Islamophobia: the new menace

DON’T you just hate the phrase “paradigm shift”? One just does not have this auditory antipathy to it and dislikes even more that the latest concept in the United States is that all things bad and blighted come from Islam, and a Muslim is America’s new bogeyman.

In 2000, then vice-president Al Gore as head of the anti-terrorism committee had gotten the Law of Secret Evidence passed and the stage set for ethnic profiling and stereotyping. Many were harassed and several held for looking the part. On the heels of that came the Carnivore software that the FBI was to use to snoop on e-mail. As the uproar gained steam, September 11 happened and it was suddenly an “I told you so” attitude all over. The tedious airport checks and the mall harassment of women in Hijab and the killing of even Sikhs, mistaken as Muslims, in hate crimes climbed.

On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the USAPA, (USA Patriot Act) into law, and suddenly the Law of Secret Evidence appeared diminutive. With the Patriot Act, sweeping new powers have been given to both domestic law enforcement and international intelligence agencies, and the checks and balances that previously gave courts the opportunity to ensure that these powers were not abused, have been done away with. Critics decrying the infringement of civil liberties by this law argue that the Patriot Act was passed in a great rush, was not debated in Congress, nor was expert testimony outside law enforcement heard.

The Patriot Act was seen in action in a comedy of errors in small town America. According to the Wall Street Journal, the city commissioner of Chester, Pa, an American citizen of Pakistani descent had the door of his house broken down by the FBI, even though the lady of the house was home. The FBI held her at gunpoint whilst it scoured the house for clues, for the neighbours had gotten suspicious and complained when a pan which had been used to cook biryani, was washed and the water thrown in the backyard.

The article was appropriately titled “Law encourages neighbours to spy on neighbour” There is no evidence that civil liberties enjoyed by people previous to the enactment of the patriot Act hindered or limited the normal process of tracking, catching and punishing terrorists. This bill, while it also invades on-line privacy, does nothing, except possibly to monitor individual non-violent computer crime. To the drumbeat of George Bush’s nauseating repetition of the “war on terror”, we in the US now have quite a choir. The sad fact is that many of the choirboys are not just obscure folk but nationally known figures who have a voice and in some cases quite a following.

During a graduation ceremony at Johns Hopkins University, Tom Brokaw, the anchor for NBC Nightline, gave an entire speech playing up Islamophobia as his central theme. He said that modernity was an affront to Allah and because “young Muslims who are suicide-motivated could not be killed or ignored, their rage had to be dealt with.” Adding provocation to alarm, he went on to add that the demographics of the world were rapidly changing and in about 20 years Islam would supersede Christianity as claiming the largest followers.

Whether the Johns Hopkins administration identified itself with this message is unclear, but despite a storm of protest, Harvard University allowed a graduating student, Zayed Yasin, to go ahead with his scheduled speech which was titled, “Of faith and citizenship: my American Jihad”. The speech was eloquently simple and afterwards the detractors realized that indeed they had been protesting too much in an atmosphere of anti-Muslim and anti-Islam phobia.

The baton, nay the bayonet, was handed by Brokaw to Lou Dobbs of CNN’s Moneyline, who, instead of acquiring fame a la stock market, decided to use the term “Islamist” as a synonym for all things terrorist. The news raged across message boards and discussion groups and many Muslims called CNN and e-mailed Dobbs. The only “concession” that he made was to call them radical Islamists, but terrorists all the same.

But these are only the backgrounders while the Bush administration gears up to pursue its open-ended and no-holds-barred “war on terror”. All Arab and South Asian Muslim visitors to the US have to have their fingerprints taken and their particulars stored in criminal databases. The administration’s giant-size catch-all Homeland Defence plan now concentrates power in a few select departments. The Washington Post says the agencies gathered under one umbrella “reach deep into American life, doing everything from coordinating disaster relief to tracking down foreigners working illegally in restaurants”, and that the measure “blurs the boundaries between gathering intelligence on foreigners and doing the same with American citizens.”

From Dobbs the cacophony reached the Southern Baptists Convention (SBC) where its former president, Reverend Jerry Vines, said disparaging things about Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Despite an uproar and repeated demands for condemnation and apology, none have been forthcoming except from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League which was swift in its condemnation and reminded all of the call made in 1999 by the same Southern Baptists Convention for Christians to pray for the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity.

Well before the female suicide bomber blew herself up in Israel, Muslim women in America were not spared intense scrutiny. An American-born woman of Pakistani parents was not just horrifically profiled at an airport; she was forced to remove her Hijab in public, despite her protestations that she had been checked by a female security officer in private. There is a quite rage within America over September 11, and President Bush’s Xenophobia utterances and policies and Attorney-General Ashcroft’s ultra-right bent and then the media chorus makes the quiet rage rather raucous at times. And this is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

According to the Annual Report of Complaints regarding discrimination compiled by CAIR, there was a 15 per cent increase in 2001 compared to the previous year and starting from 1997 there has been a steady rise in these complaints. It is safe to assume that 2002 will reveal an exponential rise in these cases. Virginia leads the pack followed by Illinois, Maryland and New York. The Muslim features attracting discrimination were Hijab and beard followed by ethnic origins.

Simple and unknowing Americans all over the country have been infected by this sickening trend; the vilification of Islam is felt all of a sudden to be not just fashionable but a necessity. Paul Craig Roberts, a columnist for the Washington Times questioned the wisdom of issuing visas to young Muslims. Shannon Burke, a radio talk show host in Florida, has called for the closure of all US borders to Muslims, because “Muslims are cruel and Islam hates education and democracy and any new invention is a threat to Allah.”

The phobia is fast turning into paranoia, and appears obviously to have been stoked by the way the September 11 events were and continue to be painted. Here in the United States, the government is formulating policy and the media is cheerleading it through. Security and protective measures are necessary as they concern each and every citizen but to lose balance and use them to terrorize only one particular section of the community is more than frightening. If one is not WASP (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant), he or she is subject to being profiled per se and ejected out of a plane, as has happened innumerable times. Only the other day five brown-skinned men were offloaded from the flight, just because another passenger had felt they were acting “suspicious.” Only two of the five were Arabs.

Of late there is a breath of fresh air though. The University of North Carolina has urged all incoming students to read a book on “Approaching the Quran” by Michael Sells, and if they do not wish to, they must write a paper on why they refuse. The book does not promote Islam, but a group of ultra-right Christians and Jews filed for a restraining order, for the book not to be discussed and surprise of surprises, got overturned by a federal judge.

The North Carolina state assembly, however, passed a resolution threatening to cut the university’s reading money if it did not give “equal time to all religions.” The UNC action was the centrepiece on TV news-shows and the screaming-hoarse Bill O’Reilly called Islam the “religion of our enemies” and likened the action of UNC as akin to having students read Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in 1941.

America is a nation of immigrants, and several strides in accommodating diversity and protecting civil rights have been made, leading to the democratic pluralism of which we are rightfully proud. Unfortunately, however, the panic generated by September 11 seems to have so occupied the mind of the administration as well as the media that they seem to have lost perspective. We pride ourselves in our diversity and our tolerance but there is the real risk of transforming this great nation into a police state, a la Soviet style, a state of fear and suspicion in which, in order ostensibly to fight criminal terrorism, the state itself becomes a terrorist. It did not hold in the once superpower, it cannot hold in the sole superpower. Fear and paranoia are their own enemies; they can’t do better when compounded with Islamophobia.

The writer is a physician practising in Toledo, Ohio, US. Her

E-mail: mahjabeenislam@hotmail.com

September 11: some reflections

AS I switched on the CNN at around 1800 hrs (Pakistan Time), the screen was clouded by smoke and the South Tower was crumbling. “War on America” was the cry behind the falling debris.

My initial reaction was shock, which soon turned into deep grief, anguish and sympathy for the innocent victims of this outrage and for the people of America who were rightly overwhelmed by sorrow and indignation.

As the news of the tragic episode rolled by, I forgot, like millions of Muslims the world over, all my complaints and grievances against America. I felt the pain of those who had suffered and the loss of their near and dear ones.

An hour later I switched over to BBC-24 and had a second shock. Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Barak, was, live on TV, alleging Islamic fundamentalists and naming Osama bin Laden for this horrifying crime, which was universally condemned by Muslim leadership and Islamic scholars.

How come he could have discovered the hand behind the crime so fast, while the American president was still seeking refuge in the air and the vice-president in the basements of the White House? I was intrigued and was apprehensive of a new war against Islam and the Muslims. And alas, that is what 9/11 has continually unfolded.

The number of victims shrank from 7,000 to 2,819 but the war hysteria has been spread to all corners of the world. Numbers are important, but not that much. Even one person, as Islam teaches us, is as important as the entire humanity. Those killed in that wanton act belonged to all faiths and came from over 80 countries of the world. According to one estimate, one in every four was a Muslim. Yet, Islam and the Muslims were targeted and demonized. Even Salman Hamdani, a Pakistani youth of 23, who rushed from outside to the burning tower to save human lives and was consumed in the flames of fire, was not remembered.

The next shock came from President Bush’s new dictum: “whoever is not with us, is with the terrorists”. A president who was not elected by a majority of the American people (Al Gore was leading by half a million votes), who was inducted into the White House with Florida’s dubious votes and the divided verdict of the Supreme Court, unleashed a crusade against other peoples of the world, terrorizing governments into falling in line with the so-called coalition against terror by threatening their leaderships to be ready to be sent back to the stone age in case they did not prepare themselves to cooperate in action against innocent people in other parts of the world without establishing their guilt.

The American justice department did not care a dime while detaining over two thousand people who lived in America under the protection of the American constitution, denying them all legal and moral rights as members of a civilized society. Even white Americans were turned into ‘non-war combatants’ and the prisoners of war were denied all rights due to them under Geneva Convention.

An era of American arrogance, and unilateralism was inaugurated, claiming exclusive rights and privilege for the Americans, particularly its armed forces, and America’s self-assumed right to military intervention wherever it chooses, and to remain above all the accepted norms of human behaviour, international law and Geneva Protocols — all in the name of fighting terrorism.

Terrorism has no religion. Timothy McWeigh or Osama bin Laden represent a class of their own who are prepared to inflict violence on others to pursue their own political causes or highlight their grievances.

Terrorism didn’t begin on 9/11 and would not end with that. It is a tactic and a stratagem. The use of force has many names and forms. It could be legitimate or illegitimate. It is only on the basis of conformity with values and principles that one can be differentiated from the other. Violence is something different. It relates to that aspect of human behaviour wherein individuals or groups (including governments) inflict injury, death or destruction on others for personal or ulterior motives, and as such they stand guilty of crime against persons or humanity. Violence is motivated by personal considerations.

Terrorism is different from both. Although there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, an overwhelming body of legal and political opinion looks on terrorism in the context, not of personal gain or vendetta, but some political or social objectives. The purpose is to shock, to strike fear and pain in order to highlight some grievances or cause. While ends cannot justify means, it would be unrealistic not to differentiate between terrorism that represent wanton violence and apparent terrorism which is a product of political or social affliction.

Apparently American fury is directed against all and sundry on the plea that (a) the act took place on American soil and that (b) it led to the death of some three thousand people. Without, in any way, diminishing the horror and despicability of the event, American duplicity cannot be ignored either. America has been responsible for acts of terrorism both at home and abroad.

The sympathy for America was the first genuine reaction of 9/11 but during the year following it, these feelings have been its hapless victim. American unilateralism and brinkmanship have produced widespread disappointment, discord, rage and hatred. Equality of all human beings has been changed into eternal superiority of the Americans. Due process of law has been discarded in favour of arbitrary detention, denial of right to defence and defence through lawyers of one’s choice. Punishment no longer requires proof and judicially acceptable evidence. Even the right to privacy is in danger.

The sovereignty of other nations is becoming irrelevant as far as the outreach of the only superpower is concerned. The United Nations and the values on which its Charter is based have been marginalized. Like the Roman Empire, the right of intervention is being claimed, including the right to impose political leadership of America’s choice on different countries.

On 9/11 we all were sharing the pain of the American people. But the initial response could not last long, despite the flirtations to and by some of the leaders of the Muslim world. American leadership chose to unleash an undefined and indefinable war against ever-changing targets: Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Muslim fundamentalists, religious educational institutions, Afghanistan, Iraq, ‘axis of evil’, ‘kernel of evil’, ‘political suspects’, ‘non-war combatants’, so on and so forth. This is forcing the people to ask as to who are the real beneficiaries of the ‘veritable hell’ of 9/11 — ‘Muslims in America and all over the world’ of the ‘vested interests in politics, economy and military’ in America, Israel and India.

We share the Americans’ pain. In fact, we are all at the suffering end. Beneficiaries are a different class: America’s conservative political leadership and its military-industrial establishment; Ariel Sharon and the Israeli forces of occupation in Palestine; Vajpayee and Advani who are using the same terrorizing weapons in Kashmir and elsewhere, to name but a few beneficiaries.

Muslim and Arab leaderships are being coaxed into submission. European and East Asian nations are being enticed and pressured. A process of global destabilization has begun, threatening all values and principles that represent the achievement of mankind over many centuries. People are bewildered on the way President Bush and his colleagues are treating the rest of the world. They are asking searching questions. Their minds cannot be shut, despite all the smoke-screen of propaganda.

The writer is Chairman of the Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, and former senator.

Constitution and its amendments

THE 1973 Constitution, like its architect, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, refuses to die. Bhutto lives on because of his two legacies: (1) the Pakistan People’s Party, which continues to loom large on the political horizon of the country with formidable popular support and (2) the 1973 Constitution which has survived suspensions under military regimes and still holds the field as the Basic Law of the land, with all the distortions it has suffered through amendments by civil and military rulers.

Amendments have been the fate of the 1973 Constitution ever since its promulgation. The irony is that the process started with Bhutto himself. During his tenure as prime minister, he carried out as many as seven amendments in four years. In July 1977, when Gen. Ziaul Haq deposed Bhutto and imposed martial law he suspended the 1973 Constitution but revived it with the 8th Amendment when he lifted his martial law in late December 1985. It is being held in abeyance again by Gen Pervez Musharraf while he rules the country under the Provisional Constitutional Order. The 1973 Constitution will be revived after the October 10 elections as indicated in the Legal Framework Order issued on August 21, 2002.

It is noteworthy that both during Ziaul Haq’s martial law and now during Pervez Musharraf’s military rule, there has been a persistent demand by the political elements for the revival of the 1973 Constitution. That obviously is a measure of confidence that the people of Pakistan repose in it. Another noteworthy aspect is that unlike their two predecessors, Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, neither Zia nor Musharraf abrogated the Constitution. Both Zia and Musharraf obviously knew it would be well-nigh impossible to replace the 1973 Constitution which Bhutto had been able to produce by securing the agreement of all the political elements represented in the National Assembly.

After the fall of Dhaka, when Gen. Niazi, Commander of Pakistan Army in East Pakistan, surrendered to the Commander of the Indian Army at Dhaka on December 16, 1971, there was such resentment in the officer corps of the Pakistan Army against the top brass that Gen. Yahya had to surrender his presidency, on December 20, 1971 to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the largest single party of West Pakistan in 1970 elections.

Bhutto assumed charge as president and chief martial law administrator. He has been often criticized for the latter, but actually there was no other alternative. Yahya had abrogated Ayub’s constitution and imposed martial law. Bhutto had no legitimate authority to introduce or resurrect an old constitution for the left-over Pakistan. Only a body elected for the purpose could produce a constitution.

In 1970 Pakistan had elected a National Assembly for the purpose. After the dismemberment of Pakistan its members who belonged to West Pakistan had the mandate to do so. Within four months Bhutto got the interim constitution approved by them and lifted the martial law on April 21, 1972. After a year came the 1973 Constitution.

Gen. Ziaul Haque deposed Bhutto in July, 1977, suspended it and imposed martial law. In 1985 he held a referendum for approval of his Islamization programme and also secured another five-year term for himself as president. Later, he held non-party elections in the hope of having a compliant parliament to get his amendments to the 1973 Constitution approved. One of them was the undemocratic Article 58 (2) b of the 8th Amendment which empowered the President to dismiss the prime minister and dissolve the National Assembly in his discretion and the other to establish a National Security Council.

The National Assembly did not turn out to be as compliant as Zia had expected. So he had to enter into a bargain with it. There was a quid pro quo: the National Assembly approved the 8th Amendment, accepted Zia as president and Zia agreed to lift the martial law towards the end of 1985. The proposal for the National Security Council was dropped.

Nawaz Sharif in his second term as prime minister when he had a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, introduced two major amendments to the Constitution. The 13th Amendment did away with the 58 (2) b and the 14th Amendment related to disqualification on account of defection of party members as a result of voting against the party mandate.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf followed Ziaul Haq in holding a referendum seeking the approval of his policies and a five-year term for himself as president. But unlike Zia he is going to have party-based elections. He has also adopted a different course of action from Zia for amending the Constitution. He has not waited for the National Assembly to meet and consider his constitutional amendments like Zia did.

Instead, in his capacity as Chief Executive he has issued a package of amendments in the form of a Legal Framework Order, deriving his authority from the Proclamation of Emergency read with the Provisional Constitution Order, and the powers vested in him by the judgment of the Supreme Court legitimizing his takeover for three years and allowing him to make such changes in the Constitution that are essential for the purpose of governance.

The LFO contains a large number of constitutional amendments. Some of the more salient and important ones are the striking down of the 13th Amendment thereby restoring Article 58 (2) b, amending the 14th Amendment by limiting the application of defection as a result of voting against the party mandate to three grounds: election of prime minister/chief minister, no-confidence motion and the budget, (This is indeed an improvement as the existing clause restricted a member’s right of dissent entirely).

The other two amendments relate to the (a) setting up of a mediation committee consisting of members of the National Assembly and the Senate to consider and resolve differences between the two houses on a particular bill for the purpose of formulating an agreed bill, and (b) the constitution of a National Security Council.

In Article 41 (7) B, the LFO deals with the office of the president. It says the Chief Executive having received the democratic mandate to serve the nation as president of Pakistan for a period of five years, shall, on relinquishing the office of the Chief Executive, assume the office of president of Pakistan forthwith and shall hold office for a term of five years under the Constitution.

The phrase “having received the democratic mandate” is obviously a reference to the referendum without naming it through which Gen. Pervez Musharraf sought public approval of his policies and his continuation as president for a period of five years. This has to be read with his reply to a question in his BBC interview with Riz Khan. When asked as to why he ignored the Constitution, which says the National Assembly should elect the president and went through the referendum, he said: “Now we are jumping the gun. I would say, who’s talking of elections? I asked a question whether the Pakistanis want me to continue as the president — why is anyone presuming — why the presumption that this was an election for the president?” (The Nation, May 25, 2002)

Finally, there is the question what happens to the constitutional amendments contained in the LFO when the parliament comes into being and the 1973 Constitution stands revived? The minister for information, Mr Nisar Memon, has “reiterated a firm commitment of the government: that it would maintain the sanctity of the 1973 Constitution and pledged that parliament would continue to remain a ‘sovereign body’ as a result of October 10 elections (The News, 27 August, 2002).

If that is going to be so, normal constitutional procedure has to be observed and the LFO will have to be considered and approved by the parliament like other constitutional amendments in the past. The LFO is silent on the point, which means that the possibility of its coming before the parliament is not ruled out. However, it will all depend on the composition of the parliament. If the parties supporting the government have the requisite majority for approving the amendments, the LFO will of course have an easy passage.

If, however, the opposition parties are strong enough to assert themselves, they may put up a resistance which may result in bargaining for a compromise to avoid a deadlock. In that case one does not know what would be the final shape of the LFO. However, In the event of a deadlock Gen. Musharraf has threatened: “Either the parliament quits or I quit”. That indeed will be a crisis situation of the highest order and will not augur well for the country.

Counting the ‘democratic’ cost

PAKISTAN’s politicians are credited with being cast in the one traditional venal mould. But, in that case, it is equally true that the country’s military strongmen have always set as much store by mental and ethical pedigree. Gen. Musharraf cannot, for instance, be described as anything other than a uniformed stereotype.

His single claim to being different from his military forbears is possibly that he has done a slightly more radical job of cutting democracy to size. With the election tribunals having had their say, the two major political parties, the PPP and PML(N), have duly lost their heads along with a whole number of stalwarts. Yet that should not have been cause for surprise.

The truth is that democracy, as we understand it, was never, certainly as far as Gen. Musharraf is concerned, on the cards. What was is on display before the people of Pakistan: a counterfeit of the bonafide phenomenon, despite George Bush’s protestations regarding Gen. Musharraf’s “commitment” to democracy. This is not just about ‘acquiring-and-maintaining’ power a la Machiavelli but about perpetuating a power base at any cost. And this is a cost which the Pakistani people will have to bear.

As it is, they were forbearing enough as regards Gen. Ziaul Haq’s bizarre version of democracy together with the havoc his rule wrought. Still, they are, it seems, on the verge of yet another similar experience. The question is: can they afford, any longer, to be mute witnesses to their own destruction? Are they ready to settle for what is currently on offer? For the new brand of ‘ethnicity’? For the new breed of moral and educational ‘graduates’ which is to take us into Pakistan’s new ‘democratic’ era?

It is not fortuitous that this should, at least in principle, seem to be in line with Gen. Ziaul Haq’s promotion of ethnicity proper in pursuit of his cherished objective of eroding democracy in Pakistan.

It may be beside the point that Islamic radicalism was also among the weapons the late general employed in his quest to undo the country’s democratic base. Yet the ironic reminders of that policy are still present, in this region as in Guantanamo Bay, in the shape of the defeated formations of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their affiliates.

What this does, above all, is point to how authoritarianism actually flourishes: by appealing to and marshalling all the retrograde forces available.

However, the antecedents of Gen. Musharraf’s new social order are a little more hybrid. It was, for instance, fairly apparent, when the concept was initially floated, that ‘devolution’ drew its inspiration not from Gen. Zia but from the system of ‘basic’ democracy sponsored by that other artful dictator, Field Marshal Ayub Khan.

Rather than bring about what it nominally purported to, by rolling back power from a federal centre, ‘devolution’ was in fact designed to serve quite other ends. Its purpose was essentially to institute a political infrastructure or support system for the consolidation of the Pakistani president’s power base.

This was suggested by the fact that the country’s nazims played an important ‘back-up’ role during the presidential referendum as indeed they also, doubtless, will in the course of the forthcoming elections. That they failed to deliver in the context of the referendum was due not to any fault of the system of which they are the pivot but to a more potent dynamic than what they themselves would seem to represent: the popular will.

Of course, today there is virtually no sign of the existence of a popular will in Pakistan. Even during the referendum, what appeared to have been at play was widespread popular apathy, which made a semi-boycott of it possible.

It is conceivable that the October elections will elicit a similar response, resulting in a tenuous turnout.

In any case, it seems unlikely that the Pakistani people, beaten by socio-economic circumstances and in the absence, from the scene, of both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, will actually come out in droves to cast their votes.

The preliminary disqualification of other key figures in various constituencies has not really helped the electoral cause either. In normal elections, there might have been a genuine level playing field as assured by the president.

The people would have been in a position to take their pick and also exercise their democratic right to disqualify whomever they pleased. However, as things stand, and with one of the ‘opposition’ alliances, the ARD, not ruling out the possibility of a boycott of the elections, loss of voter interest in them is all but certain.

Whatever the outcome of the elections, the prospects on Pakistan’s domestic front are by no means bright. We know from past experience that an obstruction of authentic democratic forces can only mean one thing: a rise, first, in ethnicity and, second, religious militancy.

In a country riven by ethnic as well as sectarian strife, this will hardly make for either inter-provincial harmony or national stability. This is something which no Pakistan government could surely not be unaware of. But, in that case, what is on its agenda? What is the new ‘grand plan’?

Or is the plan simply to keep power in the hands of the present rulers, whatever the cost? If such is the case, it would seem to be the quid pro quo underlying Pakistan’s alliance with America in respect of the war on terror.

The continuation of Gen. Musharraf’s presidency is a crucial part of that deal, democracy notwithstanding. The re-prioritization that has taken place in the sole superpower’s world view has rendered libertarian or democratic ideals merely secondary for it by comparison with what it sees as its overriding security concerns.

It is clear that Pakistan will have to bear the brunt of this for as long as America feels threatened.

However, America’s current philosophy is slightly skewed. What it does not seem to take into account is that an authoritarian order is inherently ill-equipped to deliver where US security, at least in relation to this region, is concerned.

Unless, of course, the US goal is confined to mopping up residual pockets of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the region, a genuinely democratic state set-up in Pakistan, as in the Philippines, would surely have been more in order than what appears to be in the offing.

In other words, if the intention of Pakistan’s American allies is to address terrorism at source or the terrorist genus in Pakistan itself, then such a set-up alone would be able to yield dividends.

The reason for this lies in some very basic differences between authoritarianism and democracy. These could, at the risk of over-simplification, do with being spelt out. Authoritarianism suffers from certain built-in limitations which need to be clearly understood.

In the absence of a legitimate social contract or intrinsic links of representation, it is seldom in touch with the society for which it holds itself responsible, being primarily concerned with enforcing governance. As a result, it appears being surrounded by socio-political gaps, unaccounted for areas or a no-man’s land in society which simply cannot be secured.

Such an order is, therefore, an ideal breeding ground for anarchy, miscellaneous crimes and even terrorism. The post-Soviet Union scenario — when that totalitarian Communist state had collapsed and Russia was taken over by varieties of mafia — is a case in point. The pseudo-democratic post-war order in Afghanistan, with its warlordism and frequent eruptions of violence, is another.

By contrast, a bona fide democracy has the advantage of also constituting a system of vital connections, social as well as political. It thus functions differently from authoritarianism in actually subsisting by dint of interconnectedness and transparency.

In allowing for the representation of society as a whole, it is also able to account for and indeed call to account, the socio-political mass which it governs. To this extent, democracy may, ideally, be said to abhor a void — those opaque social spaces where crime occurs, unchecked and untraced.

This is not say that terrorist attacks, such as the ones that place in recent months in Pakistan, could not have occurred in a democratic dispensation. But it is patent that cooperation and coordination being of the essence of a democratic environment, order becomes a more tangible verity when a democratic system is in place. If this has, in the past, not practically proven to be the case in Pakistan, that is because authoritarian control has persisted, during our so-called democratic phases.

The choice, then, is America’s. Either it can support Gen. Musharraf’s thinly disguised democratic fiction with its underlying no-holds-barred authoritarian reality or it can try to persuade him even now to let Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution prevail.

Of course, the catch may be that America, better attuned to its own peculiar patterns of ambivalence, has finally reconciled itself to Pakistan’s being an irreversibly ‘failed state.’