Zahir Shah’s country

HISTORY will decide who was more responsible for Afghanistan’s misfortunes — Zahir Shah, who turned out to be his country’s last king, or his cousin Dawood, who overthrew him in a coup. Under his rule, Afghanistan enjoyed peace, if not prosperity, because Zahir Shah, who died on Monday, had the good sense not to disturb the tribal system on which Afghanistan’s political edifice traditionally rested. Ever since it was created as an independent state in the 18th century on the ruins of the empire founded by Nadir Shah Afshar, the Iranian soldier of fortune, Afghanistan survived as a tribal confederacy in which the tribal chiefs pledged loyalty to the central government in Kabul provided the latter did not interfere in their internal affairs. In the realm of foreign affairs, Zahir Shah knew his limitations. Sandwiched between the USSR to the north and British India to the east and south, Afghanistan served as a buffer, with Moscow and London both pledging not to upset the delicate balance. So long as Zahir Shah remained true to this policy, Afghanistan enjoyed peace.

The fall of the British empire, the lapse of the paramountcy and the creation of Pakistan gave rise to problems which, as history shows, Zahir Shah and later Dawood failed to respond to in a manner that would have served Afghanistan’s interests. The first seeds of conflict with Pakistan were sown when the Zahir Shah regime did not accept the results of the referendum in which the Pakhtoon people had voted for Pakistan. More astonishingly, Afghanistan was the only country which voted against Pakistan’s admission into the United Nations. With the Cold War at its height, and Pakistan throwing in its lot with America, the Soviet Union and India would back Afghanistan to the hilt to foment trouble in Pakistan’s tribal areas and demand the creation of “Pakhtoonistan”, which was supposed to include vast swathes of territory in the NWFP and Balochistan. If Zahir and Dawood had confined the Pakhtoonistan stunt to radio propaganda, history perhaps would not have followed the course it did. Ignoring the traditional balance which Afghanistan had maintained in foreign relations, Zahir Shah drew dangerously close to Moscow. As a result, Soviet advisers penetrated the country in massive numbers in every department, including the military. Then Zahir Shah was overthrown by Dawood, who was murdered when Nur Mohammad Taraki installed a communist regime in Kabul. Afghanistan has not seen peace since then. Both Taraki and his successor, Hafizullah Amin, were murdered, and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.

Zahir Shah passed the last days of his life in a country ruled by President Hamid Karzai, who has failed to give the country the kind of peace that existed under Zahir Shah. The number of people killed since the Soviet invasion, the resistance, the ensuing civil war, the fall of the Taliban regime and what has been going on since the American invasion in 2001 in the wake of 9/11 runs into hundreds of thousands. The sagacity which Zahir Shah showed in managing his country’s internal affairs was missing in his conduct of foreign policy, the result being Afghanistan’s misfortunes, which have continued till this day. President Hamid Karzai should learn a lesson or two from the late king and try to restore a balance in his government. His administration is dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks, even though he himself is a Pakhtoon. That gives one added reason to the Taliban — most of them Pakhtoon — for their war against the Kabul government.

Justice for Manu Bheel

MANU Bheel, the hari from Sindh, whose family members were kidnapped in 1998, has a lot of hope resting on Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Despite all these years of not having seen his family, despite the arrest of the landlord who is alleged to have kidnapped them and despite the suo motu action the Supreme Court took in the case in 2005, Manu has never given up. It is odd that no one seems to be able to find Manu’s family of eight, including his wife, mother and children. Manu himself lives under constant fear for his life, having endured a severe beating by a senior police officer in an attempt to make him withdraw the case. It is understandable why he has so much stake in the restoration of the Chief Justice who, he expects, would restore his family to him. Yet the DIG who was following the court’s order when he began investigating the whereabouts of Manu’s family was abruptly suspended and the inquiry remains incomplete. This is another travesty to add to the long list of Manu’s grievances. One hopes that the courts will once again take note of his pitiable plight as well as the fact that the police have yet to recover his family members.

Manu Bheel’s case is a reminder of many of the missing people and their families. He is a victim of fedualism’s tyranny, and his family was — and probably still is — languishing in a private jail because of poverty. It is also a story of a person’s recourse to justice and how difficult it can be. This is something the families of the missing persons can particularly relate to. Like Manu, the families soldier on, the Supreme Court on their side, asking the government to trace the whereabouts of the disappeared. Although many of the missing persons’ whereabouts have been traced, all of them have not been produced before courts, and those who have been, narrate horrible tales of their illegal confinement. This practice of ‘disappeared’ cases must come to an end. All those who are still missing must be located and freed. Every individual has the right to legal defence and this right cannot be taken away under any circumstances.

Help for street children

HIGHLIGHTING the travails of Karachi’s street children, a report carried by this newspaper has pointed out the absence of government support for this vulnerable group of youngsters that consists mostly of runaways. It is estimated that there are 12,000 to 15,000 children who roam the city’s streets, having fled their homes for reasons of violence and poverty. While some return to their families at the end of the day, life for most is harsh as their age exposes them to physical and mental abuse at the hands of their daytime employers and the police who regularly detain them on charges of petty offences. Their trauma is such that many turn to glue addiction and to harming themselves with razors. Unfortunately, government help has been minimal and although some shelters and services providing succour to the youngsters do exist, these are mostly run by independent organisations.

In tackling the problems of a growing number of children on the streets of large cities, it is obvious that the root causes of their homelessness have to be addressed. Poverty alleviation, greater support for families and stress on values that shun violence can reduce the number of children running away from home. But this can only be achieved over the long term. Much can be done in the interim to reduce the trauma and suffering of runaway children by opening more shelters that offer food, bathing and sleeping facilities, medical aid and education. The tragedy is that although there is no lack of philanthropists in the country, there is too much stress on giving for religious purposes. As organisations catering to a wider set of social problems make their presence felt, public awareness is indeed growing. But this needs to be channelled so that priority is given to the welfare of children and others who constitute the most vulnerable section of society.

Not hot enough for a cold war

TERSE exchanges at the highest level of government. Disagreements over missiles. Warnings and threats. Diplomatic expulsions. It’s easy to mistake the rhetorical tussles of recent months as the opening shots in a new cold war between Russia and the West.

However, a revival of the confrontation between the two superpowers that dominated international politics in the latter half of the 20th century isn’t particularly likely. At least not in the short run, nor on the same scale.

There are two distinct strands in the present acrimony, both of which are part of a bigger picture that seems alarming from some angles.

The narrower strand relates to the murder in London last November of Alexander Litvinenko, a former employee of Soviet and subsequently Russian intelligence agencies who had provoked the wrath of the Putin administration by claiming there was an official plot to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, a leading oligarch who had broken away from Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. He spent some time in prison, whereafter he left Russia and was granted asylum by Britain. He found employment courtesy of Berezovsky, who by then had established himself in London as an oppositionist in exile.

Litvinenko devoted most of his energies to producing sensational anti-Putin texts which attracted limited attention. He maintained contacts with fellow former agents of the KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB, and appears to have been involved in other shadowy activities. He was suddenly taken ill in November 2006, and by the time he died three weeks later it was clear he had been poisoned with the highly radioactive substance polonium-210.

An investigation by Scotland Yard led it to conclude that the likeliest suspect was Andrei Lugovoi, formerly of the FSB, who had met Litvinenko on the day that the symptoms of poisoning manifested themselves. The detectives came to this conclusion on the basis of a trail of polonium-210 contamination that matched Lugovoi’s movements.

When Britain demanded the suspect be handed over for trial, Russia noted the absence of an extradition agreement between the two countries, but offered to prosecute Lugovoi if the British authorities handed over sufficient evidence. It also indicated that it may be willing to change its mind if Britain was willing to extradite Berezovsky.

The government of Gordon Brown chose instead to expel four employees of the Russian embassy in London, all of whom are assumed to be intelligence operatives. Inevitably, the gesture was reciprocated by Moscow. Meanwhile, at a news conference in Moscow, Lugovoi not only reiterated his innocence but claimed that Berezovsky and Litvinenko had both worked for the MI6, and suggested that the British intelligence service had a hand in Litvinenko’s death.

The Litvinenko case falls in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category and has elicited interest from Hollywood. The likeliest explanations point towards payback for perceived disloyalty to the FSB or, more ominously, a hit at the Kremlin’s instructions. However, it appears highly improbable that all the facts about this bizarre murder will ever be known. And the Russian government isn’t the only one whose behaviour provides cause for concern.

In June, for instance, the British authorities reportedly identified and trailed a Russian hit man who had apparently arrived in London with the purpose of knocking off Berezovsky. He was apprehended but, instead of charging him with conspiracy to commit murder on British soil, they put him on a flight to Moscow.

A bit of tit-for-tat does not, of course, add up to a fresh cold war. Nor does the other strand of acrimony quite fit the bill, despite its potential for causing much greater harm. The issue exploded into ominous headlines early last month when President Putin, ahead of the G8 summit in the German town of Heiligendamm, announced that Russian missiles would, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, once more be pointed at cities in western Europe.

It wasn’t an instance of out-of-the-blue belligerence. He was reacting to American plans to set up elaborate anti-missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic, with the ostensible objective of guarding against surprise attacks from Iran or North Korea.

Moscow was understandably sceptical. It has put up with the humiliating expansion of Nato and the European Union, and Putin must have been under considerable pressure to draw the line. It was cleverly done, however.

At the Heiligendamm summit, he surprised his American counterpart with an offer to share a Russian-operated missile detection facility in Azerbaijan — a location that makes much more sense in the context of any danger from Iran. Putin pointed out that if the US accepted the offer, Russia would obviously no longer feel obliged to reposition its missiles.

Unable to flatly turn down the proposal without being seen as doggedly unreasonable, a flabbergasted George W. Bush fudged the issue, saying that the matter required further discussions. Not much appears to have come of it, despite displays of bonhomie by Vladimir and George both in Germany and during Putin’s subsequent visit to the US.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Putin announced that Russia was withdrawing from the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, which, back in 1990, prescribed limits for the quantities of offensive weapons that Nato and the Warsaw Pact were allowed to deploy in Europe.

By then the Warsaw Pact was already on its last legs. It ceased to exist the following year, and there was a degree of support in Europe for Nato to similarly be laid to rest after a decent interval. This made sense, given that the collapse of European communism effectively robbed Nato of its ostensible raison d’etre — at least until the gory disfiguration of Yugoslavia afforded it an opportunity to reassert itself.

Although Europe faced no external threats — at least none that a limited multinational force under the auspices of the European Union (EU) would have any trouble coping with — there is no evidence that the senior partner in Nato ever considered phasing out its continental military presence.

Before long, former Warsaw Pact countries on Russia’s western flank were lured into Nato. Russia itself, however, has been kept at arm’s length. Nor can it be considered a prospective member of the EU. Its isolation and sense of encirclement have been compounded by the fact that, in the wake of 9/11, most of the former Soviet states in Central Asia host US military bases.

These circumstances are partly responsible for the growth of Russian nationalism. The determination on the part of the West in general and the US in particular to treat Russia as a defeated enemy could yet lead to profoundly unpalatable consequences.Russia may be a considerably smaller and weaker country than the old Soviet Union, but it is nonetheless the second largest nuclear power in the world. The biggest threats it faces may come from within rather than without, but it does not necessarily follow that any reaction on the part of the state will be confined within Russian borders.

Although some of the more egregious follies of the Yeltsin era — not least a privatisation free-for-all that effectively handed over the nation’s most precious natural resources to newly minted oligarchs — are gradually being remedied under Putin, obviously not every self-destructive act can be undone. And the Putin period, now drawing to a close, has brought new dangers of its own.

Even under Boris Yeltsin, the flirtation with democracy was half-hearted at best. Subsequently, the gloves came off, and at present the Kremlin’s ability to guide voters’ choices is not all that far removed from its Soviet-era clout.

This is not to suggest that Putin is unpopular: if anything, the authoritarian aspects of his rule have enhanced his mystique. But that itself — the perceived need to look up to a veritable czar and to overlook his excesses — could be construed as a weakness of the post-Soviet entity.

Arguably, the worst aspect of Putin’s rule is Russia’s re-emergence as a national security state. There is a strong possibility that his handpicked successor will, like him, be a former KGB/FSB apparatchik.

The Russian Duma, or parliament, effectively rubber-stamps presidential decrees: the lively debates of the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin eras are a thing of the past. Putin is often described as a Soviet throwback. That critique isn’t entirely unfounded, but there are also crucial differences.

To cite but one example, under communism in the 1980s, with a stagnating economy, average life expectancy was the same as in the US. Today, amid steady economic growth, the average Russian male dies 16 years earlier than his American counterpart.

The birth rate, too, continues to decline. The suicide rate has soared by 50 per cent since the 1990s, and adequate universal medical care is but a distant memory.

The fact that Moscow today is among the most expensive cities in the world, amid stark disparities of wealth, suggests that today’s contradictions may be very different from those that doomed the Soviet Union. But they do exist, and the state appears to have little idea of how they might be tackled. Such conditions increase the lure of foreign distractions.

Russia can ill-afford any sort of war — cold, hot or lukewarm. But why put temptation in its way? Treating it as some sort of juvenile delinquent isn’t a sensible strategy, because humiliation could provoke a great deal of unnecessary unpleasantness. The challenge now is to strike a balance: to treat Russia as a responsible and autonomous adult, without letting it get away with murder.

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