Hard road to reconciliation

IN the domain of public policy several of the major avenues are in disrepair and appear to be closed. More disconcerting is the probability that the policy makers do not know what it will take to fix them. We will focus today on an aspect of national security.

A major threat to our security has throughout been perceived as coming from India. For some 50 years our government has devoted a large proportion of our resources to the maintenance of a deterrent capability. When we began making nuclear weapons, the world community as well as India and Pakistan concluded that the simmering conflict between them must be mitigated to avoid a nuclear war in the subcontinent. Thus partly on their own volition, and partly because of external nudging, they decided to explore ways of settling their disputes.

This quest has come to be known as the “peace process”. During the first five years or so of this process many people in both countries thought that peace was at hand. A package of subjects to be discussed, called the “composite dialogue”, was prepared and several exchanges between officials from the two sides followed. But none of the issues vital to Pakistan is anywhere close to being resolved. The peace process is in trouble.

Pakistan has been saying that a mutually acceptable resolution of the Kashmir dispute is a pre-requisite of cooperation in other areas, such as trade. It has suggested several approaches to the issue. India says no serious discussions on the subject can take place until Pakistan completely stops “cross-border terrorism”, meaning the flow of militants from its side of the Line of Control in Kashmir into the Indian side.

General Musharraf had earlier assured the Indian prime minister (Mr Vajpayee and then Dr Manmohan Singh) that his government would not allow territory under its control to be used for launching terrorist attacks in India or Indian-held Kashmir. He claims that this undertaking has been fulfilled, and that infiltration from the Pakistani side has stopped. India says that is not the case, that terrorist training camps and infrastructure are still operating on Pakistani territory, and that persons from there continue to cross the LoC into Indian-held Kashmir.

It is difficult to say what the reality on the ground is. In the absence of hard evidence that would substantiate either of the claims, it may be useful to consider some of the possible scenarios. A few relevant facts may first be noted. India has declared repeatedly that it will not concede territory in its part of Kashmir to Pakistan. General Musharraf has floated several other options such demilitarization, troop withdrawal from three major cities in Indian-held Kashmir, self-governance, and joint India-Pakistan “management” of the region. India would prefer to maintain the status quo in Kashmir, and it has no real interest in General Musharraf’s initiatives. But it does not want to appear unwilling to talk with Pakistan. It is then likely that the accusation that cross-border terrorism has not halted is made to justify its disinclination to move on the Kashmir issue.

Several other possibilities regarding the merits of the Indian allegation can be imagined. General Musharraf may be right, and that Indians may simply be misrepresenting the situation. Incidentally, some Indian observers allege also that Pakistan is deliberately allowing a certain amount of infiltration to keep India under pressure, and that to this end it allows some terrorist training facilities to continue functioning. This is most unlikely to be true. The government of Pakistan has no way of ensuring that militants will do their dirty work only in India. They are mounting terrorist acts in Pakistan itself. Considering how tremendous is the havoc they are creating, it cannot be deliberate government policy to nurture them.

Still another possibility is that militants, ready and willing to become terrorists, are present on Pakistani territory, and that their sponsors may even be maintaining training and support systems for them, but that they remain hidden and conduct their activities covertly. This may well be the case. The next question would then be why the government of Pakistan does not find and disable them, one way or another, and destroy their infrastructure. The answer is that it does not have the requisite capability.

It has banned several militant organizations, closed their offices, frozen their assets, arrested and jailed many of their leading men and workers. In addition, Pakistani security forces are fighting actual and suspected terrorists, killing and getting killed, in parts of the country. Indian spokesmen say that is not enough, and that Pakistan must do more. It may well be that it is doing all it can, and it does not have the means of doing much more.

Pakistan’s inability to eradicate terrorism entirely is something that should not be difficult to understand. The Nagas, Naxalites, Maoists, and other militant groups have been perpetrating terrorist acts in India’s northeastern regions for decades, but the government of India has not been able to eradicate them. Militants in Northern Ireland resorted to terrorism for nearly a century, and the British security forces could not eradicate them. Their terrorism ceased only when the British government reached a mutually satisfactory political settlement with them. American forces in Afghanistan have failed to get rid of the Taliban.

Pakistani security forces patrol their side of the LoC, presumably to stop infiltrators from either side. Likewise Indian forces patrol their side of the line. One may ask why they do not spot and catch each and every infiltrator. Surely there is no lack of will on their part. The answer must be that they too do not have the requisite capability. No government in the world does.

A possible way out of this muddle has surfaced. The idea of joint India-Pakistan patrolling of the Line of Control was once broached and apparently accepted. But for one reason or another it did not get implemented. General Musharraf reportedly endorsed it a few years ago but, once again, it did not go forward. It has now come up again. It seems to merit consideration, for it may be the only way of knocking down India’s excuse for its tardiness in carrying forward the peace process.

It may be assumed that each of the joint patrolling teams will consist of both Pakistani and Indian personnel, and that they will operate on both sides of the LoC. In other words, Indian soldiers will come to the Pakistani side, and Pakistani soldiers will work on the Indian side. One may assume also that a Pakistani or Indian officer will command the team that is operating on his side of the LoC. He will control the movement and actions of his team members and keep them from wandering away on any other mission. There is nothing wrong with the idea, and I think we should accept it, if it will remove the main obstacle to the peace process.

Much depends on what kind of peace with Pakistan India wants. Leaving Kashmir aside, one may wonder why there is no progress in negotiations concerning Siachen, Sir Creek, Baglihar dam among others. It is conceivable that the suspicion of Pakistani involvement in “cross border terrorism” affects India’s disposition on all substantive issues. A more viable, but also worrisome, explanation may be that India wants to settle all issues on its own terms and does not want to make any concessions to Pakistani interests or point of view. In that case talk of peace during the last five years has been nothing more than a hypocritical play of words or plain noise.

What is then to be done? It is agreed at all hands that war with India is not a viable option. Expressions of hostility short of war will also serve no purpose. If we sponsor disruption and disaffection in India, the Indians can do the same in Pakistan. They will find a fair amount of receptivity to their overtures in Sindh and Balochistan. It follows that harassment as an option also deserves to be rejected.

It is clear to me that the Indians do not intend to make any meaningful concessions to the Pakistani point of view regarding Kashmir. They hope to reach a settlement with the Kashmiri dissidents without Pakistani participation, and they are in no hurry to do so. General Musharraf’s “flexibility” and innovative proposals for dealing with the issue, and his repeated pleas to Manmohan Singh to reciprocate his own open-mindedness, are not well received in New Delhi. The Kashmir issue may have to be left on the back burner for the foreseeable future to be revived when the time is more propitious.

Other issues should be pursued only insofar as they involve our vital interests. I do not know how a change in the status quo in places like Siachen and Sir Creek will advance our public good. If nothing of any consequence is going to happen, we should unilaterally withdraw our troops from Siachen and let the Indians freeze if they insist on staying there. I would vote for this approach not by way of appeasing India but in order to avoid dissipation of our own energies and resources on undertakings that will bring us no noteworthy advantage. Let us not be wasteful.

If India shows no respect or regard for our vital interests involved in issues currently on the table, amity between the two countries will remain elusive even if active hostility is avoided. In that environment travel, games, fun and entertainment may increase. But expansion of trade, investments, and academic exchanges, common approaches to world issues, and cooperation in security-related matters will have to wait.

India at this time is not ready to be conciliatory because it thinks we are in a weak bargaining position. It sees Pakistan as a house divided against itself and its government distracted by serious troubles at home. As I have said once before, if Pakistan does not want to end up being India’s “little brother,” it must set its internal politics right and affairs in order.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, US.

Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

A leader and his weight

(Art Buchwald is recuperating from surgery. In his absence, here’s a substitute column by Garrison Keillor.)

EVERYTHING was said that could be said about Ariel Sharon last week as he lay in a coma except the one thing that crossed the mind of every viewer watching newsreel footage of the prime minister, which was, “How much does that man weigh?” (Answer: 255 pounds. And he’s five-foot-seven.)

He looked like a bull walrus ruling a colony of baby seals. And it made you wonder, how does tiny Israel come up with this family-size guy while the world’s only superpower struggles along with a wiry little fellow who works very hard on his abs? Is it time we think about getting someone weightier?

We haven’t had a fat president since William Howard Taft and that was at the tail end of the Gilded Age, when politicians were expected to be portly. We’ve had a few semi-beefy ones since (Harding, Hoover), and LBJ carried a potbelly, and Bill Clinton had his moments of bloat, but the American people, now that two-thirds of us are overweight, prefer that the Great White Father be lean, taut, angular, a runner or horseman or cutter of brush. Whereas a guy who looks like he’d be right at home in a Barcalounger with a can of Pabst in his mitt doesn’t seem to fit the bill.

I suppose that a compact build indicates some sort of self-discipline, but discipline to do what? Look at Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. None of them was a hearty eater, and for good reason: paranoia. When you’re a megalomaniac, it takes away your appetite, thinking of all the folks who’d love to put rat poison in your ratatouille.

It is human to put butter on mashed potatoes and to choose the cheese plate instead of the lo-fat gelatin and to linger over the port wine and chocolates. The man who denies himself might satisfy his hungers elsewhere, promulgating reckless policies, such as a war against a nation that poses no threat to us and torturing those whom he deems enemies and detaining them at his pleasure and marching his troops into a quagmire.

A fat man, someone who must heave himself to his feet in the morning and behold a great pile of flesh in the bathroom mirror, the matronly pectorals and the enormous haunches and spare tire, might be more circumspect. He already looks like an emperor, so he would try harder not to act like one.

The advance eulogies of Sharon spoke of his remarkable political shift, from right-wing warrior to moderate compromiser, and you thought, “This is the sort of man America needs right now. Maybe we’ve been looking at the wrong body type.”

Fat men spend more time in contemplation, if only because they get winded climbing stairs and need to sit down. Because they jiggle when they walk, they may be less prone to delusions of grandeur. The fat man doesn’t expect his supporters to hoist him to their shoulders. Nor does he hope to sneak around undetected. He is able to face up to his own mistakes. (How can he not? They are hanging over his belt.)

He has lived with derision and that gives him a sense of compassion that may be lacking in a Medium or Small. And yet like Churchill, he knows what it’s like to rouse oneself to heroic effort. Neville Chamberlain was the elegant guy in the 36 Extra Long who kept backing down from the Nazis. It was the Old Fat Man who spoke of blood, sweat and tears. He knew about sweat.

The top-ranking fat man in government today is Speaker of the House J. Dennis (“Coach”) Hastert of Plano, Illinois, who for years has been two heartbeats away from the presidency, and one of those hearts has a pacemaker. A mild-mannered fellow who only seeks to do good for the western suburbs of Chicago and for American business, Hastert favours a strong national defence and the education of our children while opposing tax increases of any kind, large or small. He is also in favour of life.

Sitting on the dais behind President Bush at the annual State of the Union address, the Speaker has never missed a single standing ovation. A fat man must get tired of jumping to his feet twenty times in a row, but the Speaker has always been there, clapping his big meaty hands. He would be the first Dennis to become president. And he would look more like us, the American people. Think it over. —Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Climate change: early effects

ONE of the puzzles if you’re in the news business is figuring out what’s “news.” The fate of your local football team certainly fits the definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about changes in the migratory patterns of butterflies?

Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects of global climate change — but that isn’t news, by most people’s measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in the Arctic. We can’t see these changes in our personal lives, and in that sense, they are abstractions. So they don’t grab us the way a plane crash would — even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet. And because they’re not “news,” the environmental changes don’t prompt action, at least not in the United States.

What got me thinking about the recondite life rhythms of the planet, and not the 24-hour news cycle, was a recent conversation with a scientist named Thomas E. Lovejoy, who heads the H. John Heinz III Centre for Science, Economics and the Environment. When I first met Lovejoy nearly 20 years ago, he was trying to get journalists like me to pay attention to the changes in the climate and biological diversity of the Amazon. He is still trying, but he’s beginning to wonder if it’s too late.

Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon’s ecosystem may be irreversible. Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the tropical forests are beginning to dry out. They burn more easily, and, in the continuous feedback loops of their ecosystem, these drier forests return less moisture to the atmosphere, which means even less rain. When the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too.

“When do you wreck it as a system?” Lovejoy wonders. “It’s like going up to the edge of a cliff, not really knowing where it is. Common sense says you shouldn’t discover where the edge is by passing over it, but that’s what we’re doing with deforestation and climate change.”

Lovejoy first went to the Amazon 40 years ago as a young scientist of 23. It was a boundless wilderness, the size of the continental United States, but at that time it had just 2 million people and one main road. He has returned more than a hundred times, assembling over the years a mental time-lapse photograph of how this forest primeval has been affected by man. The population has increased tenfold, and the wilderness is now laced with roads, new settlements and economic progress. The forest itself, impossibly rich and lush when Lovejoy first saw it, is changing.

For Lovejoy, who co-edited a pioneering 1992 book, “Global Warming and Biological Diversity,” there is a deep sense of frustration. A crisis he and other scientists first sensed more than two decades ago is drifting toward us in what seems like slow motion, but fast enough that it may be impossible to mitigate the damage.

The best reporting of the non-news of climate change has come from Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker. Her three-part series last spring lucidly explained the harbingers of potential disaster: a shrinking of Arctic sea ice by 250 million acres since 1979; a thawing of the permafrost for what appears to be the first time in 120,000 years; a steady warming of Earth’s surface temperature; changes in rainfall patterns that could presage severe droughts of the sort that destroyed ancient civilizations.

This month she published a new piece, “Butterfly Lessons,” that looked at how these delicate creatures are moving into new habitats as the planet warms. Her real point was that all life, from microorganisms to human beings, will have to adapt, and in ways that could be dangerous and destabilizing.— Dawn/Washington Post Service

Cost of political expediencies

BE it the provision of relief for the victims of the earthquake or punishing defiant Baloch tribes, the only institution the president can call upon to help is the army. That amounts to terming a new political and administrative system, that he himself had devised in the face of protestations by politicians and civil servants and that he went on to protect under the Constitution, a failure.

The management of natural disasters and the maintenance of law and order are both the subjects and responsibility of the provinces. In this context the question that needs to be addressed is whether in the aftermath of the quake and in the thick of the trouble in the Marri-Bugti area the governments of the NWFP and Balochistan were able to discharge this responsibility. The answer would be they could not. The role of the provincial governments in both situations was secondary.

Federal authority took over the responsibility that vested in the provinces because the governments there lacked resources and skills and, more important, the confidence to act. This is generally true of all provinces but more in the case of Balochistan because it has a government divided against itself with a relatively narrow franchise base.

The Balochistan government has been no more than a bystander in the Marri-Bugti insurgency as have the governments of the NWFP and Azad Kashmir in earthquake relief and rehabilitation. Both tasks, or operations, have been planned and executed by the federal government with the help of the army. International agencies, local and foreign NGOs, Nato, 1,000 doctors from Cuba and even jihadist organizations have participated in earthquake relief but not the provincial or AJK government.

The district government is the centrepiece of President Musharraf’s system through which he claims to have empowered the people down to the village level. He conceived and enforced it with the help of his army colleagues ostracizing politicians and administrators. The new system has made law and order a function of the nazim of the district. The chief of the district police is also responsible to him.

Like the nazims of all other districts, the nazims of Dera Bugti and Kohlu (Marri) are also responsible for law and order in their districts. Not once have they spoken about the state of law and order in their jurisdictions and what they were doing to normalize the situation. They were elected because the sardars backed them. Their duty under the law aside, there is no way they can be seen to be acting against the wishes and interests of their patrons.

Such is the contradiction in the system that Musharraf has introduced and it is not peculiar to times of crises or to tribal areas alone. The conduct of the nazim every district is coloured by his political affiliation as is the attitude of the provincial or federal authorities towards the nazim. The authority of a nazim is reinforced if he is politically on the same grid as the government. His position is diminished if he is not, in a tribal society it is altogether undermined.

The district administration, thus, is no longer consistent and neutral in all districts as it used to be or should be. It is now political, hence partial. As a result, in situations of conflict as currently in the Marri-Bugti area or of human distress as in the mountainous north, a reliable focus of authority and coordination that is purely administrative and above politics is missing. No doubt, every district has a coordination officer but he has no executive powers and he too reports to the nazim. In a society like ours where conflicts and emergencies of one kind or the other are endemic it is imperative to have a neutral, career-oriented head of the district as also at the levels below. The elected nazim should be concerned only with developmental and municipal functions.

Above is but a glimpse of the weakness and contradiction in the administrative structure. In the political and legislative domains, such weaknesses and contradictions are more serious. It is well understood that few and cohesive political parties are the mainstay of the parliamentary form of government. In Pakistan, the political behaviour displayed and the executive decrees issued over the past five years have broken every party into numerous factions. The number of Muslim Leagues alone is said to be 10. The result has been a parliament which is ineffective as well as irresponsible.

An organization called the Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives has recently collected some facts about the working of our National Assembly showing how uninterested its members are in discharging their legislative functions and how unconcerned they remain about the problems of their constituents. Last year, the NA met, counting adjournments, for 131 days. The actual working days, may be, were less than 100 and the working hours not more than two in a day. It approved only presidential ordinances already issued, hardly ever debating a legislative measure. Prof. Anwar Syed too pointed out in this paper two instances where an ordinance was issued a day before the Assembly was to meet and another a day after it had adjourned. What becomes apparent is that neither the members wish to work nor do the president and prime minister want them to work.

The centre goes on to point out that 76 private member bills were moved but only one was admitted and that too wasn’t passed. The members asked 10,476 questions but only 2,101 were answered. No question relating to the security establishment was answered. Hardly ever did a committee of the Assembly hold public hearings to ascertain the views of experts or civil society on the laws and resolutions before it.

The parliament is considered to be sovereign, or supreme, in the parliamentary system. Here in Pakistan it has always tended to act in subordination to the chief executive. The cabinet considers itself answerable not to parliament but to the president. The chief ministers of the provinces are not elected by the assemblies but chosen by the president. The prime minister harangues his three scores of ministers but consults only a few in policymaking.

The system of governance from top to bottom is thus riven with contradictions. The practice seldom conforms to the form. The authority is more personal than institutional. General Musharraf draws his strength not from the Constitution but from the army.

All these contradictions and the problems they cause are unlikely to be resolved under the 1973 Constitution which has suffered numerous controversial amendments and long spells of extra-constitutional rule. Making a new start under a new constitution appears to be the only way out of the mess we are currently in. A non-partisan government should be now formed to hold elections to a constituent assembly. Elections held under the present Constitution and electoral system would only deepen the discontent and divisions as they have in the past.