Dealing with militants

EVERY DAY we hear that “militants” have done this or that mischief. Who are they? The mobs who executed members of the nobility and aristocracy in the wake of the French Revolution may be called militants. Stalinists who killed several million Russian “kulaks,” because they resisted the state’s confiscation of their land, and the Maoists who did the same in China, were also militants.

So were the Irish nationalists who slaughtered their rivals and bombed British posts. In sum, persons who are zealous believers in a cause, and will use violence against opponents, are militants.

In the case of Russia and China the militants were government agents, and their acts may then be regarded as cases of state-sponsored militancy. If reports and interpretations appearing in the print and electronic media are to be believed, the Karachi carnage on May 12, 2007, would seem to have resulted from a state-condoned, if not state-sponsored, exercise in militancy.

The Irish nationalist struggle went on for more than 100 years. The British government sent in security forces to combat — arrest or kill — the militants. But the latter fought back.

Eventually resort to force was given up and the conflict sought to be resolved through negotiations, which were protracted but did bring about a settlement. We have an Irish type of situation in Pakistan. Baloch nationalists have periodically revolted against central control. Each time the army has gone in to suppress the rebels, but this strategy has not worked.

The current insurrection, which began more than two years ago, shows no sign of ending. Political observers have been urging the government to seek reconciliation through negotiations. It says it wants a peaceful settlement and has sent emissaries to talk things over with the Baloch leaders. But it has not chosen to act on their advice. Resort to force continues, with each side suffering heavy losses.

Ideological militants have surfaced in Pakistan during the last 30 years. Men of reason and compassion are mortified to see that militants among Sunni and Shia Muslims have killed each other’s leading men and bombed each other’s congregational prayer meetings.

It is unlikely that the intelligence agencies have no clue to the identity of these murderers, but note that few, if any, of them have ever been caught. One might think the government did not regard this tragedy as a problem grave enough to merit its serious attention.

Then we have the Taliban. They are fundamentalist extremists who feel entitled to force their own version of Islam upon those who do not subscribe to it. They place no value on human life as such. They will kill the dissident who is stubborn because in their view he does not deserve to live.

Yet, they have admirers who believe that during their brief rule in Afghanistan they reduced crime, maintained order, and spread “righteousness.” But many more Muslims in the world consider the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to have been an abominable tyranny.

The United States forces moved into Afghanistan in October 2001 to expel the Taliban from positions of power in that country. This they were able to do, with Pakistan’s assistance, fairly quickly. The Taliban dispersed and quieted down for a couple of years, but then they resurfaced, reorganised their fighting men, and mounted a campaign to end the American presence in Afghanistan. This campaign continues and, instead of dissipating, it has been gaining momentum.

In return for substantial American funding, Pakistan took on the mission of eradicating the Taliban located in its northwestern tribal areas bordering with Afghanistan. This mission has not gone well. Far from being eradicated, the Taliban have grown in number and extended their influence beyond the tribal area into the country’s settled districts. They are no longer merely an element in Pakistan’s relations with the United States; they have become an extremely troublesome factor in Pakistan’s domestic affairs.

They go around closing down barber shops and music stores, setting up their own organs for adjudicating disputes, attacking unsympathetic newspapers, and telling people what they may or may not do. They are creating a state of their own within the state of Pakistan, and there is apparently nothing that government agencies can or will do to stop them.

Force against the Taliban in the tribal region has not been efficacious possibly because the quantum deployed is not enough, but more likely because the terrain is difficult, offering hiding places and allowing guerilla type hit-and-run operations. Consider also that the Taliban seem to have a good deal of local support.

One may ask if negotiations might produce better results: persuade the Taliban based within this country to show proper respect for the government’s writ. That is possible but not likely. The government of Pakistan will also have to ask them to quit crossing into Afghanistan to attack American forces and the pro-American government in Kabul. This demand the Taliban will not accept.

Let us now go to the country’s capital, Islamabad, where neither the terrain nor public opinion is particularly favourable to the Taliban and the likes of them. We encounter an unbelievably weird situation here. Two brothers, who administer a mosque (Lal Masjid) and a couple of affiliated madressahs have set up a parallel government in the city. They assert the right to build mosques on sites of their choosing, that belong to other parties, and do so in violation of the city’s building code. They insist that the authorities cannot dismantle these structures.

They have hundreds of students, men and women, who are armed and trained for combat. Their women have gone and forcibly taken possession of a children’s library, which they continue to occupy. They have kidnapped police officers more than once and seized their vehicles. They have abducted and detained women whom they accused of immoral conduct. They are threatening to burn down music shops and video stores if their owners will not close them. They are asking the government to enforce the Sharia, saying that they will enforce it themselves if the government won’t do it to their satisfaction.

They have set up a Sharia court of their own. They have issued a fatwa, against Nilofar Bakhtiar, the federal minister for tourism, because she parachuted out of an aircraft in Paris, and let the instructor pat her on the back. Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Sherpao says that the Lal Masjid militants who kidnapped policemen were guilty of a “heinous crime”. Yet a spokesman from the same ministry says the government does not intend to use force against them. It prefers to resolve issues with the mosque administration through “dialogue” and negotiations.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the government’s perennial negotiator, has had several rounds of talks with the Ghazi brothers (Lal Masjid administrators and directors of the madressah kids) but apparently to no avail. He returns from these rounds to announce that he has reached agreement with these gentlemen, but then it transpires that the agreement was only a figment of his imagination.

Negotiating a deal with criminals is not something unheard of. It is called “plea bargaining”. Let us say the government is prosecuting an individual for murder in the first degree which carries the penalty of death or imprisonment for life.

But its case has holes in it. The defence counsel may approach the prosecutor with the offer that his client will plead guilty of manslaughter (for which he will go to jail for 10 years or less) if the government will drop its original charge and save itself the expense of a long and problematic trial. The prosecutor may accept this offer.

Something of the same order happens in the workings of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in Pakistan. In several instances, it has let go of a man accused, let us say, of stealing two billion rupees from the government if he returns one billion out of his loot.

What does one do with the fundamentalist militants occupying the Lal Masjid pulpit? If they are criminals, which Mr Sherpao says they are, the appropriate thing to do is to arrest and prosecute them. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and other government spokesmen say they don’t want to mount an “operation” (that is, use of force) against these criminals because that might lead to bloodshed and also because women students are involved.

The police everywhere use force against lawbreakers, be they men or women, if they resist arrest, and kill them if they resort to violence. The police in Pakistan do the same. Every other day we read in newspapers that they have killed a wanted criminal, or a proclaimed offender, in an “encounter”. It is hard to see why a criminal should become entitled to an especially tender handling simply because he wears a beard, cloak and turban, and claims to be learned in the scriptures (a claim that may not be valid).

Negotiation involves mutual concessions, give and take and compromise. What can the government offer the Lal Masjid militants if the two sides sit down at the negotiating table? Can it, for instance, offer to enforce some parts of the Sharia but not others? That will be rejected out of hand by those who regard the Sharia as an organic whole, as a seamless web.

Can it tell them that they may forcibly close down shops that sell rock-and-roll but not the ones that sell classical music? Can it say that they may kidnap one police officer once a month but not four of them every week? That is ridiculous.

The militants insist on having the “whole loaf.” If they were willing to settle for half of it, they would be men of reason, those who will “live and let live”; they would then not be militants. That being the case, there is nothing to negotiate about with them. The government can either surrender, watch helplessly as they do what they will, or use the requisite amount of force to stop them from contemptuously breaking the law of the land.

The writer is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.
Email:anwarsyed@cox.net

Crisis of law and power

IN his address to the bars at Lahore, and more recently in Islamabad, Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was heard quoting Lord Acton who said: “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It was so reproduced later in the press.

The impression that a listener, or a reader, would gather from Lord Acton’s familiar aphorism, as Justice Chaudhry quoted him, would be as if power necessarily corrupts everybody who possesses and wields it.

In fact what this 19th-century historian, moralist and philosopher of resistance to the evil state said was: “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. It has been Pakistan’s misfortune that so many of its holders of public office have been corrupted by power (leave out Jinnah, Liaquat, Nazimuddin, Zafrulla, Nishtar and some others from among the founding lot) that “tends” is routinely omitted from Acton’s aphorism.

It is somewhat surprising that Justice Chaudhry did not have access to the original text of his favourite quotation. Inadvertently though, he has put his finger on the sore spot of our politics in which power just does not tend to corrupt but inevitably corrupts all, and absolutely corrupts those who sit at the pinnacle of state power.

It needs no guessing that Justice Chaudhry is repeatedly (mis)quoting Lord Acton only to draw attention to the president’s absolute power that he has used to deprive him of his constitutionally protected office. He is right. Pervez Musharraf by amending the Constitution has acquired many executive powers for the president which in a parliamentary government are exercised by the prime minister.

Then, as a matter of course, he also exercises many more powers which vest in the prime minister and the cabinet or even in the provincial and district governments. In addition, he is the chief of army staff, supreme commander of the armed forces and chairman of the National Security Council. The people also tend to believe that he directs the policies of the PML-Q. It is a formidable array of power for any one individual.

The political parties, especially of the religious variety, legislators and bureaucrats, the media, the intelligentsia and simple folk have all played their part in making Musharraf the most powerful head of state and government in the country’s history. Rallying round him when he assumed power, some among them looked up to him as a saviour, others collaborated with him for personal gain or to avenge the wrong done to them by the party bosses he had sent packing.

They are all culpable to varying degrees. But no institution of the state has empowered Musharraf more than the Supreme Court for whose independence and dignity Justice Chaudhry is now seen campaigning in the bar rooms and, more tellingly, in the media and on the streets.

Let it be quickly recounted here how the Supreme Court has empowered Musharraf and paved the path for him to wield absolute power. When the dismissal of Nawaz Sharif’s government was challenged, the Supreme Court ruled that the army’s extra constitutional intervention (on October 12, 1999) was inevitable. It went on to validate it under the doctrine of necessity, further relying on the principle that the will of the people was the supreme law.

Not many people agreed with the Supreme Court then and hardly anyone does now. But what came as a shock to cynics and supporters alike was that the court also permitted the chief executive (as Musharraf then chose to describe himself) to amend the Constitution if its existing provisions “fail to provide a solution for attainment of his declared objectives.” The general impression then was that the court had so ruled on its own without Musharraf’s counsels asking for it.

The chief executive was permitted to amend the Constitution to whatever extent he considered necessary so long as he stopped short of impairing the independence of the judiciary and did not change the federal, parliamentary and Islamic characteristics of the state. A layman still finds it baffling as to where lay the legal justification or practical need for amending the Constitution when the court itself had observed that the army rule was merely a “constitutional deviation for a transitional period” and, further, only to “fill a political vacuum and bridge the gap”.

But the wisdom or necessity of this part of the court order, too, went unchallenged for fear of contempt, and no other remedy was available. The word of the Supreme Court is final and its power is Lord Acton’s dreaded “absolute”. The judgment was written by Chief Justice Irshad Hasan Khan (who had earlier served a long term as the government’s law secretary) and the other 11 judges went along. There was no dissent nor reasoning to qualify the sweeping powers conferred on the chief executive.

Among the judges was Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry who in the hour of his suffering at the hands of absolute power is now roaming the country pleading for the rule of law and sanctity of the Constitution.

Whether the judiciary was more independent before the Supreme Court’s judgment of May 2000 or after, is too hazy and awkward a proposition to be debated publicly. But there should be no doubt that the federal and parliamentary features of the Constitution stand greatly impaired by the Legal Framework Order that Musharraf issued two years later.

Through constitutional amendments made with the help of the religious elements – but more because of physical force at his back and the obsequiousness of the politicians – all authority now emanates from the president. The technocrat prime minister and the horrendously large and languishing lot of ministers act on his sufferance alone.

The local government law of 2001 and the police law promulgated a year later have both made the federal government a dominant partner in these two subjects which were purely provincial ones even in colonial times. The district governments have taken over most provincial functions and the nazims have to suffer the provincial government but owe real allegiance to President Musharraf. He, in turn, considers nazims as his personal political cadre.

The guardians of the Islamic features of the state that the Supreme Court directed should be preserved are no longer the government and the courts but the armed lashkars and combative clerics. They issue decrees at will, abduct, burn and intimidate to enforce their own version of Islamic virtues.

No individual or party has ever challenged nor has any Chief Justice taken suo motu notice of the violations of the Supreme Court’s directions on maintaining the federal and parliamentary character of the state though it was a condition concomitant to the validation of the extra constitutional intervention. Even the independent-minded Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry let it pass while many lesser deviations attracted his ire.

Now that a Supreme Court, more assertive than ever, is reviewing the whole gamut of the laws and events that have given rise to the current crisis, it should feel incumbent to lay down a mandatory course for the return of the country to democracy and sanity. If the judges get stuck in legalism and the lawyers keep revelling in slogans the independence of the judiciary may prove as elusive as has been security for the civil servants and, indeed, democracy for the people. The origin of the crisis lies in the 1999 order of the Supreme Court. Only another order now by that very court can put an end to it.

As Bush warms up

SHOULD we be grateful that President Bush has acknowledged the impact of greenhouse gases on the Earth's climate and environment? After six years of questioning the science behind the warnings about global warming and vigorously resisting efforts to do anything about the problem, he claimed Thursday that the United States is ready to take the lead on global climate policy.

Mr Bush wants to convene a series of meetings with the Greenhouse Gas 15, the largest emitters in the world, to "set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases" that would be effective after 2012. That's when the Kyoto Protocol, which mandates global emissions reductions and which the United States never ratified, expires.

There are ample grounds for cynicism in considering this gambit. First, an international forum already exists. The administration says that the Bush-proposed talks are meant to complement the United Nations framework that drove Kyoto and that the administration's plan will drive second-phase talks in Bali later this year. But will a second forum serve as a spur or a distraction? Second, the president wants the Greenhouse Gas 15 to come up with something by the end of 2008. That's both suspiciously quick -- it took years for Kyoto to go into effect -- and suspiciously late, given that Mr Bush will leave office a few weeks after.

And then there's the absence of binding commitments in Mr Bush's vision; he's thinking about "aspirational goals," as described by White House environmental adviser Jim Connaughton. Mr Bush is right to bring into the discussion China and India, two economic powerhouses that thus far have shown no more inclination than the United States to accept binding international limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

—The Washington Post