heard in the corridors of power. Denying the middle class these opportunities and not giving it a sense of hope is as dangerous as neglecting the poor.

The many profiles published in the American press of the people who committed the terrorist attacks on September 11 point to the damage that can be done to the psychological make-up of the people who find that their voice is not being heard. This is why political development must proceed in tandem with economic and social improvement. This is why the strategy Islamabad must work on should be broad in terms of encompassing economic, political and social development. At the same time, it should be sharply focused on the people made vulnerable by the political and social upheavals of the last three decades and the sharp economic downturn of recent years.

Sitting in Washington, I am a witness to the enormous increase in interest in Pakistan on the part of the US government, the multilateral institutions based in this city, think-tanks and policy institutions all over the country. There must be a similar increase in interest in Britain, the partner of America in the attack on Afghanistan. The authorities in Islamabad will have to quickly organize themselves to respond to this development. I read in the newspapers that there are now more than a thousand journalists roaming the cities of Pakistan reporting on the developments as they take place. I am confident that several hundred people with different development agendas will soon join this crowd of media representatives. Is Pakistan prepared to deal with these crowds of enthusiasts or will it be overwhelmed by this renewed interest and attention?