Unhappy last year

NEW years should begin on any day other than Jan 1. From the moment the Australians begin their spectacular firework display over the Sydney Harbour at their midnight, which is hours before everyone else’s in the world, they generate in other nations a mood of euphoria, of optimism, an expectation that the coming year will be better than the outgoing one. If only that were true.

Time has shown that it cannot tolerate peace and tranquillity, order and social betterment, peace and harmony for too long. Ayub Khan remarked on this during his farewell speech in 1969 when he commented — more in sorrow than in anger — that he could understand why a nation can get tired of continuous economic growth and stability after a decade of reforms.

For us Pakistanis, 2008 the year in which Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto could have been prime minister was akin to 1660 — the year of the restoration in Great Britain. That year, the exiled son of Charles I (whom Oliver Cromwell had executed 11 years earlier) was recalled from France and restored to the throne. The macabre difference between our two histories is that in their case the returnee lived to rule. In our case, the returnee returned to die.

The second significant variance is that Charles II’s reign flowered into a period not only of the restoration of the concept of kingship but into an age of prosperity and good living. Although Charles II had more mistresses than Bill Gates has Mercedes or BMWs, history remembers him less for his peccadilloes than for the unity he was able to forge in his deeply divided kingdom, split as it had been by loyal Royalists and the republican Puritans.

What golden period may we look forward to? Is it the salve that will heal our national wounds? Will it be the elusive adhesive that will bind our four provinces and attached parts like Azad Jammu & Kashmir, Fata and the Northern Areas together? Is the year 2009 the dawn that will end our night of blighted darkness?

If Wapda, the IPPs and/or NTDC have anything to do with it, that is very unlikely. We will be able to shed kilos of unwanted bodyweight more rapidly than the providers of our national power will be able to end load-shedding. Living with interrupted power supply, low gas pressure and shortage of fuel including CNG will be the norm, certainly in the foreseeable future — if one can see the future that is by candlelight.

Had Quaid-i-Azam been alive today, he would have to read his memorable speeches by torchlight. Had Ayub Khan been alive today he would have needed a hurricane lamp held above his head by an orderly. We are moving into the 21st century backwards. That is not the way a nation progresses. That is not the path to prosperity. That is not the way 170 million Pakistanis deserve to live, rationed of petrol, rationed of flour, rationed of hope.

If the shortage of power — whether from hydel or thermal or nuclear or from any other source — will remain with us until at least 2012 (the date of the next natural general elections), can we hope there will be some level of power-sharing among the political parties entrusted with our governance?

Visitors who dare to come to our country fuel the suspicion of those political pundits who perform their ritualistic analyses of our political situation from a safer distance. They view us less as a failed state than as a state that accepts failure as the fourth word, the unsightly addendum to our national motto — ‘unity, faith, & discipline’.

Are we moving towards the provincial camaraderie that is such a necessary prerequisite for national cohesion? It would appear not. Political parties are finding it increasingly difficult to see eye to eye except to exact an eye for an eye. The differences in Punjab between the PML–N and its uncomfortable bedfellow the PPP remain. If anything, the truce between them has become a stalemate.

Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP rattle along, rather like Pakistan Railways — the only national service that actually connects all of them physically to each other. The extremities of our country are frayed and ragged, waiting for someone to darn them with a political settlement.

The economy is in a sense on autopilot. Our economic managers are battling on the war rations of a hope and a prayer. A hope that we can meet the undertakings that we have given to the IMF and a prayer that in case we cannot meet them (as many who know better suspect we may not), the IMF will help us even though we will have failed to help ourselves.

Perhaps the most dangerous of the threats that face us as a nation during 2009 is the petrification of our education system. We are teaching our children from outdated curricula, neglecting to recognise their potential, and perhaps worst of all, spewing out a product that in environmental terms would be deplored as intellectual pollution. Yet, hundreds and thousands of our graduates emerge from their cocoons unable to realise that the world does not need any more butterflies.

Western do-betters would have us believe that the cancer in our society is caused by the madressahs. There is no denying that they are a cancer, but they are only one form of cancer. Not all madressahs produce terrorists no more than all Catholic seminaries produce gays. Talibanisation is less a political ideology than a social reaction to values that were once liberal and enlightened and on being challenged are found wanting.

Anyone who has had the privilege of teaching at Pakistan schools anywhere across the country would have recognised the intellectual hydrocarbon just waiting to be ignited — by an idea, a thought, a word of encouragement, the glimpse of a role model.

Adults who have ushered in 2009 will probably have done so with a degree of ennui. They have seen it all before and feel condemned to reliving it for yet another year. To their young, though, 2009 is truly a year of hope. They have to look forward, if only because they have nothing to fall back upon. Just because our generation has failed does not mean that they are unfit to sit the examination of life. It is vital that we equip them to do so, for in their success lies our own salvation.

New years are best celebrated after they are over. Like the VIP who preferred to lay completion rather than foundation stones, we should look back with pride rather than to the future with a misplaced optimism.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Lessons from Kashmir

THE results of the recent elections to the Legislative Assembly of Jammu & Kashmir call for a calm, realistic appraisal.

To begin with, the long queues in all the seven phases of the elections reflect a clear snub to the Hurriyat for its call for boycott of the polls. The voting was manifestly free.

Yet, two caveats are in order. By all recognised tests of free and fair elections, the right to call for a boycott is as vital as the right to vote. This right was systematically denied. The Hurriyat’s leaders were put either in prison or under house arrest. For seven consecutive weeks Mirwaiz Umar Farooq could not lead the Friday prayers at the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar. Uniquely, undeclared curfews were the norm. They are a form of repression whose other features need no mention.

The active involvement in the elections of some national parties, for the very first time even though they had no presence at all in the state, testified to a quaint “election engineering”. Some of them had little presence in the entire country, for that matter. Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu and a highly respected journalist reported from Srinagar Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s untenable denial of the fairness of the exercise.

He, however, added: “Mr Geelani alleged that some of the huge increase in the number of candidates was engineered by the ‘agencies’. Though he offered no proof, it does seem as if the ‘soft power’ of the Indian political establishment did play a role.

“Parties like the Forward Bloc, Samata and Lok Janshakti, which have never forayed into the Valley, fielded candidates with reasonably well-funded campaigns.” The polls were held in an artificially created situation that is unlikely to be repeated.The results record the electorate’s verdict, but do not at all reflect the popular sentiment. The issue of governance was de-linked from that of azadi. Besides, the National Conference (NC) profited by and was able to form a government, ironically enough, precisely because of the Hurriyat’s call for boycott. How? The lowest percentage of voting 20 per cent was in the Srinagar district. Protesters stayed away in large numbers. The best organised party, the NC’s faithfuls grabbed all its eight seats. Of the 38 seats in the Valley outside Srinagar, the NC won only 12; in south Kashmir it got just one and seven in north Kashmir. Central Kashmir awarded it 12 out of a total of 15 seats. Most of the 20 per cent votes cast in Srinagar were cast in the rural areas out of the city. How the NC’s 28 and the Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (PDP) 21 would have been affected without the boycott can well be imagined. The PDP won more popular votes than the NC. The PDP’s vote went up; the NC’s vote went down. In several places the NC won by a whisker. Farooq Abdullah won by 54 votes.

The Amarnath shrine issue helped the BJP raise its tally from one to 11 seats at the expense of the Congress. The BJP’s vote shot up from 12.4 to 21.8 per cent. Splitting the Valley and Jammu is the BJP’s dream.

The PDP’s surge is impressive both in the Valley and in Jammu. Its strong hold is south Kashmir where it won 12 out of 16 seats. In contrast the NC lost seven per cent of votes in the Valley and nearly four per cent in Jammu. The Congress lost five per cent of the votes and won only 17 seats as against the 20 it formerly held. Regionwise, the NC and the PDP are evenly balanced in the Valley, with 20 and 19 respectively. The NC got six seats in Jammu, the PDP two.

Any historian of the two decades of militancy will have to consult the issues of the Srinagar Weekly Chattan. Its editor Tahir Mohiuddin commands universal respect for his integrity and non-partisanship. His remarks on the polls are very sound. “The centre has no coherent strategy. They are only reactive. Now that the elections have been a huge success, I hope the old mindset doesn’t come back. It is very easy to say people have voted against the separatists and for India, and that all we need to do is throw funds at the new set-up. I think this would be a big blunder on New Delhi’s part.”

He advocates a dialogue between New Delhi and the separatists. One would add that parallel to it should be a dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad, as and when they have resolved the immediate crisis. Militancy has declined by 40 per cent. It has not ended.

The PDP, thrown into opposition, has a good opportunity to articulate popular demands. The Hurriyat faces a truly existential challenge. Whatever its drawbacks the polls mark a watershed. Militancy erupted in 1988 to make Kashmir a live issue. It was militancy which gave life to the Hurriyat, not the other way around.

Will the Hurriyat boycott the next polls as well? Unlikely. It has two obvious options. One is to form a single political party as Shabbir Shah has advocated. The other is to erode. There is, however, a third course. It can galvanise itself and emerge as a united force committed to peaceful agitation, a prospect dreaded by some in New Delhi.

On Dec 24, a dejected Geelani remarked “The Indian intelligentsia and intellectuals who supported self-determination a few months ago, have also become irrelevant by this high voter turnout.” He is absolutely wrong. On the contrary, their pleas will be better heard now, provided he responds to the new situation and thinks afresh, something he has steadfastly refused to do.

For he said also, “the gun is also an important factor of the movement and if this factor falls silent, the movement suffers and it has suffered”. The implications are shocking. He implies that (a) New Delhi can be brought to its knees by guns brandished by the militants, falsifying the experience of two decades; (b) that without the guns, the people must submit in silence, for their protests will be in vain and (c) that there is no hope whatsoever now for the movement to succeed.

This is sheer escapism and self-indulgence unworthy of a highly estimable man like Geelani sahib. A Hurriyat which proclaims a firm commitment to peaceful agitation and demands civil rights to that end will pose a challenge to New Delhi and receive added support from Indian intellectuals. It is the only basis on which the Hurriyat can get a new lease of life. None abler than Geelani sahib to lead the fight. If he refuses, one must not withhold censure for such a lapse.

The writer is a lawyer and an author.

Iraq war: time for inquiry

THIS is the year of the Iraq war inquiry. At least, I have the audacity to hope so. With luck, some time this spring the government will announce a full-scale independent review of the way the decision was made to invade and occupy a major Arab country, a policy that has had a bigger impact on Britain’s international standing and domestic security than any other military move since the Second World War.

Until now, the government has claimed it would not be right to hold an inquiry as long as British troops were in Iraq. The argument was specious, but now that we know that all except 400 troops will be withdrawn by July 31 it loses any force. The prime minister recently sought to convey an image of normality by saying that the duty of the remaining contingent will be to train Iraqi troops on the same basis as British troops do in other countries. That being so, he can hardly go on arguing that combat necessities or the safety of the 400 stay-behinds make an inquiry inappropriate.

The key issue now is to ensure that an inquiry has comprehensive terms of reference, calls the right people, asks relevant questions, and does so in the proper context. The first priority is that the inquiry should work in public. The team led by Lord Franks, a former academic and diplomat, that looked into the Falklands war is often pointed to as an example; the UK’s Conservative Party leader David Cameron raised this analogy last month. But the world of 1983 is not the same as 2009. In the name of national security, Franks took evidence in private. Only his conclusions were published.

Time has moved on. We have already had the Hutton and Butler inquiries into the allegations of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The Hutton inquiry took evidence — from, among others, the then prime minister — in public. Butler examined intelligence gathering and sat in private. The new inquiry would look at policy advice and the way it was generated and used. It would be a step backwards if such an inquiry were private and therefore open to manipulation.

A new Iraq inquiry need not review WMD again. The failures of political intelligence that led ministers to think an invading army would be welcomed, especially if it stayed on indefinitely to try to rule a proudly nationalist population, were as significant as the much-reported failures of military intelligence. So an inquiry’s terms of reference must not only cover the political advice the government received before the invasion. It must also look at cabinet discussions and the options given to ministers after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

The stupidity of disbanding the Iraqi army and sacking Baghdad’s senior corps of civilian administrators on the grounds that they were all enthusiastic Saddamists is widely recognised.

But the invaders’ mistake was more fundamental. They apparently failed to understand that occupying the country indefinitely rather than immediately handing power to Iraqis or to an impartial UN caretaker administration would lead to resistance from Iraqi patriots as well as foreign jihadis.

Britain’s post-invasion policies must also be looked into. To say, as some ministers and officials do, that the Americans were in overall charge of Iraq is not an excuse. An inquiry must discover whether doubts were passed to Washington, and at what level. Did the cabinet consider withdrawing from the occupation (as many other coalition partners did) if they were unhappy about US policy after Saddam was toppled? Loyalty to an ally does not require giving it a blank cheque and ignoring Britain’s national interests.

In Basra, where Britain was the dominant foreign military power, Blair’s self-imposed mission was accomplished by early 2005. An election took place in January with minimal violence, and parties representing the various Shia factions, each with their own militias, took control of the city through the ballot box. That month senior members of Britain’s three main parties issued a joint appeal to Blair to withdraw all UK troops by the year’s end. Yet, three years on, another 80 British troops have lost their lives in Iraq.

An inquiry into the way British policy was made before the invasion and during the occupation will embarrass the government, even though its main architect resigned in 2007. This may prompt Gordon Brown to continue resisting one. But it will also put the Conservatives on the spot for going along with the war without major challenge. That makes an inquiry less difficult politically, as well as highlighting the Conservatives’ courage in calling for one.

— The Guardian, London