OPINION: So what about Iran? —Uri Avnery
Daily Times, October 2, 2007
Whoever pushes for war against Iran will come to regret it. Some adventures are easy to get into but hard to get out of. The last one to find this out was Saddam Hussein
A respected American paper posted a scoop this week: Vice-President Dick Cheney, the King of Hawks, has thought up a Machiavellian scheme for an attack on Iran. Its main point: Israel will start by bombing an Iranian nuclear installation, Iran will respond by launching missiles at Israel, and this will serve as a pretext for an American attack on Iran.
Far-fetched? Not really. It is rather like what happened in 1956. Then France, Israel and Britain secretly planned to attack Egypt in order to topple Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. It was agreed that Israeli paratroops would be dropped near the Suez Canal, and that the resulting conflict would serve as a pretext for the French and British to occupy the canal area in order to “secure” the waterway. This plan was implemented (and failed miserably).
What would happen to us if we agreed to Cheney’s plan? Our pilots would risk their lives to bomb the heavily defended Iranian installations. Then, Iranian missiles would rain down on our cities. Hundreds, perhaps thousands would be killed. All this in order to supply the Americans with a pretext to go to war.
Would the pretext have stood up? In other words, is the US obliged to enter a war on our side, even when that war is caused by us? In theory, the answer is yes. The current agreements between the US and Israel say that America has to come to Israel’s aid in any war — whoever started it.
Do Bush, Cheney and Co indeed intend to attack Iran? I don’t know, but my suspicion that they might is getting stronger. Why? Because George Bush is nearing the end of his term of office. If it ends the way things look now, he will be remembered as a very bad — if not the worst — president in the annals of the republic. His term started with the Twin Towers catastrophe, which reflected no great credit on the intelligence agencies, and would come to a close with the grievous Iraq fiasco.
There is only one year left to do something impressive and save his name in the history books. In such situations, leaders tend to look for military adventures.
True, the American army is pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even people like Bush and Cheney could not dream, at this time, of invading a country four times larger than Iraq, with three times the population.
But, quite possibly the war-mongers are whispering in Bush’s ear: What are you worrying about? No need for an invasion. Enough to bomb Iran, as we bombed Serbia and Afghanistan. We shall use the smartest bombs and the most sophisticated missiles against the two thousand or so targets, in order to destroy not only the Iranian nuclear sites but also their military installations and government offices.
That’s a tempting idea. The US will only use its mighty Air Force, missiles of all kinds and the powerful aircraft-carriers, which are already deployed in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. All these can be sent into action at any time on short notice. For a failed president approaching the end of his term, the idea of an easy, short war must have an immense attraction. And this president has already shown how hard it is for him to resist temptations of this kind.
Would this indeed be such an easy operation, a “piece of cake” in American parlance? I doubt it.
Even “smart” bombs kill people. The Iranians are a proud, resolute and highly motivated people. They point out that for two thousand years they have never attacked another country, but during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war they have amply proved their determination to defend their own when attacked.
Their first reaction to an American attack would be to close the Straits of Hormuz, the entrance to the Gulf. That would choke off a large part of the world’s oil supply and cause an unprecedented world-wide economic crisis. To open the straits (if this is at all possible), the US army would have to capture and hold large areas of Iranian territory.
The short and easy war would turn into a long and hard war. What does that mean for us in Israel?
There can be little doubt that if attacked, Iran will respond as it has promised: by bombarding us with the rockets it is preparing for this precise purpose. That will not endanger Israel’s existence, but it will not be pleasant either.
If the American attack turns into a long war of attrition, and if the American public comes to see it as a disaster, -as is happening right now with the Iraqi adventure- some will surely put the blame on Israel. It is no secret that the pro-Israel lobby and its allies — the (mostly Jewish) neo-cons and the Christian Zionists — are pushing America into this war, just as they pushed it into Iraq.
If President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not exist, the Israeli government would have had to invent him. He has got almost everything one could wish for in an enemy. He has a big mouth. He is a braggart. He enjoys causing scandals. He is a Holocaust denier. He prophesies that Israel will “vanish from the map” (though he did not say, as falsely reported, the he would wipe Israel off the map.)
This week, the pro-Israel lobby organised big demonstrations against his visit to New York. They were a huge success — for Ahmadinejad. He has realised his dream of becoming the centre of world attention. He has been given the opportunity to voice his arguments against Israel — some outrageous, some valid — before a world-wide audience.
But Ahmadinejad is not Iran. True, he has won popular elections, but Iran is like the orthodox parties in Israel: it is not their politicians who count, but their rabbis. The Shiite religious leadership makes the decisions and commands the armed forces, and this body is neither boastful nor vociferous not scandal-mongering. It exercises a lot of caution.
If Iran was really so eager to obtain a nuclear bomb, it would have acted in utmost silence and kept as low a profile as possible (as Israel did). The swaggering of Ahmadinejad would hurt this effort more than any enemy of Iran could.
It is highly unpleasant to think about a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands (and, indeed, in any hands.) I hope it can be avoided by offering inducements and/or imposing sanctions. But even if this does not succeed, it would not neither be the end of the world, nor the end of Israel. In this area, more than in any other, Israel’s deterrent power is immense. Even Ahmadinejad will not risk an exchange of queens — the destruction of Iran for the destruction of Israel.
Napoleon said that to understand a country’s policy, one has only to look at the map. If we do this, we shall see that there is no objective reason for war between Israel and Iran. On the contrary, for a long time it was believed in Jerusalem that the two countries were natural allies.
At the time of the Shah, very close connections existed between Iran and Israel, some positive, some negative, some outright sinister. The Shah helped to build a pipeline from Eilat to Askelon, in order to transport Iranian oil to the Mediterranean, bypassing the Suez Canal. The Israel internal secret service (Shabak) trained its notorious Iranian counterpart (Savak). Israelis and Iranians acted together in Iraqi Kurdistan, helping the Kurds against their Sunni-Arab oppressors.
The Khomeini revolution did not, in the beginning, put an end to this alliance, it only drove it underground. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel supplied Iran with arms, on the assumption that anyone fighting Arabs is our friend. At the same time, the Americans supplied arms to Saddam Hussein — one of the rare instances of a clear divergence between Washington and Jerusalem. This was bridged in the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Americans helped Israel to sell arms to the Ayatollahs.
One thing I am ready to predict with confidence: whoever pushes for war against Iran will come to regret it. Some adventures are easy to get into but hard to get out of. The last one to find this out was Saddam Hussein. He thought that it would be a cakewalk — after all, Khomeini had killed off most of the officers, and especially the pilots, of the Shah’s military. He believed that one quick Iraqi blow would be enough to bring about the collapse of Iran. He had eight long years of war to regret it.
Both the Americans and we may soon be feeling that the Iraqi mud is like whipped cream compared to the Iranian quagmire.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist who has advocated the setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He served three terms in the Israeli parliament (Knesset), and is the founder of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc)
Monday, October 01, 2007
Pakistan's Courts
Pakistan's Courts By Paula Newberg
The Huffington Post, October 1, 2007
On Friday, Pakistan's Supreme Court ruled to allow Gen. Pervez Musharaff's bid to run for another term. "The President respects and honors the judgment of the Supreme Court," said Musharaff's spokesman, continuing with unintended irony, "as always."
If only this were true. This is a president who sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry last spring when the Court's docket challenged government prerogatives, and was then forced to reinstate him after lawyers took to the streets and a judicial council overruled the General. The Court subsequently ruled that former Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif had the right to return from exile, but Musharaff unceremoniously deported him before he entered the country. Opposition politicians then petitioned to deny Musharaff a chance to run for another term. This time, they lost.
Pakistan's judiciary is once again at the center of a fight for the country's political future. For a few short months this year, it looked like the Supreme Court might succeed where Pakistan's pliant politicians and faltering parliaments have failed -- by interjecting constitutional principles into a fractious political environment that breeds opportunism more than good sense.
After eight years of Musharaff's rule -- long on authority, short on democracy, contemptuous of the daily maelstrom that others call politics -- Pakistan's lawyers and civic activists began to vest their hopes in a judiciary whose docket, demeanor and judgments might pave a path toward its own independence. But as the Supreme Court Bar Association president noted after Friday's ruling, "we still have a long way to go."
What does it mean for the courts to be independent? This list of requirements is familiar around the world: no interference in judicial appointments or the content or conduct of trials, no harassment of judges and lawyers, no constraints on the structure of functioning of courts or constitutions. Clear -- yes. Straightforward? Not in Pakistan.
Where the rule of law is uncertain, the role of the courts is, too. And in Pakistan, uncertainty has ruled for 60 years. Decades of military dominance have eviscerated parliaments and diluted, abrogated and negated Pakistan's constitutions. Military courts have often replaced civil tribunals. Past dictators removed judges, forced them to pledge loyalty to leaders rather than the constitution, and often placed them under extraordinary duress.
When Musharaff's own legal advisor, Sharifuddin Pirzada, was Attorney General under General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s, he continued to argue cases for private clients before judges over whom he had the power to hire and fire. Some judges, of course, have chosen patronage over principle; some have ruled to hang politicians. But many have labored, often without success, to temper the extremes of a fragile political system that can easily implode under the weight of its contradictions.
The more Pakistan's leaders have blurred the lines between military and civilian rule, and presidential and parliamentary politics, the more troubling the role of these unsung heroes has become. Every time the army has seized power, the courts have validated its actions, bowing to prudence -- or as early judgments called it, "necessity" -- to legitimate dictatorship in the name of caution and stability. On rare occasion, it has reversed itself, but only retrospectively, and sadly, temporarily.
More often, the courts have filled the gaping holes created by Pakistan's fragmented and incomplete political system -- a symptom of political manipulation far more than judicial independence. Imprisoned opposition leaders have traditionally sought recourse from the courts. But just as overweening executives have used the courts to enforce their will, so politicians have sought judicial cover for policy on everything from fundamental to rights to business decisions. Balancing unpalatable extremes, however, is a high-wire act, not justice.
Take Friday's ruling. Opposition lawyers contended that allowing Musharaff to run again was tantamount to justifying his unconstitutional appropriation of power in 1999 -- something the Court had indeed done then. But Justice Javed Iqbal noted, quite rightly, that the parliament -- compliant, if restive -- had also legitimated the coup d'etat. So the Court rested its decision on technical grounds -- who has the right to contest what -- rather than on the contentious constitutional problems that plague the state.
Point, counterpoint: there's certainly enough blame to go around. Surely, judicial prudence is as much at fault as the political conditions that have so often forced the hands of judges. From Pakistan's early years, its judge's memoirs -- even more than their judgments -- have testified to the dangers of constitutional manipulations, the vagaries of power, and the awkward role that courts play when rules, not law, run the state. Passing the buck back to an unrepresentative parliament that plays games by army rules, however, has never worked, and won't work now.
Voters want more -- from the courts, the government and themselves. They want judges to rule in favor of something they believe is democracy, as a proxy for the fundamental rights that Pakistan's governments have rarely come close to protecting.
Contradicting the government will not, by itself, make the courts free, and certainly won't deliver justice. For that to happen, the country must agree to abide by court decisions. That's where Musharaff has gone wrong: not only by firing judges, but also by disregarding their judgments.
By so doing, he has given license to everyone else to do the same. Lawyers are back on the streets, the police are back to beating them, and the order that General Musharaff craves (and promises to his American allies) has, once again, dissolved.
According to the Supreme Court, Musharaff can now run for president -- again. He has given himself the right to decide whether to remain army chief -- again. Whether he can continue to run the country will depend on how much respect he gives to constitutionalism -- and the courts that guard it.
Paula Newberg has covered Pakistan for almost thirty years, and is the author of Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan.
The Huffington Post, October 1, 2007
On Friday, Pakistan's Supreme Court ruled to allow Gen. Pervez Musharaff's bid to run for another term. "The President respects and honors the judgment of the Supreme Court," said Musharaff's spokesman, continuing with unintended irony, "as always."
If only this were true. This is a president who sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry last spring when the Court's docket challenged government prerogatives, and was then forced to reinstate him after lawyers took to the streets and a judicial council overruled the General. The Court subsequently ruled that former Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif had the right to return from exile, but Musharaff unceremoniously deported him before he entered the country. Opposition politicians then petitioned to deny Musharaff a chance to run for another term. This time, they lost.
Pakistan's judiciary is once again at the center of a fight for the country's political future. For a few short months this year, it looked like the Supreme Court might succeed where Pakistan's pliant politicians and faltering parliaments have failed -- by interjecting constitutional principles into a fractious political environment that breeds opportunism more than good sense.
After eight years of Musharaff's rule -- long on authority, short on democracy, contemptuous of the daily maelstrom that others call politics -- Pakistan's lawyers and civic activists began to vest their hopes in a judiciary whose docket, demeanor and judgments might pave a path toward its own independence. But as the Supreme Court Bar Association president noted after Friday's ruling, "we still have a long way to go."
What does it mean for the courts to be independent? This list of requirements is familiar around the world: no interference in judicial appointments or the content or conduct of trials, no harassment of judges and lawyers, no constraints on the structure of functioning of courts or constitutions. Clear -- yes. Straightforward? Not in Pakistan.
Where the rule of law is uncertain, the role of the courts is, too. And in Pakistan, uncertainty has ruled for 60 years. Decades of military dominance have eviscerated parliaments and diluted, abrogated and negated Pakistan's constitutions. Military courts have often replaced civil tribunals. Past dictators removed judges, forced them to pledge loyalty to leaders rather than the constitution, and often placed them under extraordinary duress.
When Musharaff's own legal advisor, Sharifuddin Pirzada, was Attorney General under General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s, he continued to argue cases for private clients before judges over whom he had the power to hire and fire. Some judges, of course, have chosen patronage over principle; some have ruled to hang politicians. But many have labored, often without success, to temper the extremes of a fragile political system that can easily implode under the weight of its contradictions.
The more Pakistan's leaders have blurred the lines between military and civilian rule, and presidential and parliamentary politics, the more troubling the role of these unsung heroes has become. Every time the army has seized power, the courts have validated its actions, bowing to prudence -- or as early judgments called it, "necessity" -- to legitimate dictatorship in the name of caution and stability. On rare occasion, it has reversed itself, but only retrospectively, and sadly, temporarily.
More often, the courts have filled the gaping holes created by Pakistan's fragmented and incomplete political system -- a symptom of political manipulation far more than judicial independence. Imprisoned opposition leaders have traditionally sought recourse from the courts. But just as overweening executives have used the courts to enforce their will, so politicians have sought judicial cover for policy on everything from fundamental to rights to business decisions. Balancing unpalatable extremes, however, is a high-wire act, not justice.
Take Friday's ruling. Opposition lawyers contended that allowing Musharaff to run again was tantamount to justifying his unconstitutional appropriation of power in 1999 -- something the Court had indeed done then. But Justice Javed Iqbal noted, quite rightly, that the parliament -- compliant, if restive -- had also legitimated the coup d'etat. So the Court rested its decision on technical grounds -- who has the right to contest what -- rather than on the contentious constitutional problems that plague the state.
Point, counterpoint: there's certainly enough blame to go around. Surely, judicial prudence is as much at fault as the political conditions that have so often forced the hands of judges. From Pakistan's early years, its judge's memoirs -- even more than their judgments -- have testified to the dangers of constitutional manipulations, the vagaries of power, and the awkward role that courts play when rules, not law, run the state. Passing the buck back to an unrepresentative parliament that plays games by army rules, however, has never worked, and won't work now.
Voters want more -- from the courts, the government and themselves. They want judges to rule in favor of something they believe is democracy, as a proxy for the fundamental rights that Pakistan's governments have rarely come close to protecting.
Contradicting the government will not, by itself, make the courts free, and certainly won't deliver justice. For that to happen, the country must agree to abide by court decisions. That's where Musharaff has gone wrong: not only by firing judges, but also by disregarding their judgments.
By so doing, he has given license to everyone else to do the same. Lawyers are back on the streets, the police are back to beating them, and the order that General Musharaff craves (and promises to his American allies) has, once again, dissolved.
According to the Supreme Court, Musharaff can now run for president -- again. He has given himself the right to decide whether to remain army chief -- again. Whether he can continue to run the country will depend on how much respect he gives to constitutionalism -- and the courts that guard it.
Paula Newberg has covered Pakistan for almost thirty years, and is the author of Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Benazir Bhutto's Remark about AQ Khan
Fuss over Bhutto's nuclear remarks By Farhatullah Babar
The News, October 01, 2007
The fuss over Ms Benazir Bhutto's remarks over cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not surprising. Indeed it is déjà vu. Those whose pastime is to dub her as 'security risk' are at it again. The monopolists of truth and wisdom are out to make a punching bag of her. Whenever she says something that runs counter to the officially certified truth she is lambasted for presumed lack of patriotism or toeing the enemy line. It is a different matter though the critics later come round to accepting the logic and reason.
For instance, when she called for promoting people-to-people contacts and pulling down the 'invisible Berlin Wall' between India and Pakistan, she was instantly accused of betraying the martyrs' blood. Call for demolishing the invisible Berlin Wall was resented not because it meant betrayal of the martyrs but because it would take away some shine from the glittering medallions. Today even the ardent advocates of Kargil adventure acknowledge, at least publicly, the compelling logic of pulling down the barriers, easing tensions and liberalising trade in the subcontinent. They seem to recognise that normalisation should not be stalled just because talks on Kashmir have not yet produced results.
When, some years ago, she warned against the hijacking of the liberation struggle in Kashmir by extremist non-Kashmiri groups saying it was the ultimate disservice to the cause of Kashmir, she was accused of undermining jihad and even toeing the Indian line. But soon the supporters of jihadis recognised the rationale. Responsible Kashmiri leaders themselves decry the non-Kashmiri jihadi outfits. Gen Musaharraf has even cried out louder. Don't export your jihadi zeal and khudai faujdar mat bano (Do not assume the role of God's army), he warned them in his address to the nation on January 22, 2002.
It is said that wisdom dawns upon the unwise also but only after damage has been caused. What did Ms Bhutto say lately about the IAEA that seems to have let the cat into the pigeons? At the outset she said that the issue of allowing IAEA access to Dr AQ Khan was a hypothetical one and did not arise at this stage. However, she said her government will cooperate with the IAEA in questioning those who have acknowledged the role in proliferation of nuclear technology. What is wrong with it?
Has the government itself not permitted the IAEA to put written questions to Dr AQ Khan, the replies to which are then forwarded to the UN agency? Has Gen Musharraf not admitted in his memoirs sharing 'all information' about the nuclear black market with the international agencies? What must be our central concern -- protection of those who proliferated or protection of our nuclear assets? Protection of nuclear assets demands that Pakistan is perceived as a responsible state acquiring nuclear technology for its legitimate defence and economic needs and not for setting up the juma bazaar of nuclear materials and technology. It is in our interest to cooperate with the UN watchdog body to disabuse the notion that any government in the past or any state institution was involved in the nuclear black market. The protection of our nuclear assets lies in assuring the international community that ours is not a rogue state that protects the proliferators.
This has become even more important after General Musharraf made startling revelations in his memoirs about the international nuclear black market and the role of some Pakistanis in it. Chapter 27 "Nuclear Proliferation" (pages 283-294) of his memoirs reads like an FIR that also names some Pakistanis. How can we say no to investigations? According to General Musharraf, "Our investigations revealed that AQ had started his activities as far back as 1987, primarily with Iran. In 1994-94 AQ had ordered the manufacture of 200 centrifuges. These had been dispatched to Dubai for onward distribution". Further, "Dr AQ Khan transferred nearly two dozen P-1 and P-2 centrifuges to North Korea" (page 294). This is followed by a revelation that would send many into a tail spin, "To the Iranians and Libyan, through Dubai, he provided nearly eighteen tons of materials, including centrifuges, components and drawings", saying also "the deal with Libya is estimated to be in the region of $ 100 million" (page 294). Describing AQ Khan as "not part of the problem but the problem itself" (page 288), the memoirs claim "all this information has been shared with concerned investigation international agencies".
General Musharraf did the right thing in sharing nuclear black market information with international bodies. But after having informed the IAEA that 18 tons of nuclear materials were clandestinely shipped out of Pakistan supposedly by one person, can Ms Bhutto be faulted for saying that she will cooperate with the UN in unearthing the black market. Behind lambasting Ms Bhutto is the lurking fear that there could be more than just one skeleton in the cupboard. Behind it also is the doubt that General Musharraf's candid expose of the nuclear black market may not be candid after all. If we have to protect the nuclear assets there is no alternative to take out the black market roots, branches and leaves. The logic of this reasoning will also be accepted like the logic behind the peace process and disbanding the jihadis before it. One only hopes that its wisdom dawns before any damage is done.
The writer is a former PPP senator and a member of the Senate's human rights committee. Email: drkhshan@isb.comsats.net.pk
Also See: The Real Security Threat, Dawn, October 1, 2007
Pakistan Army and the Wars Within
Editorial: Pakistan army and the nation
Daily Times, October 1, 2007
The politics in Islamabad today is posited by the opposition as a battle for civilian rule and the confinement of the Pakistan army to its constitutional role. The lawyers’ community and the opposition political parties may have different agendas up their sleeves, but at the declaratory level it is the civilian-military relationship that everyone is supposed to be trying to correct. Even the ruling party, by keeping a general as president, promises a more reliable reversion to more democracy. The consensus is apparently shared by President General Pervez Musharraf himself. But the antagonists fall apart on whether the post-Musharraf period should be “transformational” or “transitional”.
A Pakistani scholar has tried to “define” the character of the Pakistan army in his forthcoming book. A journalist and an ex-IMF officer, Shuja Nawaz, in his Crossed Swords: Pakistan Army and the Wars Within (not yet published), compares it to the army of Indonesia under Sukarno and Suharto instead of the Turkish army as is often done by those who wish to posit a polarity between the army and the people. He explains that “the army has gradually expanded its remit to include protection of the national ideology, as defined by the army itself. He said this ideology has changed from a loose definition of a Muslim state at birth to an Islamic polity under Zia-ul-Haq, and now to the ‘enlightened moderation’ of General Pervez Musharraf, even as the growing urban population appears to prefer the conservative end of the social and political spectrum”.
The Pakistan army was a professional outfit in the beginning. It accepted the challenge of an anti-India nationalism after the 1947 war in Kashmir and was supported by the country’s civilian leaders. Early Pakistani nationalism was based on the warlike self-image of the subcontinental Muslim, thinking nothing of the strategic mismatch with a much larger and “unconquerable” India as “the other”. This army embraced a tactical worldview during these early years, which in time became a part of its persona. It overthrew civilian governments in a politically conflictual early phase to carry out the anti-India mission it had been bequeathed by civilian leaders but suffered defeats at the hands of India.
After the Pakistani mind began to regard the army as a defeated/discredited entity usurping political space, the army clutched at the “ideology of Pakistan”, a much safer route to its fundamental mission of fighting a “just war” with India. It did so after the last testament of Pakistan’s anti-India nationalism was framed by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in his book The Myth of Independence (1969). He reaffirmed confrontation with India as the “grundnorm” of Pakistan’s foreign policy: “1) That the US is in a position to compel both India and Pakistan simultaneously to an arrangement compatible with its own global interests; 2) that the US thinks that its detente with the USSR, coupled with China’s continued weakness, will strengthen its power over Asia; 3) that the US and the USSR are acting in concert to force a settlement between India and Pakistan, which will effectively force Pakistan to accept Indian hegemony in the region; 4) that the US seeks peace between India and Pakistan to use them against China”.
Author Shuja Nawaz says: “It is important for the army to help create a stable national polity by subjecting itself in practice to civilian oversight and control ... [and] on its side, the civilian government needs to ensure that it follows the Constitution fully and does not involve the military in political disputes.” He warns that while the army remains a conservative institution at heart, it is not yet a breeding ground for large numbers of radical Islamists that many fear.
An unspoken consensus in Pakistan against the state’s anti-India-driven mission statement is in place today; only the politician has to begin to articulate it, not only for the economic survival of the people but also for the final “correction” of the “middle class” Pakistan Army. Pakistan’s “revisionist” nationalism has been at the root of conflict in the region and domestic supremacy of the Pakistan army. But once it has been recast in light of the new economic imperatives, redefining Pakistan’s geopolitical location, not as an obstruction to trade routes, but as a trade corridor joining two important land masses in Asia, the Pakistan army will stop representing the uncomfortable strategic “over-stretch” of the state to become a benign institution, insulated against all political upheavals inside the state because these upheavals will no longer jeopardise its mission. *
One More Push Comrades...
One more push, comrades
By Ayaz Amir: Dawn, September 28, 2007 (Written and Published before saturday clashes in Islamabad)
AIK dhaka aur, comes a cry from afar, for the towers of authoritarianism are tottering, the halls of government are in dreadful confusion, the spoons (chamchas) of this order don’t know what to say, and the crisis which erupted on March 9 – always to be remembered as a glorious day in our history – enters a decisive phase.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. As a nation we either collapse into a state of collective depression or, with luck on our side, step forward into a brave new future. It’s not a question of one man’s fate.
If it were that it would be nothing. No, it is a question affecting the country’s future. For, in the next few days we have to answer the question whether we are at all fit for
self-government or only fit to be herded like cattle by one self-appointed saviour after another?
This question can also be framed in a slightly different manner. The next few days will decide whether the Pakistani dream was worth it – worth all the effort and sacrifice that went into its making – or was it, after all, an exercise in futility. For, let us make no mistake about it: subordinating the national will to the interests of an individual amounts to nullifying the struggle for Pakistan, making nonsense of Iqbal and Jinnah and whatever they stood for.
Was Pakistan created to make it safe for military rule? An absurd proposition but then no more absurd than the games we see being played around us. The Supreme Court’s decision on the question of Pervez Musharraf’s eligibility to stand as a presidential candidate while in uniform is eagerly awaited. And what is the gist of this case? Can an army chief stand for president? People around the world must be laughing at us, wondering what kind of people we are. It is sixty years since we gained independence, seven years into a new century, and some of the country’s best legal minds have spent days wrangling over the absurdity of an army chief, one past his retirement date, standing for president?
And it’s not as if it is a ‘genuine’ election we are talking about. This is a set-up affair, a fake and phony presidential election, assemblies whose term is about to end ‘electing’ Musharraf for five more years. Eight years in power already but the lust for power remains as strong as ever.
What does it matter if the nation, heartily sick of Pakistan’s lackey status to the United States, wants a change, any change as long as it is a bit different from the dispiriting performance of the last eight years. Self-interest decrees otherwise.
What’s it with us and democracy? Why is our preferred model always someone like Hosni Mubarak or Suharto? Why does the autocratic mode of governance hold sway over most of the lands of Islam?
The developed world may have embraced democracy – indeed democracy being one of the hallmarks of its progress – but why does the meaning of democracy elude our grasp?
What an historic opportunity we in Pakistan have wasted. With our British legacy of parliamentary democracy, we could have been different, a model and beacon for the rest of the Islamic world.
But driven perhaps by an all-consuming sense of insecurity, we systematically went about destroying the foundations of democracy gifted to us by the British and instead raised monuments to greed and incompetence.
Greed and incompetence becoming our national gods, it was perhaps natural that we sought comfort in dictatorships, whether civil or military. Greed and incompetence can flourish under a democratic umbrella too (remember some of our democratic heroes and heroines) but if one is really serious about looting national wealth, nothing like a shabby dictatorship to make it happen.
Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Sani Abacha in Nigeria all of them deserving Oscars for looting their countries. In a democracy, however bad, a Zardari or a Sharif can be questioned and denounced. In the kind of setup we have, there can be a sugar scam, insider trading on the stock exchange, a questionable sale of the national steel mills (mercifully aborted by the Supreme Court), and now a wheat scam and few questions are asked. If the economic wizards of the present dispensation could have their way we would be rid of most of our national assets, including the national airlines.
I am in Lahore for the past few days and the stories one hears about ‘qabza’ groups and shady financial dealings are straight out of Mafia fiction. With so much at stake, who in his right senses would think of relinquishing power?
So are we dead as a nation, immune to things great and uplifting? By no means and this is the baffling part because given all that we have had to endure our spirit as a nation should have been dead long ago. Given the slightest opportunity the Pakistani nation stirs in its sleep and comes alive, as we saw during the course of the lawyers’ movement when across the country a groundswell of support arose spontaneously for Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and lawyers agitating on his behalf.
CJ Chaudhry may have had his faults (which mortal does not?) but something in the way he stood up to Musharraf touched the nation’s heart and so people in their thousands came out to cheer him when he took to the road to address different bar associations.
The common people of this country, those who are not into the national pastime of getting rich by fair means or foul, worship courage, they worship selflessness. They have an instinctive feeling for what is right and what is wrong. Crores if not billions of rupees are being spent on a television campaign these days extolling Musharraf as some kind of a national deliverer.
What will make fools in government realise that TV ads make a hero of no one? Pervaiz Ellahi, the Punjab chief minister, has spent billions in self-serving ads since coming to power. Does he think his public image has been enhanced because of this self-glorification?
Why don’t people come out on the streets on the call of the political parties? Because they are sick of the antics of the paper tigers who head them. Who in all of Pakistan is prepared to take Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Musharraf’s deadliest secret weapon, seriously? He only has to open his mouth on television for viewers to start sniggering, all too aware of his huge talent for false logic. Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto may have signed no public pact but who in the country doesn’t know that some kind of an understanding has been struck between them? Benazir is playing softball with the general and he with her. She continues to swear by democracy but is anyone fooled by her protestations?
As for the Sharifs it will be some before they stop paying penance for the deal they struck with Saudi help way back in 2000. What you sow is what you reap.
By Ayaz Amir: Dawn, September 28, 2007 (Written and Published before saturday clashes in Islamabad)
AIK dhaka aur, comes a cry from afar, for the towers of authoritarianism are tottering, the halls of government are in dreadful confusion, the spoons (chamchas) of this order don’t know what to say, and the crisis which erupted on March 9 – always to be remembered as a glorious day in our history – enters a decisive phase.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. As a nation we either collapse into a state of collective depression or, with luck on our side, step forward into a brave new future. It’s not a question of one man’s fate.
If it were that it would be nothing. No, it is a question affecting the country’s future. For, in the next few days we have to answer the question whether we are at all fit for
self-government or only fit to be herded like cattle by one self-appointed saviour after another?
This question can also be framed in a slightly different manner. The next few days will decide whether the Pakistani dream was worth it – worth all the effort and sacrifice that went into its making – or was it, after all, an exercise in futility. For, let us make no mistake about it: subordinating the national will to the interests of an individual amounts to nullifying the struggle for Pakistan, making nonsense of Iqbal and Jinnah and whatever they stood for.
Was Pakistan created to make it safe for military rule? An absurd proposition but then no more absurd than the games we see being played around us. The Supreme Court’s decision on the question of Pervez Musharraf’s eligibility to stand as a presidential candidate while in uniform is eagerly awaited. And what is the gist of this case? Can an army chief stand for president? People around the world must be laughing at us, wondering what kind of people we are. It is sixty years since we gained independence, seven years into a new century, and some of the country’s best legal minds have spent days wrangling over the absurdity of an army chief, one past his retirement date, standing for president?
And it’s not as if it is a ‘genuine’ election we are talking about. This is a set-up affair, a fake and phony presidential election, assemblies whose term is about to end ‘electing’ Musharraf for five more years. Eight years in power already but the lust for power remains as strong as ever.
What does it matter if the nation, heartily sick of Pakistan’s lackey status to the United States, wants a change, any change as long as it is a bit different from the dispiriting performance of the last eight years. Self-interest decrees otherwise.
What’s it with us and democracy? Why is our preferred model always someone like Hosni Mubarak or Suharto? Why does the autocratic mode of governance hold sway over most of the lands of Islam?
The developed world may have embraced democracy – indeed democracy being one of the hallmarks of its progress – but why does the meaning of democracy elude our grasp?
What an historic opportunity we in Pakistan have wasted. With our British legacy of parliamentary democracy, we could have been different, a model and beacon for the rest of the Islamic world.
But driven perhaps by an all-consuming sense of insecurity, we systematically went about destroying the foundations of democracy gifted to us by the British and instead raised monuments to greed and incompetence.
Greed and incompetence becoming our national gods, it was perhaps natural that we sought comfort in dictatorships, whether civil or military. Greed and incompetence can flourish under a democratic umbrella too (remember some of our democratic heroes and heroines) but if one is really serious about looting national wealth, nothing like a shabby dictatorship to make it happen.
Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Sani Abacha in Nigeria all of them deserving Oscars for looting their countries. In a democracy, however bad, a Zardari or a Sharif can be questioned and denounced. In the kind of setup we have, there can be a sugar scam, insider trading on the stock exchange, a questionable sale of the national steel mills (mercifully aborted by the Supreme Court), and now a wheat scam and few questions are asked. If the economic wizards of the present dispensation could have their way we would be rid of most of our national assets, including the national airlines.
I am in Lahore for the past few days and the stories one hears about ‘qabza’ groups and shady financial dealings are straight out of Mafia fiction. With so much at stake, who in his right senses would think of relinquishing power?
So are we dead as a nation, immune to things great and uplifting? By no means and this is the baffling part because given all that we have had to endure our spirit as a nation should have been dead long ago. Given the slightest opportunity the Pakistani nation stirs in its sleep and comes alive, as we saw during the course of the lawyers’ movement when across the country a groundswell of support arose spontaneously for Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and lawyers agitating on his behalf.
CJ Chaudhry may have had his faults (which mortal does not?) but something in the way he stood up to Musharraf touched the nation’s heart and so people in their thousands came out to cheer him when he took to the road to address different bar associations.
The common people of this country, those who are not into the national pastime of getting rich by fair means or foul, worship courage, they worship selflessness. They have an instinctive feeling for what is right and what is wrong. Crores if not billions of rupees are being spent on a television campaign these days extolling Musharraf as some kind of a national deliverer.
What will make fools in government realise that TV ads make a hero of no one? Pervaiz Ellahi, the Punjab chief minister, has spent billions in self-serving ads since coming to power. Does he think his public image has been enhanced because of this self-glorification?
Why don’t people come out on the streets on the call of the political parties? Because they are sick of the antics of the paper tigers who head them. Who in all of Pakistan is prepared to take Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Musharraf’s deadliest secret weapon, seriously? He only has to open his mouth on television for viewers to start sniggering, all too aware of his huge talent for false logic. Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto may have signed no public pact but who in the country doesn’t know that some kind of an understanding has been struck between them? Benazir is playing softball with the general and he with her. She continues to swear by democracy but is anyone fooled by her protestations?
As for the Sharifs it will be some before they stop paying penance for the deal they struck with Saudi help way back in 2000. What you sow is what you reap.
The Roar of Rumi - 800 years on
The roar of Rumi - 800 years on
By Charles Haviland: BBC News, Balkh, northern Afghanistan: September 30, 2007
For many years now, the most popular poet in America has been a 13th-century mystical Muslim scholar.
Translations of Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi's - better known as Rumi - verse are hugely popular and have been used by Western pop stars such as Madonna.
They are attracted by his tributes to the power of love and his belief in the spiritual use of music and dancing - although scholars stress that he was talking about spiritual love between people and God, not earthly love.
Rumi, whose 800th birth anniversary falls on Sunday, was born in 1207 in Balkh in Central Asia, now part of Afghanistan.
I came here to see whether he has much resonance in his native country which, under the Taleban, went so far as to ban music.
Still standing
A young Afghan archaeologist, Reza Hosseini, took me to the ruins of the mud-and-brick-built khanaqa - a kind of madrassa or religious school - where Rumi's father taught and the young boy is believed to have studied, lying just outside the old mud city walls and probably within yards of his birthplace.
It is a quiet and melancholy place, the structure eroded and encroached on by shrubs and bushes.
But an amazing amount of it is still standing - the square structure, its four arches with pointed tops, in the Islamic style, and half of the graceful dome.
Mr Hosseini says the floor was originally constructed of baked bricks and lined with carpets donated by those who came to share the learning.
Sufism - or Islamic mysticism - was already enshrined here before Rumi's time and Mr Hosseini imagines that this corner of the town, by the madrassa, would have echoed to the sound of Sufi singing and prayer.
But, he says, it is unclear how widespread, or acceptable, practices such as music and dance were in the wider population.
When Rumi was barely out of his teens, Balkh was reduced to rubble by Genghis Khan's marauding Mongol invaders.
Rumi had fled in advance with his family and settled in Konya, now in Turkey.
After the murder of his close friend, a Persian wandering dervish called Shams-i-Tabriz, he was depressed for years but later wrote his greatest poetic work, the Mathnawi.
It describes the soul's separation from God and the mutual yearning to reunite.
With his injunctions of tolerance and love, he has universal appeal, says Abdul Qadir Misbah, a culture specialist in the Balkh provincial government.
"Whether a person is from East or West, he can feel the roar of Rumi," he says.
Great love
"When a religious scholar reads the Mathnawi, he interprets it religiously. And when sociologists study it, they say how powerful a sociologist Rumi was. When people in the West study it, they see that it's full of emotions of humanity."
The Sufi mystical tradition is not immediately apparent in modern Afghanistan.
But with Mr Hosseini's help, I traced a small group of eight Sufi musicians in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif whose great love is Rumi's poetry.
First there is a solo from Rumi's favoured instrument, the reed flute.
Then the flute player is joined by Mohammed Zakir, usually a shopkeeper, who fills the room with his powerful voice in interpreting the words "I'm a man who's not afraid of love; I'm a moth who's not afraid of burning".
In the third song, all the men join in with an extraordinary, percussive vocal sound which, Mr Zakir says, comes straight from the heart. It continues for nearly 10 intense minutes.
I meet Professor Abdulah Rohen, a local expert on the poet, who says that, regrettably, knowledge of Rumi - also known as Mawlana - has declined recently.
"Forty years ago the economic situation of the people was good. People would work in the summer time collecting food and would eat it in winter. In winter they were free. They would gather in mosques and sing Mawlana's poems.
'Disfavour'
"But in the past 10 or 15 years people's economic situation has deteriorated, so they are far from Mawlana."
He says the advent of communism in Afghanistan brought poetry into disfavour because it was seen as backward-looking.
Then the Taleban attempted to crush Sufism and outlawed all music, but Prof Rohen says it has since regained huge popularity.
According to him, Rumi brought Sufi mysticism away from asceticism and into the heart of the people.
Many western fans of Rumi have secularised his message.
It was in fact a religious one; and, says Prof Rohen, Christians and Jews as well as Muslims flocked to his funeral.
I ask him to sum up the poet's message and he offers a quote.
"Mawlana says - if the sky is not in love, then it will not be so clear. If the sun is not in love, then it will not be giving any light. If the river is not in love, then it will be in silence, it will not be moving. If the mountains, the earth are not in love, then there will be nothing growing."
Book Review: On Pashtuns and Tribal Areas
BOOK REVIEW: Tribal stories that reveal character by Khaled Ahmed
Daily Times, September 30, 2007
Pashtun Tales from the Pakistan-Afghan Frontier
by Aisha Ahmad & Roger Boase
Publisher: Saqi Books 2003
The foremost theme of the treasure collected in the book pertains to what the Pashtunwali terms badal or revenge. In the tale titled Musa Khan Deo, it is the jinn that has to avenge the insult of a moustache snipped by a proud princess
A scion of the great Pathan tradition in Pakistan, Aisha Ahmad, has collected the tribal stories that underpin the complex Pashtun psyche in Pakistan. Somehow Peshawar in Pakistan’s NWFP province has been associated with the recall of this collective mind. There is even a Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar where visitors have flocked again and again in vain to collect the lost tales of a great ethnic stock known in India and Pakistan as Pathans.
When Aisha went in search of the tales, she predictably failed in the Qissa Khwani Bazaar which may now resonate exclusively with the Wahhabi inspiration unleashed by the warrior-priest in the region. She finally found the bard named Saeed Baba in the Mohmand Agency in 1977 and collected what may be called the last treasure of ancestral tales that the suicide bombers of Al Qaeda may be about to destroy. Along with the radio, the modernity of “facts” is in the process of defeating the Pashtun soul.
The preface notes: ‘The traditional Pashtun way of life was seriously disrupted by the social consequences of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere, and many years of civil strife”. Over 80 percent of the 6 million refugees displaced by the intervention were Pashtuns, 12 million of whom live in Pakistan as opposed 7 million that live in Afghanistan. Saeed Baba’s fairy tales are treated with the same kind of modern disdain as the tribes treated their professional classes.
The book quickly brings to the fore the tribal denigration of the professionals. This applies to all the ‘devolved’ Pathans too that live in the plains of Pakistan and India. Employment of the state became honourable for those who climbed down from the mountains. This extended later to the employment of the British Raj, but the professions remained clean of Pathans because the ancestral memory of the highlander hinterland made fun of these callings. From barber, weaver, spinner, tailor and story-teller, the scoffing devolved to all commercial callings with the passage of time and today stands in the way of ‘modern’ normalisation of the Pashtuns.
The stories encompass the Pashtunwali, the code of life that bestows and takes away the honour of the Pashtun and makes them so attractive to the detribalised people of the plains. The foremost theme of the treasure collected in the book pertains to what the Pashtunwali terms badal or revenge. In the tale titled Musa Khan Deo, it is the jinn that has to avenge the insult of a moustache snipped by a proud princess. Even wives take up arms to avenge the insult attached to the rape of the husband’s moustache probably because the man himself was too prostrated by the grief of losing the hair on his upper lip.
The second item in the tribal code is melamstia or hospitality found in all pastoral societies where the tribe is isolated with territory strictly delimited according to its food sustainability. Melmastia goes together with nanawati (submission) when a stranger is offered hospitality and protection after he has thrown himself on the mercy of the host tribe. In both cases the delimitation of territory is significant and the relief at knowing that a stranger is not a marauder triggers large-heartedness. Prince Bahram forgives six jinns because their sister had been hospitable to him during his wanderings.
The book classifies the tales under rubrics of belief in fate, debt among peasants, importance of male heirs (read denigration of the female child), and stupidity and clownishness of the menial tribes, giving rise to much humour today under attack from the high-seriousness of hard Islam. The story of a king pondering his lack of a male heir in a secluded corner of his palace recalls stories in the plains as well where sons are even today considered more important than daughters against all available evidence. Menial tribes give rise to humour and point to the racism of the Pashtun especially when he is juxtaposed with the plainsman Punjabi.
‘The Parrot and the Starling’ expresses the fear of the black man as sexually superior, so well expressed in the tales of The Arabian Nights, which could well be the source of the tale as the Pashtuns hardly had any truck with the African slaves in their society. The miracle story, when they mixed with Islam, could have been imported too, probably from the fuzzy Shia-Sunni borders of the mystically inclined people of the plains of India. The tales of Imam Hanif, the half brother of Imams Hassan and Hussain, is definitely borrowed from the Punjabi qissa tradition sung in the streets of Lahore in the 1950s.
Ahmad and Boase have done a great job by preserving what could be the last vestige of the Pashtun mind as it was before modernity — and that includes hard Islam — overtook it. Surprisingly much of Saeed Baba’s fantasia gibes with the tales still bandied by the settled Pathans of the plains with longings of the tribal past they said goodbye to a long time ago. Their tales also include some from beyond the Pak-Afghan tribal territory and extend to the Armenian-Turkish zones of contact, mostly by those migrants who came into the Pashtun lands and Pashtunised themselves.
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