Key aspects of Afghan poll

The presidential election in Afghanistan is less than a fortnight away. It would be an over-statement to say that the campaigning by the 18 candidates who are theoretically in the field is lackadaisical.

It is, in fact, non-existent. Even in Kabul, there are some posters and some public announcements of manifestos but campaign rallies and mass meetings have been conspicuous by poor attendance. Outside Kabul, few are familiar with any of the candidates other than the incumbent president and the candidates of particular ethnic regions.

A major reason for this state of affairs is the security situation. Admittedly, this had deteriorated. Between September 20 and 23, three American soldiers were killed in eastern Afghanistan while on Monday 14 Americans were injured and nine "insurgents" killed in eight separate incidents.

President Karzai, while attempting to campaign in the troubled Khost province on September 16, turned his helicopter back to Kabul after rockets were fired at the landing site. Four days later, his vice-president, Shahrani, while campaigning in the northern province of Khanabad, escaped unhurt when an apparent assassination attempt was made.

Meanwhile, Taliban have stepped up their activities. "Night letters" circulated primarily in the south and southeast of the country have given dire threats to all those who dare to vote in the elections or participate in any electoral activity.

Afghan officials and security personnel, far more vulnerable than the relatively well protected and well-armed Americans, have, in particular, been soft targets for Taliban.

The violence and mayhem perpetrated by the Taliban and their sympathizers is, of course, a factor in the continuing turbulence in large swathes of Afghanistan but it is not the main reason for the lackluster performance of the candidates.

The main issue, however, is that most of the leading candidates are certain that the only votes they can bank upon are the ones from their own region or ethnic community.

These votes will come whether they campaign for them or not. With the exception of the incumbent President Karzai, who has had wide projection on the mass communication media as it exists in Afghanistan, no other candidate feels he has a chance of breaking through the ethnic barrier.

Even Karzai's national appeal is dependent in part on the fact that he has as his running mate the brother of the late Ahmad Shah Masood who, in the three years of Panjsheri domination of Kabul, has perhaps been lionized even more than Karzai as Afghanistan's national hero.

Much has been made of the fact that Yunus Qanooni, with the strong backing of Defence Minister Fahim, is a formidable candidate particularly since he has been able to wrap himself in the mantle of Ahmad Shah Masood, and because his ethnic group consisting of the Tajiks, is the largest in Afghanistan after the Pushtuns. To my mind, this is a misreading of the reality on the ground.

Qanooni, or Marshal Fahim, can lay unquestioning claim only to the votes of the Tajiks of the Panjsher valley. According to the UN's original estimate, there are just less than 50,000 voters there although some astutely handled over-registration has brought this number to 125,000.

He may also be able to draw on the clout of warlord Atta Mohammad in Farah and Mazar Sharif since apart from being a Tajik, he is also beholden to Marshal Fahim for the support he provided in his battle against his chief regional rival, the Uzbek General Dostum, and for helping him to resist Karzai's efforts to exercise central government control over the area under his domination.

Both these factors put together, along with some over-registration in Mazar and elsewhere, will make far less than 600,000 to 700,000 voters. The bulk of the Tajiks, however, are to be found in Badakhshan, and there it appears the word of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani may carry greater weight.

It would be a great surprise if Rabbani, who was deliberately excluded from the corridors of power when the Panjsheris took control of Kabul, gives his support to Qanooni. It is far more likely that he will throw his weight behind Karzai and his own son-in-law, Zia Masood, who is Karzai's running mate and Ahmad Shah Masood's brother.

Qanooni has, as his running mate, Amin Wardak, a former minister in Karzai's cabinet and a Pushtun from a prominent tribe. His chances, however, of bringing any Pushtun votes with him are extremely limited.

For most Pushtuns, the Panjsheri trio of Fahim, Qanooni and Abdullah unfairly secured a monopoly of power after the overthrow of the Taliban. They found particularly galling the role Qanooni played at the Bonn Conference to bring this about.

They have bitter memories of the ethnic cleansing of the Pushtuns from northern Afghanistan, by General Dostum and by Fahim's protege Atta Mohammad. Wardak's ethnic background cannot overcome the formidable obstacles that Qanooni would face in trying to woo the majority community in Afghanistan.

Over the last couple of months, there have been repeated attempts by the Karzai opponents to try and build a united front and to agree upon a single candidate who could secure the votes of the minority ethnic communities and win over some Pushtuns.

None of these efforts have borne fruit. I am sure there is some truth in the allegation that Khalilzad has been active in trying to prevent the forging of such a unity but the fact is that his effort was unnecessary.

What divides the Panjsheri from the Badakhshan Tajik, or even more so more from the Hazara and the Uzbek, is of far greater importance to these leaders than the front against Karzai.

On the other hand, for the Pushtun community, which is the majority ethnic group or, - according to flawed UN estimates - the plurality of the population in Afghanistan, there is only one credible Pushtun candidate and that is Karzai.

The number of Pushtuns registered may be only 75 per cent of the eligible; some from among those who have registered there will not cast their vote because they support the Taliban but others will vote for Karzai.

No other Pushtun leader, let alone the leader of another ethnic group, stands a chance. Karzai, therefore, has an overwhelming advantage reinforced perhaps decisively by the manner in which the Americans have given him their support.

Realizing this, Qanooni has been anxious to reach a deal with Karzai and there is no doubt that he has been and is even now being pushed in this direction by the Americans and, particularly, by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. No deal has been reached.

Qanooni, while announcing his manifesto, had revealed that talks had been conducted on his behalf by Abdullah with the close associates of Karzai but no agreement could be reached presumably because the latter was not willing to offer as much as Qanooni and the Panjsheris wanted.

Other candidates have been just as anxious to make a deal with Karzai. The Hazara leader, Mohaqiq, in an interview to an American reporter, maintained that he had been under intense pressure from Khalilzad to make a deal with Karzai.

In negotiating with Khalilzad, he asked for a number of cabinet posts and governorships and then indicated his willingness to accept the counter-offer, which was somewhat less than half of what he had demanded.

According to him, the deal fell through since Karzai refused to accept it. Mohaqiq's bargaining power was limited in any case since the Hazaras are relatively a small minority amounting to between eight and 10 per cent of the population and since a sizable portion of even this percentage would probably favour Karzai's Hazara running mate, Khalili.

Dostum's plight is similar. Outside the rather limited Uzbek dominated region in the north, he and his female Pushtun running mate have little appeal. Rumours abound that he has promised to throw in his lot with Karzai provided the latter lets him retain his fiefdom and curbs his principal Tajik rival Atta Mohammad.

The question now is what sort of a deal the Americans can broker to ensure not only a smooth election for Karzai but also an avoidance of ethnic strife after the elections are over.

After his initial foray into deal-making, Karzai declared during his visit to the UN and the US that he will not have a coalition government if he is elected. Yet the fact is that his running mates, while providing electoral appeal, will not be perceived as truly representative of their communities.

Moreover, even if they were included in the government that the provisional Afghan constitution lays down, the vice-presidents will have little more than a ceremonial role. In the interest of ethnic harmony and equitable sharing of power, some concessions will need to be made to the Tajiks, Uzbeks and the Hazaras.

Even more important than this noble adherence to the principles of equity are some considerations that will pull him in this direction, the principal one being the fact that these ethnic leaders are the biggest warlords in Afghanistan and command the greatest number of guns.

Kabul may have been "deweaponized" but Fahim's militia has not been disarmed, nor have been the militias of the others, with the notable exception of Emir Ismail of Herat.

The Americans were ready to act against Ismail after the ground had been prepared by an attack on Ismail by a Pushtun leader of the region probably engineered by Karzai or his aides. They would be loath to support any such action against Fahim or Dostum in the immediate future, as this would risk raising the spectre of a civil war thus damaging Bush's chances for re-election.

The real question in the Afghan election is not whether there is enough security, or whether there is sizable presence of foreign and domestic election observers, or even the fraudulent registration of voters in the north and the non-registration of many in the south.

All these would be important flaws in normal circumstances and could call into question the claims of a free and fair election. The crucial problem is what minimum Karzai can offer to his opponents, and what tactics the Americans would be prepared to employ to ensure that these concessions are accepted.

The Americans will try hard. Bush needs the foreign policy success of a relatively peaceful Afghan election that brings Karzai to power without ethnic strife.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Jirgas: defying the court

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has been rendering useful service to society by acting as a watchdog body to monitor human rights violations in Pakistan. Apart from the annual report it publishes every year to document the state of human rights in the country, the HRCP also studies various issues of special concern to the people at a given time and prepares reports on them to create public awareness and thus generate pressure on the government to take requisite measures.

The latest report from the HRCP comes from its Karachi chapter. Titled Jirgas: A Parallel Justice System in Sindh, this 107-page report is not one of those fancy publications with an expensive look that many NGOs are producing to project a favourable public image of themselves. But the HRCP report contains a wealth of information that has been collated with great care and after a lot of research. What it reveals is quite shocking.

Since April 2004 when Justice Rehmat Hussain Jafri of the Sindh High Court (Sukkur Bench) imposed a ban on the holding of jirgas in the province, the Sindhi press has reported 25 jirgas that have been held. What is worse, in many of these, members of political parties and local administration have taken part.

What does one make out of all this? The jirga which was not an indigenous institution in Sindh - having been imported from Balochistan - will not be easy to root out for many reasons.

Many observers and even intellectuals have defended the institution saying that the formal judicial system is so overloaded and slow that the jirga offers an alternative and a quick way of dispensing justice and redressing people's grievances.

If it had actually been so, one could have accepted it as an auxiliary judicial mechanism to relieve the load of the courts, especially in the resolution of petty disputes.

One would have accepted this point of view if the tribal elders had confined their mediatory skills to issues such as "a petty skirmish during snooker play" or "dispute between two groups". One also presumes that the punishment meted out was not of a serious nature and was designed more to conciliate than penalize.

The issue acquires grave dimensions if one looks at the nature of quite a few of the crimes that were considered by jirgas. The HRCP report gives a table listing the data for the jirgas held in Sindh month by month in 2004.

Unfortunately it does not give the punishment that was handed down. Since some of the crimes mentioned are of an extremely serious nature, such as murder, double murder, triple murder and so on up to 13 murders - in January-July period at least 85 murder cases came before jirgas in Sindh - one cannot look away saying justice was done.

Given their arbitrary and summary character, the absence of modern methods of investigation (the guilt or innocence of the accused is determined by making him walk on embers), and a patriarchal mindset (38 cases were of karo-kari and sex-related crimes) it is unlikely that the jirgas work as institutions dispensing justice and not as mechanisms for perpetuating the power and privileges of the powerful. Since they operate in a feudal milieu, they are inherently partial and biased in favour of their own tribe and class.

Moreover, seeped as they are in the patriarchal traditions, the jirgas do not acknowledge the woman's identity, let alone her rights. If she is involved in a case, her father or brother will speak on her behalf. Women are not allowed to defend themselves especially if she is accused of being a kari and is presumed to be guilty.

It is generally known how jirgas operate. Can one really believe that the cases of karo-kari, rape, forced marriage, and the marriage of a nine-year old girl - which are listed in the HRCP report - would receive fair treatment? Many of the punishments meted out exceed the punishment prescribed by the law, while in other cases no crime has been committed and yet a penalty as serious as death is known to have been awarded.

Given the evils of the jirga system one can ask why is it allowed to operate? The fact is that the jirga is a handy instrument for the tribal elders to consolidate their power and have a firm control over the people.

The members of the local administration and political parties, who not only uphold it explicitly but are also active participants - since January, 38 jirgas have been held under the chairmanship of MPAs, nazims, political party leaders and even ministers - obviously hope to enhance their influence.

The British first introduced the jirga in Balochistan during the time of Sir Robert Sandeman in 1876 for political reasons. It allowed them to control populations spread over vast areas through a handful of tribal elders who were held responsible for the good behaviour of their tribe. It also allowed the British to keep out of local feuds and thus not antagonize one or the other group.

The jirga is now working as a parallel system of justice and is also undermining the laws of the land by blatantly violating them. Hence Justice Jafri's judgment to ban them was most timely and should have been made effective.

Why is the administration not ensuring its implementation? The tragedy of this land is that the feudal and tribal culture continues to influence our national psyche and political approach.

People are not willing to change this. Those who benefit from it - and they include political leaders and members of the local administration - do not wish to relinquish an advantage which they enjoy.

As for those who are the victims of this feudal culture, that is the peasants, the women and the commoners, they lack the legal protection, the resources, the awareness and the guts to challenge the institution of jirga. When the government also connives in a wrong act, it becomes all the more difficult for the victims to resist it.

One hopes the authorities will heed the recommendations of the HRCP given in this report. The commission calls for the effective implementation of the High Court decision. The judgment should be translated into the local language and disseminated through the media for public awareness.

In fact a media campaign should be launched to generate public interest in the issue in which the legal community should also be involved. The commission also suggests that any government official found involved in a jirga should be heavily penalized.

Finally, reforms should be introduced in the judicial system to expedite the dispensation of justice. These suggestions merit serious consideration if the bane of the jirga is to be rooted out from our society.

Prisoners of time

There are some problems of the nation as a whole (though not national problems as such) about which we, as a people, never feel bothered. One of them is the value placed by foreigners on punctuality. "Time is precious," they say. It may be for them; for us it is not.

Only yesterday a young niece wanted on telephone a short phrase, just a few words, to caption her work in fine arts, her subject being time. I obliged her at once, and she was happy at my response. It was "Time is an illusion."

Illusion or delusion, time has no meaning for us, except as something than can be wasted without much loss to the national economy. Every now and then there are indignant letters in newspapers bemoaning this habit.

Similarly there may be some individuals who give the same importance to observance of a time schedule as people do in advanced countries. The rest of us just go along making nonsense of watches and clocks. At the same time you must have noticed that even the poorest Pakistani wears a watch. Maybe its just to confirm the date.

Its how you look at things. Suppose there is a general upsurge in Pakistan aimed at making punctuality a national trait. And suppose it succeeds. Then it will be punctuality that may become a problem, as it must be for some lazy Japanese, if there are any lazy Japanese. The older generation, my generation, will miss the good old days when time did not matter and we were not slaves of precision digital clocks.

Socially speaking, everyone of us is expected to observe national traditions whether, by modern standards, they are good or useless. It is still considered a bad practice to be anywhere on time.

Certainly it would be infra dig for VIPs and political bigwigs to be punctual like some lesser folk. The importance that we have always given to these gentlemen (and ladies) in our public life, and their sense of self-esteem, demand that there should be a decent interval between the appointed time and their arrival even at functions where they are the hosts.

Foreigners, when they are in Pakistan, should be taught that time and punctuality are not the most vital things in the world. They love time, and they love to be on time.

But taking liberty with a verse of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, they must be told that "Aur bhi gham hain zamane men waqt ke siva." They must be advised to leave their watches at home when they come here, and learn to follow the dictum "When in Pakistan do as Pakistanis do."

As a nation we may have been prisoners of martial law, we are prisoners of superstition and enervating social taboos, we are prisoners of ostentation and self-delusion, but we shall never become prisoners of time.

Take my cousin Rauf. He is settled in Canada and is therefore a prisoner of time. He pays an annual visit to this country to be with the family in winter. With nothing to keep him occupied he regulates even his idling moments with the help of a high-priced watch. He can't help it. Being a prisoner of time he is unable to shed even for a couple of weeks the foreign obsession with punctuality and well-controlled utilization of his waking hours.

The last time he was here there was a wedding of a young nephew of ours. Like the custom-abiding citizen of an advanced nation he reached the hotel right on the dot according to the time given on the invitation card.

After inspecting the hotel's fancy fittings, its decor and other appurtenances for an hour or so, he drove to the groom's house and then came back with him for the reception, like the other sensible guests.

Instead of being grateful that he got the opportunity to study the interior of a five-star Pakistani hotel, and that he was able to revive his knowledge of how a Pakistani baraat proceeds, Rauf was annoyed that his time had been wasted. We tried to convince him that, with nothing else to do, it was not a bad utilization of his precious time, but he stuck to his tune.

In Punjab, except among the rich and the fashionable, most wedding parties are still held at home, and very few in hotels and marriage halls. Even so it has become the fashion among the middle class to inscribe a call for punctuality on the invitation card.

All the guests know that if they are punctual they will have to wait for at least an hour, and in the bargain, receive their own hosts, who will be straggling in at irregular intervals, one putting on his tie and the other doing up his shoelaces. As for the hostesses, at that exact moment they would be at their extended toilet.

But why indicate the time at all on the wedding card? Why not just say lunch or tea or dinner? I am sure it would make no difference to the guests, or to the hosts either.

As it is, if seven O'clock is the time given for the dinner reception, the guests will actually come between eight and nine, and the hosts will barely make it. Everybody thinks that since nobody is going to be silly enough to be on time (except foreigners like Rauf) why expend time and nerves on being punctual?

Even in this country of "Late Latifs," there are some people who are punctual by temperament. Whenever he was travelling, my father-in-law used to get to the railway station or the bus depot at least an hour before the scheduled time.

Often he would catch an earlier train or bus and disrupt the arrangements made to receive him at the other end. He also made it a point to go to weddings on time, much to the annoyance of the hosts whom he upbraided for their lack of courtesy towards old people like him by their wayward concept of time.

Wedding receptions apart, when government ministers arrive hours late at public gatherings, when ticketed shows do not begin at the appointed hour, when 'baraats' consider it their privilege to keep the bride's people waiting, when air flights and trains are delayed for VIPs, when public-dealing officials are absent from their seat without notice, then there is something basically wrong with the nation's sense of values.

For five years I was in the office of Sardar Muhammad Iqbal, Pakistan's first Ombudsman (Wafaqi Mohtasib). He would pride himself on the fact that you could correct your watch by the time of arrival of his officers. In my 39 years' government service this was the only instance I came across of meticulous punctuality. The reason was simple. Sardar Sahib was never late by a minute.

Strike while the irony is hot

"We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace." No, I don't believe George W. Bush misspoke when he uttered these words at the United Nations last week. And it's unlikely that a subversive speechwriter sneaked in a sentence such as this without anyone noticing.

The tragedy, of course, is that the president of the United States is delusional enough to have missed altogether the irony in his utterances. And too many of his compatriots, if they paid any attention at all to their great leader's UN oration, probably did not wince at these words.

Or when he spoke of "terrorists and their allies" believing that "torture and murder are fully justified to serve any goal they declare". Or at: "The people of .... Baghdad have done nothing to deserve sudden and random murder."

In the extremely unlikely event of the US ever finding itself in the dock at an international human rights tribunal, perhaps Bush could be employed as a prosecutor. Going by his UN performance, it seems he could draw up a fairly convincing indictment.

There was a sting in the tail, too, as he called for the establishment of a "democracy fund" that would "help countries lay the foundations of democracy by instituting a rule of law and independent courts, a free press, political parties and trade unions", as well as "help set up voter precincts and polling places, and support the work of election monitors". Many countries could benefit from this, not least a certain North American power scheduled to go to the polls five weeks from now.

Perhaps what's more significant than the unintended ironies peppered throughout Bush's speech - symptomizing the deadly combination of ignorance and hubris his administration represents - was the absence therefrom of any obvious threats to the UN.

It's difficult to forget that when the hereditary ruler of the "free world" appeared before the world body in an attempt to win endorsement for his gratuitous invasion of Iraq, he made it clear that the UN's failure to fall in line would inevitably render it irrelevant.

Bush's presence at the UN last week proves that he was utterly wrong. Which must by now be a fairly familiar experience. In fact, it's hard to think of a single sphere in which he has not been proved wrong.

But recognition of failure is a different matter: that's incompatible with blind faith, and it doesn't meld too well with intellectual mediocrity. All the same, the UN secretary-general's pronouncement earlier this month that aggression against Iraq was illegal must have caused a degree of embarrassment.

It would, of course, have made a great deal more sense for Kofi Annan to go public with his judgment long ago. Declaring any invasion of Iraq illegal unless it was specifically sanctioned by the Security Council may not have sufficed as a deterrent in, say, February 2003, but it would at least have put the leaders of the US, Britain, Spain and Australia on the defensive. And it would have strengthened the sizable anti-war movements in these and other countries.

The war would have been equally immoral and disastrous even if the Anglo-American axis had succeeded in coercing the Security Council into sanctioning it. And by lending an aura of legality to such an obviously unwarranted display of imperial might and arrogance, the UN truly would have compromised whatever remained of its credibility.

Even if such thoughts have crossed Annan's mind, he is unlikely to articulate them. He does deserve a few marks, however, for pointing out at the UN's session that: "Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it; and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it."

The US has a distinct distaste for being reminded of its flaws, and although Bush's visage bore evidence of his customarily inane half-smirk, half-smile during photo-ops with the UN chief, chances are this expression was merely a mask that concealed a darker state of mind.

By contrast, the US president appeared genuinely elated while holding hands with Iyad Allawi, who heads the effectively powerless puppet regime installed in Baghdad earlier this year.

It wasn't, meanwhile, clear at the time of writing how the US might react to pertinent and fairly pointed criticisms of its role in Iraq by Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf, who told CNN in an interview over the weekend that the conflict "has ended up bringing more trouble to the world" and "has complicated the war on terror".

If the past is any guide, there won't be any reprimand. Favoured allies are invariably allowed a certain amount of leeway in this respect, on the grounds that they have their domestic constituencies to consider.

It is nonetheless interesting that in their thrust, Musharraf's comments are remarkably similar to the arguments that have lately been advanced by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in attacking the Bush administration's policies on Iraq.

A commonsensical coincidence? That's the likeliest explanation, but it may not be enough to placate perturbed neocons at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Kerry's campaign came close to being derailed this month, after documents that, on the face of it, poked a huge hole in the official narrative of Bush's National Guard service were aired on CBS television by Dan Rather, a widely respected anchor. It became evident almost immediately afterwards that the documents, attributed to Bush's commanding officer, were forgeries.

Pending an inquiry into this faux pas, there is no evidence linking the documents to the Democratic party. That hasn't, of course, prevented partisans on the other side of the fence - not least Rupert Murdoch's insufferable Fox network - from trying to smear all of the president's opponents with the deliberate-deception brush.

What has more or less been drowned out by all the noise is strong evidence that, although the documents in question were not genuine, they accurately reflected the commanding officer's views about his over-privileged and under-motivated subordinate.

Over the years the White House has been unable to refute charges that: (a) Bush was propelled into the National Guard through family connections so that he could avoid being drafted for service in Vietnam; and (b) that he frequently wriggled out of his National Guard obligations on the flimsiest of excuses.

This part of the president's past is fair game, given concerted efforts by the other side to denigrate Kerry's service record in Vietnam. And some Democrats suspect that Bush's closest adviser, the machiavellian Karl Rove, somehow manipulated the entire CBS scandal in order to deflect attention from the war president's lackadaisical commitment to national defence three decades ago.

That's possible, but highly unlikely, given the political penalties accidental disclosure would entail. However, the far bigger question in this context is: Why focus on George W's philandering days as a young no-gooder when his presidential career offers such rich pickings?

To his discredit, Kerry has not been doing too well in that sphere, particularly where Iraq is concerned. The relatively aggressive stance he has adopted of late comes after months of reinforcing the impression that, given the chance, he would have replicated every one of Bush's deadliest errors. The inconsistencies have enabled Republicans to portray Kerry as weak and indecisive.

The problem is that for much of the campaign Kerry and his advisers have been undecided about exactly what position on Iraq would go down well with voters. They have, therefore, been hedging their bets. Even now, Kerry speaks of US troops staying in Iraq until they "finish the job".

Does he realize how ridiculous that sounds in the light of what has been happening in the battle zone over the past 18 months?Luckily for Kerry, the projection of his less dithering self has coincided with increasing disarray within the administration over conditions in Iraq and prospects for elections in January.

The Pentagon and the state department increasingly seem to be singing from different hymn books, and the White House's seems to be completely estranged from reality.

The Democratic candidate will have the opportunity this week to cut through Bush's customary claptrap about the march towards democracy and freedom at the first of three presidential debates in hurricane-battered Florida.

If Kerry can't land at least a few telling blows during this encounter, he'll only have himself to blame if he goes down in American history as an also-ran - a reasonably articulate, although not particularly charismatic, mainstream Democrat who took on the most dangerous president in the nation's history - and failed to prevent his re-election.

To improve Kerry's still shaky chances of making it to the White House, there is a movement to dissuade Ralph Nader from contesting the November election. Although endorsed by the broadly right-wing Reform Party, he is expected to take votes from the left of the political spectrum, potentially costing Kerry crucial states where voters appear to be more or less evenly divided between the incumbent and the challenger.

Leading figures who supported Nader in 2000 - including Noam Chomsky, the historian Howard Zinn and the activist-actress Susan Sarandon - have requested him to step aside in the national interest.

Although Nader has every right to run, in the present circumstances the plea is not an unreasonable one. Four more years of George W. and the Bushies could prove completely catastrophic for the US and the world.

But if Kerry cannot persuade the majority of voters in a majority of states to give him the edge over Bush, then he can take his long face back to the Senate and vote for more wars. Because in that case the message from US voters will be clear: the rest of the world can go to blazes.

e-mail: mahirali2@netscape.net.