Opposition in disarray

IT IS difficult to say who between the government and the opposition is capable of demonstrating a higher degree of political gaucherie. The government’s stubbornness is centred on President Pervez Musharraf’s insistence on perpetuating himself in power. From this have followed policies that focus on giving the general another five years — though, mercifully, without uniform. If it were in his power, he would have sought re-election as head of state while brandishing the swagger stick. However, thanks to the popular support to the “non-functional CJ” and the massive rebuff delivered by the Supreme Court, the general had the good sense to realise that the nation would no more tolerate him as a president in uniform. Hence the pledge to discard the uniform before taking oath as president. The opposition’s ranks have been characterised by disunity bordering on chaos and lack of consistency in policies. The opposition consists of honest hardliners as well as conscientious soft-liners, besides turncoats, time-servers and the dubious like their counterparts in the “king’s party”. With less than a fortnight left for the crucial presidential vote on Oct 6, the opposition has failed to demonstrate even a semblance of unity. To begin with, the PPP is already sitting on the fence. Irrespective of how the much talked about deal is going, the PPP — conscious perhaps of its vote bank — has made up its mind to go it alone. On Friday, its secretary-general said the APDM’s decision to quit the assemblies was premature and hasty.

The PPP is not part of the APDM, so its criticism of the latter’s decision is understandable. However, the APDM’s position as a bastion of opposition to President Musharraf seemed shattered on Friday after Raja Zafarul Haq’s categorical announcement prompted Maulana Fazlur Rahman to air his dissenting views from abroad. Without waiting for the JUI chief to return home, Raja Zafarul Haq announced that the APDM parliamentarians would quit the assemblies next Saturday. Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s reservations about quitting the assemblies are well known. In fact, the JUI chief fell out with Qazi Hussain Ahmad publicly on this issue. Immediately after the PML-N leader’s press talk, the JUI chief cautioned his allies against any hasty moves that could precipitate martial law. Talking to Dawn from Makkah he criticised what to him appeared to be the APDM’s change of stance towards the Supreme Court. He claimed that the APDM supported the apex court when it ruled against the government but that its attitude towards the higher judiciary now lacked enthusiasm. Indeed, Raja Zafarul Haq’s claim that the higher judiciary was under “tremendous pressure from the administration” sounds strange against the background of the two Supreme Court decisions that went against the government on key issues, one of them concerning Nawaz Sharif.

Even more astonishing was Qazi Hussain Ahmad’s plea to the public to put pressure on the Supreme Court to deliver the right kind of judgment. The JI chief even hinted at a press conference in Islamabad that the CJ was restored to his office because of the popular agitation and, therefore, there should be a sort of quid pro quo. The judges, he said, were now “silent and subdued”. One is constrained to ask whether the opposition, like the government, confuses an independent judiciary with a pliant judiciary.

Lahore smog: bleak prospects

THAT air quality in Lahore is bad is a huge understatement. Statistics and studies show that the city is 20 times more polluted than the limit permitted by the World Health Organisation. The environment in some Lahore neighbourhoods where industrial and residential areas have been allowed to exist together is in fact much more lethally poisoned resulting in a disturbingly high number of deaths: out of 63,000 annual deaths in the city, about 1,250 are caused by air pollution.

Unfortunately, there is hardly anything that the authorities are doing to ameliorate the situation except for issuing occasional notices and orders which are hardly, if at all, followed up. The latest reports that the environment protection department has issued environment protection orders against 70 steel re-rolling mills and referred 47 of them to environment protection tribunals for failing to meet environment quality standards are expected to change nothing. Like all other official proclamations on checking air pollution in Lahore, these reports are least likely to go beyond making occasional headlines in local newspapers. The city’s environment is sure to deteriorate further before it ever improves.

Some recent pronouncements by the government show why. Steps needed to reduce poisonous emissions by commuter transport responsible for 80 per cent of the pollution in the city are being taken as if we have all the time in the world to implement them. The city government has announced that it will phase out all two-stroke auto-rickshaws by December and convert all public buses and vans to run on compressed natural gas instead of diesel and petrol. So far only two main city roads have been declared off-limits for two-stroke rickshaws, the greener four-stroke rickshaws are still a rarity and there are no signs at all of buses and vans moving to CNG. This woefully inadequate progress will certainly add to the pollution facing the city where thousands of new vehicles are added to the transport pool every month. This criminal lack of urgency at the official level will ensure that Lahore’s annual winter smog — mainly caused by rising air pollution — is dirtier and deadlier this year. The hapless residents of the ‘city of gardens’ of yore surely deserve a better quality of life.

Checking police excesses

TWO recent incidents of police highhandedness indicate that the stipulated measures for reforming the law-enforcement agency have yet to see the light of day. On Wednesday, the father of the murdered man in Karachi’s high-profile NED couple case complained of being severely beaten by the police and warned by them to refrain from implicating two people in the affair. More recently in Thatta, an elderly French scholar, who had reported to the police station after losing her precious research work, was mercilessly thrashed by the investigation officer who was presumably enraged by an MPA’s threat to take up the matter of police callousness in the assembly. In both cases, the victims had come to the police to seek help and justice. They received none, and, instead, were further victimised. Their case justifies the public perception of the police as persecutors rather than as a truly professional force charged with the task of helping the course of justice.

What has made matters worse is the non-functional state of the public safety commissions that are supposed to take up citizens’ complaints against errant law-enforcers. The commissions are seen as a fundamental part of the Police Order 2002 and are critical to ensuring accountability in police ranks. Their absence or poor functioning only proves that the authorities are not serious about carrying out the mandated reforms, especially with many politicians and influential people looking upon the force as an instrument with which to settle personal scores. Rather than submitting to police excesses and taking these for granted, the public, helped by the media, would do well to highlight cases of police atrocities. While, no doubt, this would incur the wrath of police officials, such action might expedite the proper constitution and functioning of safety commissions.

New book tells all about CIA

PRESIDENTS of modern republics, like the pharaohs of Egypt in another age, would like to be remembered by future generations. A few French heads of state have left behind monuments to their own glory.

A glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre is a glittering homage to late François Mitterrand while Jacques Chirac ordered a giant museum to be built to house the relics of primitive art from Africa and the Oceania.

Instead of building monuments, US presidents prefer to leave behind what is known on the other side of the Atlantic as a “legacy”. Such is currently a major worry for the present tenant of the White House, whose name, whatever he does, it is safe to assume, will irremediably be linked with the Iraq fiasco. Such was the preoccupation also of President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the end of his second term in 1960.

Terribly frustrated over the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency, a pitiful record of gaffes and blunders by an organisation created to provide “ears and eyes” to the country at the end of the Second World War, the president burst in anger: “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this.” He added that he was leaving behind a “legacy of ashes” to his successor.

Tim Weiner who has been covering the CIA for The New York Times for the past 20 years and has won a Pulitzer for his investigative reporting, borrows Ike’s term for the title of his book. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a breathtaking account of an avalanche of blunders, and a few achievements, of the agency in the past six decades.Weiner consulted more than 50,000 documents, mainly from the CIA’s own archives, and interviewed hundreds of the agency’s veterans. “What I have written here is not the whole truth,” he says in the preface, “but to the best of my ability is nothing but the truth.”

Following 9/11, the ultimate tombstone to the secret service’s monumental collapse as the guiding light of America’s foreign policy and national security, Weiner observes: “We are back where we began 60 years ago, in a state of disarray.”

As the narrative unfolds at breakneck speed, during these 60 years the CIA’s fervour to keep a tab on the march of current history, and repeatedly bumbling efforts to change its course, takes its agents all over Western and Central Europe, Africa, Asia and to the USA’s own backyard in South America, at the expense of billions of dollars in unaccounted cash for covert operations, with precious little to show by way of accomplishments.

Pakistan is mentioned, and more than once. From the fateful Francis Gary Powers flight from a secret airbase near Peshawar on May Day in 1960 in the spy aircraft U-2 that was shot down by the Soviets, to the broad daylight assassinations of CIA officials by a Pakistani terrorist on Jan 25, 1993, right at the gate of the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The Russians, the Chinese, even the Cubans would have plenty of leisure to target, and occasionally bring down, more U-2s in the course of time. Nothing the CIA does works right. Put together to replace the wartime OSS, the agency was supposed to be the concretisation of the Truman Doctrine: “Any attack launched by an American enemy on any nation of the world will be considered an attack on the United States.”

Bereft of its Second World War foe, the Nazi regime, the agency considered the Soviet Union the rightful enemy President Harry Truman was alluding to in his historic address to a joint session of the Congress on March 12, 1947. But, as demonstrated by Weiner, the mighty organisation created to fight Marxism could have been run by the Marx brothers themselves, had its record not been splattered with so much gore.

Hundreds of its agents, local but now and then Americans as well, were spotted by the KGB and intelligence agencies belonging to the Eastern European, Asian or South American countries, then arrested, tortured and executed without the CIA being able to identify the mole in its own ranks.

In 1994 the agency spied on its own ambassador in Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee. Secretly planted microphones in her bedroom recorded hushed sweet nothings addressed to someone named Murphy. The CIA promptly sent the “Murphy Memo” to Washington, incontestably concluding that Her Excellency was having a clandestine amorous affair with her own secretary, a young woman named Carol Murphy, and was hence a lesbian.

It was left to the ambassador herself to prove that her two-year-old black poodle was coincidentally also named Murphy and that those terms of endearment were meant exclusively for his woolly ears.

But the greatest faux pas of all will probably remain the quasi-theatrical performance by the then Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations on Feb 5, 2003, flaunting graphic details of the depots where Saddam was supposed to store his Weapons of Mass Destruction. The images were provided by the CIA. These WMDs never existed.

From Ike to JFK to Nixon, from Carter to Reagan to the Bushes to Clinton, each president was initially aghast to learn of the CIA’s covert operations and gargantuan expenses, often without congressional assent, even knowledge. Each president vowed to cut the agency down to size. Each president ended up playing the CIA’s game and enhanced its powers to aliment his own fixation.

The result was, inevitably, unfailingly, monumental bloomers. JFK’s obsession with the assassination of Fidel Castro drove him to the Bay of Pigs disaster while Nixon’s determination to use the agency’s overseas expertise to spy on political adversaries at home brought him the Watergate stigma.

Jimmy Carter’s attempts to free American hostages in Iran were an unending tragicomedy and Ronald Reagan barely escaped with the skin of his teeth the Iran-Contra fiasco, though his legacy will remain his Mosaic commandment before the Berlin wall: “Mr Gorbachev, bring down that wall!”

The less said about Bill Clinton the better. In Weiner’s words: “No commander in chief since Calvin Coolidge had come to the White House thinking less about the wider world. When he spun the globe, it always came back to rest on the United States.”

Clinton was not the least interested in the agency’s work. The CIA director of the time, Jim Woolsey, put it succinctly: “I didn’t have a bad relationship with the president. I just didn’t have one at all!” Clinton’s gaffes include ordering a shower of Tomahawk missiles on a house in Iraq identified by the CIA as a terrorist training camp and ending in the massacre of an entire family.

Following the bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, he ordered similar firing of a dozen or so cruise missiles (a million dollars a piece) on the supposed hideout of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan (also pinpointed by the CIA). At the receiving end of the deadly rain this time was a caravan of 20 camel riders. The agency would miss many more chances to get Bin Laden.

Real democracy and lost trust

Kawish

COMMONWEALTH Secretary-General Don McKinnon has urged Gen Musharraf to hang up the army uniform before the end of his current presidential term, ensure transparent and fair general elections and allow all parties to participate in the polls to ensure real democracy in the country.

…In successive years, rulers have not only breached the trust of the people but have also lost the confidence of the international community. Regardless of the claims of the rulers about democracy in the country, the international community is demanding true democracy and the holding of free and fair elections as an essential condition for democracy.

Transparent and fair polls are the first step towards democracy, but when doubts are expressed at the outset the entire election process becomes questionable. We have a strong tradition of pre-poll riggings such as forced exile of opposition leaders, barring them from the election process on the pretext of court cases which could not be proved in 10 years.

… If Gen Musharraf is not elected, or due to some legal and constitutional anomalies he is out of the race, then what will happen? The recent statements of Punjab chief minister Parvaiz Elahi has further raised the apprehensions of democratic-minded people that if the court declared Gen Musharraf ineligible, then what are the other options available.

We would suggest to the rulers to take measures which ensure free and fair elections and avoid controversial and doubtful decisions. — (Sept 21)

Wheat crisis & govt’s hollow claims

Khabroon

THE federal cabinet at its meeting in Islamabad directed all the concerned ministries and departments to take effective and emergency measures to end the sensitive wheat flour crisis. The federal government accused the Punjab government for not achieving the wheat target on time. All said and done, the government has failed to resolve the wheat flour crisis.

Before the advent of Ramazan, prices of daily items, particularly flour, started rising and now it is out of reach of the common man who lives below the poverty line.

It is very pathetic that hoarders and big traders are snatching the bread from the mouth of poor families by increasing the flour price.

There were reports that the Sindh government was contemplating action against the hoarders, but the federal government did not approve it, saying that those traders also had other businesses and extreme measures would affect the economy. Then a new surge in prices was witnessed, while those whose responsibility it is to control the prices remained silent spectators.

It is strange that instead of tackling the situation through some effective measures the government was trying to make excuses to explain the shortage of flour.

Now the government is talking about emergency measures. If these had been taken before Ramazan, the common man would not have faced this hardship. — (Sept 21)

— Selected and translated by Sohail Sangi