Shape of things to come

Pakistan's relations with the United States matter a great deal at this time. In fact, they matter more now than they ever did in the country's history. One important reason for this is that for the first time in Pakistan's long association with the United States, the two countries are pursuing common sets of objectives.

Both are on the same side of the war on terrorism. Both are concerned by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism around the globe and how that is influencing the Muslim world.

For 55 years - from 1947 to 2002 - Islamabad remained preoccupied with India and that country's perceived intentions towards Pakistan. That has begun to change with the growing recognition that continued hostility towards India only serves the purpose of Islamic fundamentalist forces in Pakistan.

The United States and Pakistan may now be aiming at the same goals and there may be a fundamental change occurring in what Islamabad considers to be the main threat to its security.

That notwithstanding, US-Pakistan relations will also be shaped by the way Washington is fighting the war against terrorism on several fronts - in particular in Iraq, Afghanistan and against the rapidly morphing Al Qaeda.

They will also be influenced by the twists and turns in America's relations with Tehran. And, the way Washington looks at President Musharraf's Pakistan may change as President George W. Bush, at present distracted by the war in Iraq, returns to the subject of promoting democracy in the Muslim world.

There may be now, for the first time in nearly 60 years, lack of confusion in the overall objectives that Pakistan and America are pursuing. Nonetheless, this new relationship is being forged in a very uncertain world.

It is not only the continuing war against terrorism that has produced this uncertainty for policymakers in Islamabad. There are a number of other things happening in Pakistan's immediate neighbourhood that would need to be factored in as President Pervez Musharraf and his colleagues attempt to redefine how the country he leads must deal with other parts of the world, not just America.

For the last three years - since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on America - Washington is totally preoccupied with its war on terrorism. However, there seems to be no end in sight to this effort; its conduct is becoming more complicated with every passing day.

On December 22, the United States suffered its heaviest one-day loss since it invaded Iraq in March 2003. A suicide bomber attacked an American base in Mosul, a northern Iraqi city, and caused the death of 19 American soldiers.

Will America persevere in light of the increasing pressure being exerted on its forces by the insurgents in the Sunni areas of the country? Or, conversely, will it escalate its efforts by involving itself somehow with other Muslim countries in Iraq's neighbourhood? President Bush recently issued a clear warning to Iran and Syria not to create problems for his administration in Iraq. When President Bush issues a warning, the world has learnt to listen and take note.

These are not the only questions being raised by those who are watching the developments in Iraq and their impact on America. There are a number of other unanswered questions as well.

Will Iraq be pacified eventually and also gradually democratized? Will elections be held at the end of January, and if they are held what kind of political order will they produce? Will the inevitable victory of the majority Shia community in the planned elections produce another nation ruled - or at least heavily influenced - by the clergy that subscribes to that particular interpretation of Islam? Will a Shia Iraq align itself closely or become a rival of Iran, the largest Shia country in the Muslim world? That will undoubtedly have consequences for Pakistan since it has the world's second largest Shia population.

There are more Shias in Pakistan - estimated at some 35 to 40 million - than Iraq's 15 million. Unfortunately, Pakistan's Shia community has recently come under attack by the Sunni fundamentalist groups. How would Sunni-Shia relations in Pakistan be affected by the possible rise of Shia Iraq that may work closely with Iran?

The question of pulling out of Iraq has come to be raised seriously in Washington's policy circles. No matter whether it was right or wrong for America to invade Iraq, withdrawing from the country without ensuring that it can protect itself from internal strife will have enormous consequences for the Muslim world. An unsettled Iraq would become a destabilizing factor for the entire Middle East, including Pakistan.

There are also many unanswered questions about Afghanistan, Pakistan's immediate neighbour to the north. Will President Hamid Karzai, the recently elected and installed president of Afghanistan, succeed in establishing the authority of Kabul over other parts of the country, or will the warlords continue to hold sway over large swathes of Afghan territory? President Pervez Musharraf suggested recently that the most important initiative Kabul and its allies must take is to create a viable Afghan army that can provide internal security in the country and bring the warlords and the remnants of the Taliban under the government's control.

Will this happen, or will the Afghan experience in creating a military force loyal to Kabul face the same kind of difficulties being encountered by the Americans in Iraq, engaged in a similar enterprise? How will the increasingly important role of poppy cultivation and opium production influence the evolution of the fledgling Afghani political system? Will the growing importance of Afghanistan's drug economy spill over into the restive tribal areas of Pakistan as happened in the 1980s?

Another set of issues for Islamabad's evolving relations with Washington concerns Iran, one more northern Muslim neighbour of Pakistan. One of the more important of these is related to Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

It is not entirely certain that the European negotiators have finally succeeded in persuading Iran to give up its attempt to acquire nuclear weapons. Tehran may believe that America's continuing problems in Iraq have provided it with a narrow window of opportunity for developing its own nuclear arsenal.

If Tehran persists, how would America react, and what will be the consequences of those actions for Pakistan whose scientists have been accused of aiding Tehran in achieving this objective? And then, there are some speculations among terrorism experts that Osama bin Laden may be changing the tactics of his organization and also his overall political objectives.

His latest pronouncements seem to suggest that he is now much more interested in bringing about regime changes in many parts of the Muslim world than in inflicting heavy damage on the Americans and their country's assets.

He seems now more focused than before on Saudi Arabia, his native country. He may be able to foment more trouble there in the coming months. If that happens, what will be the impact on other Muslim countries that also have weak political institutions?

Then there are questions related to the strength of the Al Qaeda and associated groups. Has the American campaign against them, which is fully supported by Pakistan, succeed in weakening the organization or would it result in drawing more support for it? Will the stateless groups of terrorists continue to draw sustenance and recruits from many parts of the Muslim world - not just from Iraq and Afghanistan but also from the northern areas of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the countries in the Maghreb, Thailand and Indonesia - or will America's military might bring them finally under control?

With this as the background, I will begin by looking at how Pakistan's relations with the United States have evolved over time, and at how they may take shape in the future.

In the article today, I will make only passing references to the way India and Pakistan have looked at one another and why that relationship may also be on the verge of being transformed. A more detailed analysis of that subject will appear in this space a couple weeks from now.

Pakistan's association with the United States became close not too long after the country gained independence. The start of the relationship was not particularly propitious since Franklin Delano Roosevelt - the American president for the entire period that Mohammad Ali Jinnah campaigned for the establishment of an independent Muslim state in British India - was not supportive of the idea of Pakistan.

The American president admired Mohandas Gandhi, the principal leader of the Indian independence movement, who wished India to remain united once the British departed from the subcontinent. Roosevelt was of the view that it was imprudent for the Muslims in India to demand a separate state for themselves once the British left the scene.

A different president was in place in Washington when the British finally departed from India. Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, did not have strong views about succession to the British Indian Empire and South Asia did not figure prominently in his thinking about America's world interests.

South Asia - in particular Pakistan - remained a distant place for policymakers in Washington. If there was any interest in South Asia it was because of India's exotic past rather than the region's future and its economic potential.

It was only after the full meaning of Winston Churchill's warning that an iron curtain had descended in Europe that Washington began to look with some interest at the countries that lay on the periphery of the new empire Moscow was still in the process of creating.

The United States became increasingly concerned that an assertive Soviet Union had begun to influence not only the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia but was taking an active interest in South Asia.

Under Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican president of the post Second World War period, America developed an interest in the South Asian region because of the fear that the Soviet Union might have ambitions of extending its influence over it.

After all, for several decades in the latter part of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, the Russians had played the "great game" with Great Britain over creating spheres of influence in the countries bordering India.

With Britain having departed from the scene after 1947, and with the United States without any experience in the area, there was apprehension that Moscow might try to fill the vacuum by creating its own presence in the region.

President Eisenhower, prompted by the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, began to build a structure of relationships between the United States and the newly emergent countries of South Asia.

India, however, had ambitions of its own. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister, was not prepared to play second fiddle in the diplomatic orchestra conducted by Washington.

New Delhi regarded the growing conflict between Moscow and Washington as a distraction for the developing world. These countries, the Indian prime minister maintained, were neither capitalist nor communist; they were simply "developing" and belonged to the part of the globe that he and those who shared his thinking began to call the Third World.

There was no reason for these countries to align themselves with either of the two blocs - the blocs led respectively by Washington and Moscow. Thus was born the Non-Aligned Movement.

Nehru, along with President Soekarno of Indonesia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Gamal Nasser of Egypt were some of the principal players in this movement. I will pick up the rest of this story in the article next week.

Ringing out a cheerless 2004

Those who bring a new year in by some sort of celebration are called revellers. There is about the word a certain joyous abandon that is sinful in a playful way. But not everybody approves and in the climate of righteousness that was created by Ziaul Haq any sort of festivity on New Year's Eve was not only frowned upon but was positively dangerous and such public places as hotels became targets of sanctimonious vandalism.

Hotels not only pulled down their shutters but also took out advertisements informing their clientele that they were closed to business. Of course, a case could have been made that there was no occasion for celebration merely because one year was receding and another was approaching.

Why is a new year more hopeful than the preceding one? This is particularly true of 2005 and the hope may be that it couldn't be worse than 2004. There was little to cheer for us in Pakistan, There was some activity on the political front but it took the form of shadow boxing.

There was no leap forward in the social sector, the usual promises, like the usual suspects, and the cost of living kept rising and unemployment and law and order got worse for it added to crime (which too soared).

There were bomb blasts, random acts of terrorism that claimed many innocent lives, the most tragic and soul-destroying being those of a sectarian nature. There were two assassination attempts on President Musharraf, vile deeds aimed at destabilizing Pakistan. No tears should be shed for the passing of 2004.

The state of the world has never been worse in recent memory and the pride of shame will have to go to the unholy mess that has become Iraq. George Bush visited Iraq but did not move out of Baghdad airport.

Tony Blair too paid a surprise visit to Iraq and was brave enough to venture downtown, ferried by helicopter from the airport to the fortress of the Green Zone, the road to and from the airport being deemed too dangerous. What sort of message did this send when it is being triumphantly proclaimed that only a handful of insurgents were disturbing the peace in pockets of Iraq?

On the very day of his visit, the mess-hall of an American unit located in Mosul was attacked and the casualties were heavy - 21 killed and 51 wounded - these were not routine Iraqis whose deaths go un mourned except by their own families, but American soldiers and contractors. That's a different ball-game.

We are yet to be told of the casualties of Fallujah and the extent of the destruction of the town but are told that residents are starting to come back. Come back to what? As far as it is humanly possible, American casualties are not being disclosed but the carnage in Mosul could not be kept secret.

One hopes that it has come as a wake-up call for the American public who have been brainwashed into believing that war in Iraq had been militarily won and the peace too, barring some mopping up of criminal elements and Saddam loyalists (the two are interchangeable) who do not want liberty and democracy in their country. The American administration is too arrogant, as indeed is the government of Tony Blair, to pay heed to world public opinion.

First, it was the imminent threat posed by Saddam's weapons of destruction. Then it was the removal of a brutal tyrant who had gassed his own people with no regard to the fact that when he did so, he was a stout ally of the United States and Britain, and there was not a peep out of them.

Now it is the elections in Iraq, which will be free and fair and bring forth a brave new world. We were told that the security situation would get worse in the lead up to the elections and now we are being readied to accept that the violence will continue after the elections. What we are looking at is an open-ended war.

The most distressing aspect of all this is the subtle manner in which the war on terror has been merged with the one in Iraq. Iraq was a secular country and there was no connection of any kind, except mutual hostility, between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Now we are being led to believe that they were soul-mates. What the Americans and British have not been able to identify is who is the enemy. Not to accept the fact that they are in Iraq, not as a liberation army but an occupying force, not to accept that the insurgency is a national uprising is to bury one's head in the sand.

Even more distressing is the silence of the Muslim world. The western world sees terrorism in religious terms. There is mention of Islamic fundamentalism, which describes a form of rabid fanaticism. There is no mention of Christian fundamentalism that played such a pivotal role in the re-election of George Bush and even less mention of Judaism which drives Israel.

It was a cheerless 2004, and 2005 is likely to be even worse. Still, on the off chance that I may be wrong, a happy new year to all. Christmas has just passed. Its message of peace on earth and goodwill to all rings somewhat hollow.

Hope for Palestinians

It is often a sign that something is shifting in Israeli politics when Shimon Peres is in government, and the return to power by the veteran Labour leader is evidence that a breakthrough in the peace process may - just - be possible in 2005.

By joining Ariel Sharon's Likud-led coalition as deputy prime minister, Peres is showing that the majority of Israelis back the plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, remove its settlers and restart negotiations with the Palestinians.

Peres, now an impressively sharp 81, has never been popular (perhaps because he has never won an election), and many Israelis agree with Yitzhak Rabin's description of him as an "indefatigable schemer". But he ignores the sneers to stick optimistically to his hopes for a "new Middle East" in which globalization and demography will drive political change.

Talking to the Labour leader in his Tel Aviv office is to be reminded of his role in key episodes in Israeli history: the nuclear weapons he secretly acquired in the 1960s, the Entebbe rescue, the disastrous Grapes of Wrath operation in Lebanon when he was prime minister after Rabin's assassination. Mementoes include the citation for the Nobel peace prize he won - with Rabin and Arafat - for the Oslo agreement in 1993.

Peres will back Sharon in insisting that Mahmoud Abbas cracks down on Hamas, but he will push for confidence-building measures and negotiations without waiting for a reformed Palestinian Authority. After all, Israel made peace with Egypt and Jordan without insisting that Anwar Sadat or King Hussein were card-carrying democrats. But he will be cautious too.

It is too often forgotten that Labour bears a grave responsibility for the deadly impasse of recent years. Jewish settlement in the West Bank began under its rule after the 1967 war. But the party has long accepted the formula of land for peace.

Now there is a sense that time is running out. Palestinians, who live with the routine degradation of occupation, have good reason to be sceptical about the future and fear an imposed "solution" of disconnected cantons or Bantustans, of Gaza first - and last. But there are signs that the silent majority recognize that a just agreement is possible. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service

Religion and the passport

Just when people were beginning to get used to the idea that in spite of official endorsement, the only thorny unresolved national issue in this country was the one about the president wearing two hats, the MMA had to stir up another hornet's nest and raise a right royal shindig about the deletion of the religion clause in the Pakistan passport.

In most countries the selection of the text in a passport would be treated as a minor issue and left to a functionary of the level of deputy secretary. But now that certain factions of the Muslim League have also gotten involved, the issue has been blown out of all proportions.

The deletion of the column in which the religion of a citizen of this country is inscribed, has been widely acclaimed across the country, as a number of letters addressed to newspaper editors indicate. The government has been praised for taking such a progressive step and for getting something right for a change.

It is believed that the real reason, which prompted the government to eliminate the column, was a desire to conform to international practice and policy, to stop being the odd-man-out and to be part of the world community.

One of the effects of globalization has been to keep communication straight, short and simple, and to cut out flaccid padding. Besides, in most countries, religion is still regarded as a highly personal matter, and the various governments are reluctant to volunteer information when it is not required.

In fact, in the United States of America, with all the hype about targeting Muslims, the constitution still guarantees every citizen the right to worship in whatever manner he or she pleases; and it would be quite unthinkable to print a citizen's religion on his passport or other identification like a driver's licence or application form for purchasing shares from the stock exchange.

One wishes the law courts and the people who craft rent leases would emulate this example of not volunteering information, and cut out the oriental flummery. Coming back to the passport, the more vocal supporters of the government decision to eliminate the column have argued quite logically, that a Muslim doesn't cease to be a Muslim, just because his religion hasn't been inscribed in his passport.

Or put conversely, a Muslim will always remain a Muslim, irrespective of whether or not the passport officer advertises the fact in the little green book. However, before condemning the MMA for deliberately swimming against the tide and for being unnecessarily difficult, one must try and understand the reasons that prompted their leadership to oppose the refinement in the text.

The MMA is deeply worried that Pakistanis who carry Muslim names, but do not actually practise Islam, might have access to holy places in Saudi Arabia that are totally out of bounds to non-Muslims.

They are not worried about Pakistani Christians, many of whom have adopted Muslim names, especially in Punjab, possibly with the intention of integrating with the majority Muslims. These Christians, however, could have no possible reason for wanting to visit Saudi Arabia, except in the pursuit of employment. They would, nevertheless, steer clear of the Muslim holy cities.

The people who are the real target of the obsessive concern of the MMA, and who carry Muslim names, are the ones who were excommunicated in the 1970s by the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. On this issue, the MMA certainly have a point. They have held a number of angry protests, and the public is waiting to see just how the president is going to wriggle out of this one.

One has no information on the reaction of the Saudi authorities to the objections raised by the MMA, which might be interpreted as a friendly attempt to continue the practice of indirectly sifting and pre-censoring passenger lists of Muslims attempting to conduct pilgrimages to the holy land.

But surely the Saudis have their own methods of ascertaining whether or not a pilgrim is a Muslim, even if an applicant resides outside the Middle East oil belt and his passport does not specify his religion.

These measures must have been in place long before the Pakistani government decided to insert, and then remove this controversial column in the machine-made passport. After all, there are countries like Egypt and Turkey that have substantial non-Muslim populations.

Many Turks who follow the Islamic faith have names that are unfamiliar and do not immediately identify them as Muslims. These could best be described as religiously ambivalent. The same is the case with the Chinese, Thai and Sri Lankans.

What about Lebanon, which has a huge Christian population? This writer had the privilege of knowing the American chief executive of the real estate and publishing empire of the Galadari Brothers in Dubai in the early 1980s, a gentleman that carried the moniker of Abraham Moses.

Now every good Yid in Yonkers and Brooklyn would have said he was a Jew. But Abe Moses, who came of solid Lebanese stock, was a Muslim, and a practicing one at that. This was something that Abdul Rahim Galadari, whimsically confirmed to people who wondered why the brothers had hired an Aschkenazy to run their business.

Anglicizing Muslim names has been going on for a long time. That's how Dr Shaikh Mohammed Din of Gujranwalla became Dr S.M. Dean and ended up with a practice in Chiswick. One wonders how the MMA would have handled this one, or if Abe Moses had at some stage in his long career decided to migrate to this country. Perhaps he would have reverted to his Arabic name of Ibrahim Musa.

Anyway, dropping the religion column from the passport, while it may satisfy some job seekers abroad, won't really make all that much difference. This is the perception of a number of frequent Pakistani travellers who, in spite of having valid visas, are still given the third-degree at foreign airports.

Immigration officials at Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, who have established a reputation for being the most offensive of the uniformed guards, often don't even read the personal details of the passport holder. A Muslim name and the green passport cover is enough for the antennas to go up and to set off the alarm bells.

The passport office might just as well put the religion column back, because it would not make a jot of difference. Nothing will change. The Pakistani passport holder has, over the years, and long before 9/11, acquired the unique distinction of heading the list of nationalities at foreign airports that were singled out, made to form a separate queue and interrogated.

First it was drugs, then illegal employment visas. And now the Pakistani is being suspected of carrying phials of nitro glycerin in the heels of his shoes. What will they think of next?

Trapped in the Iraqi quagmire

Who said this and when? "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information.

The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that the public knows... We are today not far from a disaster."

Answer: T.E. Lawrence in The Sunday Times in August, 1920. And every word of it is true today. We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We were lied to about the links between Saddam Hussein and September 11, 2001.

We were lied to about the insurgents - remember how they were just "dead-enders" and "remnants"? - and we were lied to about the improvements in Iraq when the entire country was steadily falling outside the hands of the occupying powers or of the government of satraps that they have set up in their place. We are, I suspect, being lied to about elections next month.

Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that the whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that western armies - when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq - are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East.

My own calculations - probably conservative, because there are many violent acts that we are never told about - suggest that in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day. And American troops are sending home increasingly terrible stories of the wanton killing of civilians by US forces in the towns and cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence of ex-marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee hearing in Canada earlier this month.

Massey told the Canadian board - which had to decide whether to give refugee status to an American deserter from the 82nd Airborne - that he and his fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms up.

"We killed the man," Massey said. "We fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle." Massey assumed that the dead Iraqis didn't understand the hand signals to stop. On another occasion, according to Massey, marines - in reaction to a stray bullet - opened fire and killed a group of unarmed protesters and bystanders.

"I was deeply concerned about the civilian casualties," Massey said. What they (the marines) were doing was committing murder." The defector from the 82nd Airborne, Jeremy Hinzman, told the court that "we were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists... to foster an attitude of hatred that gets your blood boiling".

All this, of course, is part of the "withholding of information". It took months before the Abu Ghraib torture and abuses were made public - even though the International Red Cross had already told the American and British authorities.

It took months, for that matter, for the British government to respond to the outrageous beatings - and one killing - carried out on defenceless Iraqis in Basra.

In the first seven months of last year, the authorities maintained that they still "controlled" Iraq, even though - when I drove 70 miles south of Baghdad in August - I found every checkpoint deserted and the highways littered with burnt American trucks and police vehicles.

Still we are not told how many civilians were killed in the American attack on Fallujah. The Americans' claim that they killed more than 1,000 insurgents - only insurgents, mark you, not a single civilian among them - is preposterous. Still we are not free to enter the city.

Nor, given the fact that the insurgents still appear to be there, is it likely that anyone can do so. Why are American aircraft still bombing Fallujah, weeks after the US military claimed to have captured it? It is difficult, over the past year, to think of anything that has not gone wrong or grown worse in Iraq.

The electrical grid is collapsing again, the petrol queues are greater than they were in the days following the illegal invasion in 2003, and security is non-existent in all but the Kurdish north of the country.

The proposal to put Saddam's minions on trial looks more and more like an attempt to justify the invasion and distract attention from the horrors to come. Even the forthcoming elections are beginning to look more and more like a diversion.

For if the Sunnis cannot - or will not - vote, what will this election be worth? Yet, still the invaders go on telling us that things are getting better, that Iraq is about to enter the brotherhood of nations.

This is the same old story that Bush and Rumsfeld used to put about last spring: that things are getting better - which is why the insurgents are creating so much violence; in other words, the better things are, the worse things are going to get. When you read this nonsense in Washington or London, it might make sense. In Baghdad, it is madness.

It would be pleasant to record some happiness somewhere in the Middle East. Palestinian elections in the New Year? Well, yes, but if the colourless and undemocratic Mahmoud Abbas is the best the Palestinians have to look forward to, after the far too colourful Yasser Arafat, then their chances of achieving statehood are about as dismal as they were when Arafat resided in his Ramallah bunker.

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is not trying to close down illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza because he wants to be nice to the Palestinians; and his spokesman's dismissive remarks about the West Bank - that the Gaza withdrawal will put Palestinian statehood into "formaldehyde" - does not suggest that the occupied are going to receive statehood from their occupiers.

Which means, one way or another, that the Intifada will restart. At which point, the Israelis will complain that Abbas cannot "control his own people", and the Israelis and the Palestinians will return to their hopeless conflict.

It is impossible to reflect on the year in Iraq without realizing just how deeply the Israeli-Palestinian struggle affects the entire Middle East. Iraqis watch the Palestinian battle with great earnestness.

Saddam Hussein's support for the Palestinians was one with which many Iraqis could identify - even if they loathed their own dictator. And I doubt very much if the suicide bomber would have come of age so quickly in Iraq without the precedent set by the suicide bombers of Palestine and, before them, of Lebanon.

It is this precedent-setting capacity of events in the Middle East - not the mythical "foreign fighters" of George Bush's fantasy world - that is costing America so much blood in Iraq. When Sharon tries to prevent Palestinian statehood, Iraqis remember that his closest ally is represented in Iraq by an army which most of them regard as occupiers.

When US forces learn their guerrilla warfare techniques from the Israelis - when they bomb houses from the air, when they abuse prisoners, when they even erect razor-wire round recalcitrant villages - is it surprising that Iraqis treat the Americans as surrogate Israelis?

We shouldn't need the evidence of ex-marine Massey to show us how brutal the occupying armies have become - and how irrelevant Iraq's "interim" government truly is. In Washington or London, these "ministers" play the role of international statesmen, but in Baghdad, where they hide behind the walls of their dangerous little enclave, they have as much status as rural mayors. Besides, they cannot even negotiate with their enemies.

Which leads us to the one clear fact about the last year of chaos and anarchy and brutality in Iraq. We still do not know who our enemies are. Save for the one name, "Zarqawi", the Americans - with all the billions of dollars they have thrown into intelligence, their CIA mainframe computers and their huge payments to informers - simply do not know whom they are fighting.

They "recapture" Samarra - three times - and then they lose it again. They "recapture" Fallujah and then they lose it again. Iraq is proving all over again what we should have learned in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel: that Arabs have lost their fear. It has been a slow process.

But a quarter of a century ago, the Arabs lived in chains, cowed by occupiers and oppressive regimes. They were a submissive society and they did as they were told. The Israelis even used a "Palestinian police force" to help them in their occupation. Not anymore.

The biggest development in the Middle East over the past 30 years has been this shaking off of fear. Fear - of the occupier, of the dictator - is something that you cannot re-inject into people. And this, I suspect, is what has happened in Iraq.

Iraqis are just not prepared to live in fear any more. They know they must depend on themselves - the betrayal of the 1991 rising against Saddam proved that - and they refuse to be frightened by their occupiers.

It was the West that warned them of the dangers of civil war, even though there never has been a civil war in Iraq. As a people, they watched westerners turn up by the thousand to make money out of a country that had been beaten down by a corrupt dictatorship and UN sanctions. Is it any surprise that Iraqis are angry?

The American columnist Tom Friedman, in one of his less messianic articles, posed a good question before the 2003 invasion. Who knows, he asked, what bats will fly out of the box when we get to Baghdad? Well, now we know. So we should repeat Lawrence's chilling remark - without the quotation marks and the date 1920. We are today not far from a disaster. - (C) The Independent