Iran’s quest for N-energy

A NEW book Lawless World by Professor Philippe Sands of University College, London, claims that in a telephone conversation with Tony Blair on January 30, 2003, President Bush stated that he “wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation” and that in this context he mentioned ‘in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan’. A few weeks later, he invaded Iraq as planned much earlier.

The reference to Pakistan made long after it had committed itself to Bush’s war against terrorism is rather baffling. In any case, nearly three years later, his formidable helicopters are sharing with the Pakistani armed forces the hazards of providing relief to earthquake victims in a treacherous terrain and not taking out Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. No less mystifying is the mention of Saudi Arabia which has never aspired to any WMD capability and has been a staunch US ally in the Middle East. Iran, with which the US has been locked in hostility since the revolution, has certainly emerged as the target of a relentless campaign similar in intent to Iraq.

Washington achieved a diplomatic success when, on September 24 this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) initiated a move to refer Iran’s alleged ‘non-compliance’ to the Security Council. Ahead of a November meeting that may invest that move with greater substance and urgency, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been assigning a high priority to Iran’s referral to the Security Council in her travels.

In Paris, on October 14, she tried to stiffen the resolve of EU3 — Britain, France and Germany — to go beyond negotiations. “There is always the course of negotiations,” she said, ‘but there is also the course of the Security Council”. Next day, confronted with Moscow’s refusal, Rice responded with an observation strongly reminiscent of the approach to Iraq. “This is not an issue of rights,” she said, “but of whether or not the fuel cycle can be trusted in Iran.” In other words, it is the prerogative of the United States to decide how the rights and obligations of an international instrument — in this case, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) — will be applied to a particular signatory.

We may well be witnessing a replay of the old scenario except that Iran is altogether a different proposition. Iraq could not have done anything to prevent the impending invasion. Similarly, Tehran may well conclude that, in the absence of cast iron security assurances that it sought amongst other things in the dialogue with the EU3, unilateral concessions by it would not reduce the American hostility. No wonder Iran has reiterated its decision to revive the suspended activities of the Isfahan facility.

Iran has repeatedly assured the international community that its nuclear programme is exclusively geared to mastering the nuclear fuel cycle to sustain nuclear power production. This is consistent with Iran’s signature to the NPT. Against Iran’s categorical declarations is Washington’s equally vehement assertion that Iran has a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.

A review of Iran’s negotiations with IAEA and the three European powers (EU3) shows that no evidence of work on a nuclear weapon has ever surfaced. The Isfahan facility can produce uranium hexafluoride in gaseous state. A relatively small plant at Natanz can turn this gas into enriched uranium. Inspection regimes can oversee the level of enrichment constantly. There were unsubstantiated reports of earlier programmes for plutonium separation suggestive of another route to nuclear weapons.

The dialogue with the IAEA addressed, in various phases, concerns about transparency and disclosure. The IAEA’s inspection became more aggressive as allegations multiplied and became virtually fool-proof when Iran tried to assuage European apprehensions by signing an additional protocol designed to give IAEA extensive powers of inspection in December 2003. The Iranian majlis now wants the president to suspend this protocol, thereby restricting IAEA’s inspection rights.

The IAEA’s main reservations on concealment or incomplete disclosures about uranium enrichment, laser experimentation, details of designs and import of uranium were resolved by the end of 2004. Doubts about the discovery of trace elements were removed after they were firmly linked to contamination of parts imported from outside. Credible estimates put Iran’s know-how a decade short of the level where a nuclear weapon becomes even a possibility. For reasons that are obscure and political, the IAEA did not, however, issue a clean bill of health.

Dr Mohammed El-Baradei survived a well orchestrated American campaign to unseat him and his moral authority has been enhanced by the award of the Nobel peace prize. He has never expressed any fear of Iranian WMD but the IAEA seems to have come under unusual pressure between September 2 when he presented his report, and the meeting of the 35-nation board of governors on September 24. In its latest vote, four Asian states (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Yemen) four African states (Algeria, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia), three Latin American countries (Brazil, Mexico Venezuela), Russia and China denied support to a move linked to US plans to ratchet up the diplomatic war against Iran.

The shocking desertion from this show of solidarity with Iran came from India which threw its weight behind a procedure similar to the one adopted in Iraq’s case to legitimize the use of force. India should have remembered that the Security Council did not authorize the invasion of Iraq and is even less likely to sanction punitive measures against Iran.

The IAEA’s majority decision of September 24 makes demands of Iran that are inequitable and counter-productive. It seeks an inspection regime far beyond the additional protocol and, in fact, reminds us of the build up against Iraq. It seeks an indefinite end to reprocessing and enrichment activity and a voluntary abandonment of the heavy water reactor at Arak.

This set of demands, at the peril of referral to the Security Council, mirrors a similar shift, under US pressure, in the negotiating posture of the EU3. The European Union had launched a commendable initiative to ensure that the nuclear question be resolved exclusively through constructive negotiations aimed at satisfying mutual needs. This was to be an alternative to the US drive for a regime change.

The basic document in this regard is the Paris agreement of November 15, 2004. The trade off between Iran’s voluntary suspension of enrichment activities was a comprehensive package of nuclear, technological and economic measures underpinned by guarantees of security. Now EU3 offer hardly anything in return for a virtual shut down of Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme. The EU3 have come perilously close to the US position that irrespective of international agreements for lawful nuclear commerce, Iran cannot be trusted even with peaceful nuclear technology.

What lends credence to this interpretation is the negative or muted response to President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad’s bold offer for joint multilateral projects which preclude any diversion of material to military uses.

Meanwhile, Iran is stepping up its preparedness for various kinds of warlike actions it may face during at least the remaining years of the Bush presidency. Some of its threat perceptions can be named easily: massive air assault followed by land-based invasion from Iraq, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan; subversion by counter-revolutionaries harboured by Iraq; ethnic incitement in the “Arab” province of Khuzestan , Balochistan and the Kurdish areas.

Iran’s battle-hardened forces — the regular army, the revolutionary guards and the Baseej — are being reorganized to meet possible contingencies. Iran has the capability to greatly aggravate the difficulties faced by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who like me lived in Iran during Saddam Hussein’s invasion know that Iranian armed forces learn fast and adapt their tactics rapidly to developing situations.

The Iran-Iraq war created a deep awareness in Iran of the need to develop indigenous defence capability. There have been notable achievements in ballistic missiles technology as attested by the Shahab 3 project. The nuclear programme is surrounded by national pride and will not be easily abandoned. The present US tactics may tilt the balance in favour of those who see ultimate security in nuclear weapons.

This is a time of considerable disarray in the international non-proliferation regimes largely because of the policies of the leading nuclear weapon powers. Horizontal and vertical proliferation, the virtual demise of the concept of universal disarmament and a gradual conditioning of the world to the idea that in some situations, pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons would be permissible, combine to revive interest in nuclear weapons as the ultimate source of security.

It is highly unlikely that President Bush can widen the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to include a much stronger Iran in the time available to him. Beyond him, a democracy like the United States will probably find alternatives to the current ideology-driven militarism. For Pakistan, the choice is clear; it has a strategic relationship with Iran that must be independent of accidents of history, such as the self-limiting ascendancy of neo-conservatives in the United States. Pakistan’s vote in the IAEA reflected this awareness. Efforts should be made to build further on it.

Out of the cauldron that the invasion of Iraq has turned it into, the region may still emerge with Iran as a leading power. In fact, it is poised well to turn the present turmoil into an opportunity. The Iraqi invasion is destined to create grave uncertainties; only time will decide whether its purpose was to replace a tyrannical Ba’athist state by a single democratic Iraqi state or by three indefensible statelets that Israel had hoped for. Iran will, sooner or later, play a stabilizing role in this potentially chaotic situation.

The emerging dynamics such as Kurdish aspirations to statehood and sectarian assertion in Iraq will inevitably create long-term instabilities that should revive the rationale of much greater cooperation in the ‘northern tier’ comprising Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. As a core group, which works together and not at cross-purposes, it can exert a powerful influence on developments in Central Asia where a new version of the great game is already being played. With time-tested friendship with Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states, Turkey and China, and developing cooperation with Azerbaijan, the other Central Asian republics, and Afghanistan, Islamabad can play a pivotal role in promoting regional stability. The only question is if its thinking measures up to this historic potential.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: sakhanster@gmail.com

Battles change, wars don’t

MODERNISTS like to believe that we have entered an entirely new era of armed conflict. To some military thinkers, it’s the primordial nature of the terrorists’ beheadings, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices that has marked a completely new form of “asymmetrical warfare” in which the two sides are terribly mismatched.

Others have a different argument. They say it is our own high-tech, computer-enhanced munitions that have reinvented the very nature of conflict into something called “4th-generational war.”

But neither argument could be further from the truth. War is like water - its fundamental character remains unchanging precisely because the nature of the humans who fight it is constant over the centuries. True, the pump - the delivery system of flint, arrows, firearms, nuclear bombs, guided missiles and satellite weapons - radically changes the face of battle with each generation. But the essence of war nevertheless stays the same, as we are reminded when we study the distant past.

More than 2,400 years ago, the Spartans fought the Athenians in a bloody 27-year war that nearly wrecked the Greek city-state in its greatest age. Almost every horror we have experienced since 9/11 had a counterpart centuries earlier in that awful Peloponnesian War.

Limb-lopping? The Athenians ordered the right hands of captured Spartan seamen cut off.

Terrorism? On the island of Corcyra, factions burned innocents alive and executed civilians by running them through a gantlet.

Disease and fear of biological attack? The Athenians lost a quarter to a third of their population to a mysterious plague, and they blamed the outbreak on the Spartans.

Roadside executions? The Spartans rounded up 2,000 of their Helot serfs and butchered them all.

Kidnapped diplomats? The Athenians captured Spartan envoys on the way to Persia, ignored their diplomatic immunity, killed them and cast their corpses in a pit.

We recoiled in horror last September when Chechen terrorists stormed a school in Beslan and more than 150 children were killed in a bloody shootout. But in 413 BC, the Athenians unleashed their Thracian mercenaries on the tiny Boeotian town of Mycalessus. The killers slaughtered men, women and children, burst into a schoolhouse and butchered all the students. They even attacked livestock and, according to the historian Thucydides, “whatever living thing they saw.”

But the Peloponnesian War not only reminds us of how thin the veneer of civilization is when war, plague or natural disaster rips it off, it also shows that the reasons states fight each other have remained mostly the same over the years.

Thucydides says the Spartans attacked Athens “in fear” of its growing power - the “real” reason despite the numerous pretexts alleged. And the Athenians defended their earlier acquisition of territory on grounds that they took and kept it out of “fear, honor and self-interest.”

In our age of sophisticated economics, we tend to look for material causes for wars - land, resources, populations - rather than remembering these age-old emotional urges. But perhaps we could learn from Thucydides the next time Osama bin Laden alleges in his fatwas that we provoked him by stationing troops in Saudi Arabia or by enforcing the U.N. oil-for-food embargo.

The fact is, the deep-seated anger and humiliation of Al Qaeda were more likely incited by a globalized and Western culture that really did threaten all the old hierarchies of an increasingly dysfunctional Arab and Islamic world (and the worried mullahs, patriarchs and theocrats, whose sense of privilege and honor derived from that world).

In other words, Bin Laden probably went to war over a sense of lost honor, in Thucydidean fear of Western globalization and due to his perceived self-interest - given perceptions of Western appeasement of radical Islamist terrorism since 1979 - that he had more to win than lose by hitting New York and Washington.

Of course, we must be careful when evoking the past to make sense of the present. Many, for example, recently cited the Iraq war as the modern equivalent of the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415-413 BC, when Athens lost most of its fleet by assaulting distant Syracuse. But Syracuse was democratic, larger than Athens and, until the invasion, mostly neutral during the Peloponnesian War. A more historically apt analogy to that expedition would be if the United States had attacked democratic India during the midst of the U.S. war against Al Qaeda.

Study of the Peloponnesian War should also remind us that it is not assured that the wealthiest, most sophisticated and democratic state always triumphs over less impressive enemies. After all, Athens, for all its advantages, finally lost its war. And as Thucydides reminds us about the democratic empire’s lapses, arrogance and major blunders, more often the chief culprit was its own infighting and internal discord than the prowess of its many enemies. — Dawn/Los Angles Times

There’s a time for everything

A CONSULTANT on a visit to Pakistan, who charges by the hour, once quipped that he was thinking of retiring after working in Karachi for a month, because the clients who had hired him were invariably absent, habitually late or irritatingly indecisive. And all the while the meter was ticking.

This is not at all unusual, for while there is a chronic shortage of a number of goods and services in the city, the one resource of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply is time. And it is amazing how many people are dedicated to the task of ensuring that it is wasted.

One sees signs of this everywhere. In government offices, where a citizen has to make repeated visits because somebody or other is perpetually on leave or under transfer, national savings centres, where the payment system is so cumbersome that a certificate has to pass through a number of hands before it is paid. One saw evidence of this during the recent earthquake when it apparently took the army three days to get to the scene of the disaster, and the prime minister six days to say that the government would now build model villages on the sites where the devastation took place.

This must have pleased the MNAs of the ruling party who see a wonderful opportunity for a mammoth delegation to tour, of course, at the country’s expense, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary to see how the citizens of those countries handled problems of reconstruction after whole villages had been washed away.

The classic example of gross ineptitude, based on the theory that time should be wasted, provided it is somebody else’s, occurs every year towards the end of September when citizens realize with a weary resignation that the time has come to pay their income tax, so that the top brass in Islamabad can be provided with a fleet of bullet-proof Mercedes Benzes. They dutifully trot off to the nearest branch of the bank designated for this purpose, which 50 years ago had already been swept into the hideous maw of bureaucratic inertia.

To this day the management continues to believe that a 200-yard long queue which quivers and germinates all day long in the early autumn sunshine should be handled by only one clerk who communicates with all and sundry through a small hole in a heavily barred window.

The concept of quality time, where a person can read a good book, play a game of bridge or chess or listen to a raag or symphony, does not exist, except among a few members of the leisure class whom most people would like to think of as unhappy, talentless and probably crooked. The average citizen in Karachi faced with the harsh realities of life, is obliged to spend three hours a day commuting to and from his place of work.

When the poor commuter finally gets home, exhausted and depressed, to find that line water has not been delivered for the third day in succession, and that his family has been without electricity for eight hours, one can image his reaction when he reads in the newspaper that the prime minister had recently told a group of foreign investors that Pakistan was on its way to becoming an Asian tiger. For the present the commuter would be quite content if the prime minister ensured that the three public utilities issued their bills on the same date.

Another area where a colossal waste of time takes place is when inaugurations, anniversaries, seminars and felicitation ceremonies are held. These functions invariably start half an hour after the scheduled time, because the chief guest has been ‘unavoidably delayed’ or because organizers just expect their guests to come late. Nobody complains, because it is apparently the done thing and organizers behave as if the guests have nothing better to do.

In fact, during the last 10 years, Pakistanis of various classes and professions appear to have become obsessed with making speeches, a practice indulged in by not only the president and the prime minister, but also by ordinary mortals.

This writer remembers an occasion over 20 years ago when he was requested to attend the opening of the branch of a local bank located close to Manghopir. It was a colossal waste of time and an experience that induced him, in future, to read both sides of a card before accepting an invitation. It made him adopt a firm resolution that a book launch or seminar which lists more than two speakers should be given a definite miss. Political meetings which are long on rhetoric and short on content also fall into this category.

Coming back to the memorable bank function, there were 11 speakers, earnest wordsmiths headed by the regional manager. The list included two senior tellers. It also included the guard who was the usual salt-of-the-earth type who had faithfully served the bank since the ‘65 war. His character analysis of his colleagues, while touching once or twice on some endearing fable, was highly favourable in the main. The function lasted a little over three hours. The speeches which were delivered partly in English and partly in Urdu were far too long, boring, repetitive, badly written and badly delivered.

Halfway through a particular piece of tedious and dreary oratory this writer wanted to escape in order to take a peek at the crocodiles in the pond. He was prevented from doing so because of having been plonked in the front row between the chief guest and a security officer. The latter’s fierce unblinking stare was directed at one of the speakers who had the distinct impression that he was being suspected of purloining the bank tie and scarf during some momentary failure of surveillance in just such another resplendent place as this.

It’s bad enough when organizers inflict themselves on the locals who are used to listening to long-winded speeches. But what is inexplicable is why they insist on involving foreign diplomats in their promotional exercises. It was embarrassing to watch a US diplomat having to sit through three hours of pure bromide, as speaker after speaker at a function inflicted badly delivered homilies at the audience, while a moderator, who laboured under the delusion that he was required to present a precis of every presentation, prolonged the agony.

More recently, the deputy high commissioner of the United Kingdom, Hamish St Clair Daniel and the consul general of Switzerland Julius Anderegg had to cancel other engagements scheduled for the same evening, because the seminar at which they were guest speakers was dominated by spokespersons who just didn’t know when to call it a day.

Presenters who love the sound of their own voice and are reluctant to waste Pakistan’s inexhaustible resource, are strongly advised to read Hank Seiden’s classic Advertising, Pure and Simple, published by the American Management Association. Though his advice was directed primarily at copy writers, it holds good also for people who love to make speeches even when they have nothing substantial to say. They should remember three basic principles: keep it straight, keep it short and keep it simple. So far it has always worked.

The problem of selectivity

NATURAL disasters are always a test of our capacity to empathise with other people’s problems, and the massive earthquake that has devastated parts of northern Pakistan and India is no exception. Just 18 days on, the story is fading from our (British) TV screens and being relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers, though some things are getting worse.

The death toll, nearly 50,000, seems certain to rise further. Many international rescue teams have ended their searches. Helicopter flights are the only way of reaching remote villages cut off by landslides and buckled roads. And helicopters are still in desperately short supply.

The hundreds of helicopters being routinely used by US forces in Iraq are a reminder of how resources are concentrated in the hands of the world’s only superpower, and what missions they are made available for. There are not enough tents, tarpaulins or blankets, all vital for emergency shelter as the temperatures drop.

Amazingly, 15 per cent of the populated areas of the earthquake zone have yet to be even reached by rescuers.

Every natural disaster brings its own specific problems, and the sheer logistical difficulties of delivering relief to this region cannot be exaggerated. The human cost is certainly far greater than that of Hurricane Katrina in the US — where, for all the globally-observed drama, the final death toll was just over 1,000. But general factors are at work too.

The South Asian earthquake is the latest in a year of some of the worst disasters ever. Governments and the international community have failed to respond adequately. Lives have been lost as a result.

The first problem, according to a new report by Oxfam, is selectivity. While governments responded generously to the Boxing Day tsunami, partly because so many tourists from wealthy countries were among the 230,000 victims, they all but ignored less visible crises in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Niger and its Sahel neighbours. That is unfortunate for both moral and economic reasons since it is cheaper to act to prevent a famine than to deal with the human consequences once they have occurred.

The second issue is that in all these cases, as in Pakistan, responses would almost certainly have been faster if the UN central emergency fund had enough cash in it to permit rapid action.

—The Guardian, London