Truth’s healing power

THE catalogue of events about which the people of Pakistan want to know the truth grows by the day. It is the staple of private conversations as well as that of public debate. Even those who are supposed to know declaim knowledge of what transpired; others who are not expected to be privy to the truth indulge freely in conspiracy theories that get wilder and wilder.

There are persistent demands for commissions to inquire into events ranging from the Kargil war to the alleged U-turn on the Taliban and on to the latest massacre in Bajaur.

South Africa offered a model of public investigation for the expiation of past sins and the promise of future reconciliation and that model is invoked time and again to trigger off a healing process in our midst too. The one big difference is that the present regime in Pakistan sees no virtue in post-mortems and seeks to bridge gaps of logic and discontinuities of action by simply claiming that whatever the government did was absolutely the right thing to do at the time and the change in policy and praxis was dictated only by a sudden transformation of “environment”. Environment is dynamic; the righteousness of the state is a static dogma.

In other words, the people of Pakistan are being asked to embrace a new doctrine of pragmatism, a new religion of relativism. It may sound like a contradiction in terms but the application of relativity is also an absolute and one is not expected to indulge in excessive scrutiny of it. There is a semantic jungle in which the best of us would be lost. Being lost is an unpleasant experience as primordial fears of encountering unforeseen perils lurking behind every bush overwhelm mind and body.

This fear has a hundred names and gives rise to a hundred questions. Are we a sovereign nation any more? Do we take our own decisions or does our army of ministers and supportive bureaucrats only find the right vernacular for decisions taken elsewhere? Sovereignty in this time and day may well be a limited concept but why do we make unprecedented efforts to advertise our loss of it? Do we have any reliable mechanism for computing the consequences of events or are we simply hurtling towards a destiny that we do not wish to know?

As I write these lines, the media resonate, as they do on most days, with “disclosures” that deepen the mystery of things. One Gartenstein-Ross, a contributor to the blog Counterterrorism.org has claimed on the authority of “a military intelligence source” that the Bajaur strike was carried out by a US Predator and that it coincided with the signing of Bajaur accords similar to the September 5 Miramshah agreement. This investigative writer is sceptical of the information that at Zawahiri was sighted in the area; he is also uncertain if Matiur Rehman is amongst the dead. He also thinks that “at this point, the Bajaur accords are on hold” and that “we will probably see some payback from Al Qaeda and the Taliban”. Basically, the unnamed military intelligence source is confirming what the locals of Bajaur had said at the very beginning that the devastating attack was carried out by the Americans. He has re-opened the question as to what the Pakistani helicopters were doing there presumably after the madressah had already become a pile of rubble and a dreadful scene of carnage.

More by accident than by design, there is also a reiteration of the overall context in which such events keep taking place with monotonous regularity in our borderlands. Our media retail a version of Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri’s encounter with the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee which his staff should double-check for accuracy. Apparently, the foreign minister was yet again taxed with allegations of a lopsided foreign policy and he went back to the thesis that Pakistan’s ‘fate would not have been different from that of Afghanistan and Iraq’ if Pakistan had not taken the right decision to join the international war on terrorism. Backing US, he is reported to have said, was compulsion, not choice.

Mr Kasuri’s predecessor used to fly in the face of available evidence and assert that the change in the Taliban policy had nothing to do with external ultimatums and threats and that it was brought about as a result of an extended internal policy review over which he had presided; it was as natural as leaves come to trees. While he tried to restore our national pride and self-esteem, his cabinet colleagues kept demolishing his claims by reminding our people publicly that resistance to Mr Armitage’s demarche would have turned a substantial part of our land into another Tora Bora.

It is not really necessary that we have a cast-iron version of how and why the great reversal was made in the looming shadow of the tragedy of the twin towers of New York. There is a vast body of literature on the event that enables us to arrive at a reasonably accurate conclusion on why General Pervez Musharraf ordered the reversal. The difficulties that one continues to face fall, broadly speaking, into two categories. It is highly problematic if we keep claiming an absolute validity for the policy prior to reversal and the policy adopted the day after the reversal. It poses the disturbing question if our policymakers have any framework of principles and purposes beyond expediency which they burnish with their own self-serving interpretation of national interest.

Secondly, there is the nagging doubt if the policymakers are relatively free of the shock-and-awe state of 2001 and thus capable of recovering some of the lost terrain of national sovereignty. If the American blog’s account of the Bajaur incident mentioned above is correct, which may not be the case, there would be further doubt about the ability of Pakistan’s present decision-makers to understand the transformation that is beginning to take place in the region and also re-align Pakistan’s foreign policy accordingly. There is some danger that one day they may, speaking metaphorically, be stranded on a roof top, just as the Vietnamese regime acting as the frontline against Asian communism once was, and there would not be enough rescue helicopters.

The distinguished American scholar, Graham Fuller, was at the US embassy in Kabul when I was there. He rose to great heights in CIA and subsequently in the academic world because of his insights into the world of Islam. Consider the following passage from his recent comment: “The setbacks and disappointments for the United States — both in policy failures and their international backlash — are of course intense. Yet our national debate still revolves around only the tactical or the specific — Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Global War on Terror, the Patriot act, even unilateralism — but there has been no serious discussion at all about the implications of a unipolar world in itself — except to celebrate it. But by now there is not much celebration left. We are indeed confronted by strategic fatigue.”

Fuller ends this essay in The National Interest by forecasting a renewed global quest for a more multipolar world. It is not a conclusion that most readers of this influential journal cherish. It is a conclusion that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice still discounts when she says that ‘we have been there before’. But it is a possibility that the American people can live with and bend to their advantage with their limitless capacity for adaptation to new realities.

But what about allies of the United States in the region that by convention is kept on a tight leash? In much of the Middle East, including the Gulf, initiatives are in hand to develop mechanisms for coping with the world emerging out of the debris of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran, in particular, is taking stock of new opportunities and perils; its present military exercises are part of what in Pakistan is proudly described as war-gaming. But the Pakistani leadership finds it difficult to break out of the semantic prison into which it locked the country in 2001. There is still a tedious repetition of worn out cliches like a frontline state in the war against terrorism. Government spokesmen still get onto the airwaves to advertise their great victories in this mythic epic.

One will have to return to this theme next week as the shape of the US Congress becomes clearer. But clearly there is already a message or two for us in the situation. One message primarily concerns what Shakespeare called the conscience of the King. Would the King not be better off, and, indeed, stronger if truth is given a free and unfettered sway over our public life?

Whether it is Kargil or Bajaur, the nation will be more secure if it knows what really happened. The second message is for Mr Kasuri. Would it not be better if he detaches himself from 2001 to concentrate better on re-shaping Pakistan’s foreign policy for the day which is about to break, the day after Afghanistan and Iraq? He should now be talking to the Chinese and the Iranians rather than revive the horrors of Tora Bora or Fallujah, which seems to have been the case in the Senate committee.

The writer is a former foreign secretary

The reality about gaffes

A “GAFFE” is a true statement that outrages the hypocrites, who then mobilise to shut the truth-teller up. The most common gaffes are about politics and religion, because those are the areas where the level of hypocrisy is highest. Which explains John Kerry’s problem last Tuesday, or why Muazzez Ilmiye Cig almost went to jail in Turkey on Wednesday.

John Kerry inadvertently spoke the truth about why some people end up in the US armed forces while others do not. Speaking to students in California, he said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard...you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Cue mass outrage. How dare Kerry suggest that people might be in the US army because they lacked the education for softer, safer, better-paying jobs, or indeed might have joined precisely to get that missing education? No, they’re all there solely because they are patriots, and anybody who says differently will be spanked soundly and sent to bed without supper.

Senator Kerry issued a grovelling apology (“I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform”), and cancelled any further campaigning in support of Democratic Party candidates in the mid-term elections, returning to Washington in order not to be a “distraction.” Too late, of course.

The Republicans leaped on Kerry’s remark as a golden opportunity to paint the Democrats as unpatriotic and disloyal to the armed forces (even though most senior Bush administration officials, including the president, the vice-president, and the national security adviser, successfully avoided service in Vietnam). And yet Kerry’s remark was entirely true.

Ordinary soldiers are not the “scum of the earth,” as Wellington called the British infantry who won a dozen battles against the French for him in Spain, but they are definitely not the “creme de la creme” in educational terms. Most of them are there because it was their best remaining option.

The Pentagon’s own figures show that only 10 per cent of American enlisted troops have any post-secondary education, whereas 56 per cent of the general population does. It has been true since Sargon of Akkad created the world’s first regular army over four thousand years ago: it’s mostly poor people who join the army, because rich people have better options. The military themselves recognise this in their recruiting ads, which stress the opportunities for further education during or after military service. It’s obvious, but you’re not allowed to say it plainly in public.

More admirable than Kerry, because her gaffe was deliberate and she refused to apologise, is Muazzez Ilmiye Cig, a 92-year-old Turkish archaeologist who said bluntly that hijab — “Islamic” head-scarves that hide women’s hair — are not Islamic at all, but a 5,000-year-old Middle Eastern tradition.

The great thing about being 92 — one of the few good things about being 92, apart from not being dead yet — is that you no longer have to care about your career or what people think. As one of the world’s leading experts on Sumer, the first civilisation, Cig published thirteen books and dozens of scholarly articles on her subject and earned great respect within that small community. But then she published a book last year about her own convictions (“My Reactions as a Citizen”) and all hell broke loose in Turkey.

All she said was that the head-scarf, now a badge of Muslim identity for devout women in Turkey and elsewhere, was actually first worn five thousand years ago by temple priestesses in Sumeria whose job was to initiate young people into sex. They were not prostitutes; only the daughters of the rich and influential got temple jobs. So gradually the wearing of head-scarves came to designate “respectable” women; that is to say rich women, not peasants and slaves. The fashion persisted down to Greek and Roman times, and was picked up by the Arabs when they conquered Syria in the generation after the Prophet.

Well, I could have told her that. I grew up a Catholic in prelapsarian Newfoundland, and the nuns who taught my sisters wore the full Sumerian gear. Until a couple of decades ago, Catholic nuns still dressed like any respectable Middle Eastern woman (of any religion) of two or three thousand years ago. Muazzez Ilmiye Cig was just stating the obvious historical truth. A serious gaffe.

She is not an innocent abroad. She has been an activist in feminist causes since the 1930s, and she recently wrote an open letter to Emine Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister’s wife, urging her not to wear a head-scarf in public. “She can wear whatever she likes at home, but as the wife of the prime minister, she cannot wear a cross or the head-scarf,” Cig told Vatan, a popular daily.

So Islamist lawyers brought charges against her for “inciting hatred and enmity among the people,” and she ended up in court facing the prospect of one and a half years in prison. But 25 lawyers showed up to defend her for free, and the state prosecutor himself asked the judge to drop the charges, and in half an hour she walked out of the court a free woman, cheered by the crowd that had come to support her. The hypocrites do not always win. —Copyright

The writer is a London-based free-lance journalist.

Stern warning

THE overwhelming message of the much-leaked Stern review on the economics of climate change is that it is now time to move on from arguing about statistics to taking drastic action at an international level.

Most of the facts contained in the report will not come as a surprise to people who have been following the debate but that is not the point. It is aimed at an international audience and amounts to a devastatingly convincing argument of the urgent need for all of us to change our energy-guzzling behaviour and all the more so coming from an internationally respected economist.

The figures speak for themselves. A rise in temperatures of between 5C and 6C, which is “a real possibility for the next century” could trigger a global loss of economic wealth (GDP) of 10 per cent with poorer countries, which have contributed least to the problem, suffering most of the damage. A “worst case” scenario could cut GDP by 20 per cent” with global floods displacing 100m people and drought creating hundreds of millions of “climate refugees”. He emphasises the seriousness of the figures by reminding people that the world is only 5C warmer now than in the last ice age.

What separates this review from nearly 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles, none of which cast any doubt on the basic hypothesis, is partly that it appeals to self-interest (possible economic collapse and millions of migrants escaping to the west) and partly because global awareness of climate change is rising. This includes India and China, which has plans to reduce energy usage per unit of GDP by 20 per cent between 2006 and 2010, and the US where individual states are taking measures despite the president’s inertia, which may itself change if the upcoming elections produce a Democratic majority in Congress.

Targets alone are not enough, as has become clear in the UK. The prime minister talks sense but emission-reduction targets have been missed. Gordon Brown, whose ownership of this review has a domestic political motive as well as an international one, also has a mixed record: he chickened out of continuing the fuel duty escalator (introduced by the Tories) and is even now cutting back spending on environmental issues such as flood protection.

The chancellor has promised to expand carbon trading and legislate on carbon reductions, with an independent body to monitor progress and to push to reduce European-wide emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 and over 60 per cent by 2050.

— The Guardian, London

Crimes against journalists

IT started innocently enough with a remark uttered in all seriousness by a guest at a recent dinner party. He wanted to know why a certain columnist who writes for this paper is opposed to the establishment of a proper democracy in this country, and why he never writes against the army.

It was politely pointed out that it is an unwritten convention in the Fourth Estate that newspaper columnists do not comment on the works and views of other columnists. They leave that to the readers. It is also one of the canons of journalism that every writer has a right to his opinion, and other writers have to respect a particular point of view, however unpopular it might subsequently prove to be.

That’s not to say that all opinions are relative and have equal validity. Some columnists have an edge over others — and that’s due to consistency, and not how they review a particular policy by government or a particular blunder by a politician.

Of course, every correspondent loves those letters to the editor which start off with the words ... “so and so is a cultural god”, or “I’ve named the new restaurant in my hotel after him.” Newspaper columnists are, after all human. But readers often forget that columnists are not cultural bookies, or tipsters trying to pick winners, or second-guessing an audience. They express an opinion based on experience.

A case in point is this writer’s epistle on ‘Scams for all seasons,’ written strictly in the public interest which ruffled quite a few feathers in the corridors of power. It didn’t evoke any reactions among the letter writers who probably agreed with the ground covered by the article. But it did induce angry retorts from a junior policymaker in Islamabad and a letter from a minister who was at least decent enough to understand and appreciate the point of criticism, and that there was no malice in my analysis.

Another case in point is the Dawn columnist earlier referred to, who during the last 20 years, has been quite consistent in his attacks on corruption in high places; government officials caught with their fingers in the national till; and the unscrupulous builders who, motivated by avarice, have repeatedly disregarded and flaunted local building laws in their attempts to disfigure the landscape.

If it hadn’t been for his one-man crusade against these builders and their capricious and whimsical plans, attempting to encroach upon pavements and roads, and endeavouring to swallow up leafy parks and amenity plots earmarked for schools and hospitals, the city would have looked a lot worse than it does today.

Recently, he has been criticised in the letters column for his persistent refusal to write against the President or alleged misdemeanours committed by members of the armed forces — and for being provided a police escort at the taxpayer’s expense.

If this writer prefers enlightened despotism to democracy, a theme in which he is increasingly finding himself in a distinct minority in this country, it is his point of view, and one should leave it at that. But it is the bit about being provided a police escort at the public’s expense that has irked a few letter writers. It does convey a wholly erroneous impression about his relationship with the establishment, which one is sure he would be anxious to correct.

One letter writer pointed out that police protection should be extended also to other journalists who are outspoken in their criticism and whose assignments often expose them to danger from an assortment of enemies. If this had been done in the recent past perhaps those unfortunate seven journalists who were killed in the line of duty between 2002 and 2006 might have been alive today, and those other 20 journalists who had been assaulted or improperly detained, might have been left alone.

On February 21, 2002 US government officials confirmed that Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal had been killed by his captors. According to The Journal, Pearl had been reporting on would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, who sought to blow up an aeroplane during a transatlantic flight.

On October 20, 2002, Shahid Soomro, a correspondent for the Sindhi-language newspaper Kawish, was assassinated in the town of Kandhkot, apparently in reprisal for his reporting on abuses committed during general elections held on October 10. His brother filed a case with police identifying three assailants, all members of a powerful local family.

On January 21, 2003, Fazal Wahab, a freelance writer, was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen while he was sitting in a roadside shop in Manglawar Bazaar, near the resort town of Mingora in northwestern Pakistan. His colleagues believe that he was targeted for his work. Wahab had published several books in Urdu and in Pashto that criticised local religious leaders and Islamic militant organisations.

On January 29, 2004, Sajid Tanoli, a reporter with the regional Urdu-language daily Shumal, was killed in the town of Mansehra in Pakistan’s Frontier province. Tanoli was stopped on a highway, dragged from his car and shot several times, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported. Tanoli had written critically about the head of the local government, including a story three days before the slaying that described an allegedly illegal liquor business run by a politician.

On February 7, 2005, gunmen in the capital of the remote South Waziristan tribal area fatally shot Amir Nawab, a freelance cameraman for Associated Press Television News who doubled as reporter for the Frontier Post newspaper, and Allah Noor, who was working for the Peshawar — based Khyber TV. The journalists were on their way back from the town of Sararogha, where they were covering the surrender of suspected tribal militant Baitullah Mehsud. An unknown group calling itself ‘Sipah-i-Islam’ took responsibility for the killings in a letter faxed to newspapers. It accused some journalists of “working for Christians” and of “being used as tools in negative propaganda ... against the Muslim Mujahideen.”

On May 29, 2006, Munir Ahmed Sangi, a cameraman for the Sindhi-language KTN, was shot while covering a gunfight between members of the Unar and Abro tribes in Larkana. Police said Sangi was killed in the crossfire, although some colleagues believe he may have been deliberately targeted for the station’s reporting on a jirga, or tribal council, held by leaders of the Unar tribe, according to the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists.

On June 16, 2006, the body of Hayatullh Khan, a freelance journalist, was found by villagers in North Waziristan town of Mir Ali, from which he was abducted on December 5, 2005. He disappeared after reporting that an Al-Qaeda commander had been killed by a US missile, contradicting official Pakistani accounts of the death. Local government officials and family members told journalists that Khan had been shot in the back of the head, probably on June 15, and was in handcuffs.

In an environment of gross intolerance journalists are often threatened by the groups they cover and fear retribution from the government, including illegal detentions and harassment. Many journalists also speak of the lack of support from the news organisations for which they work, saying the outlets are frequently reluctant to confront the government when their reporters are arrested or detained.

While Pakistan’s press is vibrant and growing, it continues to face escalating threats. The Committee to Protect Journalists proposed that the government should take the following steps to enhance the confidence of Pakistani journalists and the international community in the government’s commitment to protect press freedom.

There should be public recognition by the government that a crisis exists that threatens the lives of working journalists and the flow of accurate information to the Pakistani people. A special unit in the interior ministry to deal with crimes against journalists should be created and the reports of this investigative unit reflecting its work on each case should be published.

Public news conferences should be convened within a week of the publication of each report so that unit officials can address questions about the investigations. The delegation also recommended the creation of parallel structures in tribal territories to track crimes against journalists in those areas. If these measures are introduced they will certainly improve the lot of the working journalist.