Turbulent Pak-Afghan ties

BUT for some unexpected strains injected into the sensitive Pakistan-Afghanistan relations by intemperate allegations and counter-allegations, there was perhaps not enough reason to return to the subject in this valuable space after a mere two weeks. The exchanges made at ministerial and higher level are a cause of apprehension because they indicate a loss of focus on the larger strategic purpose. Some of them, like the threat to fence and mine the common frontier, reveal a disregard for the imperatives of geography and dictates of ethnic and civilisational identity stretching back into millennia.

The occasion that has caused this unexpected exacerbation of negative sentiments should not be missed. If the visit of President Bush was at all designed to bring India, Pakistan and Afghanistan closer, the results were counterproductive, particularly at the popular level where the perception of what transpired was worse than reality. Either through nonchalance or deliberate policy, President Bush made explicit the substantial differences that, in recent years, had come to inform and shape his country’s policy objectives towards the states of this region. In so doing he dealt a deadly blow to the fiction of even-handed treatment that client states had kept up for their supposedly unsophisticated and credulous populace.

Perhaps Bush needed to subordinate Pakistani sensitivities and sentiments to the imperative of articulating a new doctrine for the region. Part of this articulation was reflected in carefully crafted references that encouraged India to assume a dominant role in Afghanistan in the name of the newly developed joint Indo-US enterprise to build democracy in this benighted part of the world. Another motif was the unabashed attempt to intensify pressures on President Musharraf to “do more” to consolidate the Karzai government and, in this context, came the gratuitously provocative public statement that President Bush on his visit to Pakistan would remind the Pakistani president of his promise to curb cross-border interference.

Talking of provocation, there was enough of it, as President Musharraf’s angry comments made only too clear, in the timing of the Afghan allegations that a growing insurgency in Afghanistan was receiving material and logistical assistance from the Pakistani soil despite Islamabad’s solemn commitment to stop it. The coincidence with the visit of US president was almost inflammatory. Given this fact, the exasperation was also understandable, at least up to a point.

What distressed independent observers, many of whom hold the cause of Pakistan-Afghan amity very close to their heart for historical reasons and for reasons of the future needs of the entire region was the lack of a credible bilateral initiative to eliminate mutual misperceptions. Instead, there was the unseemly sight of both sides acting as if all that was needed was to collect some more certificates from Centcom. Washington’s approval became a substitute for the gravitas warranted by good neighbourly relations.

The need of the hour is to understand the dynamics that fuel suspicion, and oblige one country to seek shelter in blaming the other for what is an undeniable internal crisis. I have in earlier articles tried to assess the successes and failures in the implementation of the new order envisaged in the Bonn agreement. There have been constitutional, political and economic shortfalls for reasons that are not difficult to discern. Some of the reasons lie beyond the capacity and resources of the fledgling Afghan state now being reconstructed from the debris of a quarter century of conflict; they depend on foreign powers fulfilling their promises and commitments.

There are others that highlight the intrinsic competence and capacity of Karzai’s government. Another set of explanations belongs to the perception in various regions of a sprawling and heterogeneous land of new institutions such as the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP). The response varies dramatically. In some parts of the country these new instruments of state power are applauded; in another they are attacked as collaborators of a hated occupation army.

The overall situation in Afghanistan presents a mix of achievements and equally important failures. Even as the constitutional plan went through successive stages — with determined help from Pakistan, as President Musharraf chose to remind President Karzai publicly — some dark areas expanded and became murkier. Year-end reviews for 2005 affirmed the quantitative and qualitative stiffening of armed resistance. There was consensus that the “Taliban” threat, far from nearing its end, was showing resurgence.

The insurgency showed successful Taliban regrouping and the development of new tactics. These included a greater use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Similarly, there was a noticeable increase in suicide attacks which considerably reduced the casualties of the insurgents and made a greater psychological impact on the government and foreign forces. The death toll rose notably. Despite this worsening of the situation, or perhaps because of it, stage III of the Nato plan had to be accelerated. It will see the deployment of a considerable Nato force in the sensitive Helmand valley where it may well be increasingly drawn into combat situations, rather than a peace-keeping and supportive role for the provincial reconstruction teams.

In the latest testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, General Maples, director of the US defence intelligence agency, spoke of the insurgency as “capable and resilient”. At least one provincial governor, Ghulam Dastigir of Nimroz claimed an increasing influx of foreign fighters, especially from Iraq, who were making a visible impact on the tactics of insurgents, a phenomenon occasionally described as the “Iraqization” of Afghan resistance. The coalition commanders now increasingly speak of virtually an endless military commitment to Afghanistan.

There are other aspects of the situation that should cause no less concern. Nato’s supreme commander, General James Jones, has very recently said that the narcotics trade posed a greater threat to Afghanistan than a rekindled insurgency by Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. It is common knowledge that some of the warlords, otherwise aligned to the Karzai administration, “are believed to have profited immensely from the opium trade”. One of the few successes of the Taliban era was the destruction of poppy cultivation but now in an ironic twist of the tale, the Taliban are reported to be coercing the rural population to grow more poppy as they find it a relatively convenient way of financing their prolonged war of attrition against foreign forces and the reconstituted national army and police.

It was against this backdrop that President Karzai visited Pakistan in February. His was an unenviable task. He was known to be unhappy with the persistent insensitivity of US soldiers towards his countrymen but had few options in dealing with them. In Pakistan, he sought help from ‘brothers’. In an important forum, he tried to come to terms with a controversial past by rejecting the concept of Pakistan’s strategic depth but by endorsing new ideas of common space for mutually beneficial economic cooperation. Pakistan was courteous and understanding and the media was full of the Afghan potential of providing a land bridge between South Asia and Central Asia.

But then came that part of his mission where he is most vulnerable. Despite some reshuffling, he is still surrounded by the stalwarts of the erstwhile Northern Alliance who have yet to shed the habit of mind to conflate their Taliban adversaries with the Pakistan army or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The love-hatred that characterized Pakistan’s relations with late Ahmad Shah Massoud is for them still a living reality.

President Karzai has no apparatus to fine-tune the difference between information and hard intelligence fed into the system by these influential elements, a shortcoming for which President Musharraf chided him. Similarly, leaking the so-called intelligence dossier provided to Pakistan by President Karzai is a process that the Afghan president could not have singly controlled. Blaming Pakistan for heightened insurgency was a joint project of elements in the United States and in the Karzai government. One obvious objective was to increase pressure on Musharraf, who is routinely described by American experts as reliable only under pressure. If this is a gross misperception, which every patriotic Pakistani hopes it is, it can be removed only by the Pakistani president himself.

Meanwhile, it is imperative to step back from the present destructive blame game. It is not in Pakistan’s interest to weaken the Karzai government. Expedients, or transient irritants, should not also obscure the larger geo-strategic and geo-economic design which would hardly be advanced by fencing or mining the border. Pakistan has a serious deficit of experts on Afghanistan. For many long years, it had no diplomats in Kabul and it looked at it through the prism of intelligence officers. There are also freelance experts with a self-serving agenda of their own. The epistemological situation in Pakistan is only marginally better than in the Northern Alliance — dominated set-up in Kabul.

It is also important to step aside from the obsession with the United States and, even under conditions of occupation which constrain the Afghan government, initiate a continuous bilateral dialogue with it. Pakistan should, in the confidence of this dialogue, spell out the limits of what Pakistan can do. Even if President Musharraf can persuade the Americans to bank roll an indefinite deployment of 80, 000 troops — clearly in harm’s way — there are other unintended consequences which can snowball and become highly deleterious to the interests of the people of Pakistan.

Just as Pakistan defines the parameters of its military commitment to the consolidation of the Kabul government, it should speak directly to Karzai about reciprocal expectations. The present phase of attributing our difficulties in the tribal belt and in Balochistan to Indian interference through conduits provided by the Afghan ministry of defence can only impact negatively on regional inter-relationships.

That it is being done publicly reflects poorly on the status of the India-Pakistan composite dialogue as well as the state of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations. Afghans have made many mistakes since 1945 in their approach to Pakistan but the list of Pakistani mistakes vis-a-vis Afghanistan is not small either. It is necessary to assign them all to the judgment of history and craft future policies with a full knowledge of the causes of past failures. Reinforcing failures is not the best policy.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email : tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

The man who would not die

(This column was written by Art Buchwald from the hospice in Washington, D.C., where he is undergoing care. Buchwald stopped writing his regular column at the end of December, but offers this update on his condition — and his life — to his regular readers.)

Dear Reader,

I AM writing this article from a hospice. But being in a hospice didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted it to. By all rights I should have finished my time here five or six weeks ago — at least that’s all Medicare would pay for.

What happened was, I was riding the elevator at the acute care facility next door when I saw a sign that said there was also a hospice in the building. I arranged a tour and everything looked very good to me.

I talked to my doctor, Mike Newman, and he said, “It’s your choice. You’re the only one who can decide what you want to do.” Which was, I thought, a good answer. That’s when I decided to discontinue dialysis.

One of the reasons for the decision was that I lost a leg at Georgetown Hospital. I miss my leg, but when they told me I would also have to take dialysis for the rest of my life, I decided — too much.

Several things happened. My decision coincided with an appearance on Diane Rehm’s radio talk show. She has over a million listeners. I talked with her about my decision not to take dialysis. The response was very much in my favour. I had over a 150 letters, and most of them said I did the right thing. This, of course, made me feel good.

It is one thing to be in hospice; it’s another to get on the air and tell everybody about it.

When I got to the hospice, I was under the impression it would be a two- or three-week stay. But here I still am, six weeks later, and I’ve gotten so well Medicare won’t pay for me anymore.

Now this is what it’s like for someone who is in the hospice: I sit in a beautiful living room where I can have anything I want and I can even send out to MacDonald’s for milkshakes and hamburgers. Most people who are not in hospice have to watch their diets. They can’t believe I can eat anything I want.

I have a constant flow of visitors. Many of them have famous names, so much so that my family is impressed with who shows up. (I would not be getting the same attention if I were on dialysis.) I hold court in the big living room. We sit here for hours talking about the past, and since it’s my show, we talk about anything I want. It’s a wonderful place to be, and if for some reason somebody forgets to come see me, there’s always television and movies on DVD.

I keep checking with the nurses and doctors about when I’m supposed to pull out. No one has an answer. One doctor says, “It’s up to you.” And I say, “That’s a typical doctor’s answer.”

I receive plates and baskets of delicious food — home-cooked meals from my son and daughter-in-law, treats from the delicatessen and frozen yogurt from Haagen-Dazs.

Everybody wants to please me. Food seems to be very important, not only to my guests, but also to me. If they bring food, they get even better treatment from me. One day I told a friend I wanted a corned beef sandwich. The next day I got 10 corned beef sandwiches.

Also, I have received dozens of flower arrangements, something I would never get if I were on dialysis.

I don’t know if this is true or not, but I think some people — not many — are starting to wonder why I’m still around. In fact, a few are sending me get-well cards. These are the hard ones to answer.

So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn’t Die. How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. I don’t know where I’d go now, or if people would still want to see me if I wasn’t in a hospice. But in case you’re wondering, I’m having a swell time — the best time of my life. — Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Wrong time for ‘people power’

THAKSIN SHINAWATRA has poorly served Thailand’s fragile democracy during his five years as prime minister. He monopolized television media and bullied or bought opponents in the parliament and independent press.

He launched a “war on drugs” that led to the assassination of some 2,500 suspected traffickers by government-backed death squads. His campaign against Muslim insurgents spawned still more human rights abuses, including the suffocation of 78 prisoners in government custody. He has been cozy with the ruling generals of neighbouring Burma. We have criticized him on all these grounds as well as the Bush administration for embracing him in spite of these failings.

Mr Shinawatra nevertheless has been democratically elected twice, the last time by a large margin. In response to mounting criticism and street protests by his opposition, he has called a vote for early next month. Opposition parties have responded by announcing a boycott and by organizing large protests; a big one is planned for next week.

Mr. Thaksin’s adversaries clearly hope to force him from office through the use of “people power,” which has driven pro-democracy revolutions in Thailand and several other Southeast Asian countries during the past two decades. But that’s the wrong answer.

Protest leaders claim that they can’t support new elections because elections won’t change the political system Mr. Thaksin has manipulated to his advantage. They point out that he appointed cronies to bodies that will supervise the balloting.

But a glance at opinion polls makes it hard not to suspect another motive: In any fair vote, Mr. Thaksin would easily win. Though he is held in contempt by the capital’s elite and middle classes, the prime minister is strongly supported in the countryside, where his populist policies have brought real improvements. By skipping the election the opposition simply concedes the prime minister a still more dominating position in parliament.

—The Washington Post

Learning from the Japanese

IN the nineteenth century, many European composers saw Japan as some sort of musical comedy nation.

They were fascinated by its charming old-world culture, its Sumo wrestlers charging like raging bulls, its tea ceremonies and flower arrangements, its geishas in kimonos, fans fluttering in their hands, opening paper-thin sliding doors and gliding noiselessly across wooden floors, while the samurai wielded two-handed swords and settled old scores. Some decided to set the country to music.

In Austria, Franz Lehar produced his delightful operetta ‘The Land of Smiles’ in which the world’s greatest tenor Richard Tauber sang what is arguably the western world’s most famous ballad “Dein is mein ganzes Herz”. From Britain, Gilbert and Sullivan rustled up their eighth Savoy opera, a hugely successful, effervescent two-act musical called ‘The Mikado’, subtitled ‘The Town of Titipu’; and from Italy there came that heart-rending opera ‘Madame Butterfly’ by Giacomo Puccini.

The West’s perception of the Nippon kingdom changed drastically during the Taisho and early Showa periods when Imperial Japan defeated Czarist Russia in 1905 after one of the world’s most famous naval battles. Later, when Japanese soldiers invaded Manchuria and China, renaming the former Manchuko, the western world took note. Japanese technology had been put to its most devastating use.

The Japanese understandably don’t like to discuss the war, or the fact that in the last stage of the struggle they were fighting a rear guard action against the collective military might of 16 nations. It is the period after the war that is of most concern to countries around the world, many of whom, like Pakistan and India, failed to grasp the elan vitale that catapulted a nation of 30 million people to its predominant place in world industry.

After the Second World War, one often heard the cliche about Japan losing the war and winning the peace. Exactly what it was that turned a militarily defeated nation into one of the world’s great industrial giants, has always been a great mystery, and has made western management theories look old fashioned and ill-equipped to handle challenges posed by international competition.

Carol Kennedy in her Guide to the Management Gurus listed 33 management thinkers who have had an effect on policymakers in the West. The list included Chris Argyris, Peter Drucker, Frederick Herzberg, Douglas McGregor, Abraham Maslow and Max Weber. Surprisingly, only one Japanese name surfaced in this highly informative book — that of Kenichi Ohmae, which is not at all surprising.

Japanese management theories have not coalesced and developed into what could be referred to as ‘a general theory of Japanese management’. In short, no all embracing theory has as yet evolved from what could be called the ‘mutual mediation’ of historical and theoretical studies of local Japanese business management practices. A possible reason for this is that there is too much focus on specifically Japanese traits within its system of management. And this ranges from cultural aspects embedded within business, to issues of the financial system, relations with government, ‘kigyoshudan’ and ‘keiretsu’, industrial relations and labour management and management methods such as production control.

Nevertheless, some of the mystique of Japanese management was unveiled in a recent presentation organized by the Institute of Business Administration and the 21st Century Business and Economics Club. The speaker was Tsunenari Tokugawa, a soft-spoken modern day mandarin descended from a long line of Japanese nobility. He made a number of observations which have been borne out by theorists who specialize in the Japanese industrial scene.

The main thrust of his lecture was: the Japanese style of management is based on ethics, honour and credibility. A group that has lost its credibility has little chance of survival. His talk was also peppered with delightful asides like: in Japan people use up twigs and leaves. They don’t cut down trees. If they did, they wouldn’t have any paper. And: while some countries impose an authoritarian form of management, in Japan management takes place through consensus. Once consensus is reached, the whole body becomes very strong.

The one that raised quite a few eyebrows was his reference to a BBC survey conducted towards the end of last year in which the news channel asked viewers to vote on which country or bloc had made the most positive contribution to world culture. The European Union headed the list, followed closely by Japan. At the bottom of the list were the United States and Iran.

By the late 1970s people had started to notice how successful Japanese industry had become. In industry after industry, including steel, watches, ship building, cameras, automobiles, and electronics, the world marvelled at the way the Japanese were surpassing American and European companies, advertising their wares in neon fluorescence in six out of seven continents. Westerners naturally wanted to know why.

All kinds of theories were aired to explain the success of the Japanese companies. Some of the pegs on which analysts hung their theories included higher employee morale; dedication, and loyalty; lower cost structure, including wages; effective government industrial policy; modernization after the Second World War leading to high capital intensity and productivity; economies of scale associated with increased exporting; relatively low value of the yen leading to low interest rates and capital costs, low dividend expectations, and inexpensive exports; superior quality control techniques such as total quality management and other systems.

These explanations were more or less accepted, until it was discovered that the mechanism was not always firing on all cylinders. In fact, by 1980, the Japanese cost structure was seen to be higher than the American and the West German. The first management theorists who attempted an explanation were Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos in their 1981 publication The Art of Japanese Management. They claimed that in spite of occasional hiccups the main reason for Japanese success was their superior management techniques.

They divided management into seven aspects: strategy, structure, systems, skills, staff, style, and subordinate goals. The first three of the seven S’s were called hard factors — and this is where American companies excelled. The remaining four aspects, skills, staff, style, and subordinate values were called soft factors and, in their view, were not well understood by American businesses of the time. The Americans did not yet place great value on corporate culture, shared values and beliefs, and social cohesion in the workplace.

In Japan the task of management was seen as managing the whole complex of human needs, economic, social, psychological, and spiritual. In America and indeed parts of the western world, work was seen as something that was separate from the rest of one’s life. It was quite common for Americans to exhibit a very different personality at work compared to the rest of their lives. Pascale and Athos also highlighted the difference between decision-making styles; hierarchical in America, and consensus in Japan. They also claimed that American business lacked long-term vision, preferring instead to apply management fads and theories in a piecemeal fashion.

A year later in The Mind of the Strategist Kenichi Ohmae claimed that strategy in America was too analytical. Strategy should be a creative art. It is a frame of mind that requires intuition and intellectual flexibility. He claimed that Americans constrained their strategic options by thinking in terms of analytical techniques, rote formula, and step-by-step processes. He compared the culture of Japan in which vagueness, ambiguity, and tentative decisions were acceptable, and preferable to American culture that valued fast decisions.

So far this writer has not come across a comprehensive book based on Japanese management which could prove useful to heads of companies in Pakistan. Most of the industrialists, like the family oligarchs, who have their own unique, individual style of management, wouldn’t know what to do with such a volume even if it was made available. However, many local organizations have come to realize that the most successful organizations are the ones that make the most effective use of their people.

A welcome development in recent years in Pakistani companies is the induction of people specializing in human resource management. The problem is that most HRM specialists believe that their role ends once an employee has been selected and inducted.

Authorizing surveillance

IN the past week both congressional intelligence committees have taken modest steps toward oversight of the National Security Agency’s mysterious programme of warrantless wiretapping.

First, the House intelligence committee agreed to conduct a comprehensive review of the implementation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the law that governs national security wiretapping and searches within the United States — and to push the Bush administration to give a substantial briefing on the NSA programme to a subcommittee.

Then, this week, the Senate intelligence committee — having rejected Democratic requests for a full-blown oversight investigation — set up a subcommittee of seven members to look into the matter. Previously, only individual members have received full briefings on the programme, which circumvents FISA’s requirement of a warrant from a special court. In the Senate’s case, the committee action coincided with a proposal by several moderate Republicans to authorize aspects of the NSA programme and impose modest restrictions. The bill, which is being advanced by Sen. Mike DeWine, would allow warrantless surveillance for 45 days — and in some instances much longer — when one party to a communication is outside the United States and one party is linked to terrorism. The bill has positive and negative elements.

It contains important restrictions on the use and retention of information, and it would require the administration to get a warrant as soon as the standards for one can be met. But it would also allow surveillance to continue without a warrant if the administration certifies its necessity to a congressional subcommittee.

Whatever its merits, the legislation seems premature. Any bill should flow out of the examination of the programme the committees are only now undertaking, not from guesswork about what is going on and what rules should apply.

Two key inquiries ought to guide any new legislation: how FISA is working and what precisely the administration is doing outside of its strictures. The administration has said that the surveillance law is too cumbersome for certain essential national security surveillance. If this is true, the law needs to be updated.

—The Washington Post