Friday, July 04, 2008, Jamadi-ul-sani 29, 1429    

Foreign policy fumbles

Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

THE discerning Pakistani citizen could, retrospectively, validly conclude that this state has never been under competent stewardship. It has had rulers rather than leaders. But that same citizen would also arrive at the ineluctable conclusion that the current situation is the worst in this nation’s history.
It is almost three months since the new government attained to power. Yet, the opacity in terms of imperatives, priorities or, simply, direction is depressing. This is both in the internal and external contexts.
Conventional wisdom has always had it that the transitory nature of governments has hardly mattered, insofar as in terms of policy formulation and implementation, the bureaucracy has been there to handle affairs. Its permanence, as an institution, is also assumed to provide a level of expertise to the political functionaries in terms of options and evaluation. This is all pathetic myth, and Pakistan’s Foreign :Office is a prime example. The denizens of the FO arrive via the CSS exams to the post of section officer and proceed, with the fullness of time, to reach the upper echelons of that service.
The process is hardly conducive to honing the intellect or substituting for perspicacity, academic excellence or innate capacity. All that acclivitous movement through the ranks strengthens is sclerotic vision. This being the case, governments in this country cannot rely on the bureaucracy to provide viable policies or guidance. There is, thus, an exigent need for rulers to be endowed with the vision, the intellect, the experience and the instinctual qualities to chart a viable course for the nation. That there has been precisely such a lack of qualitative leadership is an irrecusable fact. Space prohibits an expatiation on the past lack of leadership and, therefore, attention will be focused here on the present situation.
Lamentably, and true to tradition, the incumbent decision-makers and their coteries evince little of those qualities that could assure one that Pakistan’s foreign policy is viable, independent and in the national interest. Ask the foreign minister to locate Bujumbura on the map. Ask Asif Zardari to locate Ouagadougou. And do not ask Nawaz Sharif to locate any place other than Macdonalds. Lets face it: the people who are the repositories of the decision-making powers, are simply not imbued with the wherewithal to guide the ship of state through the perilous shoals in which we now flounder.
When the Great White Father in Washington dispatched his henchmen, John Negroponte and Richard Boucher to this land of subservient natives, it was to size up the new dispensation and to read it the US diktat. As per tradition, other than some mewling, one could safely conclude that the government respectfully touched its forelock. The American duo would not have expended much time in evaluating the government or the party leaders. Their conclusions could hardly have been complementary. Given the American agenda, the collective capacities of Messers Zardari, Sharif and Gillani would not have impressed the US representatives. Symptomatic of the capacity of the power-wielders is their choice of advisors in the foreign policy context. For example, the N-League trots out its expert in the form of a superannuated FO “babu”, who doubles as putative analyst on the telly. The PPP’s paucity is illustrated by its choice of an erstwhile resident of an American institute whose real capacity lies in jumping parties, this time landing on the right side of the PPP.
It is inevitable, then, that the Americans should reaffirm and reinforce their commitment to Pervez Musharraf’s completion of his tenure. After all, he has been their boy for the last eight years, and if they expected him to always do more, they would, nonetheless, find him more competent than the present rulers.
When the N-League and the PPP were in opposition mode and, later, during the elections, they gabbled, ad nauseam, about their commitment to Pakistan’s sovereignty and independence and the inimical consequences of following the American agenda. To be fair though, the PPP was never as strident as the N-League, simply because of Benazir Bhutto’s proclivity towards accommodating American interests, and returning to Pakistan via Washington. The real vehemence erupted from the Sharif camp. Nawaz was going to remove Musharraf, pronto; install Dr. Qadeer Khan as president; restore the judges and end American interference in Pakistan. All of which merely illustrates how ignorant Mr. Sharif is of the imperatives of realpolitik.
The fact of the matter is this: the US has its grip on Pakistan’s jugular. Economically, Pakistan’s condition is brittle enough to have brought it almost to shattering point. If the masses are not given relief, the escalating deprivation can plausibly lead to civil war. Any withdrawal of US financial support, at this point, will propel Pakistan on the declivitous slope to hell. Baluchistan and FATA are out of control. Elections have not healed suppurating wounds, nor stemmed the alienation of the masses. Under these conditions, it would have taken real leadership to chart a viable foreign policy course and to release Pakistan from its gnaithomic submission to Washington. To our irredeemable misfortunate, we lack that leadership.

A case of two speeches
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

DURING the annual UN omnium gatherum of the General Assembly sessions, most speeches are anodyne or soporific. However, sometimes sparks do fly! Last year, Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, disturbed the somnolence with an address which was encapsulated by his observation that when US president, George Bush, left the General Assembly rostrum, he left behind a hellish trail of sulphurous smoke!
This year, Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, without specific satanic allusions, nonetheless referred cogently and convincingly to Washington’s imperialist policies, which were nothing less than a diabolical victimization of a helpless world. Mugabe’s starting point was the castigation of his rule in Zimbabwe, by Western powers, especially the US and Britain, as being in violation of human rights and suppressing the opposition. Whereas these allegations may be true, Mugabe’s counterpoint was conclusively valid: namely, that the US had no right to pontificate on rights, or cast aspersions on any country’s record on human rights considering its own charge sheet. Parenthetically, one can correctly conclude that it is, indeed, a case of “the pot calling the kettle black.” (No pun intended).
Mugabe was irrecusably justified in his view. Any statement by the US, or any action, regarding justice, equity, human rights, principles, morality or any other nostrum, is nothing more than an example of the unipolar international power structure facilitating a tyrant state to spew all the inveracity it pleases. Mugabe reeled off a sanguinary list of atrocities the US either directly perpetrated or forced its client states to effect on its demand. He referred to Washington’s support of tinpot dictators, superannuated, royals and a variety of troglodytes, whose rule was antithetical to their peoples’ will and a perpetuation of the worst aspects of colonialism. Mugabe also averred that any species of ruler was acceptable to Washington as long as he, or she, acquiesed in America’s imperial agenda.
Mugabe was spot on, if one considers, impartially, American foreign policy. Ever since 9/11/2001, and the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, the leitmotif of US policy has been the war on so-called terror. How contrived this war is can be adduced, from the now convincing evidence that the attack was a connived act undertaken by Washington itself, to provide a casus belli for a policy of imperial aggrandizement already decided upon. Given the recrudescence of an assertive Islam, since the Iranian revolution of 1979, Washington needed to have an excuse to bludgeon into submission any entity that would, predictably, resist its diktat. Concomitantly, every act of resistance was, and is, subsumed into the war on so-called terror, and that “war” has become the “justification” for every illegal American act or intervention.
Mugabe has two examples on his own continent in support of the above argument: Somalia and Dafur.
After years of internecine warfare, Somalia had finally won through to a relative peace under the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). The latter was a group that based its ideology and policy on the tenets of Islam, as opposed to the “secular” warlords who had been relentlessly shedding the blood of the people of Somalia. That had been perfectly acceptable to the US.
The installation of a government with an Islamic afflatus was not. As par for the course, Washington fomented rebellion against the UIC. Then, in a flagrant act of international crime, the US ordered its client state, Ethiopia, to militarily attack and invade Somalia to overthrow the UIC government. Presently, the US presides over a divisive puppet government in Somalia, while the country has reverted to a state of internal bloodletting.
In another African case, that of Dafur, in the Sudan, Bush has started his vaudeville act about the atrocities being committed by the local “jinjaweed” militias. Any human suffering is lamentable, as is death. Which is why Bush’s bona fides to pronounce, or act, upon any case of human rights violation can be emphatically rejected by anyone not in gnaithonic submission to the US.
Mugabe is absolutely correct when he asserts that Washington is least justified to pronounce on any issue of a violation of human rights. After all, the US is irredeemably guilty of the crimes of, inter alia, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, farming out victims to client states to be tortured and the suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims.
While not on UN premises, Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to deliver a speech at Columbia University in New York, which was within the ambit of international concern. In a revolting display of crudity and stupidity, the president of the university launched a gratuitous attack against Ahmadinejad.
The purpose of the display was so precisely reminiscent of Washington’s spurious accusations against Iran, contrived solely to prepare the world for another one of America’s criminal acts, namely an attack against Iran. Except for the Zionism-zonked, the whole speech episode was exactly reflective of the stranglehold Israel has over the US, and how the latter is manipulated into endorsing and comprehensively supporting every renegade act of Israel.

 

A Turkish lesson
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

On August 28, 2007, Abdullah Gul, quondam foreign minister, was elected as president of Turkey. Beyond the mechanical dimension of casting a vote for a representative, this was, in a manner of speaking, a seminal exercise inasmuch as it involved the heart and mind of a nation at a very fundamental level.
There are antecedents of this event, and one has to start with the collapse of the Caliphate in Turkey at the close of the First World War. The successor regime of Kemal Ataturk undertook a comprehensive overhaul of Turkey’s socio-political edifice. Ataturk wanted no less than a decisive severance of a continuity between religion-based tradition and a modern, secular “Kemalist” state that he proposed to establish. Integral to his vision was the conviction that the declivity in Turkish power and international position was ascribable to a traditional ethos, including religion. The de nouveau construction of Turkey was to proceed on exclusively secular lines down to minutiae like banning the wearing of headscarves in state buildings, schools and universities. The designated guard against recidivism, as it were, was the Turkish army, which was empowered to dismiss any government from which emanated even a whiff of Islamism. Four times, in as many decades, the Turkish armed forces dismissed elected governments: ample evidence of the overarching tenet of secularism that was upheld even at the cost of democracy. However, after decades of strenuous and assiduous efforts to deracinate religion from politics, the unadulterated secularism that Ataturk propagated has been diluted by the process of the presidential elections this year.
In 2002, the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (known in Turkey as the AKP) assumed power in Turkey. It did not pursue an Islamist agenda, but rather validated its position through good governance. Although looked at askance by the military, the AKP was tolerated. However, when it looked set to electing Abdullah Gul as president, Turkey fell into a paroxysm of doubt and fear. The furore centered around the issue of Turkish secularism being threatened. It is not necessary to go into details of the convolutions that eventually resulted in victory for Gul and the AKP. It is enough for the present argument to note that notwithstanding “Kemalism”, secularism and the Turkish army, over a period of eighty years, political Islam was not successfully consigned to the bottom of the Bosphorous.
And in this very fact, there is a lesson for Pakistan.
If a recrudescence of political Islam can occur in Euro-centric, secular Turkey, then the relevance of political Islam in an avowedly Islamic state such as Pakistan must be realized and accommodated. This is specifically required in the present context of America’s imperialist agenda, its contrived war against terror, its overt and covert assault on Islam and the fallout on Pakistan.
Ever since the attack in New York in 2001, Pakistan has been in the eye of the storm, as it were. Washington pursues a two-pronged strategy in this country. The first is short-term and the other long-term. The immediate policy involves unleashing military force against the Taliban or anyone the Americans regard as “terrorists”. The long-term policy revolves around efforts to mould Pakistan’s Islamic nous to render it pliant to US demands. Both of these have proved to be inimical to Pakistan’s stability and security.
Approximately, 100,000 Pakistani soldiers are deployed along the Durand Line. Its consequences are that, first, too many of our fine soldiers are being killed for somewhat dubious aims. Secondly, too many innocent civilians are being slaughtered. Thirdly, too often is Pakistan’s sovereignty being violated. Fourthly, as a corollary of the border situation, explosions, mayhem and death are seeping across the country. Fifthly centrifugal forces are being encouraged. Sixthly, the position of the army is becoming increasingly invidious, and its capability questioned in the light of an apparently unmanageable problem, including the recent kidnapping of several hundred soldiers by the Taliban.
It is hardly salutary to endorse the American line on terrorism. For the sake of our own interests, we have to see that the Taliban and others of a similar persuasion regard themselves as Muslims resisting an egregiously unjust and aggressor power. Pakistan bears the brunt of American imperialist depredations because our policies are perceived as being unduly pro-American and, concomitantly, our actions an extension of Washington’s agenda. Against such a backdrop, tinkering with educational curricula or tackling madrassa reform merely exacerbates the problem in Pakistan. Nor do exhortations of enlightened moderation resonate with the people. What the people wish to see is for the government to draw the line against the sort of American pressure that is patently inimical to Pakistan’s interest.
Pakistan is an Islamic state. The nous of the people is unequivocally Islamic. If recent events in Turkey have taught us anything, it is that Islam cannot be extirpated from the hearts and minds of Muslims. In formulating policies, Pakistan’s decision-makers had better start taking this country’s Islamic afflatus into consideration.

Fearsome fallout
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

The blood spilled in the Lal Masjid has sunk into the earth and signs of human loss covered over, but the issue, in all its permutations, has not followed suit. There is an ongoing fallout of attitudes against the government and in the NWFP the forces of state authority are increasingly in contention with civil society. Nor can it be predicted with any degree of certitude that the sanguinary mess is going to be contained within the bounds of that unfortunate province. Already the struggle between militants and the army has stretched its tentacles. A problem which started in South Waziristan, has bled across North Waziristan, Bajaur, Khyber Agency, Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Lakki Marwat, Bannu, Malakand Agency, Swat and Dir. Not to speak of the twenty-four bomb blasts that have occurred in Peshawar. The momentum which has propelled the disaffection from tribal territories to the settled areas of the NWFP is adumbrative of the probability of the creeping stain of anger eventually engulfing even the Punjab. As this article is being penned, news has just broken of a bomb blast of severe proportions in Islamabad.
There is an orbicularity in the Lal Masjid incident, bomb blasts and the escalation of the insurrection in the NWFP. This has had an egregious fallout in terms of perceptions and the fundamentals of statehood.
To start with the armed forces of Pakistan: eighty-five thousand army personnel are strung out along the Pak-Afghan border. Their purpose is two-fold. To stem alleged cross-border infiltration by those the Americans castigate as “terrorists” and, secondly, to end Taliban activity within Pakistan’s borders. The army has been operating, in the area under discussion, for three years. Yet, neither has the pullulation of doctrine been stymied nor has the severity of armed opposition been contained. This situation can only lead to a negative perception of the efficacy of state power with the concomitance of emboldening the opposing forces.
This negative perception is compounded by America’s Afghan war, and its fallout on Pakistan. Despite the substantial sacrifices rendered by this country and the killing of Pakistan’s soldiers, Washington in its phoney war on so-called terror, has cut Pakistan no slack. Obtuse as the arrogance of power makes the US, even it must understand the connotations of sovereignty. With eighty-five thousand soldiers posted on the Durand Line to guard Pakistan’s sovereign territories, the US, regardless of violating our sovereignty and the implications thereof, sends its drones and other vehicles of death to kill Pakistanis. For all its much vaunted precision technology, so-called terrorists escape while Pakistan’s innocent citizens pay the price for America’s unconscionable aggression. This ensures that a perception is created that this state cannot protect its citizens or its sovereignty. The other perception is that the government acquiesces in Washington’s predations.
A fundamental of state power is that a government at least attempts, even if it cannot always ensure, the inviolability of the right to life and security of its citizens. So do the Americans, except that they do not extend that right to weak states across the globe. Which is why Washington’s clamant iteration to “do more” is pushing Pakistan’s policy towards untenable ends.
Because, what does “do more” imply? Simply, kill more Pakistanis. Which is why Washington was ecstatic over the Lal Masjid operation and the termination of the government-North Waziristan agreement, knowing full well that these developments presage an acceleration of deaths.
The US can, indeed, be personified as a malevolent vampire salivating over the rivers of spilt Muslim blood.
Which brings us to a third perception. The US administration insistently refers to Pakistan as its closest ally in the war on so-called terror. Now, the problem is that in most Muslim countries, several surveys have revealed the US to be the most hated nation. Most crucially, the masses in the Muslim world abhor American imperialism and specifically perceive the US to be the enemy of Islam, virulent in words and sanguinary in deeds against those who, in the pursuance of the Islamic tenets of justice and equity, resist American imperialism.
There is, thus, a groundswell of opinion in this country against the fact that Pakistan should be allied with a state whose imperialist policies are the antitheses of Islamic values. Its quintessential aspect is the physically violent reaction of the people of the tribal agencies and, virtually, the whole of the NWFP, with an explosive fallout in other provinces.
Another negative perception pertains to the state of governance in Pakistan. Leaving aside the denouement of the Lal Masjid case, during the five-month stand off between the masjid clerics and the government, it was the latter itself which incessantly iterated the inadmissibility of having “a state within a state.” The issue, with all its ramifications and implications, has engendered a host of questions and doubts which adversely impacts on the credibility of the government.
The fact that swathes of public opinion refuse to accept the authorities’ version of events is reflective of the chasm that has opened up between the government and the people. Good governance cannot prevail in an atmosphere of distrust. One can only view the future with dire foreboding.

 

Not as it should be

Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

[This article is being written as the Jamia Hafsa/Lal Masjid armed clash with the
authorities is ongoing in Islamabad].

IN SHAKESPEARE’S Julius Caesar there is a memorable line uttered by Mark Antony over the corpse of the eponymous protagonist
of the play: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now”. Only, that is one
corpse, one moment in time. But, for Pakistan, the corpses are piling up and one
moment seems to spread into a painful eternity. If one were to indulge in
hyperbole, one could well aver that the torrential rains are not so much a matter
of the heavens weeping on us, as they are for us. For, what is transpiring now,
is the antithesis of both Islam and democracy, situations to which we ostensibly
aspire. We seem to be a people collectively incapable of grasping the dynamic of
history, the imperative of establishing the fundamentals of statehood, or proceed
beyond the ad hoc, and that, too, contrived for personal rather than national
interests. The unfolding tragedy of the Lal Masjid/Jamia Hafsa clash with the
government is a case in point.
Before continuing with the exposition, the writer invites the reader to consider
the following questions:-
* If a state purports to be Islamic, can it ignore the Divine proclamation that
sovereignty belongs to Allah?
* If Allah is Sovereign, and has indicated a set of rules for Muslims to follow,
can these be denied?
* Can a Muslim gainsay that the Shariah constitutes the rules of Allah?
* If the Shariah is the rule of Allah, can an Islamic state substitute an
adventitious juridical system or ideology for the Shariah?
* If a Muslim lives in a society governed by rules other than the Shariah, can he
be denied the right to demand the establishment of the Shariah?
* Then, is Pakistan an Islamic state in consonance with its state nomenclature?
* Then, in principle, is the Lal Masjid/Jamia Hafsa demand for the imposition of
Shariah inherently invalid?
Without being dogmatic, ratiocination dictates that no Muslim can avoid answering
the above questions with a resounding negative. Neither can it be denied, then,
that there is a critical disconnect between what the state actually is, and what
large segments of the people expect it to be. The Lal Masjid is, per se not the
problem. Rather it is symptomatic of one aspect of the disconnect between the
state and the citizen. This aspect has its provenance in the lack of an ideology
or system of values, which would serve to meld the rulers and the ruled into a
viable, essentially homogenous entity. Islam, perforce, is that ideology.
However, Pakistan is not an Islamic state. It is a state consisting of Muslims,
without practically constituting an ideological collective. Which is why a
sustained and solid unity on ethnic, provincial and sectarian matters has eluded
us. The state has failed to implement Islamic values, or in substituting an
effective, alternative construct along secular lines. It is this lacuna that
ineluctably leads to the Lal Masjid syndrome. We are a nation of ideological
schizophrenics.
Pakistan might have drifted along this course indefinitely, with endemic
religio-political upheavals, but on a moderated scale. But international
developments have so impacted on the domestic context, that existing schisms now
threaten the security of the state.
Prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, ideology of a confessional kind did
not exist as a vehicle of defiance in the Muslim world, after World War II.
Nasserite Egypt, Baathist Syria and Iraq and even Mossadegh’s Iran defied the
Western diktat. But the leitmotif of this defiance was exclusively secular. It
was not till Iran under Imam Khomeini rose against American imperialism that the
afflatus for defiance was firmly rooted in Islam. A recrudescence of assertive
Islam and the Ummah followed from the crucible of the Iranian resistance. The
concept of Islam as a catalyst to redress the inequity and injustice of the West,
especially the US-Zionist iniquitous axis, transcended national borders, and a
collective Muslim conscience was forged. Islam became internationalized, as it
were. Which is why permutations of the Al Qaeda syndrome extend across the Muslim
world.
Pakistan has been critically affected by this phenomenon. Since its inception,
Pakistan has had to countenance sectarian, provincial and ethnic upsets. But
these problems, very largely were within the national boundaries. No longer so.
What today transpires in our border areas, the other acts of violence and bomb
blasts, can be directly attributed to the American-Zionist cabal’s feral shedding
of Muslim blood. It is our misfortune, indeed, that we are tied by an umbilical
cord of perceived necessity to Washington. It is the immiscibility of Islamic
principles and imperial American predations which has ensnared us to our great
detriment. This is not as it should be. We need to rethink our priorities to
obviate the possibilities of Lal Masjids in the future.

Terrorism: the irrecusable facts
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

AMNESTY International in its report for 2006, has stated, inter alia, “Nothing more aptly portrayed the globalization of human rights violations than the US-led ‘war on terror” … Five years after 9/11, new evidence came to light in 2006, of the way in which the US administration treated the world as one giant battlefield for its ‘war on terror’, kidnapping, arresting, arbitrarily detaining, torturing and transferring suspects from one secret prison to another across the world with impunity …. The ‘war on terror’ and the war in Iraq, with their catalogue of human rights abuses, have created deep divisions that cast a shadow on international relations.” The report further accuses Washington of “shameless doublespeak” in pious mouthings on human rights while brazenly violating international law.
The criminal acts of the Bush administration are now extensively disseminated and acknowledged as credible. The roster of crimes, run the gamut of inhuman, degrading and murderous acts from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, which have rendered the US the most hated nation in the world.
To the extent that the Amnesty report excoriates the US for its violation of human rights, it is commendable. But it does not, for it is not within its purview, deal with the gestalt; of what the world suffers at the hands of the US, in its wider imperial depredations, of which violation of human rights is but one facet.
To place matters in true perspective, it is worth remembering that America’s genocidal proclivities were sanguinarily established at its inception. The merciless extirpation of the autochthonous Amerindians was not only an act of physical elimination, but an exercise in terrorism, by any lexical definition or historical observation. Subsequent US policy is of lineal descent, from afflatus to implementation, to the present day via the recursive theme of terrorism exemplified by the atomic attack on Japan, the war in Vietnam, the killing fields of Cambodia, sanguineous and disruptive interventions in South America and the Middle East, among other heinous offensives.
However, through these years of mayhem and murder, Washington contrived to, at least, project a modicum of morality and adherence to international law. But in 2000, there was a palpable shift from realpolilik to untrammeled and overt Machtpolitik, when George Bush first assumed the presidency of the US. Under the tutelage of a group that came to be known as neo conservatives, or neocons, Bush opted for a policy of terrorism which is lexically defined as “using, or favouring, violent and intimidating methods of coercing a government or a community.”
A fundamental goal of the neocons was to extend American power over the globe in a manner which would assure the control of the world’s resources, not only for US domestic needs, but to eventually deny any rivals access to those resources outside of American consent. Since energy is a crucial resource, it was inevitable that the Middle East would be a primary area on which to unleash US terrorist policy. Another factor reinforced this decision. Consideration of the list of rebarbative neocon decision-makers, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, among others, are all vehement Zionists, with a voracious propensity to devour anything (and that often includes the genuine interests of the American people) that stands in the way of Israel’s own imperial impulse to mould the Middle East to its purpose. Hence the term “Zioncon.”
Conceptually, the plan to terrorize the Middle East was already in place in 2000. The casus belli was the 9/11/2001 attack on the New York Twin Towers, that ultimate scam manipulated by the Zioncons, which would allow them global carte blanche to violate every international norm and massacre hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
The Muslim Ummah (never mind its craven and misbegotten leadership) is only too aware of the draggonade launched against it by the US and Israel, and their machinations for the final comminution of the Muslim world. In that context, the latest act of terrorism visited on the Ummah is the concerted effort being made by the US-Israel axis of evil, to widen and deepen the Sunni-Shia schism which was initiated by the US-Zionist cabal’s bombing of the Al-Askariya mosque in Iraq. The purpose of this odious policy is to contain Iranian influence and secure Israeli dominance over a perpetually unstable Middle East.

 

Perceptions and politics
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

POLITICS, as has been astutely observed, is as much a matter of
perception as of fact. Which is why it matters less what a protagonist
declares than how the audience receives that message. This is a truism
much in evidence during the turn of events unfolding over approximately
the last three months.
The current debacle was occasioned by the reference made by the
government against the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan
(CJP), Chaudry Iftikhar. The government maintains that the CJP indulged
in manifest abuse of his position as defined by certain acts of
aggrandizement for personal benefit. The government acted within its
legitimate ambit in framing the reference. Nor would it, per se, have
evoked the sort of response that eventually followed. That anger,
resentment, opposition and agitation was the direct consequence of the
modalities employed to relieve the CJP of his responsibility. It was
the denigratory treatment meted out to the symbol of the supreme
judiciary that aroused the ire of the legal fraternity as well as civil
society: the peremptory summons to the presidential office; being
virtually ordered to resign; kept incommunicado within the presidential
office for six hours; being victimized, en famille; being prevented
from attending office. If as it is said, “one picture is equal to a
thousand words,” then there are two pictures which most effectively
moulded public perception. The first picture was of a defiant Chief
Justice sitting before a uniformed general. The second, a graphic
demonstration of the CJP being manhandled, including being pulled by
the hair, by the untrammelled executive power of the state. Apart from
the technical and legal minutiae which inform the stance of Bench and
Bar, the essential response of the lawyers, like the general public, is
essentially premised on the perceived oppression and derogation of the
judiciary by the military-packed executive. This militates against the
sine qua non of a democracy, namely a balance of power between
fundamental state institutions.
Considering prevalent public perceptions and the provenance
thereof, the government proponents have hardly distinguished themselves
in mounting their own campaign to neutralize the escalating opposition
and agitation. The media has had a crucial role to play in presenting
the current crisis. Yet, on that most powerful a medium, the
television, the defenders of the government position have only managed
a pathetically lackluster performance. This, in equal measure, due to a
palpable lack of personal credibility and intellect. This, ab initio
puts them at a catastrophic disadvantage vis-à-vis their interlocuters.
Another tool that the government seems to be addicted to, to
counter the public approbation of the lawyers’ movement, is the
wretched “jalsa”. The organizers of these jamborees seem to be
incapable of taking into consideration what the public perception of
these rallies is.
Not just the present dispensation, but every incumbent
government is immediately perceived as using state resources and its
machinery for public meetings. Transporters are harried and their
vehicles commandeered. Government employees are forced to attend, while
other individuals bribed or pressurized to join the rally. A
rent-a-crowd rally is neither an effective stratagem to prove the
government’s popularity, nor does it erode a given opponent’s appeal to
the masses. Two recent examples illustrate this observation.
On the day the CJP undertook his odyssey from Islamabad to
Lahore on the historic Grand Trunk Road, a public rally was held for
General Musharraf in Naukot, in Sindh, hosted by the Chief Minister of
the province, Arbab Ghulam Rahim, in the heart of his stamping grounds.
Both Naukot and the GT Road were juxtaposed in TV reports. And what
were the perceptions? Of the former, a usual rent-a-crowd meeting. The
claques arrayed in the front rows clapped feebly and raised desultory
slogans. Close-ups of the participants revealed expressions of boredom,
indifference and “what is a guy like me doing in a place like this?” On
the other hand, the CJP’s 26-hour procession was broadcast in all its
unflagging fervour, rousing spontaneity, elements of genuine public
support and facets of participatory democracy. Baldly phrased, the
government lost the day.
The lesson, however, was not imbibed. On May 12, another rally
was arranged for President Musharraf in Islamabad. This was to be the
mother of all rallies. It was, actually, replete with all the elements
described in the Naukot meeting. It was also arranged on the same day
as the CJP’s visit to Karachi.
This time, however, the rally coincided with the sanguinary
developments in that city. So, what did the public perceive? A festive
rally being held in the Capital, while Karachi profusely bled. One need
hardly expatiate on the reaction of the people. Suffice it to say that
a conspectus reveals that nothing redounded to the government’s credit
on that ineffably tragic day.

Disturbing developments
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

IT WOULD only be the most  anoetic of individuals calling themselves Pakistanis that would fail to be alarmed by the declension in the current socio-political order of this state.
Just in a single day, namely April 28, three events occurred. A suicide bomber blew himself up at a public meeting in Charsadda, killing 30 people and wounding additional scores. Another bomb was detonated at Peshawar Airport, and in Miranshah a military post was hit by rockets. If this list referred to isolated or endemic activities, it would have little relevance beyond the immediate acts. What renders it cause for the highest degree of concern is the fact that it is symptomatic of a fundamental malaise, most acutely being manifested in the NWFP and Balochistan. The provenance of this issue has both long-term historical and short-term immediate dimensions.
Historically, the two provinces have been, to a greater or lesser degree, and sporadically, disaffected since the nascence of the state. In neither Balochistan nor the NWFP was the idea or movement of nationhood developed organically from the grass roots upwards. In the tribal belt (now FATA), the referendum which was initiated by Quaid-i-Azam, was a resounding affirmative for amalgamation with Pakistan. But the afflatus for the decision drew on Islamic affinities rather than considered political imperatives. Further, in the settled territories of the Frontier, the Pathans accepted inclusion into the new state, but the psychological dimension was somewhat distorted by the ambivalent position of the Frontier leader, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his party, the Red Shirts. In Balochistan, briefly stated, the decision to be part of the emergent state was predominantly effected by the upper echelon sardars.
This was the situation obtaining at the gestation of the state. Admittedly, the genesis of Pakistan was attended upon by exigencies that put its very survival at stake. It was difficult to prioritize or even, perhaps, develop a long-term vision for a homogenous polity. But this factor cannot exculpate leaders who subsequently neglected to understand the incipient fissiparity of the constituent units of Pakistan. It was both the monumental stupidity and egregious egocentricity of Pakistan’s so-called leaders which militated against the formulation of policies that could have welded together the disparate entities within Pakistan. A fact which seems to have eluded the comprehension of our benighted governments is that the subsumption of geographical territories into a sovereign state is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Nations are forged in the crucible of a shared psychology, ideas, vision, goals and fraternal sympathy. Neither force nor physical contiguity define a nation, nor can nationalism be superimposed. One need only recall here the cretinous imposition of the One Unit plan in the mid-50’s and its disasterous fallout.
The devastating fact is that never in this nation’s history, have decision-makers and leaders made an objective, informed, cogent, consistent and sincere effort to forge a national consensus. Which is why the history of this country is replete with examples of centrifugal impulses such as the quondam demand for Pukhtunistan, Sindudesh, Greater Balochistan and that ultimate example of the secession of East Pakistan.
It is this historical background that needs to be kept in mind when putting the present situation in the NWFP and Balochistan into perspective.
Since the last two years, quotidian reports inform of unremitting attacks against government installations, military posts and individuals. It serves little purpose to ascribe those to “miscreants”.
It is equally counterproductive to unleash military forces against the citizens of the state, or to kill local leaders acknowledged as such by the population. Balochistan is tribal; concomitantly, its loyalty is focused within the tribal paradigm rather than dispersed over the national grid. The simple expedient of allocating development funds neither severs the horizontal and vertical tribal concatenation, nor does it assuage the alienation nurtured by decades-old perceptions of deprivation. Which is why, very often, one hears ominous comparisons between Balochistan and East Pakistan prior to its secession. Unless the government reorders its policies, one can hardly be sanguine about a satisfactory resolution of the situation.
The problem in the Frontier is somewhat different at this time. Here national policy has fallen victim to the war on so-called terror. America’s imperialist aggression in Afghanistan, launched some six years ago, has landed it in a trap from which it can only extricate itself if it abandons its imperialist agenda. As it is loathe to do so, it has unconscionably pressurized Pakistan to facilitate its iniquitous depredations in the vicinal state. The Taliban resisting US occupation forces in Afghanistan are emphatically not terrorists. They are Mujahideen seeking to terminate foreign aggression. To facilitate its reprehensible agenda, the US includes the Taliban jihad in the ambit of its arbitrarily defined “terrorism”.
Pakistan’s unfortunate involvement in Washington’s policy has not only precipitated the most inimical developments in the tribal areas but its fallout is being felt in the whole province and, indeed, the country.


 

The Hafsa factor
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

The ongoing Jamia Hafsa incident, playing itself out in Islamabad, whether orchestrated by the authorities to deflect attention from the legal morass, or a genuine expression of grievance, is little relevant to the argument at hand. Regardless of this particular incident’s provenance, it is exemplary of the sort of reaction that is generated when a society is victim to a perpetual crisis of identity.
Pakistan is pre-eminently an ad hoc society, as it were. It is mind-blowing that a country can be so dismissive, ab ovo, of the imperative of formulating and putting into practice the fundamentals of statehood, most importantly with reference to national identity.
The Two-Nation thesis has been expatiated upon in terms of afflatus for the nascence of Pakistan and its continuing validity. Without going into the minutiae of the argument, the minimum irrecusable fact is that this country emerged as a result of a definable Islamic consciousness. If those who aspired for a separate homeland were disgruntled with an economic, political and social disenfranchisement, in a predominantly Hindu India, it was as Muslims that they felt the discrimination. If they struggled for an alternative, it was as Muslims, and when Pakistan was created it was on the basis of Muslim majority areas. Yet, subsequently, this pervasive and primarily significant impetus was not worked up into an ideological framework which could guide the fledgling nation on to a practical path of homogenous, consistent and constructive socio-political development. Instead, the principal impulse of the local babu detritus of colonialism and the political pygmies, that masqueraded as leaders, was a lurch towards the West, thinking that it was the sole direction towards progress.
This exercise engendered a fundamental distortion in what should have been an Islam-based organic growth of society in consonance with the nous and consuetude of the people. Adopting, indiscriminately, a Western political system, with the prerequisites utterly lacking, has resulted in a bastardized polity, with which we are afflicted till today. We were, then, inflicted with the folly of tacking “Islamic” on to Pakistan. This graphically illustrates the obtuseness that characterized our decision-makers. When Western mores and political systems were being adopted, only the cerebrally impaired would fail to see the contradiction of including the term “Islamic”, in the title of the state.
For a Muslim, a man-made ideology or system can be accepted or rejected. But Allah’s law is mandatory. In the Quran, it is unequivocally proclaimed that sovereignty belongs to Allah. One need not be a Quranic exegete to comprehend its implication: Allah’s sovereignty is expressed through His immutable laws (Shariah). The ratiocinative conclusion has to be, that if this country is an Islamic republic, then the Shariah should have been imposed decades ago. That the action was avoided, can be ascribed to several facets of our leadership: negligence, corruption, obtuseness, hypocrisy and submission to the West.
Be that as it may, the historical lack of socio-political coherence and identity may not have so acutely arisen today, were it not for certain developments at regional and systemic levels. A significant factor that has caused the chasm between practice in Pakistan and pretence of nomenclature to impact so negatively at this time is the Afghan-Soviet war of 1979-1989, and its fallout. In those ten years, the American CIA scoured the madrassas to recruit Taliban to fight their proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan. At that time, for its egocentric purpose, the US and the West lionized the Taliban and other warriors. Then the favoured term was “Mujahideen”, with the most admirable connotation. The Muslim warriors, however, were either unaware, or dismissed America’s iniquity. For them, they were genuinely imbued with a sense of Jihad, to help their co-religionists to rid themselves of the Soviet yoke. Concomitantly, when the US abandoned Afghanistan and Pakistan after 1989, large cadres of committed Islamic mujahideen, were left behind, still immured in the spirit of Holy War. A second factor was the afferent impact of the Afghan Jihad. The concept of the Ummah had always been there; but in Afghanistan, which drew mujahideen from across the Muslim world, the concept of the Ummah was given practical form and that, too, as a fighting force against tyranny.
Individuals and groups that had been constrained within national boundaries, were to become truly “internationalized”, as it were, that now plays itself out across a geopolitical spectrum of issues. Today, if a Muslim is cut in Mauritania, he bleeds in Malaysia. It is a corps d’esprit that galvanizes Islamic warriors against those perceived to be oppressing Muslims. A factor which brings us up square against the American-Zionist injustice and suppression of the Muslims.
It is these developments which are having an inimical impact within Pakistan’s society and polity. Most regrettably for this country, American imperatives have propelled Pakistan into making invidious choices. There are those who maintain that America’s war on so-called terror is nothing more than a crusade against Muslim resistance to American dictates and depredations. Pakistan’s close alignment with Washington has facilitated those who use the Islamic platform against the government, on issues such as madrassa reform, curricula modification, “liberalization” of society and events in the NWFP and Balochistan. These developments are attributed to American pressure on Pakistan. Which is, au fond, how trouble starts at marginal areas, and spreads its tentacles to Islamabad.

 

The whole truth
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

Reams have been used to expatiate on the current crisis afflicting the national body politic and hours of audio-visual time expended on holding forth on the matter of the Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry.
It is to be wondered whether further commentary can be anything but superfluous. This writer’s caveat for the present exercise, then, is that there has been little, if at all, attempt to anchor the issue in the gestalt, nor has blame been fairly, or realistically, apportioned. So let’s consider the issue in the orbicular.
It is a common perception that the removal of the Chief Justice has been peremptory and in violation of constitutional norms. This assessment has two aspects. One is exclusively concerned with the letter of the law, that is really within the purview of those well-versed in the juridical process, rather than lay persons.
In any case, this is an aspect that can only be definitively assessed after the ruling of the Supreme Judicial Council, which is adjudicating the said issue.
The second aspect of the matter is infinitely more accessible to the lay person. This is the aspect that has been encapsulated by the gratuitous manhandling of the Chief Justice by elements wielding power.
This has been a graphic illustration of a fundamental national integrant being denigrated and pressurized by another pillar of the state. It is, thus, comprehensible that the legal fraternity should have taken extreme umbrage and agitated the issue as has been done.
It was scarcely salutary to then belabour those who were protesting in the streets. For those who are interested in the long-term development of this country, it may be worthwhile to pause here and posit the query, “Is the issue of the Chief Justice an isolated incident, sprung fully-fledged like Athena from Zeus’ head, or is it the logical outcome of a declivitous socio-political process over an extended period of Pakistan’s history? Honesty dictates the conclusion that the answer to be incontrovertibly that the present event is the ineluctable result of processes set in motion since this nation’s inception.
It is a textbook staple that a functional democracy is premised on three entities: the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, each within the ambit of given laws, mutually cooperating, while simultaneously constituting, per se, a mutual check and balance.
To our abiding misfortune, all three branches of government, very often in the letter, unremittingly in the spirit, have performed as a dysfunctional conglomerate. Their acts of omission and commission have neither been inadvertent nor a function of human, or systemic, fallibility.
They have invariably occurred as a deliberate and connived subversion of principles for the sake of pelf, self-promotion or submission to extra-legal pressure. If today the Chief Justice has been denigrated and his basic rights violated, it is because a string of yesterdays bear witness to the sustained and flagrant violation of the rule of law; a process from which the juridical branch cannot be entirely absolved.
The judiciary has walked the walk through a series of invidious compromises that has impacted negatively on due process, and the rule of law. It is appropriate that the legal fraternity has expressed outrage over the violation of one man’s dignity and basic rights.
But where has the fraternity been when, over the decades, millions of Pakistanis have wasted time and resources in pursuit of what has been ephemeral justice? Not only does one need to allude to that truism that “justice delayed is justice denied”, but one needs also to recall that an extensive perception prevails, that at the end of the day, the individual has little guarantee of a just conclusion to a long and ruinous process.
When has the legal fraternity undertaken a sustained and strong effort to rectify the anomalies and aberrations in dispensation of the law or in the juridical edifice? It is an irrefragable fact that when there is a calabrated declension within any system, excess against its citizens is the inexorable result in any state. As for the cacophonous din set up by the politicians, it is risible in the very least.
Considering that the founder of Pakistan was the quintessential legal man, it is only malign fate that can explain how politics and principles have so irreparably diverged subsequently.
It would be virtually impossible to identify a politician who has not subverted the rule of law, when in power. Those who are squawking the loudest in the issue of the Chief Justice, are precisely those whose hodiernal violation of the rule of law for their destructively egocentric purposes, have created the conditions which have culminated in the current deplorable circumstances.
For the future of this country, one can only fervently hope that the efforts of Bench and Bar will be constructively channelized to effectuate change for the better.
 

Divide et impera
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

Divide and rule. The classic nostrum for the success of Western imperialism’s occupation of conquered peoples and territories. That was a factor that should have gone by the board with the demise of colonialism, and the emergence of a new world of putatively independent and sovereign states. But the stratagem is back with a vengeance, in a form more virulent, pervasive and equally destructive as was the imperialism of the 18th to 20th centuries.
The end of the Second World War, that then held the promise of an equitable and just world order, proved ephemeral. Without going into the minutiae of post-1945 developments, one can fast forward to the present time, when the US has so comprehensively, callously, immorally and destructively donned the mantle of imperialism to exert dominion, through a techno-military superiority over the globe. Concomitantly, it has, like imperialism’s progenitors in earlier centuries, adopted the strategy of divide and rule as a crucial part of its policy, specifically in regard to the Muslim world.
The term “fundamentalism” assumed political connotation after the victory of the Iranian revolution and Ayatollah Khomeni’s triumphant return to his country, in 1979. Had Iran based its polity on Islam qua religion confined to its national parameters, it would have been of no significance to Washington and its impetus for world domination. However, two aspects of Iran’s Islamic revolution alarmed the US. First, the Islamic afflatus, given political form within Iran, was not confined merely to reordering social priorities according to religious dictates. Islam, in fact, became the basis of Iran’s expression of its sovereignty and freedom. It constituted the wellspring of that nation’s resolve to resist America’s attempts to control Iran; to oppose the Zionist – American agenda for the Middle East which included control of the region’s oil resources and, to that end, render entirely malleable the Middle East’s leaders and decision makers.
Secondly, as if Iranian independence was not anathema enough, the Iranian experience served as an example and inspiration for the whole Muslim Ummah. Labouring under the humiliation of a succession of Muslim leaders distinguished only by a gnaithonic submission to the US, Muslims across the globe were imbued with a recrudescent pride and a belief that Islam was, indeed, an ideology, an adherence to which could lead to a renaissance of Muslim independence and progress. It was a vital factor that incited the Muslim masses against their puppet leaders. And that set off the alarm signals in the US. Consequently, a blitzkrieg against resurgent Islam was unleashed.
The Muslims had to be divided and the developing, concerted consciousness of the Ummah dissipated. Ergo, was born the American policy to separate Muslims into “fundamentalists” and “progressives”. Except for the cretinous or those purblind in their emulation of purulent Western mores, the above categorization, within the ambit of Islam, is just so much stercoraceous gabble. However, it has served the West well, in practical terms. Most Muslim states, at official level, perform cartwheels to “explain” Islam to the Western imperio-fascists. Integral to this explicatory effort is the attempt to emasculate Islam, and to interpret it in consonance with the Zionist-American agenda. Thus, the latter is fulfilled through the division of the Muslims into states, leaders, groups or individuals who cravenly submit to the West – the “progressives”; and those who resist the cruel and inhuman dictates of imperio-fascism – the “fundamentalists”.
Another prong of this divisive strategy is to exploit sectarian fault lines within the Ummah, specifically the Sunni-Shia controversy. Irrefragably, it was American-Zionist agents provocateurs who instigated the Sunni-Shia sanguinary conflict in Iraq. Its implications were not to be limited to Iraq, but were calculated by the US to be used against Iran, and to reorder interstate relationships within the Middle East.
In order to facilitate and justify whatever nefarious designs Washington has against Iran, including illegal military attack, Iran is accused of using Iraq’s Shi’ites against the US forces in that state. Furthermore, the client states of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are being herded as a Sunni bloc against Iran. The American-Zionist cabal has taken its malign policy to the extent of putting about the canard that Pakistan will share its nuclear capacity with Saudi Arabia, that Khadimain-al-Americain, to withstand any nuclear threat from Iran!
The fact is, that Iran’s nuclear development for entirely peaceful ends, is being used as a bogey in the Middle East to mobilize its craven leaders to endorse the iniquitous plans of the American-Zionist axis-of-evil, against Iran.
The real tragedy of the Muslim world has never been so much of what the Infidel has done against it, as what it has done to itself. And that is a fact of history being replayed today. It is the leaders of the Muslim world who, for a variety of self-serving reasons, fail to take a stand against the imperio-fascists’ stratagems to divide the Muslim world.
 

Destructionalism
Comment, Dr Niloufer Mahdi

Lexically, the title term is non-existent. However, these are extreme times, and hence the writer takes recourse to “poetic licence”, in its most liberal sense, to coin a word to describe the horror of current affairs.
Destructionalism is a term aptly connotative of the murder and mayhem unleashed by the United States across the globe to fulfil its egocentric, iniquitous agenda. “Destruction” is a term that could have been used. However, it is inadequate to express the scale, intensity, inhumanity and illegality of America’s imperial depredations.
“Destruction” is a impulse that connotes more an act or tendency to destroy. It is not necessarily innate in reference to a person nor is it holy writ or integral to a policy. In that sense it is incidental. The end inclusion of “ism” in a word, however, is indicative precisely of integrability, absolute belief with nuances of irrationality, bigotry and comprehensive egocentricism to the exclusion of any alternative principle or anyone else’s rights. A destructionalistic policy arrogates to its protagonist the right to peremptorily impose an exclusively egocentric order on anyone, or anywhere, regardless of consequential acute social disruption, misery and death.
And that is exactly what hodiernal American international policy is. Just scan the globe for verification.
Take Iraq: one no longer needs to expatiate on the perfidy of American motives. It is now a truism. But anyone possessed of a modicum of humanity or sanity cannot often enough heap opprobrium on the feral brutality of Washington’s onslaught against the Iraqi nation. Having massacred, in a proclivity no less pronounced than in Attila or Hitler, a million Iraqis, George Bush is now floundering about seeking a way to extricate his country from the sanguinary mess his destructionalism created. What is insupportable is the utter indifference of American leaders, even those who oppose the war, to the suffering of the Iraqi people. In an unconscionable and emetic adherence to realpolitik, all the American leaders focus on is the fate of their troops and the piddling number of their deaths, the inimical impact on America’s image and the adverse consequences for the fulfilment of its future agendas.
America’s destructive self-righteousness in imposing its diktat, where it pleases, is not questioned anywhere across that nation’s political spectrum. That is, its destructionalism will remain an integral part of its policy for as long as it has the overwhelming military power to exterminate opposition to American imperialism.
Another example of Washington’s murderous propensity is its role in Afghanistan. After 9/11, the US attacked Afghanistan ostensibly because it harboured Osama bin Laden, who was accused of masterminding the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. How inveracious that accusation was, can be gauged by two arguments: first, there is now fairly extensive opinion, and not on the lunatic fringe, that America set up the 9/11 incident, under the neo-con afflatus, to engineer a validation of a spurious war on terror. If this thesis is rejected as improbable, there is the second irrecusable fact: at the time of America’s aggression against Afghanistan, at the end of 2001, no less a person than the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that quintessential Bush poodle, was reported to have declared that the evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in 9/11 would not stand up in a court of law. Yet, the US did not scruple to rain down Daisy Cutter bombs on innocent Afghans. That thousands more of them died than were the victims of 9/11, was a fact relegated to the dustheap of destructionalism’s “collateral damage” bin.
Lately, Washington has opened another bloody chapter in Somalia. For years that country had been rent by internecine warfare and afflicted with warlordism. In 2006, a movement named the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), established its writ over most of Somalia, and brought an end to fratricidal conflict. But the term “Islamic” presaged the UIC’s doom. After all, America’s atavistic crusader antipathy to assertive Islam is a crucial part of destructionalism. Thus, in short order, Christian Ethiopia, an American client state, was ordered to, illegally, invade Somalia and terminate UIC control. The US itself bombed Somalia at least twice, ostensibly to hit Al Qaeda operatives taking alleged refuge in Somalia. Predictably, no “terrorists” were hit, but many innocent Somalis perished. The country bids fair to reverting to its bloody state of warlordism.
And now the US stands poised to embark on another renegade enterprise. If the UIC was unacceptable to the US because of its Islamic credentials, then it requires scant cerebral exertion to conclude how Iranian independence and intrepid resistance to destructionalism, must ire the US. The latter, along with Israel, that excrescence on humanity and international law, will not rest until it attacks Iran, and murders thousands more Muslims.

 

Surging China

Dr Niloufer Mahdi

A few days ago, China launched a missile which took out a Chinese satellite in orbit. Although a relatively modest test, it reveals Chinese perspicacity and China’s sagacious evaluation of what will be required for its defence in the future.
China’s action needs to be set in a historical and global context to be properly understood. The Chinese are a people with an acuity to learn from history. In the late 19th century, imperial wars launched on an attenuated Chinese kingdom resulted in iniquitous treaties forced on it by Western powers.
This was made possible only by a technologically superior military power. Apropos of this humiliating experience, when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party assumed power in 1948, he ringingly declared, “China has stood up”. This meant that Beijing would henceforth guard its sovereignty and resist the American diktat. To this end the Chinese, ab initio, focused on building up resistance by developing an economic, technological and military capacity.
China was, since its inception, put on the defensive by American policy which sought to inflict as much harm on China as possible. The crossing of American troops of the Yalu river in the Korean war in 1950; the myth of a Two-China policy, setting up the anathema of Taiwan as an independent state when China claimed it as its integral part; encouraging centrifugal forces by infiltrating agents into Tibet; establishing a cordon sanitaire along China’s periphery; prodding its Asian stooges to assume an anti-China stance and other efforts inimical to China’s interests.
This destructive hostility remained the cornerstone of US policy till 1971. In that year, US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger visited Beijing in a change of policy which heralded the start of a Sino-American détente. Beijing responded by making assiduous efforts to present itself as irenic and responsible in the comity of nations.
It would, however, be an egregious error to assume that China has forgotten the past, especially the recent past. However halcyon the last thirty-six years, Beijing bears in mind that when it was militarily and technologically decisively inferior to the US, it was the unremitting focus of American hostility.
“The Yellow Peril” is how the latter state viewed China and, as stated earlier, everything short of a direct attack was employed to “contain” China. If Beijing has opted to upgrade its economic and defence capabilities, apart from the domestic imperative of progress, it is to obviate the possibility of ever again being vulnerable to any global player’s military clout.
Beijing must surely also have in mind the dismantling of the Soviet Empire, and the main reasons thereof. Since 1945, Moscow had been able to compete with the US, albeit at a heavy economic cost, in conventional arms and nuclear systems, to constitute an alternative locus of global power.
A balance of terror prevailed, inasmuch as it was manifest that any nuclear war would inflict an unbearable cost on both powers.
Then in the 80’s Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency of the US. The US-Soviet détente evaporated in the rightist surge of his administration. The Soviet Union was dubbed “The Evil Empire”, and Washington determined to disintergrate it.
The modality opted for was a most ingenious economic strategy. Washington was aware of the derelict state of the Soviet economic structure. Maintaining a terrestrial nuclear balance was just about what Moscow could afford.
So, America upped the ante, with the announcement that it would embark on a Space Development Initiative (SDI) or what came to be popularly known as the Star Wars initiative. Without resorting to detail, the fact is that the Soviet Union realized it could not compete militarily in space with the US, prohibitive as the cost would be to the Soviet Union.
The ultimate result was a manifest weakening of the Empire; the latter lost control of its Baltic, Eastern European and Central Asian satellites along with certain Soviet areas. Having forced the Soviet Union to its knees, America emerged as the sole superpower in 1889. The concomitant unipolarization of power permitted it to give full vent to its iniquitous imperial impulse.
Apart from America’s depredations, in violation of international norms, against hapless states across the globe, the US has undertaken seminal initiatives. It has refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to enable it to continuously test new nuclear weapons; it is setting up an anti-ballistic missile defence, which would give it a decisive advantage in a nuclear conflict; it has tested weapons in space, and has not agreed to a treaty banning the militarization of space; it continues to maintain a formidable nuclear capacity; it annually increases the $ 450 billion, that it now spends on defence to develop ever more lethal conventional weapons.
The aggregate of this offensive capacity, underpins American’s imperial impulse that will not tolerate a competitive power, which could, in the future, be China.
Given this situation, it is most prescient of China to continue to upgrade its military forces, maintain a credible nuclear defence and, above all, not allow an unbridgeable chasm to develop between its own and the US’ development in the militarization of space.
 

A hanging as metaphor

Comment

Dr Niloufer Mahdi

First, there was the Saddam hanging. No, first there was the Saddam trial. Yes, Saddam was a monster; yes, in the ultimate analysis, his punishment was condign. But the trial itself was a juridical farce. He was hauled up before a kangaroo court, instated by the American viceroy in Iraq, Paul Bremmer. The proceedings were ultra vires of international norms. It was a trial that reflected more of America’s guiding principle in global affairs, namely that “might is right”, rather than a civi-lized, impartial procedure of justice.
Saddam’s were truly indelible crimes against humanity. The appropriate forum to try him would have been the International Criminal Court (ICC). But that option was evaded, because it would expose the real criminal behind Saddam. If he was a mon-ster, then America was Dr. Frankenstein. He was America’s creation, using for his purpose funds, in the Iran-Iraq war, drawn on
Washington’s obsequious Arab allies and arms funnelled through them. As a tool of America’s imperial design against the Iranian revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, his benefactors saw fit to overlook his feral assault on the Kurds and Marsh Arabs. When Iraq with the unremitting and exhaustive support of the US failed to reverse Iran’s rejection of the American diktat, Washington sought to secure its own foothold in the Gulf region, to counter Iranian influence. Dubya’s dad, George Bush Senior’s modus operandi was to inveigle Saddam into invading Kuwait, to provide the rationale for a permanent, extensive military presence in the Middle East.
Irrefragable evidence for this conclusion can be adduced by the fact that between Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and arrival of American forces in the region, there was what could have been a decisive lapse of time. Had Saddam’s motivation been unilateral expansionism, it would have far better suited Saddam’s purpose to strike through to Saudi Arabia, which lay virtually supine before him, the Saudi armed forces being the proverbial gnat’s worth. That he never even considered this option irrecusably indicates that he had been manipulated into thinking that an invasion of Kuwait would not elicit a decisive response from the US. All of which leads to the conclusion that Saddam’s trial had to be a ‘managed’ exercise so that America’s role from 1991 to date, which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, would not be exposed.
Saddam’s execution itself was a botched affair. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing in Saddam’s life so became him as the leaving of it. For many, he metamorphosed from monster to martyr. His execution assumed more of an image of vengeance than due process. An impression rein-forced, as Fate would have it, by his co-accused being decapitated in the process of being hung. The grisly episodes could aptly be a metaphor for America’s policies in several areas.
None but the cerebrally impaired would now deny the unconscionable, inveracious and self-aggrandizing nature of America’s attack on Iraq in spite of three years of occupation, in spite of mindblowing equipment, the Iraqi resistance to American occupation has not been subdued. Now the delusional George ‘Speaks with God’ Bush is preparing to dispatch a further 21,000 troops to that hapless nation. If they perform anywhere near to the 140,000 American troops already in Iraq, their impact is likely to be insignificant. There are actually two wars being fought in Iraq: the first is the Iraqi resistance to the American occupation; the second is the Sunni-Shia conflict. In an earlier attempt to deflect the full force of the Iraqi resistance against US troops, the Americans surreptitiously sparked, what turned into, a sectarian conflagration. Presently, more people are dying in the sectarian conflict than in the US-Iraq struggle. Iraq cannot settle into normalcy unless the sectarian strife is contained.
To that end, US troops will have to engage the Shi’ite militias complicit in the sectarian war. Generally speaking, the Shi’ite have not significantly resisted the American occupation, which is why the predominantly Shi’ite southern Iraq is relatively quiescent. But when US troops move to neutralize the Shi’ite militias, the situation will perforce change.
Shia resistance to the American occupation will escalate. In such a situation the presence of 21,000 additional troops will scarcely make’ a difference, except many, many more Iraqis will die. Apart from the sanguinary aspect in Iraq, there is a possibility of developments that would draw in Saudi Arabia and Iran into the equation, creating an egregious instability in the whole Middle East. It is a lamentable feature of the present world order, that inebriated on power, the US can consign virtually any nation it wants to the hang-man’s rope.

 

Slip sliding along

Comment

Dr Niloufer Mahdi

DECEMBER 25, has come and gone – replete with the predictable, pro forma panegyrics and hagiographies of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. If the soul and material circumstances of a nation could be secured through rhetoric, then Pakistan would have been the most enviable state in the world. As it is, given the chasm between words and deeds, this nation has fallen short even of the ideals which engendered it. The declivity has not been abrupt. There has been steady declension of political and social values over nearly sixty years. For anyone even vaguely interested in the psycho-sociological moorings of the state, it would not require inordinate prescience to infer what Quaid-i-Azam would have thought of developments in post-partition Pakistan.
Perhaps, the most lamentable feature of our existence as a nation is that we do not know what we are. National identity is not primarily definable in terms of a people occupying a sovereign geographical territory. Existentially, identity is premised on ideology and social values. Both are noticeably in abeyance in Pakistan. This is a state without ideological ballast, without a lodestar.
It is glibly iterated that this is an Islamic state. That is meant to take care of ideological necessity. This writer would take issue with that claim. Pakistan is merely a geographical entity within which Muslims live. The connotations of an Islamic state are not adequately included. The Quran categorically states that sovereignty belongs to Allah. In that case, it is Allah’s Will that must prevail, taking form within the state as laws based on His Commands. And His Law is the Shariah. Logically, it becomes difficult to reconcile the notion of an Islamic state with a system based on gobbets of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, with some elements of Shariah.
Academic considerations apart, it is unfortunate that the population of this state appears indifferent to the need for the imposition of an Islamic system, and some sections disagree with it. This factor has historical antecedents. It is an observable fact that subject people tend to emulate their masters, either because that appears the route to success, or it helps to ingratiate the serf with the master. The expansion of Western imperialism served to ingrain such a mindset in the conquered people. The imposition of alien rule distorted the natural development, pride and assurence of the colonies. Worst still, even after the recession of foreign rule, part of the detritus was a persistence of intellectual slavery to the West. This was reinforced by the economic chasm between the West and its erstwhile colonies. Briefly, in Pakistan, as with many other states, development and progress came increasingly to be defined in terms of adopting Western culture. Within this paradigm, countries came to embrace the notion that virtually nothing of autochthonous origin, except for cultural kitsch served up for tourists, can be conducive to modernity and progress. Within this attitude falls the issue of religion.
Concomitantly, within Muslim countries subservient to the West, especially after the latter’s Crusades-like response to Islam, there has been a tendency to mould Islam to fulfil the dictates of the West, the United States in particular. We have been so conditioned by the Western media and cowed by Western power, that we assiduously contrive to modify, or de-emphasize, our religion, particularly in regard to Jihad and resistance to injustice and oppression. To portray ourselves as liberal and progressive, we have deconstructed our mores and ethos and substituted for them the shallow and prurient values of the West.
The net result is that ours is a floundering society, cut adrift from its moorings. Tendentious theses on whether Quaid-i-Azam believed in secularism or confessionalism is superfluous.
Germane to our situation is the total lack of a value system. Ignoring the social strictures imposed by Islam by being brainwashed into believing them to be retrogressive and obscurantist, we have nothing left to adhere to, or guidance as to where to set the bar. Such a laissez-faire environment has spawned the most extensive and deleterious egocentricism at the cost of the national interest. This is the basis of the corruption that destructively gnaws at the vitals of the state. One needs hardly mention that adherence to an Islamic system would have, at institutional level, constrained the worst excesses to which this nation has fallen prey.
A viable, organic, national consensus based on the sagacious, rational, tolerant, enlightened comprehension and implementation of the Shariah, would have acted as a cohering force to restrain the mischief of sectarianism, ethnocentrism and parochialism. Instead of which we are bereft of a viable system because of our sclerotic vision and awe of the West. Hypocritical lip-service to the vision of the Quaid will not redeem the situation.


 

End of a phase
Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi

US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has resigned. The American representative at the UN, John Bolton, has submitted his resignation. The Democrats have won both Houses of the US Congress on a mainly anti-war platform. The Neocon-Zionist combine which constituted the ideological underpinning of American imperialism is in disarray, with many of its stalwarts displaying rodential propensity in abandoning the destructive policies they persuaded President George Bush to launch in the Middle East and the; Muslim world.
It has not been the scale of innocent Muslim deaths, suffering, displacement or societal disruption that has prompted the above-quoted alterations. It is, simply, that under hitherto existing policies, Washington’s aims have not been met. These were, briefly stated, two-fold: first, ensuring that over the long-term, or presently, any impediment to the Zionist. American agenda was conclusively eliminated. Secondly, ensuring control over Muslim polities and national resources. These aims were to be instated through the mailed fist in a specific area, with its ripple effect cowing into submission the whole region. Where this did not automatically occur, the second modality to promote the American agenda was the physical removal of independent leaders, specifically those of Iran and Syria, and substitute for them puppets of the ilk of the Khadimain al-American in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Iraq, and the removal of Saddam Hussein, which was to herald the commencement of the Zionist-American agenda, has morphed into a dec1ivitous slope to hell. A US military report “State of Insurgency in Al-Anbar”, although province-specific, nonetheless applies to the whole of Iraq. Al-Qaeda, according to the report, is fully entrenched in Iraq and American troops are incapable of containing the insurgency. In fact, they have conspicuously failed even in controlling the civil law and order situation. Over swathes of territory, the essential amenities of civilized society are non-functional. The prospects for economic well being are grim. Although Iraq has the second largest proven oil resources globally, severe interruptions in supply militate against optimum availability and utilization. According to the report “illicit oil trading is providing millions of dollars to Al-Qaeda while official profits appear to feed Shiite cronyism in Baghdad.” Ergo, not only is America being denied the oil supplies it went into capture, but it has spent $350b to date on maintaining its aggression in Iraq. The societal impact is horrendous: 650,000 dead, thousands wounded and displaced. Set in destructive motion has been the ideologically premised Shia-Sunni internecine war, ripping out the entrails of both communities. This development was instigated by the Zionist-American cabal. It was a Machiavellian calculation to deflect attacks focused on American forces. However, the malevolent conspiracy backfired. Thousands of innocent Iraqi’s are, indeed, dying but the body count of US solders is markedly increasingly as well, with no end in sight.
Notwithstanding the obtusely optimistic US expectation that Iraq would precipitate a domino-like fall of regional submission to the US the Iraqi adventure has demonstrated the limits of American power. Within the wider context, it is the resistance of other players that has resulted in their elevated prestige. The US-Zionist cabal had planned that subsequent to what was supposed to be a successful aggression against Iraq, it would effect regime change in Syria and Iran, and eliminate the latter’s nascent civilian nuclear programme. However, with the Iraqi situation spiralling beyond apparent redemption, Washington’s comminatory stance against Iran and Syria has, perforce, been modified. That does create a dent in Washington’s imperial hubris.
The situation in the Lebanon has also exposed the limitations of the US-Zionist agenda. Israel assassinated the Lebanese leader, Rafik Hariri, to precipitate the removal of Syrian troops and influence in Lebanon. This was the first step in fulfilment of its plan to reoccupy southern Lebanon to its Litani River. Israel’s autumn attack against that country failed in its objective. To the great pride and resurgent hope of Muslims from Mauritania to Malaysia, Lebanon’s Hezbollah fought the much -vaunted Israeli army to a standstill. Israel’s ignominy also illustrated American limitations. It was Washington that unequivocally and unstintingly propped up its renegade partner’s carnage in the Lebanon. When Israel failed, America failed.
So, too, with Palestine. Despite sanctions and Israel’s murderous forays into Gaza, the democratically elected Hamas government and the indominatable will of the Palestinians endure. Not all the might of the Americans has prevailed against a militarily defenceless people.
Despite these setbacks, it would be irrational to pronounce any exequies over American imperialism. Washington will simply retool the modalities to attempt to achieve the Zionist-American agenda in the Middle East and, indeed, the Muslim world. Sobeit. But all of Allah’s Blessings on the likes of Iran, Syria, Palestine, the Mujahideen who fight against an iniquitous world order, the Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas. They nourish with their blood and sacrifice the belief that faith in Allah does, indeed, empower nations and men to resist craven acquiescence to any temporal power, however super.
 

Where are we at?

Comment
Dr Niloufer Mahdi
IT CANNOT be other than with ineffable sadness, bitter regret and bar-breaking frustration that a committed Pakistani would view the prevailing national scene.
Lets start with the loudest debate, the one pertaining to democracy versus a stratocracy. Military take-overs are hardly salutary interventions in any polity. However, in Pakistan’s case, this is merely an academic assessment. In practical terms, as far as the ‘demos’ is concerned, there is virtually no substantive difference between a civilian and military dispensation.
For those who adhere to the notion that a qualitative distinction exists between the two, their fundamental thesis is that military intervention, or quasi-military rule, is premised on the bullet, whereas civilian rule proceeds from the ballot. In many instances, however, this is a distinction, that in practical terms is rendered irrelevant. The crucial factor that emerges is not the modality for capturing power, but how power is subsequently exercised and, specifically, to what extent it benefits the people. It is not for nothing that an important maxim for a functional democracy has been expressed thus: “Elections are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.” This is indicative of the fact, especially in the case of Pakistan, that whatever the modalities employed to achieve power, if the subsequent exercise of power does not fulfil the conditions of a democratic order, then the respective net impact of an elected or non-elected government will not be marked by any substantive difference as far as the citizens of the state are concerned. There is a conclusive argument which can be adduced to demonstrate that assertion:-
It is incontestable that the basis of a democracy is the rule of law. The indispensability of this condition in the context of a functional democracy lies in the provision of universal equality and accountability before the law, exclusive of any element of grace or favour. This is the only mechanism through which to ensure that arbitrary intervention does not sabotage, subvert or circumvent due process and that, concomitantly, individual rights are not violated. At grass roots level, this could be considered as the most vital aspect of democracy. An impartial scan of juxtaposed ‘autocratic’ and ‘democratic’ rule would ineluctably lead to the conclusion that as far as the predominant sector of Pakistan’s citizenry is concerned, its condition has virtually nothing to do with what category of political dispensation, per se, obtains in the country.
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the working of the system, over several decades, would be aware of the fact that the average citizen has been where he is, regardless of changes in the nation’s leadership. He is no less assured of his rights, no more discriminated against or put upon today than he was under previous governments. The patronage system cuts tempro-spatially across political divides. This is the fundamental reason why Opposition calls against a concurrent COAS and state president simply does not resonate with the masses. Opposition political parties have failed to mobilize the masses on this platform. The irrecusable fact is that the people of Pakistan are concerned with how they are being ruled rather than who is ruling or the features of a political structure. The brouhaha about the uniform emanates from those excluded from the corridors of power, rather than the masses who regard the sartorial issue as irrelevant to their hodiernal existence.
It is worth noting that public indifference to the structural essentials of statehood is a searing indictment of the role of leadership and political parties since the nascence of this state. Ab initio, institutionalized power at every tier of government has been attenuated. Space prohibits expatiation; it will suffice to refer to the above-argued consistent abeyance of the rule of law. Much of this situation can be ascribed to a critical lack of requisite leadership and the failure of political parties to meet the genuine needs of a democratic order.
No political leader in Pakistan has quite succeeded in resisting egocentric compulsions and worked to lay the foundation of a system of genuine institutionalized power. No political party has been able to sustain mobilization of the masses on a platform of universal socio-political imperatives or the constructive principles of statehood. Electoral candidates across the political spectrum conspicuously lack the commitment to enlighten a nescient public or to galvanize support for the national good. What does occur is a morbid appeal to the most crassly individualistic proclivities of human nature to garner votes. All of which cumulatively exercises a deleterious effect on enlightened national progress.
Democracy in a modern nation-state cannot be functional without political parties. In Pakistan where institutions are weak in the political, economic and social spheres, parties have to function across several dimensions. Where we are at presently is hardly reassuring. Parties and their respective leaders will have to make a massive effort to reorientate themselves if they are to meet the conditions of a true democracy.