Cost and gain of Kashmir

WITH this article I am returning to the issue of Kashmir on which I began to write three weeks ago. In the first article of this series that appeared in this space on June 7, I suggested that the time has come for both Pakistan and India to move beyond the strategies they have pursued for nearly six decades to produce a result that was satisfactory for them. In the language of economics, Islamabad and Delhi generally followed the “zero-sum game”, a game according to which what one side would gain the other side would necessarily lose. This has not worked.

What is likely to succeed is a “plus-sum” strategy in which both sides lose a bit but gain a great deal more. In the articles that will appear for the next few weeks, I will demonstrate that such an approach is more beneficial for Pakistan since keeping the Kashmir issue alive has cost it considerably more than the social, political and economic costs paid by India.

It is at times useful to deploy the methodology often used by the historians who practise “counter-factual” analytical techniques to gauge the impact of the developments that might have happened differently or not happened at all. This technique is particularly useful in determining both qualitatively and quantitatively the impact on India and Pakistan had they not sustained their dispute over Kashmir for such a long time.

What would have happened to these countries — in fact to all of South Asia — had Kashmir not become an all-consuming problem draining both energy and capital away from the areas that needed the attention of the two governments? An answer to this question requires a rough measure of the various kinds of costs for the two countries associated with the Kashmir dispute.

“The obvious objection to such hypothetical or ‘counterfactual’ questions is simple: why bother to ask them? Why concern ourselves with what didn’t happen? ... It seems we cannot resist imagining the alternative scenarios: what might have happened, if only we had or had not ... We picture ourselves as avoiding past blunders, or committing blunders we narrowly avoided, “ writes Niall Ferguson, one of the most articulate exponents of this form of analysis.

He continues: “Of course, we know that perfectly well that we cannot travel back in time and do things differently. But the business of imagining such counterfactuals is a vital part of the way in which we learn. Because decisions about the future are — usually — based on weighing up the potential consequences of alternative courses of action, it makes sense to compare the actual outcomes of what we did in the past with the conceivable outcomes of what we might have done.”

The long-enduring Kashmir dispute lends itself very well to this kind of analysis. What would have happened had the British treated the princely states the way they treated the provinces they directly administered and partitioned them on the basis of religion as well? That way Kashmir with a vast majority of its population professing the Muslim faith would have automatically become part of Pakistan. The same would have been the case with the state of Hyderabad whose ruler, the Nizam, toyed with the idea of independence until the Indian government sent in its troops and had him change his mind.

It is true that one part of Kashmir — the area of Jammu — had a large Hindu population. This could have been handled as well by partitioning the state into two parts, a Muslim Kashmir and a Hindu Jammu as was done with the provinces of Bengal and Punjab. This way the problem of Kashmir could have been avoided. A more suspicious reading of the intentions of the departing British administration suggests that they deliberately left some unresolved issues in order to be called upon to adjudicate between the successor states of India and Pakistan. That way the British could retain some influence over the area they had controlled for almost 200 years.

Both India and Pakistan have already paid a heavy price for not being able to resolve the problem of Kashmir. Costs were incurred not just in economic terms — the expenditure of resources on the militaries in the two countries that could have been put to better economic and social use. These costs and the amounts of foregone benefits are not too difficult to estimate. What is more difficult to quantify, particularly for Pakistan, is the overall cost to society. There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute has seriously affected Pakistan’s social and political development.

Islamabad’s policymakers were tempted to use Islamic zeal as one way of putting pressure on India over Kashmir. After the success of the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and after the demonstration that an inspired group of reasonably trained warriors could defeat even a superpower, it was tempting for strategists in Pakistan to allow the same tactics to be used in Kashmir.

Steve Coll, who studied the use of the jihadist approach in Afghanistan and the lessons learned by the Pakistani military establishment from its seeming success has, drawn a number of interesting conclusions about Islamabad’s handling of the Kashmir problem. He maintains in his recent book that the temptation offered for the use of jihad as a weapon against the Indian occupation of Kashmir was difficult to resist for the Pakistani military establishment.

“Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999 not from personal conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the force able to frighten, flummox, and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. About a dozen Indian divisions had been tied up in Kashmir during the late 1990s to suppress a few thousand well-trained, paradise-seeking Islamist guerrillas. What more could Pakistan ask? The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defence against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb.”

However, the infrastructure needed to produce jihadists proved corrosive for Pakistani society, a development not appreciated at that time by those who developed the strategy. As it turned out, a heavy price was paid for the reliance on groups whose members were deeply committed to Islamic fundamentalism. Often under official patronage, these groups began to penetrate Pakistani society and also its political system. One consequence of this was the political gains made by Islamists in recent years. The unanticipated success of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, (MMA) was a direct product of the support some of their constituent parts had provided to various Islamic causes around the globe and the position they had taken against the United States in the latter’s war against international terrorism.

Not only did the MMA gain at the national level, which was an unprecedented development for Islamic parties in the country, the alliance was also able to form a government led by it in the (the NWFP) and to become a prominent partner in the multi-party government in Balochistan. Both the NWFP and Balochistan border on Afghanistan. It is in this border area that the remnants of the Taliban continue to be active. This has happened in spite of the victory of the American-led coalition in December 2001 over Kabul and its success in installing a government in Afghanistan that is not only sympathetic to Washington but is highly appreciative of the role the United States had played in bringing about regime change in the country.

The political success of the forces of Islam to which the strategy pursued in Kashmir by a succession of administrations in Islamabad was the visible part of the change that occurred. Another development — perhaps even more profound than the electoral success of the MMA — was taking place below the surface as large segments of the Pakistani population came to be converted to an interpretation of Islam with which they were not very familiar. This happened as a result of the series of measures adopted by the administration of President Ziaul Haq. This trend was given impetus by the establishment of hundreds of Saudi funded madressahs that taught the Salafist interpretation of Islam, and was kept alive by the struggle over Kashmir. Another “what if...?” question would help to understand how certain developments and several actions taken in the 1980s and 1990s had unintended consequences. These concern the dominant role played by President Ziaul Haq for 11 years in Pakistan’s political life and the support he provided to various jihadist causes including those in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Had that not happened the austere, Salafist Islam that has penetrated several segments of the Pakistani society would not have arrived in Pakistan with such force and the country would have continued on the path of modernization on which it embarked President Ayub Khan’s 11 years.

Although Pakistan’s first military ruler named the new capital he built Islamabad and added Islamic Republic to Pakistan’s name as was done by the framers of the 1956 Pakistan, he was keen to introduce social change aimed at weaning society away from some of the practices that the Salafists fully endorsed. Ayub Khan’s emphasis on population planning and family laws ordinance went against the grain of the Islamists who had established their sway over the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The full realization of the threat militant Islam posed to Pakistan’s security came in December 2003 when there were two attempts on President Pervez Musharraf’s life in Rawalpindi, the seat of the Pakistani army. That the president was attacked in Rawalpindi suggested that there may have been some involvement at some level by military personnel. The military indicated as much by putting on trial two of its officials and sentencing one of them to death for his involvement in the assassination attempt.

By the early months of 2004, General Musharraf had begun to declare that among the many problems he faced as Pakistan’s president, by far the most important was the threat posed by Islamic extremism. He was also now making the connection between the Kashmir problem and this threat since its continuation provided the Islamic groups with the raison d’etre for their operations.

While Pakistan was to pay a heavy price for allowing Islamic fundamentalism penetrate society, at one point in time reliance on it had become an integral part of the country’s defence strategy. India did not incur this kind of cost. India’s Kashmir war, fought on conventional basis, did not affect its society or the country’s political system. India was not scarred as badly by the long enduring insurrection in Kashmir. The fact that Kashmir is distant from the main population centres of the country has also kept the conflict in Kashmir at some distance from Indian society. That did not happen in Pakistan.

Cultural diversity challenge

THE beginning of 21st century has given rise to divisive threats, especially in the Third World. These threats arise from the polarization of society along cultural, ethnic and religious lines in the states and have already led to the fragmentation of some states such as Yugoslavia, Indonesia, South Africa etc, while others are about to meet the same fate.

The cause of the resurgence and assertion of cultural, ethnic and religious identities and the internal conflicts and wars that these identities have generated in the states, is generally ascribed to ‘state failure’ associated with corruption, neglect of small-scale agriculture, government control over the economy and financial repression. In nutshell, it is considered a purely domestic phenomenon. The truth of the matter, however, is that the international forces of globalization and democratic values that are sweeping across the world at the moment and are aimed at integrating with the global economy, have destabilized our societies and intensified conflict.

The forces of globalization have increased poverty and unemployment, especially in the Third World with half of the world’s population living on less than two dollars a day and one fifth of humanity — some 1.2 billion people — surviving on less than one dollar a day. In fact, globalization has not only brought about a fall in average income and high levels of unemployment on account of structural reforms but also promoted income redistribution, exacerbating a divide between a group or region and other groups or regions. Economist Mark Duffield has remarked that “rather than promoting stability, globalization has helped illiberal and quasi feudal forms of political economy to expand.”

Poverty in general and the redistribution of income in favour of one cultural group or the other in poor and economically vulnerable countries has given rise to cultural, ethnic and religious groups, each asserting itself in order to clinching economic and political power in the state. This is well articulated by Paul Collier in his paper Doing Well Out of War: An Economic Perspective. He says, “At one extreme they (rebellions) might arise because rebels aspire to wealth by capturing resources extra-legally. At the other extreme they might arise because rebels aspire to rid the nation, or the group of people with which they identify of an unjust regime”. This grievance is based on economic inequality among groups and regions, manifested in unequal income or in the unequal ownership of assets.

The purpose of these groups is to use ‘differences’ as a medium for making economic and political gains. David Turton in his study War and Ethnicity lucidly makes this point: “What both sociological traditions appear to have missed was the possibility that a cultural, linguistic or religious difference might be defended and asserted not as only an end in itself but also as a means — and particularly effective means — to economic and political advancement”. The roots of ethnic, cultural and linguistic conflicts are, therefore, buried underneath the economic differences among different classes of society and organizations based on cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious lines use them as a means to demand their economic and political rights.

Now we come to Mr Sardar Aseff Ali’s article The Question of Identity which appeared in these columns on June 17. The writer makes out a case for discarding the ideology of Pakistan and adopting the cultural identity of the Indus Valley civilization as the basis of the state. He goes on the suggest that the Muslims of Pakistan belong to a South Asian culture that evolved through a huge South Asian diffusion of language, literature, food, poetry, architecture, painting etc. His deductions are not based on the historical truth of economic disparity between Muslims and Hindus which motivated the Muslims of India to organize themselves to for demand economic and political rights in an undivided India. Neither has he analyzed the causes of contemporary internal conflicts within states.

The ideology of Pakistan is purely based on a historical truth that following the wresting of power from Muslims, the British government of India remained suspicious of Muslims rising against its power in India. For this reason, it kept them in a state of economic deprivation. This was managed by them through the enforcement of discriminatory policies against Muslims in the services, business and industry. These policies helped to improve the economic and financial status of Hindus and opened up the gates of poverty for Muslims.

When chances of India acquiring an independent status emerged, there was fear among the Indian Muslims that the discriminatory policies of the British government in India, long embedded in the system, might be continued by the Indian National Congress party which was dominated by Hindus. It was this fear that led our pre-independence leaders to demand constitutional safeguards for Muslims in a future, undivided and independent India.

If any examples are needed in support of this reasoning, these are many: the Lucknow Pact of 1916, the 14-point rejoinder to the Nehru Report of 1928 which resiled from the Lucknow compact over separate electorates for Muslims, the subsequent warning of Mohammad Ali Jinnah to Congress leaders at the All-Party Conference at Calcutta about ignoring minimum Muslim demands for representation in a future Indian government, the acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan framework by the Muslim League in 1945 and Nehru’s assertion thereafter of the right of carrying out amendments to the plan.

Surely, the demand of ‘constitutional safeguards’ by a cultural minority of Muslims was asserted as a means to ensure economic and political advancement in future a constitutional set up in undivided India. However, the majority represented by the Indian National Congress denied it and preferred the division of India rather than granting this right to a religions minority. But does it mean that we should reject the two nation theory as the genesis of Pakistan or our statehood and substitute it with the Indus Valley civilization? Will this substitution help galvanize various groups raging in our state on sectarian, ethnic and cultural grounds and bring harmony and unity? Will the renunciation of Urdu or Hindustani which evolved as a link language in undivided India ensure cohesion among various cultural groups in Pakistan?

But these are not causes of our growing divide. The cause is globalization which has helped illiberal and a quasi-feudal form of political economy to grow in Pakistan and has contributed to a redistribution of income in favour of one group over the other. Hence, Pakistan today is riven by disparities among regions and classes. The assertion by these regions and groups emanate from economic factors. These groups are articulating their cultural identity for making economic and political advancement which has been denied to them since long.

The substitution of genesis of Pakistan by the Indus Valley civilization will not bring internal conflicts to an end because the Indus Valley civilization is not a ‘unitary identity’ of all federating units in Pakistan. The remedy lies in granting political and economic rights to all regions and groups for enabling them make economic and political advancement. This is what is importunately pressing for the preservation of our identity as a state. This step needs to be supported by measures aimed at neutralizing the negative effects of globalization on our economy so that the size of cake is not reduced and its distribution is not skewed further, giving rise to an upward swing in poverty levels and an assertion of cultural identities with renewed force.

Any linkage of the ‘Indus Valley civilization’ with the huge South Asian culture is an escapist route and will not bail us out of our present problems. Identifying the Indus Valley civilization with the broad-based South Asian culture amounts to forgetting the lessons of history that our country came into existence owing to the deliberate denial of rights by the majority to the Muslims. The majority in the South Asia has never rejected their pre-independence leadership for their political decision. Why should we?

The writer is a former additional secretary.

A farewell to petroleum age

FOR those oil enthusiasts who believe that petroleum will remain abundant for decades to come — among them, American president, vice-president and their many friends in the oil industry — any talk of an imminent “peak” in global oil production and an ensuing decline can be easily countered with a simple mantra: “Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia.”

Not only will the Saudis pump extra oil now to alleviate global shortages, as is claimed, but they will keep pumping more in the years ahead to quench our insatiable thirst for energy. And when the kingdom’s existing fields run dry, lo, it will begin pumping from other fields that are just waiting to be exploited. This is the basis for the administration’s contention that we can continue to increase our yearly consumption of oil, rather than conserve what’s left and begin the transition to a post-petroleum economy.

But that may not be the case. In a newly released book, investment banker Matthew R. Simmons convincingly demonstrates that, far from being capable of increasing its output, Saudi Arabia is about to face exhaustion of its giant fields and will probably experience a sharp decline in output relatively soon. He also argues that there is little chance that Saudi Arabia will ever discover new fields that can take up the slack from those now in decline.

If Simmons is right about Saudi Arabian oil production — and the official dogma is wrong — we can kiss the era of abundant petroleum goodbye forever. This is so for a simple reason: Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading oil producer, and there is no other major supplier (or combination of suppliers) capable of making up for the loss in Saudi production if its output falters.

According to the US Department of Energy, Saudi Arabia possesses about one-fourth of the world’s proven oil reserves, an estimated 264 billion barrels. Also, the Saudis are believed to harbour additional reserves containing another few hundred-billion barrels. On this basis, the department asserts that “Saudi Arabia is likely to remain the world’s largest oil producer for the foreseeable future.”

Consider the DOE’s projections. Because of the rapidly growing international thirst for petroleum - much of it coming from the United States and Europe, but an increasing share from China, India and other developing nations - the world’s expected requirement for petroleum is projected to jump from 77 million barrels per day in 2001 to 121 million barrels by 2025. Fortunately, says the DOE, global oil output will also rise by this amount in the years ahead. But over one-fourth of this additional oil - about 12.3 million barrels per day - will have to come from Saudi Arabia.

The problem is, if you take away Saudi Arabia’s 12.3 million barrels, there is no possibility of satisfying anticipated world demand in 2025.

The Saudis vehemently deny their fields are in decline. The DOE, with no independent verification, backs them up. In the end, it comes down to this: America’s entire energy strategy, with its commitment to an increased reliance on petroleum as the major source of our energy, rests on the unproven claims of Saudi oil producers that they can continuously increase Saudi output in accordance with the DOE predictions.

And this is where Simmons enters the picture, with his meticulously documented book, “Twilight in the Desert.” Simmons is not a militant environmentalist or anti-oil partisan; he is chairman and CEO of one of the nation’s leading oil-industry investment banks, Simmons & Co. International. For decades, he has been financing the exploration and development of new oil reservoirs. In the process, he has become a friend and associate of many of the top figures in the oil industry, including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Essentially, Simmons’ argument boils down to four major points:

(1) Most of Saudi Arabia’s oil output is generated by a few giant fields, of which Ghawar — the world’s largest — is the most prolific.

(2) These giant fields were first developed 40 to 50 years ago, and have since given up much of their easily extracted petroleum.

(3) To maintain high levels of production in these major fields, the Saudis have come to rely increasingly on the use of water injection and other secondary recovery methods to compensate for the drop in natural field pressure.

(4) As time passes, the ratio of water to oil in these underground fields rises to the point where further oil extraction becomes difficult, if not impossible. To top it all off, there is very little reason to assume that future Saudi exploration will result in the discovery of new fields to replace those now in decline.

This being the case, Simmons concludes, it would be the height of folly to assume that the Saudis are capable of doubling their petroleum output in the years ahead, as projected by the DOE.

The moment that Saudi production goes into permanent decline in the not-too-distant future, the Petroleum Age as we know it will draw to a close. Oil will still be available on international markets, but not in the abundance to which we have become accustomed and not at a price that many of us will be able to afford. Transportation, and everything it affects — virtually the entire world economy — will be much more costly.

The cost of food will also rise, as modern agriculture relies to an extraordinary extent on petroleum products for tilling, harvesting, protecting, processing and delivery. Many other products made with petroleum - paints, plastics, lubricants, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and so forth - will also prove far more costly. Under these circumstances, a global economic contraction appears nearly inevitable.

Only if we act now to limit our consumption of oil and develop non-petroleum energy alternatives, can we face the “twilight” of the Petroleum Age with some degree of hope; if we fail to do so, we are in for a very grim time.

Given the high stakes involved, there is no doubt that intense efforts will be made to refute Simmons’ findings. With his book, however, it will no longer be possible for oil aficionados simply to chant “Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia” and convince us that everything is all right in the oil world. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times

The writer is a professor at Hampshire College, the US, and the author of “Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency”.

Civil society without democrats?

GENERAL Musharraf’s velvet gloves are off. Answering questions at the Auckland Foreign Correspondents Club recently, he reportedly admitted that he had barred Mukhtaran Mai from travelling to the United States to prevent her from maligning Pakistan over the “terrible state” of the country’s women. He then took a swipe at the “westernized fringe elements” of civil society by equating them with “Islamic extremists”.

If intent be fully manifest, what better demonstration that the routine application of physical coercion and verbal intimidation to silence dissent and opposition is essential to the logic of authoritarian rule. In other words, General Musharraf is but another military dictator rehearsing the standard operating procedures of authoritarianism.

Yet his blunt disclosure seems to have nonplussed some sections of moderate, liberal opinion in the country. For instance, one newspaper editorial captured the sentiment in these words: “The truth is finally out. It was none other than President Pervez Musharraf who ordered the travel ban on Mukhtaran Mai.” The editorial went on to note that “conservatism in society gives credence to Gen. Musharraf’s agenda for transforming the country into a modern, forward-looking state” but that his actions and words were risking the alienation of “progressive forces in the country.”

Why should “progressive forces” be supporting General Musharraf in the first place? The standard line goes something like this: the “good-hearted” general who has risked his life for “enlightened moderation” needs a ‘margin of manoeuvrability’ as he balances the needs of political expediency with his commitment to fighting the reactionary forces of religious extremism. Liberals’ support for Musharraf also issues from their profound disillusionment with partisan politics and, especially after the October 2002 elections, by their fear of an Islamist-dominated state. Not to mention the utopian vision of ‘changing the system from within’ which convinced many in civil society (amongst them economists, NGO leaders, journalists and academics) to work in close alliance with the supposedly new breed of military- authoritarianism installed in October 1999.

Co-opted in the authoritarian “reconstruction” of Pakistan, however, they decided to overlook the fact that the military had assumed power to preserve and advance its vital corporate interests, not to institute social reforms or augment institutions of participation and accountability. That the generals used the veneer of “reform mongering” as a means of concealing their actual projects of authoritarian consolidation mattered even less.

The paradoxical result: instead of questioning the legitimacy of the authoritarian regime, prominent sections of liberal civil society settled for the role of tailor to the naked emperor. Clothed in their apologetics and shielded by the military’s coercive power, the liberal emperor set about the task of establishing a decidedly illiberal regime. One that talked of “enlightened moderation” but walked with the Islamist political parties. The aim was twofold: to marginalize its more secular opponents and to extract benefits from its external allies in Washington by presenting them with a stark trade-off between a “secular” military and “mad mullahs”.

Duly worried over the military-facilitated electoral rise of the MMA, some of these same liberals started pushing for a pragmatic “compromise” between the military and the moderate parties. Such an alliance, they thought, would kill two birds with one stone. First, it would endow Musharraf with reliable democratic credentials to blunt external concerns about democracy. Second, it would broaden the support bases of the authoritarian regime and work as an antidote to the extremist threat.

But the vested interests of authoritarian consolidation demanded that any cooperation with these parties would be acceptable to the military sans their top political leadership. Not surprisingly, this political-military rapprochement has not yet come to pass.

The point is simply this: our liberals are contingent democrats for the very reason that they are consistent defenders of the authoritarian status quo. A few notable exceptions aside, they remain beholden to the state and hence ambivalent about democratization especially if it means crossing swords with the military. Hesitant to challenge the legitimacy of military- authoritarianism as a political regime, their typical strategy is to criticize particular policies and sporadically protest violations of individual rights.

The implications have been dire. Civil society’s “qualified” political support has allowed the military to claim a degree of legitimacy for its coercive actions that it otherwise lacks. In the process, civil society has become a site for reproducing rather than resisting authoritarian domination. It is no surprise that our basic civil and political freedoms and rights remain subject to growing authoritarian discretion and are tolerated by the state one day but snatched the very next.

Mukhtaran Mai praised for her courage one day, is kidnapped the next. The enforcement of a state protected framework of citizen rights requires responsive public institutions such as a strong parliament, an impartial judiciary as well as an autonomous press. These institutions, in turn, require political democracy. More specifically: democratic control over the coercive institutions of the state.

What is to be done? There is an urgent need for a renewed focus in civil society on collective action for democratization. If liberal human rights groups can hold a mini-marathon in defiance of state authority, why stop there? Why not expand the repertoire of resistance by holding civic protests calling for restoration of the 1973 constitution as it stood on October 12, 1999? Or for removing the democratic anamoly of a military president and introducing transparency in the rising and scandalously opaque military budget?

It would be naive to think that dissent and opposition emanating from civil society will not invoke state repression. But hardly ever has the modern state, let alone a military dominated one, voluntarily extended democratic freedoms and rights to a prostrate civil society. If civil society organizations are to regain a semblance of public credibility and counter their image of empty shells painted over by foreign money, they ought to use their unique access to financial resources and international networks to challenge the existing configuration of state power.

In that struggle, they should join hands with the mainstream political parties, even if that means having to swallow their reservations about “corrupt” politicians. There is no other option if the authoritarianism rapidly creeping into our social, economic and political lives is to be contained and ultimately reversed.

Wing and a prayer

CONSERVATIVES and moderates in the Iranian political system, the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, has said, are like the wings of a bird. Both must beat if the bird is to stay aloft.

It is an image with which many outside observers of Iranian politics, who have for years seen the two tendencies as cooperating and sometimes colluding with one another, would concur. But it does not hold at all today, after the victory in the presidential elections of, a victory which means that the hardliners now have power in every branch of the government.

It is not so much that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been defeated, for his claims to reformist status were largely bogus, but that the hardliners could not even reconcile themselves to coping with a skilled old political operator of his kind, or face the prospect of him offering some sort of rivalry to Khamenei.

In the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, as well as in the supervisory institutions and offices they have always controlled, the hardliners are on top. This does not mean that a few reformists will not survive nor, Iranian being Iranians, that there will be no divisions among those in power. Quite apart from the impact of personal ambitions, Iran’s dilemmas are so deep that divisions are inevitable, but they will now be between hardline and harder line, rather than between conservatives and reformers.

This is a frightening state of affairs, which has arisen precisely because those who hold most of the power in Iran are very fearful men. They are frightened of the United States, suspicious of Europe, mistrustful of their Middle Eastern neighbours and unready at home to advance even to the halfway house of relative openness and democracy represented by Mohammad Khatami, the outgoing president. The consequences for both Iranians and for the rest of us are likely to be serious, even if the changes may not be as immediately dramatic as some might predict.

Khatami thought, or hoped, that the revolution could be democratized. The new president, by contrast, says that the revolution was not made to bring democracy. It may be that the heirs of Khomeini’s revolution are right in believing that the pursuit of democracy would ultimately have unseated them. In any case, they have made it clear they are determined to dominate.

The new president will have some initial impetus because of his promises to attack corruption and divide wealth more fairly, but, if he fails in that, as he is likely to, the frayed political connection between government and people in Iran could give way completely.

—The Guardian, London