By M A Niazi
The Nuclear Security Summit has taken place, and is over with a commitment from countries attending to stop the movement of fissile material in the next four years. This replaces the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), hitherto the sole instrument for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons. The USA used the Summit for three purposes: first, to demonstrate in its ability to host it, its status as the sole superpower. Second, to beat up on Iran, and finally, but perhaps most important, to show that it retained the lead on nuclear issues in the new unipolar world, they previously having been tackled only with the consent, assistance, and perhaps initiative of the USSR. The USA did not mean to use it to fulfil any of the hopes that were being placed in it in Pakistan, that it would address any of the concerns of Pakistan, which along with India and North Korea is in a kind of limbo, having carried out a nuclear explosion, but not admitted into the nuclear club.
The USA succeeded in calling the Summit apart from the United Nations, the mechanism it has favoured so far for multilateral operations of this sort. This may cause some worry in UN circles, as the response indicates that the USA may well no longer need its fig-leaf to carry out such activities. That it no longer wants the fig-leaf, which it used to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, indicates the dominance (at least to American eyes) of non-Americans in the world body. However, it also respects the expertise that it has developed, and the joint communiqué issued after the Summit mentions it as the lead agency in monitoring compliance.
Summoning the Summit was easy compared to getting it to condemn Iran, which did not happen, summoned to agree to a new package was another matter. However, while the USA is over-stretched, it will engage in an adventure there as soon as it can release sufficient forces from one or both theatres. Meanwhile, the next Summit has been agreed upon, and it was President Obama who announced that it would take place in two years, and would be hosted by South Korea. That would serve to apply more pressure to North Korea than the present Summit. Again as a sort of replacement for the UN, at least for participants, the next step would be the setting up of a Secretariat, and entering negotiations about having the IAEA report to the new body. The USA is not just concerned about its UN dues, but it has multiple issues of control, associated with its payment of dues, which this mechanism would help resolve.
At the same time, the USA has demonstrated that it has primacy on nuclear issues. By an agreement on the example of Iran should provide enough evidence of the limits placed by the USA on peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
Fissile material is the key. This is to go back a step in the nuclear cycle, and recognises that the same fissile material, or rather radioactive metal, which can be used for generating power can also be used for bringing about an unimaginable explosion. The focus on fissile materials came because it was realised that any nuclear material that went into peaceful uses was not available for weapons use. This was proposed through the original compact proposed, “Atoms for Peace”, through which developed countries gave peaceful nuclear technology in exchange for a promise to eschew weapons development. However, the cornerstone of this edifice was that the winners of World War II would have nuclear weapons, along with their veto power in the UN, and none of the countries which won independence after that War, were supposed to have these weapons.
However, within the newly independent countries, there were several with their own reasons to achieve nuclear weapons status. India in particular has been the leader, because it has harboured superpower ambitions from the time of its independence in 1947. It has no real motive beyond the ambition of its rulers to be acknowledged as a superpower. However, its pursuit of nuclear weapons status, which culminated in the tests of 1998, made Pakistan respond in kind, making it the first country without global ambitions to become a nuclear power. In the two decades and more that it pursued this technology, it did not see a global role for itself beyond what it could fulfil without nuclear weapons. Similarly, North Korea used its possession of nuclear weapons more as a bargaining chip with the USA, than as a real threat to force South Korea into any action.
Israel also developed nuclear weapons after fighting two wars with its Arab neighbours. Israel’s nuclear weapons are based on technology stolen from the USA. However, the Israeli nuclear threat to the peace of the world could not be tackled at a Summit hosted by the USA.
The movement of fissile material was thought the best possible step after the failure of the proliferation regime in the shape of multilateral treaties. However, as the Summit itself shows, there is still a lot of fissile material floating around, and if it is not necessarily used to make bombs be used to replace material that could be. Fissile material is the datum of information on which all of those estimates of bombs manufactured are made. The motive of the nuclear powers in ensuring weapons non-proliferation remained maintaining the monopoly. Though its reasons for participating in the “war on terror” have nothing to do with the Summit, Pakistan is so subordinate to the USA that its participation in the latter was assured. And if it can be fobbed off with statements about its weapons being safe, then it is probably not only not a danger, but it will not get a civilian nuclear deal that allows it to put fissile material to military use, as India is doing.
More importantly, the Summit did nothing towards solving the problem of the ‘limbo’ nuclear powers, who may or may not be accommodated, but who undoubtedly exist. When the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) was brought in, much was made of the promise of the nuclear powers to give up these weapons. However, they did not. And this was not pursued at the Summit, which the USA not only had the effrontery to attend as a nuclear power, but which it convened as the leader of the nuclear haves. Without some adjustment of the new nuclear powers, who are now almost as many as the original nuclear club, there will be no real purpose to such Summits.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Side-effect
By Harris Khalique
The senators belonging to different factions of Pakistan Muslim League staged a walk-out from the current session of the Senate protesting against the remarks made by an Awami National Party senator in one of the appearances he made on a television talk show. He perhaps mentioned that the leadership of the Muslim League included people who ate pork and consumed alcohol. I couldn’t watch the programme but supposedly morality of parliamentarians and Islamic values in the backdrop of Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution of the republic were being discussed. It was alleged that the ANP senator made a reference to the eating habits of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, father of the nation and president of the All India Muslim League which later became the Pakistan Muslim League. The senator denied the allegation and said he did not mean to imply the Quaid-e-Azam and respected him fully. He asserted that his comments were being blown up disproportionately.
To the citizens of Pakistan, is it really of any consequence today what Mr Jinnah ate or drank when young? Or for that matter whether Allama Iqbal used to drink or not? What matters to us now is the governance and state of affairs in the country Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisioned and struggled for. None of the factions of the Muslim League have anything to do with the ideals, views and practices of Jinnah. Their claim to being the successor party or parties of Jinnah’s Muslim League and staging a walk-out on that pretext is totally unjustified. Jinnah’s Muslim League soon became Unionist League after partition. Following his (expedited) death, feudal lords of West Pakistan, in cahoots with the protégé of the Indian Civil Service we inherited, took over the country. Then we saw a long drawn martial rule of General Ayub Khan and the formation of the dictator’s party which was named Muslim League with a prefix. A lame opposition party in dictator’s parliament was also another Muslim League with a different prefix. Then there was a Muslim League formed by General Ziaul Haq. Some years later, another was formed under the instructions of General Pervez Musharraf. The various factions of Muslim League we have today, PML-Nawaz, PML-Quaid-e-Azam, PML-Ziaul Haq, Awami Muslim League, All Pakistan Muslim League (Musharraf’s new antic), to name a few, have nothing whatsoever to do with either Jinnah or his party. They are the direct successors or derivatives of different parties formed by feudal lords, retired bureaucrats, business magnates and autocrats. To use a cliché, Jinnah would be turning in his grave when referred to as the president of a party whose factions today perpetuate a politics that revolves around interests of the wealthy, repression of the poor and bigotry when it comes to matters of religion.
The tragedy is that the same has happened to other parties. They have gone on a complete tangent from what their initiators stood for. Today, the PPP struggles to harmonise the interests of feudal lords and ladies with those who believe in neo-liberal management of economy. Common populace and programmes for their uplift seem no more than penance. The firebrand National Awami Party of yesteryear, which linked its politics to global emancipation of the working classes and realisation of the rights of oppressed nationalities, is now reduced to a group of politicians calling themselves ANP who pursue narrow local interests and behave as the counterparts of Karzai on this side of the border. None of them are true successors of their erstwhile leadership.
The senators belonging to different factions of Pakistan Muslim League staged a walk-out from the current session of the Senate protesting against the remarks made by an Awami National Party senator in one of the appearances he made on a television talk show. He perhaps mentioned that the leadership of the Muslim League included people who ate pork and consumed alcohol. I couldn’t watch the programme but supposedly morality of parliamentarians and Islamic values in the backdrop of Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution of the republic were being discussed. It was alleged that the ANP senator made a reference to the eating habits of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, father of the nation and president of the All India Muslim League which later became the Pakistan Muslim League. The senator denied the allegation and said he did not mean to imply the Quaid-e-Azam and respected him fully. He asserted that his comments were being blown up disproportionately.
To the citizens of Pakistan, is it really of any consequence today what Mr Jinnah ate or drank when young? Or for that matter whether Allama Iqbal used to drink or not? What matters to us now is the governance and state of affairs in the country Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisioned and struggled for. None of the factions of the Muslim League have anything to do with the ideals, views and practices of Jinnah. Their claim to being the successor party or parties of Jinnah’s Muslim League and staging a walk-out on that pretext is totally unjustified. Jinnah’s Muslim League soon became Unionist League after partition. Following his (expedited) death, feudal lords of West Pakistan, in cahoots with the protégé of the Indian Civil Service we inherited, took over the country. Then we saw a long drawn martial rule of General Ayub Khan and the formation of the dictator’s party which was named Muslim League with a prefix. A lame opposition party in dictator’s parliament was also another Muslim League with a different prefix. Then there was a Muslim League formed by General Ziaul Haq. Some years later, another was formed under the instructions of General Pervez Musharraf. The various factions of Muslim League we have today, PML-Nawaz, PML-Quaid-e-Azam, PML-Ziaul Haq, Awami Muslim League, All Pakistan Muslim League (Musharraf’s new antic), to name a few, have nothing whatsoever to do with either Jinnah or his party. They are the direct successors or derivatives of different parties formed by feudal lords, retired bureaucrats, business magnates and autocrats. To use a cliché, Jinnah would be turning in his grave when referred to as the president of a party whose factions today perpetuate a politics that revolves around interests of the wealthy, repression of the poor and bigotry when it comes to matters of religion.
The tragedy is that the same has happened to other parties. They have gone on a complete tangent from what their initiators stood for. Today, the PPP struggles to harmonise the interests of feudal lords and ladies with those who believe in neo-liberal management of economy. Common populace and programmes for their uplift seem no more than penance. The firebrand National Awami Party of yesteryear, which linked its politics to global emancipation of the working classes and realisation of the rights of oppressed nationalities, is now reduced to a group of politicians calling themselves ANP who pursue narrow local interests and behave as the counterparts of Karzai on this side of the border. None of them are true successors of their erstwhile leadership.
Parallel worlds beginning to collide
By Shafqat Mahmood
The disconnect between different layers of Pakistani society has never been more visible than today. The political elite and intelligentsia are celebrating the passage of the 18th Amendment. The people are angry and on the streets, rioting.
The elite have good reason to be happy. The virtues of democracy need advertising in a state that has seen frequent interruptions of military rule. And what better commercial than a broad political consensus that has endorsed a National Finance Commission Award and now the 18th Amendment.
The people have good reason to be angry. Inflation, particularly of basic food items, has decimated their savings. Without electricity, the summer heat is boiling their bones. And there is no care in hospitals, no education in their schools, no security, no justice, and no relief, anywhere.
The concerns of the elite are mumbo jumbo to the people. Strategic depth in Afghanistan, nuclear parity with India, supremacy of parliament, independent judiciary, provincial autonomy, etc., are all worthwhile pursuits. At some level they affect the lives of everyone.
But go and tell this to the parent whose child is visibly dying and no decent care is available, or whose earnings can no longer feed the kids. Say this to the family that lives in fear of qabza groups, neighbourhood gangsters, swindlers and cheats. Pass this on to those who have to deal with a marauding police, uncaring bureaucracy and a corrupt and inefficient justice system.
This is the reality of their existence. The elite, in one form or the other, are insulated from this. Not that they do not have issues; their children need education and family members do fall sick. Occasionally someone gets into trouble and has to deal with the police, the courts or the bureaucracy.
Money takes care of some of these problems. Private education and private hospitals provide a reasonably decent service. And confronted with the state system, the social and familial network comes into play. Everyone knows someone in the police or the bureaucracy. And good lawyers can be hired to manage the courts.
This framework of comfort and support frees the mind to focus on abstract reality. Structures of democracy and their philosophical pillars occupy the thoughts. The country’s place in the world and how it can be enhanced becomes a justifiably patriotic concern. Not unimportant, yet so divorced from people’s existence.
Our accidental prime minister Shaukat Aziz and his cohorts believed in the trickledown theory or what the development economists call unbalanced growth. Its basics were that economic progress, even if it makes the rich richer, would eventually find its way to the poor. How long will it take and how much disruption it will cause before the trickle is felt, was never full explained.
The same trickle down model can be applied to alternative realities of the elite and the people. No doubt, a better democracy is good for everyone. A fearless judiciary and a truly paramount parliament will eventually improve lives; as will enhanced security, impregnable defence and a better image of the country in the world.
The question is what happens in the interim? If we had a small population, the discontent could be contained. But we don’t, we are a hundred and seventy million. Most of this population is poor and there is a huge youth bulge: people between the ages of 15 and 24. Since we did not do much for them, we have anarchy, if not a revolution, on our hand.
While the elite were busy building fancy castles in the air and fighting grand strategic battles, some of the poor were finding their way into schools of hate and terror. It took a while for them to get organised and realise their destructive potential. But they have, and with devastating effect.
The elite, blind to the blowback capacity, helped them in this task. They used them to fight some of the elite’s strategic wars. Once the strength of the alienated had been built up and their understanding of the state better, their attack against it was inevitable. Now we are busy fighting the children of our own creation.
Fighting organised terror groups is very tough, but at least there is an identifiable enemy. More dangerous are spontaneous eruptions of public anger and random acts of destruction. This can neither be anticipated nor contained. We see this happening every day.
The easy way to look at the turmoil in Hazara is that it relates to marginalisation of the Hindko ethnicity. Some of it is there, and it has been shamelessly exploited by out-of-work politicians. But underneath it lies people’s anger with the quality of their lives.
In essence, these eruptions signify failure of the elitist state. One example of it is the way we order the priorities of our public expenditure. People who own cars in the country are maybe ten percent of the population, or even less. Yet the amount of resources being spent on improving their driving experience is scandalous.
We need better roads and motorways and ring roads around our cities, but how many people truly benefit from them? Railways are universally seen as the mode of mass transportation. Yet, how much do we spend on that? We were lucky to inherit a very good railway system from the British, and what have we done to it? It is in a shambles, and deteriorating by the day.
Within cities, how much time effort and money have we devoted to public transport? It is true that the state does not have to do everything, but it can create the enabling environment for the private sector to fulfil this and other public needs.
It boils down to priorities. Elites have their needs and their capture of the state is nowhere more obvious than in our part of the world. Hence, state resources are targeted towards priorities that the elites have.
This does not mean that elite control is not happening in Europe, the US and other parts of the developed world. It is, but there is a strong realisation that the people have to be given the basics, or they will revolt. Thus, public education and health, public transportation and basic food items are kept within everyone’s reach.
We are failing in this. The result is insurgencies and spontaneous eruptions of violence. India is in the same trap. Maoist insurgency in 300 districts is a revolt of the poor. Its global ambitions and horrendous domestic reality is a classic example of elite priorities underneath the facade of democracy.
The elites in Pakistan have to wake up in their own self-interest. They are barely safe today in their protected homes and air-conditioned cars. The flames of anger from below are already singeing their safe cocoon. If priorities are not turned towards the people, the flames will engulf them.
The disconnect between different layers of Pakistani society has never been more visible than today. The political elite and intelligentsia are celebrating the passage of the 18th Amendment. The people are angry and on the streets, rioting.
The elite have good reason to be happy. The virtues of democracy need advertising in a state that has seen frequent interruptions of military rule. And what better commercial than a broad political consensus that has endorsed a National Finance Commission Award and now the 18th Amendment.
The people have good reason to be angry. Inflation, particularly of basic food items, has decimated their savings. Without electricity, the summer heat is boiling their bones. And there is no care in hospitals, no education in their schools, no security, no justice, and no relief, anywhere.
The concerns of the elite are mumbo jumbo to the people. Strategic depth in Afghanistan, nuclear parity with India, supremacy of parliament, independent judiciary, provincial autonomy, etc., are all worthwhile pursuits. At some level they affect the lives of everyone.
But go and tell this to the parent whose child is visibly dying and no decent care is available, or whose earnings can no longer feed the kids. Say this to the family that lives in fear of qabza groups, neighbourhood gangsters, swindlers and cheats. Pass this on to those who have to deal with a marauding police, uncaring bureaucracy and a corrupt and inefficient justice system.
This is the reality of their existence. The elite, in one form or the other, are insulated from this. Not that they do not have issues; their children need education and family members do fall sick. Occasionally someone gets into trouble and has to deal with the police, the courts or the bureaucracy.
Money takes care of some of these problems. Private education and private hospitals provide a reasonably decent service. And confronted with the state system, the social and familial network comes into play. Everyone knows someone in the police or the bureaucracy. And good lawyers can be hired to manage the courts.
This framework of comfort and support frees the mind to focus on abstract reality. Structures of democracy and their philosophical pillars occupy the thoughts. The country’s place in the world and how it can be enhanced becomes a justifiably patriotic concern. Not unimportant, yet so divorced from people’s existence.
Our accidental prime minister Shaukat Aziz and his cohorts believed in the trickledown theory or what the development economists call unbalanced growth. Its basics were that economic progress, even if it makes the rich richer, would eventually find its way to the poor. How long will it take and how much disruption it will cause before the trickle is felt, was never full explained.
The same trickle down model can be applied to alternative realities of the elite and the people. No doubt, a better democracy is good for everyone. A fearless judiciary and a truly paramount parliament will eventually improve lives; as will enhanced security, impregnable defence and a better image of the country in the world.
The question is what happens in the interim? If we had a small population, the discontent could be contained. But we don’t, we are a hundred and seventy million. Most of this population is poor and there is a huge youth bulge: people between the ages of 15 and 24. Since we did not do much for them, we have anarchy, if not a revolution, on our hand.
While the elite were busy building fancy castles in the air and fighting grand strategic battles, some of the poor were finding their way into schools of hate and terror. It took a while for them to get organised and realise their destructive potential. But they have, and with devastating effect.
The elite, blind to the blowback capacity, helped them in this task. They used them to fight some of the elite’s strategic wars. Once the strength of the alienated had been built up and their understanding of the state better, their attack against it was inevitable. Now we are busy fighting the children of our own creation.
Fighting organised terror groups is very tough, but at least there is an identifiable enemy. More dangerous are spontaneous eruptions of public anger and random acts of destruction. This can neither be anticipated nor contained. We see this happening every day.
The easy way to look at the turmoil in Hazara is that it relates to marginalisation of the Hindko ethnicity. Some of it is there, and it has been shamelessly exploited by out-of-work politicians. But underneath it lies people’s anger with the quality of their lives.
In essence, these eruptions signify failure of the elitist state. One example of it is the way we order the priorities of our public expenditure. People who own cars in the country are maybe ten percent of the population, or even less. Yet the amount of resources being spent on improving their driving experience is scandalous.
We need better roads and motorways and ring roads around our cities, but how many people truly benefit from them? Railways are universally seen as the mode of mass transportation. Yet, how much do we spend on that? We were lucky to inherit a very good railway system from the British, and what have we done to it? It is in a shambles, and deteriorating by the day.
Within cities, how much time effort and money have we devoted to public transport? It is true that the state does not have to do everything, but it can create the enabling environment for the private sector to fulfil this and other public needs.
It boils down to priorities. Elites have their needs and their capture of the state is nowhere more obvious than in our part of the world. Hence, state resources are targeted towards priorities that the elites have.
This does not mean that elite control is not happening in Europe, the US and other parts of the developed world. It is, but there is a strong realisation that the people have to be given the basics, or they will revolt. Thus, public education and health, public transportation and basic food items are kept within everyone’s reach.
We are failing in this. The result is insurgencies and spontaneous eruptions of violence. India is in the same trap. Maoist insurgency in 300 districts is a revolt of the poor. Its global ambitions and horrendous domestic reality is a classic example of elite priorities underneath the facade of democracy.
The elites in Pakistan have to wake up in their own self-interest. They are barely safe today in their protected homes and air-conditioned cars. The flames of anger from below are already singeing their safe cocoon. If priorities are not turned towards the people, the flames will engulf them.
Defiance Iranian style
By M Saeed Khalid
Diplomatic manoeuvres around Iran’s nuclear programme have gathered pace in recent weeks, creating suspense and anxiety about a looming showdown between Iran and the United States. Washington’s efforts to bring greater political and economic pressure to bear on Iran could reduce the short-term risk of a military clash, which could result in an uncontrollable hike in oil prices, with frightening consequences for the global economy.
Even limited strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites are bound to draw retaliation from Iran’s considerable missile defence system. The US is, therefore, trying extra hard to carry along the four other permanent members of the Security Council and Germany in devising a new set of UN sanctions on Iran. Top emissaries are logging extra air miles to power centres like Brussels and Beijing to find a formula which can satisfy Iran’s national pride while fulfilling non-proliferation goals set by the leading powers.
The origins of the complexities of the imbroglio are deeply rooted in history. The year of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election also witnessed the publication of British historian Tom Holland’s book Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West.
Echoing American Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, Holland traces the origins of East-West tensions to the epic battles between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states 2,500 years ago. After recounting the emergence of the Persian Empire in the sixth century BC by Cyrus, and its extension into Central Asia and Africa and beyond the Danube, Holland takes the reader to the clash with Greece. He acknowledges Persia’s status as the first great empire and notes that, in many ways, Greek culture was more primitive compared to Persian civilisation.
Relying largely on the narrative of Herodotus, Holland recounts how the revolt in some of the Greek areas under Persian control led to an unsuccessful invasion by Xerxes against Greece and provoked the Spartan expedition under Alexander, which brought Persia to its knees. Holland goes on to conclude that by virtue of their victory over Persia, the Greeks succeeded in carving a destiny for themselves and Europe while intentionally denigrating Eastern culture.
The cumulative effect on Iranians’ psyche was a constant urge to reassert their cultural identity. But it also extends to defending national sovereignty over their resources, as witnessed in the challenge launched by Mohammad Mossadeq. The Shah’s efforts to Westernise the Iranian people while assuming the role of a Western post in the region met a terrible backlash in the form of a leftist movement and eventually by the Islamic revolution. Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear capability and the West’s efforts to thwart that plan represents the latest episode in the age-old rivalry.
In 2005, after the US and allies had overrun Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran was identified as the next target by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld. However, an important development took place at the time as Iran went through the spectacular shift of power with the election of Ahmadinejad, a hardline Islamist, populist, ultra-nationalist and anti-reformist.
No one was surprised at his vocal pride in Iran’s glorious past, but many eyebrows were raised at his assertion that a clash with America was not a matter of “if” but of “when.” In a change of policy, Iran assigned the highest priority to the attainment of nuclear capability. To ensure success Ahmadinejad undertook the parallel effort of keeping Iran’s defences prepared for any showdown along the way.
Iran’s latest bout with the West has two important new features. The first is Europe’s aversion to military operations. Trying to enlist European nations in another war would only accentuate divisions among them. Their preferred solution is to give Iran sufficient inducements to give up nuclear-weapons development. The second feature is the role assumed by Israel in the American calculus to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear capability.
While time is a critical factor in further actions contemplated by Tel Aviv and Washington, the Europeans could counsel the US to give greater emphasis to diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran than military pressure, since any military action is unlikely to discourage Iran from continuing on its path. Ahmadinejad’s critics in Iran say that confrontation with the US is his calculated tactic for projection of an external threat so that the revolutionary regime receives a new lease on life. If so, he has found the perfect cause to rally support, that of Iran’s right to nuclear technology.
Viewed from Pakistan’s perspective, no discussion of the Iran-US confrontation is complete without reference to natural gas from Iran to meet our pressing needs. Our final decision on the gas pipeline project will have a bearing on Pakistan’s future. To put it plainly, friendship with America is a requirement for our immediate economic well being but assured gas supplies are vital for Pakistan’s long-term economic survival.
We should look at the way Turkey made the right choices to ensure gas supplies. In the days of the Cold War, Turkey, like many other European nations, built a gas pipeline with Russia. Then, the Turks did not hesitate to open negotiations with Iran for a second source of gas, even while they accused Tehran of fomenting trouble in Turkish universities.
By virtue of these timely decisions, Turkey enjoys gas supplies from Russia as well as Iran, while remaining a key Western ally and a member of Nato. The writing is on the wall. By exercising our sovereign right to build the gas pipeline with Iran without losing time, we will go up, rather than down, in America’s estimation. The world respects only the courageous.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Diplomatic manoeuvres around Iran’s nuclear programme have gathered pace in recent weeks, creating suspense and anxiety about a looming showdown between Iran and the United States. Washington’s efforts to bring greater political and economic pressure to bear on Iran could reduce the short-term risk of a military clash, which could result in an uncontrollable hike in oil prices, with frightening consequences for the global economy.
Even limited strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites are bound to draw retaliation from Iran’s considerable missile defence system. The US is, therefore, trying extra hard to carry along the four other permanent members of the Security Council and Germany in devising a new set of UN sanctions on Iran. Top emissaries are logging extra air miles to power centres like Brussels and Beijing to find a formula which can satisfy Iran’s national pride while fulfilling non-proliferation goals set by the leading powers.
The origins of the complexities of the imbroglio are deeply rooted in history. The year of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election also witnessed the publication of British historian Tom Holland’s book Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West.
Echoing American Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, Holland traces the origins of East-West tensions to the epic battles between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states 2,500 years ago. After recounting the emergence of the Persian Empire in the sixth century BC by Cyrus, and its extension into Central Asia and Africa and beyond the Danube, Holland takes the reader to the clash with Greece. He acknowledges Persia’s status as the first great empire and notes that, in many ways, Greek culture was more primitive compared to Persian civilisation.
Relying largely on the narrative of Herodotus, Holland recounts how the revolt in some of the Greek areas under Persian control led to an unsuccessful invasion by Xerxes against Greece and provoked the Spartan expedition under Alexander, which brought Persia to its knees. Holland goes on to conclude that by virtue of their victory over Persia, the Greeks succeeded in carving a destiny for themselves and Europe while intentionally denigrating Eastern culture.
The cumulative effect on Iranians’ psyche was a constant urge to reassert their cultural identity. But it also extends to defending national sovereignty over their resources, as witnessed in the challenge launched by Mohammad Mossadeq. The Shah’s efforts to Westernise the Iranian people while assuming the role of a Western post in the region met a terrible backlash in the form of a leftist movement and eventually by the Islamic revolution. Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear capability and the West’s efforts to thwart that plan represents the latest episode in the age-old rivalry.
In 2005, after the US and allies had overrun Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran was identified as the next target by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld. However, an important development took place at the time as Iran went through the spectacular shift of power with the election of Ahmadinejad, a hardline Islamist, populist, ultra-nationalist and anti-reformist.
No one was surprised at his vocal pride in Iran’s glorious past, but many eyebrows were raised at his assertion that a clash with America was not a matter of “if” but of “when.” In a change of policy, Iran assigned the highest priority to the attainment of nuclear capability. To ensure success Ahmadinejad undertook the parallel effort of keeping Iran’s defences prepared for any showdown along the way.
Iran’s latest bout with the West has two important new features. The first is Europe’s aversion to military operations. Trying to enlist European nations in another war would only accentuate divisions among them. Their preferred solution is to give Iran sufficient inducements to give up nuclear-weapons development. The second feature is the role assumed by Israel in the American calculus to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear capability.
While time is a critical factor in further actions contemplated by Tel Aviv and Washington, the Europeans could counsel the US to give greater emphasis to diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran than military pressure, since any military action is unlikely to discourage Iran from continuing on its path. Ahmadinejad’s critics in Iran say that confrontation with the US is his calculated tactic for projection of an external threat so that the revolutionary regime receives a new lease on life. If so, he has found the perfect cause to rally support, that of Iran’s right to nuclear technology.
Viewed from Pakistan’s perspective, no discussion of the Iran-US confrontation is complete without reference to natural gas from Iran to meet our pressing needs. Our final decision on the gas pipeline project will have a bearing on Pakistan’s future. To put it plainly, friendship with America is a requirement for our immediate economic well being but assured gas supplies are vital for Pakistan’s long-term economic survival.
We should look at the way Turkey made the right choices to ensure gas supplies. In the days of the Cold War, Turkey, like many other European nations, built a gas pipeline with Russia. Then, the Turks did not hesitate to open negotiations with Iran for a second source of gas, even while they accused Tehran of fomenting trouble in Turkish universities.
By virtue of these timely decisions, Turkey enjoys gas supplies from Russia as well as Iran, while remaining a key Western ally and a member of Nato. The writing is on the wall. By exercising our sovereign right to build the gas pipeline with Iran without losing time, we will go up, rather than down, in America’s estimation. The world respects only the courageous.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Commodifying drinking water
By Ahmad Rafay Alam
A few months ago, the Lahore High Court had taken suo motu notice of the quality of water served up by bottled-water companies. I happened to be in court that morning, and overheard the judge say something that has stayed with me since: when he was growing up in Lahore, it was unthinkable that water was something that could be sold. This is true even for my lifetime. I have seen drinking water in my city of Lahore go from being a common resource to a commodity. There is much to make of such a radical change.
It was the colonialist who first tapped Lahore’s underground water resources for the purposes of domestic consumption, that is, drinking and for sanitation. The old water pipe that sucked water from the ground still stands behind the Paani wala Talaab in the Walled City. The management of the water resource lay in the hands of the municipality, which laid out water and sewerage pipes throughout the old city, as well as the rapidly sprawling rest of the city. Water was thus available to those who were served by the municipality and who paid their water dues on time. It was clean, readily available and, importantly, considered “free.”
At the moment, the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) of the Lahore Development Authority estimates it manages something in excess of 1,700 kilometres of water and sewage pipes in the city – some new, some nearly a century old, many in-between. But this does not include management of water pipes in the Cantonment, which vests in the Cantonment Board (the Cantonment in Lahore has no sewage system; its residents work with on-site soakage pits), or the management of water by the many phases within the Defence Housing Authority or properties receiving water from the Services and General Administration Department. And here lies an interesting thought.
Most people I ask will readily admit to knowledge of the concepts of the sale or mortgage of land, though few, if any, have ever entered into such transactions themselves. But none will offer any insight into any of the rights to drinking water. It’s odd how there’s a vacuum of knowledge surrounding the rights we have in something as existential as water.
The very many local authorities that are responsible for providing drinking water to the eight million Lahoris are not coordinated in any way. Thus, WASA tends to think it has the rights, under statute, to the city’s underground water resource. But even if it did, it can do nothing about the water extracted, say, by the DHA.
Lack of coordination of how we use our underground water resource wouldn’t be a problem if Lahore’s underground water table were in abundant supply. Since the Indus Basin Treaty apportioned the waters of the River Ravi to India, Lahore has been cut off from its traditional source of groundwater replenishment. There’s no water to replace the water we are currently extracting. You could be allowed to mistakenly think that rainwater is a source of recharging the water table. It would be, if only we weren’t so adamant in paving over green areas and emitting all manner of liquid pollution into the soil as well.
The tube-wells installed in the city are now extracting drinking water from a depth of some 700 feet and more. Water immediately under the soil is too polluted to drink.
One of the problems of going so far down to get drinking water is that it requires enormous amounts of electricity. Last year, in a remarkable example of ignoring the potential of solar electricity, the Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered that the city’s tube-wells be fitted with diesel generators so that residents would still get water during prolonged periods of load-shedding. Not only will the cost of diesel soon become part of our water charges but, because of the use of diesel generators, our use of water is now completely environmentally unsustainable.
Lahoris must not take for granted whatever water they have available to them now. In almost all of Pakistan’s major urban areas, drinking water is either unavailable, is unhygienic or just not there. In these alarming circumstances, it is completely understandable how private interests can take up where the local authorities are simply not up to the task. Witness the commodification of water.
In the last 15 years, as drinking water problems have exacerbated as much as they have been ignored, private companies have overseen a subtle propaganda campaign which, in essence, has been nothing less than a reversal of priorities. Instead of citizens demanding more from their local authorities when it comes to clean water, they have sat back and allowed drinking water to be allocated a commercial value and be considered in economic terms. Their jobs were made considerably easier by the attitude of the urban elite, who think nothing of spending Rs15 for a glass or two of water when the vast majority of urban Pakistanis cannot afford such an expense, on a daily basis. In a city where only 20 years ago water was a common resource, it is now commonplace to see drinking water for sale.
I have it on good authority that the only water available at the recent workshop in Islamabad on drinking water organised by the ministry of the environment – which, it seems, is devoid of a sense of irony – was bottled water.
Meanwhile, the water and sanitation infrastructure in Lahore is in disrepair. The persistent rate of gastroenteritis in the city is testament to the fact that, on too many occasions, rusted pipes discharge sewage into pipes carrying drinking water. The health and environmental impacts of this do not require elaboration. The great challenge facing WASA is not, however, mending the pipes. Because of the rapid urbanisation expected in the future, WASA will need to lay as many kilometres of pipes in the next 20 years as it has since Partition. For anyone who appreciates the magnitude of this challenge, drinking water in Lahore is now something that cannot be ignored any longer.
On war footing we must repair the existing water and sewerage infrastructure. On war footing we must plan for future urbanisation. On war footing we must put in place drastic water-use legislation and water-conservation measures. And we must ensure our efforts yield positive results. The goal should not just be the availability of clean drinking water, but its availability as a right. We cannot allow the commodification of water. It is against our ethos.
The writer is an advocate of the high court and a member of the adjunct faculty at LUMS. He has an interest in urban planning.
A few months ago, the Lahore High Court had taken suo motu notice of the quality of water served up by bottled-water companies. I happened to be in court that morning, and overheard the judge say something that has stayed with me since: when he was growing up in Lahore, it was unthinkable that water was something that could be sold. This is true even for my lifetime. I have seen drinking water in my city of Lahore go from being a common resource to a commodity. There is much to make of such a radical change.
It was the colonialist who first tapped Lahore’s underground water resources for the purposes of domestic consumption, that is, drinking and for sanitation. The old water pipe that sucked water from the ground still stands behind the Paani wala Talaab in the Walled City. The management of the water resource lay in the hands of the municipality, which laid out water and sewerage pipes throughout the old city, as well as the rapidly sprawling rest of the city. Water was thus available to those who were served by the municipality and who paid their water dues on time. It was clean, readily available and, importantly, considered “free.”
At the moment, the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) of the Lahore Development Authority estimates it manages something in excess of 1,700 kilometres of water and sewage pipes in the city – some new, some nearly a century old, many in-between. But this does not include management of water pipes in the Cantonment, which vests in the Cantonment Board (the Cantonment in Lahore has no sewage system; its residents work with on-site soakage pits), or the management of water by the many phases within the Defence Housing Authority or properties receiving water from the Services and General Administration Department. And here lies an interesting thought.
Most people I ask will readily admit to knowledge of the concepts of the sale or mortgage of land, though few, if any, have ever entered into such transactions themselves. But none will offer any insight into any of the rights to drinking water. It’s odd how there’s a vacuum of knowledge surrounding the rights we have in something as existential as water.
The very many local authorities that are responsible for providing drinking water to the eight million Lahoris are not coordinated in any way. Thus, WASA tends to think it has the rights, under statute, to the city’s underground water resource. But even if it did, it can do nothing about the water extracted, say, by the DHA.
Lack of coordination of how we use our underground water resource wouldn’t be a problem if Lahore’s underground water table were in abundant supply. Since the Indus Basin Treaty apportioned the waters of the River Ravi to India, Lahore has been cut off from its traditional source of groundwater replenishment. There’s no water to replace the water we are currently extracting. You could be allowed to mistakenly think that rainwater is a source of recharging the water table. It would be, if only we weren’t so adamant in paving over green areas and emitting all manner of liquid pollution into the soil as well.
The tube-wells installed in the city are now extracting drinking water from a depth of some 700 feet and more. Water immediately under the soil is too polluted to drink.
One of the problems of going so far down to get drinking water is that it requires enormous amounts of electricity. Last year, in a remarkable example of ignoring the potential of solar electricity, the Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered that the city’s tube-wells be fitted with diesel generators so that residents would still get water during prolonged periods of load-shedding. Not only will the cost of diesel soon become part of our water charges but, because of the use of diesel generators, our use of water is now completely environmentally unsustainable.
Lahoris must not take for granted whatever water they have available to them now. In almost all of Pakistan’s major urban areas, drinking water is either unavailable, is unhygienic or just not there. In these alarming circumstances, it is completely understandable how private interests can take up where the local authorities are simply not up to the task. Witness the commodification of water.
In the last 15 years, as drinking water problems have exacerbated as much as they have been ignored, private companies have overseen a subtle propaganda campaign which, in essence, has been nothing less than a reversal of priorities. Instead of citizens demanding more from their local authorities when it comes to clean water, they have sat back and allowed drinking water to be allocated a commercial value and be considered in economic terms. Their jobs were made considerably easier by the attitude of the urban elite, who think nothing of spending Rs15 for a glass or two of water when the vast majority of urban Pakistanis cannot afford such an expense, on a daily basis. In a city where only 20 years ago water was a common resource, it is now commonplace to see drinking water for sale.
I have it on good authority that the only water available at the recent workshop in Islamabad on drinking water organised by the ministry of the environment – which, it seems, is devoid of a sense of irony – was bottled water.
Meanwhile, the water and sanitation infrastructure in Lahore is in disrepair. The persistent rate of gastroenteritis in the city is testament to the fact that, on too many occasions, rusted pipes discharge sewage into pipes carrying drinking water. The health and environmental impacts of this do not require elaboration. The great challenge facing WASA is not, however, mending the pipes. Because of the rapid urbanisation expected in the future, WASA will need to lay as many kilometres of pipes in the next 20 years as it has since Partition. For anyone who appreciates the magnitude of this challenge, drinking water in Lahore is now something that cannot be ignored any longer.
On war footing we must repair the existing water and sewerage infrastructure. On war footing we must plan for future urbanisation. On war footing we must put in place drastic water-use legislation and water-conservation measures. And we must ensure our efforts yield positive results. The goal should not just be the availability of clean drinking water, but its availability as a right. We cannot allow the commodification of water. It is against our ethos.
The writer is an advocate of the high court and a member of the adjunct faculty at LUMS. He has an interest in urban planning.
The damage-control ploy
By Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto
Pakistan is ready to explode. The politicians, despite their deep differences, are entwined in the net of reconciliation which is a poor camouflage for abandoning all conflicting ideologies, principles and pride to join the feast of government. This has smothered all complaint and objections, opening the door to a state of hear no evil and see no evil, just do all evil.
Transparency International has disclosed that whereas in 2004 Rs45 billion were pilfered from Pakistan’s treasury, in 2009 corruption has cost the people Rs195 billion. This is in addition to the nurturing of the useless MNAs and MPAs, each of whom is paid about 500,000 rupees per month, hordes of ministers, each of whom receives a salary of around three million rupees per month. The prime minister costs about 25 million a month and the president 30 million. The VIPs’ security costs us Rs165 billion per year. Last but not least, Rs860 billion is the up-to-date cost of the civil war going on in the north. Of course, the cost of lives lost and property damaged is unfathomable, but Amnesty International has said that in the drone attacks alone, while only five high-value targets have been eliminated, more than 700 innocent lives have been lost as the government just looks on.
Of course, the above is not all that afflicts the nation. The process of accountability has been buried so deep that not a single case has been filed against anyone in the top echelons of government and politics since the Musharraf takeover in 1999, even though the stench of corruption reaches the sky. When a minister’s loot and plunder can no longer be ignored and there is uproar in the media, his portfolio is taken away and a less lucrative one allotted.
This background and anger of the people, expressed by protests at the local level all around, only results in one question: when will Zardari go? Quit he will not, despite his constant humiliation. He has already declared that exit in an ambulance is the only option for him. And now that all his corruption cases have been reopened, the only thing keeping him out of jail is the presidential immunity. So he will hold on by the skin of his teeth. The basic cause of all the harm that has been endured in the post-Musharraf era is Zardari and his inability to provide leadership and good governance. It is not surprising that those around him are not only shielding him from accountability but also proclaiming him as a hero on the same level as Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. For this, on the one hand, they have mounted a visibly massive campaign to gag the critics (including, it seems, that knight in shinning armour, Ayaz Amir); on the other hand, they are holding on to straws like the 18th Amendment, which only emphasises the desperateness of their situation.
The 18th Amendment is fine, but certainly not a panacea. Nor can it mitigate the harm caused by this government. It has done away with the dictatorial powers of the president, which Zardari could not exercise anyway. Every effort by him to assert himself had ended in his own humiliation. He passed orders transferring the ISI into civilian control but had to hastily withdraw them the next day. We have seen that he surrendered under pressure on the questions of reinstatement and appointment of judges. He had to quickly lift the emergency he imposed in Punjab and was forced to transfer the National Security Authority to the prime minister. As for dissolving parliament and appointing the chiefs of the armed services, Zardari simply does not have the stature and strength to even think of doing so. This is different from ordering transfers and postings of bureaucrats with shady records for services rendered, or rewarding jail mates and being a “friend of friends” to favourites at public expense.
The 18th Amendment, which is essentially a damage-control ploy, has come very late and under pressure, giving little while generating much controversy. The boast that it has restored democracy and blocked subversion of the Constitution is absurd. By removing the requirement of elections within political parties, nurseries for dictators have been opened up as heads of parties have been given absolute powers over their party men. A constitution did not stop Ayub Khan from taking over. Zia tore up and threw away the Constitution with impunity, in spite of Article 6, which made such contempt punishable with death. He hanged the framer of the Constitution instead. Musharraf also violated the Constitution, imposed the 17th Amendment and ruled for ten years. The 18th Amendment is no Great Wall of China. It cannot stop a takeover or save the Constitution and democracy.
There is no escape from the truth that it is only the people who are the protectors of their land and rights, and this is where the weakness lies.
The systematic plan initiated by Zia to corrupt politics for the purpose of shielding unworthy rulers has culminated in Zardari’s mind-blowing rise to power, with immunity against all forms of accountability. Unfortunately, in Pakistan the curse of corruption has become so endemic that even the man on the street has become contaminated. He is also running in the rat race for personal enrichment rather than the collective benefits derived from honest and good governance. But this has only delayed the inevitable. Thanks to Zardari, the foundation for a bloody revolution has been laid. When the president refuses to obey the orders of the Supreme Court and continues to hide from corruption cases, aided and abetted by his all-too-willing party men and women, the end has been reached and something has got to give.
We know that the French Revolution, followed by the other great revolutions, started with downtrodden and deprived people being forced to come out in scattered groups to protest. This started a momentum which threw up new leaderships and brought unity among the angry crowds, who then focused on complete change and real solutions. In recent years, we have seen uprisings in Ukraine and Georgia. Only a few days ago, the people of Kyrgyzstan rose to remove their corrupt and incompetent government and install a new one, headed by a woman president.
Who knows what is around the corner for Pakistan.
Pakistan is ready to explode. The politicians, despite their deep differences, are entwined in the net of reconciliation which is a poor camouflage for abandoning all conflicting ideologies, principles and pride to join the feast of government. This has smothered all complaint and objections, opening the door to a state of hear no evil and see no evil, just do all evil.
Transparency International has disclosed that whereas in 2004 Rs45 billion were pilfered from Pakistan’s treasury, in 2009 corruption has cost the people Rs195 billion. This is in addition to the nurturing of the useless MNAs and MPAs, each of whom is paid about 500,000 rupees per month, hordes of ministers, each of whom receives a salary of around three million rupees per month. The prime minister costs about 25 million a month and the president 30 million. The VIPs’ security costs us Rs165 billion per year. Last but not least, Rs860 billion is the up-to-date cost of the civil war going on in the north. Of course, the cost of lives lost and property damaged is unfathomable, but Amnesty International has said that in the drone attacks alone, while only five high-value targets have been eliminated, more than 700 innocent lives have been lost as the government just looks on.
Of course, the above is not all that afflicts the nation. The process of accountability has been buried so deep that not a single case has been filed against anyone in the top echelons of government and politics since the Musharraf takeover in 1999, even though the stench of corruption reaches the sky. When a minister’s loot and plunder can no longer be ignored and there is uproar in the media, his portfolio is taken away and a less lucrative one allotted.
This background and anger of the people, expressed by protests at the local level all around, only results in one question: when will Zardari go? Quit he will not, despite his constant humiliation. He has already declared that exit in an ambulance is the only option for him. And now that all his corruption cases have been reopened, the only thing keeping him out of jail is the presidential immunity. So he will hold on by the skin of his teeth. The basic cause of all the harm that has been endured in the post-Musharraf era is Zardari and his inability to provide leadership and good governance. It is not surprising that those around him are not only shielding him from accountability but also proclaiming him as a hero on the same level as Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. For this, on the one hand, they have mounted a visibly massive campaign to gag the critics (including, it seems, that knight in shinning armour, Ayaz Amir); on the other hand, they are holding on to straws like the 18th Amendment, which only emphasises the desperateness of their situation.
The 18th Amendment is fine, but certainly not a panacea. Nor can it mitigate the harm caused by this government. It has done away with the dictatorial powers of the president, which Zardari could not exercise anyway. Every effort by him to assert himself had ended in his own humiliation. He passed orders transferring the ISI into civilian control but had to hastily withdraw them the next day. We have seen that he surrendered under pressure on the questions of reinstatement and appointment of judges. He had to quickly lift the emergency he imposed in Punjab and was forced to transfer the National Security Authority to the prime minister. As for dissolving parliament and appointing the chiefs of the armed services, Zardari simply does not have the stature and strength to even think of doing so. This is different from ordering transfers and postings of bureaucrats with shady records for services rendered, or rewarding jail mates and being a “friend of friends” to favourites at public expense.
The 18th Amendment, which is essentially a damage-control ploy, has come very late and under pressure, giving little while generating much controversy. The boast that it has restored democracy and blocked subversion of the Constitution is absurd. By removing the requirement of elections within political parties, nurseries for dictators have been opened up as heads of parties have been given absolute powers over their party men. A constitution did not stop Ayub Khan from taking over. Zia tore up and threw away the Constitution with impunity, in spite of Article 6, which made such contempt punishable with death. He hanged the framer of the Constitution instead. Musharraf also violated the Constitution, imposed the 17th Amendment and ruled for ten years. The 18th Amendment is no Great Wall of China. It cannot stop a takeover or save the Constitution and democracy.
There is no escape from the truth that it is only the people who are the protectors of their land and rights, and this is where the weakness lies.
The systematic plan initiated by Zia to corrupt politics for the purpose of shielding unworthy rulers has culminated in Zardari’s mind-blowing rise to power, with immunity against all forms of accountability. Unfortunately, in Pakistan the curse of corruption has become so endemic that even the man on the street has become contaminated. He is also running in the rat race for personal enrichment rather than the collective benefits derived from honest and good governance. But this has only delayed the inevitable. Thanks to Zardari, the foundation for a bloody revolution has been laid. When the president refuses to obey the orders of the Supreme Court and continues to hide from corruption cases, aided and abetted by his all-too-willing party men and women, the end has been reached and something has got to give.
We know that the French Revolution, followed by the other great revolutions, started with downtrodden and deprived people being forced to come out in scattered groups to protest. This started a momentum which threw up new leaderships and brought unity among the angry crowds, who then focused on complete change and real solutions. In recent years, we have seen uprisings in Ukraine and Georgia. Only a few days ago, the people of Kyrgyzstan rose to remove their corrupt and incompetent government and install a new one, headed by a woman president.
Who knows what is around the corner for Pakistan.
The art of inventing problems
By Ayaz Amir
A week is indeed a long time in politics. It has only been a few days since the 18th Amendment was passed by the National Assembly and already the shine is wearing off that ‘historic’ achievement. The only thing historic about it was its unanimous passage by the National Assembly. Unanimity is a virtue but since when was it alone a measure of great accomplishment?
To slow minds – and I stress the adjective – it was never very clear in what way the constitution as inherited from Pervez Musharraf was an impediment in the path of good governance? Was there any inherent disability in it which prevented decisive action, say, on power shutdowns or inflation? Did the constitution prevent the prime minister from streamlining his cabinet and making it more efficient? Did it in any manner impede the war against extremism?
And with the constitution cleansed, how precisely will things improve? Will the amended constitution induce national clarity? Will it light the path towards a common education policy or the improvement of public transport? Will we get better municipal services? Will the nation be finally convinced to get rid of that number one nuisance, the plastic shopping bag? Will the mounting tide of sectarian divisiveness be checked? Will Balochistan’s anger somehow be appeased?
A constitution is a set of guiding principles much as the Quran, as Muslims believe, is a compendium of divinely-ordained principles. But just as the Quran does not automatically produce good Muslims or lead to the perfect society – for that to happen action must take precedence over lip-service – the best constitution in the world contains no guarantees that it will lead to the promised kingdom.
The 1973 Constitution when first passed was also a unanimous document (although the Baloch leadership of the time has a different take on this point). Doubtless Pakistan would be poorer without it. But merely having that constitution never led to the transformation of Pakistan. And it never stopped tinpot dictators from marching in and seizing power, and adding to the nation’s woes.
The 18th Amendment too by itself will work no wonders. But it has already led to one problem, the turmoil in Hazara over the renaming of the Frontier province as Pakhtunkhwa, which is a rebuke to the orgy of celebrations which got going after the National Assembly’s passage of the 18th Amendment.
Stemming from the Hazara unrest are (1) calls for a new Hazara province and (2) renewed focus on the demand for a Seraiki province in the south of Punjab. The 18th Amendment was supposed to settle old problems, not open fresh wounds.
The original sin – or call it the first blunder – was the formation of the constitutional reforms committee representing all parties in parliament. Its composition was almost guaranteed to encourage every party to raise its own flag. The ANP’s favourite horse, which it was bound to ride, was the Pakhtunkhwa issue. The MQM had its eyes from the start on undoing the Concurrent List. For obvious reasons, it also wanted ports to become a provincial subject (something which, mercifully, hasn’t come to pass).
Raza Rabbani and the PPP seemed to have no clear aim apart from wanting to gain credit and political mileage out of shepherding through parliament a consensus document. The PML-N was primarily interested in trimming the president’s overweening powers. But in gunning for this it found itself slipping into a swamp in which fresh issues kept rearing their heads.
The first rule the committee imposed upon itself was to keep its deliberations away from the public eye. So well was this injunction obeyed that much of parliament was clueless about what was afoot behind the curtains. The inordinate stretching-out of the committee’s deliberations – nine months – was also enough to put parliament to sleep. The parliamentary vigilance that should have been exercised was thus sadly missing. And there were those who doubted that President Asif Zardari would willingly shed his powers. So they convinced themselves that the committee’s deliberations were a charade.
The doubters of course were proved wrong and, against commonly-held expectations, Zardari agreed to become a figurehead president, in line with the intent of the 1973 Constitution. But this was just one aspect of the situation. Thecommittee’s report when it came, and was ready for signing, was almost a fait accompli. The various parties should have examined it more thoroughly earlier. Not having done that at the proper time, it was too late to go through the contents with a fine comb or suggest meaningful changes at the last minute.
Indeed, when Mian Nawaz Sharif raised two objections which in hindsight – the clearest sight of all – seem entirely valid, this triggered such a storm of criticism that it almost seemed as if he was the Judas bent upon betraying the will of the rest of parliament. True, the timing of the objections was awkward and put the PML-N in a spot. I too was of the opinion that this was no time to quibble. But the fact remains, and as the explosive turn of events in Hazara has amply indicated, the objections were not wholly without merit.
Towards the end, the hype generated became so powerful that endorsing the consensus report seemed more important than examining its contents. Nawaz Sharif had tried to swim against the tide. But he had no choice but to go along with the mainstream when public pressure became overwhelming. Even then he managed to extract two minor concessions, the Khyber prefix to Pakhtunkhwa and a small change in the agreed formula regarding the appointment of senior judges. But as we have seen, the prefix was not enough to forestall the emotional backlash in Hazara.
How much nicer it would have been if instead of the nine-month marathon which the Raza Rabbani committee chose to run over high mountain and plunging valley, it had agreed on just a one-line amendment that the constitution stood restored to its shape as on the evening of July 4th, 1977, the eve of Zia’s coup?
As Zia’s first victim, the second victim being the nation, the PPP should have gone for this option. But it chose the longer route, thereby opening a Pandora’s box whose first contents we have seen in Hazara (although it is not a little pathetic to see the defeated remnants of Musharraf’s Hazara supporters, in the shape of the local PML-Q, trying to draw political advantage out of this sad affair. What will discarded politicians not do to attract attention?)
As stated above, the ANP, to the exclusion of anything else, had its eyes on Pakhtunkhwa. The MQM single-mindedly had its eyes on the Concurrent List. When the clause doing away with it was passed in the National Assembly, and the MQM members went giddy with excitement, shouting Altaf Hussain slogans at the top of their voices, I had a feeling that we had rushed into something without fully gauging its consequences.
On closer examination therefore the 18th Amendment looks to be more and more of a half-cooked affair. Consider the deletion of Zia’s name from the constitution. His name has gone but his spirit lingers on. The articles he inserted into the constitution (62 and 63 – setting out standards of rectitude for candidates) are still there. They have no practical import. But if something is rubbish what wisdom in preserving it? More to the point, the 8th Amendment validating Zia’s coup is still part of the constitution. What does it matter then if Zia’s name has been taken out?
Zia and no one else, through an executive order, made the Objectives Resolution a substantive part of the constitution. Of no practical significance, it merely adds to the wordiness of a document already weighted down by unnecessary verbiage, at least in the principles of policy.
Which lends itself to the conclusion that where the committee could have been radical it seized the path of caution, while things best avoided it chose to embrace. Pakistan’s problems lie not in the realm of law-making. It’s getting things done, of making them work, which require to be the focus of its national energies.
A week is indeed a long time in politics. It has only been a few days since the 18th Amendment was passed by the National Assembly and already the shine is wearing off that ‘historic’ achievement. The only thing historic about it was its unanimous passage by the National Assembly. Unanimity is a virtue but since when was it alone a measure of great accomplishment?
To slow minds – and I stress the adjective – it was never very clear in what way the constitution as inherited from Pervez Musharraf was an impediment in the path of good governance? Was there any inherent disability in it which prevented decisive action, say, on power shutdowns or inflation? Did the constitution prevent the prime minister from streamlining his cabinet and making it more efficient? Did it in any manner impede the war against extremism?
And with the constitution cleansed, how precisely will things improve? Will the amended constitution induce national clarity? Will it light the path towards a common education policy or the improvement of public transport? Will we get better municipal services? Will the nation be finally convinced to get rid of that number one nuisance, the plastic shopping bag? Will the mounting tide of sectarian divisiveness be checked? Will Balochistan’s anger somehow be appeased?
A constitution is a set of guiding principles much as the Quran, as Muslims believe, is a compendium of divinely-ordained principles. But just as the Quran does not automatically produce good Muslims or lead to the perfect society – for that to happen action must take precedence over lip-service – the best constitution in the world contains no guarantees that it will lead to the promised kingdom.
The 1973 Constitution when first passed was also a unanimous document (although the Baloch leadership of the time has a different take on this point). Doubtless Pakistan would be poorer without it. But merely having that constitution never led to the transformation of Pakistan. And it never stopped tinpot dictators from marching in and seizing power, and adding to the nation’s woes.
The 18th Amendment too by itself will work no wonders. But it has already led to one problem, the turmoil in Hazara over the renaming of the Frontier province as Pakhtunkhwa, which is a rebuke to the orgy of celebrations which got going after the National Assembly’s passage of the 18th Amendment.
Stemming from the Hazara unrest are (1) calls for a new Hazara province and (2) renewed focus on the demand for a Seraiki province in the south of Punjab. The 18th Amendment was supposed to settle old problems, not open fresh wounds.
The original sin – or call it the first blunder – was the formation of the constitutional reforms committee representing all parties in parliament. Its composition was almost guaranteed to encourage every party to raise its own flag. The ANP’s favourite horse, which it was bound to ride, was the Pakhtunkhwa issue. The MQM had its eyes from the start on undoing the Concurrent List. For obvious reasons, it also wanted ports to become a provincial subject (something which, mercifully, hasn’t come to pass).
Raza Rabbani and the PPP seemed to have no clear aim apart from wanting to gain credit and political mileage out of shepherding through parliament a consensus document. The PML-N was primarily interested in trimming the president’s overweening powers. But in gunning for this it found itself slipping into a swamp in which fresh issues kept rearing their heads.
The first rule the committee imposed upon itself was to keep its deliberations away from the public eye. So well was this injunction obeyed that much of parliament was clueless about what was afoot behind the curtains. The inordinate stretching-out of the committee’s deliberations – nine months – was also enough to put parliament to sleep. The parliamentary vigilance that should have been exercised was thus sadly missing. And there were those who doubted that President Asif Zardari would willingly shed his powers. So they convinced themselves that the committee’s deliberations were a charade.
The doubters of course were proved wrong and, against commonly-held expectations, Zardari agreed to become a figurehead president, in line with the intent of the 1973 Constitution. But this was just one aspect of the situation. Thecommittee’s report when it came, and was ready for signing, was almost a fait accompli. The various parties should have examined it more thoroughly earlier. Not having done that at the proper time, it was too late to go through the contents with a fine comb or suggest meaningful changes at the last minute.
Indeed, when Mian Nawaz Sharif raised two objections which in hindsight – the clearest sight of all – seem entirely valid, this triggered such a storm of criticism that it almost seemed as if he was the Judas bent upon betraying the will of the rest of parliament. True, the timing of the objections was awkward and put the PML-N in a spot. I too was of the opinion that this was no time to quibble. But the fact remains, and as the explosive turn of events in Hazara has amply indicated, the objections were not wholly without merit.
Towards the end, the hype generated became so powerful that endorsing the consensus report seemed more important than examining its contents. Nawaz Sharif had tried to swim against the tide. But he had no choice but to go along with the mainstream when public pressure became overwhelming. Even then he managed to extract two minor concessions, the Khyber prefix to Pakhtunkhwa and a small change in the agreed formula regarding the appointment of senior judges. But as we have seen, the prefix was not enough to forestall the emotional backlash in Hazara.
How much nicer it would have been if instead of the nine-month marathon which the Raza Rabbani committee chose to run over high mountain and plunging valley, it had agreed on just a one-line amendment that the constitution stood restored to its shape as on the evening of July 4th, 1977, the eve of Zia’s coup?
As Zia’s first victim, the second victim being the nation, the PPP should have gone for this option. But it chose the longer route, thereby opening a Pandora’s box whose first contents we have seen in Hazara (although it is not a little pathetic to see the defeated remnants of Musharraf’s Hazara supporters, in the shape of the local PML-Q, trying to draw political advantage out of this sad affair. What will discarded politicians not do to attract attention?)
As stated above, the ANP, to the exclusion of anything else, had its eyes on Pakhtunkhwa. The MQM single-mindedly had its eyes on the Concurrent List. When the clause doing away with it was passed in the National Assembly, and the MQM members went giddy with excitement, shouting Altaf Hussain slogans at the top of their voices, I had a feeling that we had rushed into something without fully gauging its consequences.
On closer examination therefore the 18th Amendment looks to be more and more of a half-cooked affair. Consider the deletion of Zia’s name from the constitution. His name has gone but his spirit lingers on. The articles he inserted into the constitution (62 and 63 – setting out standards of rectitude for candidates) are still there. They have no practical import. But if something is rubbish what wisdom in preserving it? More to the point, the 8th Amendment validating Zia’s coup is still part of the constitution. What does it matter then if Zia’s name has been taken out?
Zia and no one else, through an executive order, made the Objectives Resolution a substantive part of the constitution. Of no practical significance, it merely adds to the wordiness of a document already weighted down by unnecessary verbiage, at least in the principles of policy.
Which lends itself to the conclusion that where the committee could have been radical it seized the path of caution, while things best avoided it chose to embrace. Pakistan’s problems lie not in the realm of law-making. It’s getting things done, of making them work, which require to be the focus of its national energies.
An embarrassing obsession
By Jawed Naqvi
Mirza Ghalib presciently captured the futility of India’s Pakistan-centric foreign policy in the following self-mocking verse he penned in the 19th century:
‘Maine kaha jo bazm e naaz, chahiye ghair se tihi
Sun ke sitam-zareef ne, mujhko utha diya ki yun!’
(‘I asked the sweetheart to evict the intruder from the boudoir. She acquiesced, and instead had me thrown out quite far!’)
The verse written a century before the two countries were created still depicts the way most world leaders have responded to India’s unending petitions against Pakistan as Delhi seeks to check its own waning influence in Afghanistan and over its other quests including what has proved to be elusive access to a mysterious terror mastermind locked up in an American jail.
This man has a Pakistani connection but is also believed to have worked for US intelligence. So that’s a big quandary.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s plea in Washington for “zero tolerance” for nuclear delinquents had Pakistan in its crosshairs. The cliché of zero tolerance is of course best applied to traffic rules. Its excessive emphasis for serious problems could convey the impression that all other issues have been settled, i.e. zero tolerance for terrorism, communalism, corruption, poverty, internal rebellions and so on.
To use a cricketing idiom the Indian prime minister’s appeal against Pakistan’s nuclear waywardness can be seen as a wicket-keeper’s ploy to distract the umpire from calling a wide ball. Nobody believes India’s nuclear weapons are not ill-gotten, or that under the terms of the NPT they are any more legal than Pakistan’s or Iran’s if it acquires them.
Kolkata’s Telegraph newspaper ran a Ghalib-like assessment of India’s habit of venting its spleen about its difficult neighbour to all and sundry. In a dispatch from Washington, where the nuclear summit was the main agenda, the newspaper’s correspondent counted at least 30 direct or indirect references to Pakistan by India’s foreign secretary Nirupama Rao in a briefing which should have been about global proliferation.
This was of course not Ms Rao’s fault. As India’s spokesperson at the Agra summit in July 2001 she faithfully followed a totally different tack on Pakistan only because then foreign minister Jaswant Singh was keen to walk the “high road to peace” with the neighbour. It was in response to the Indian media’s 13 questions in Washington, all related to Pakistan instead of nuclear worries, that the 30 references to Islamabad became perhaps inevitable.
The Pakistan-obsession may not be a problem of the Indian media alone. It runs deeper and is clearly more systemic. I asked a foreign ministry official in Delhi about the procedure for Indian journalists to get accreditation to the Saarc summit in Thimpu this month. My friend said with concern: “Good question, boss. We are going too slowly on this. I am sure the Pakistanis will land there with a huge delegation.”
Of course the India-Pakistan obsession is a mutually counter-productive element in South Asian diplomacy. Pakistan has its own bee in the bonnet with regard to India. Its leaders never tire of complaining bitterly about Delhi to anyone they can buttonhole.
On one occasion a high-profile listener didn’t know who the petitioner was and who the accused. On April 6, 1995, recalls The Telegraph’s correspondent, when Benazir Bhutto was escorted to the US Senate floor by the late Jesse Helms, he introduced her thus: “The Foreign Relations Committee has had the honour of welcoming the distinguished prime minister of India and I wish to bring her to the floor.”
With Benazir looking horrified, the Republican senator compounded the error by saying he had just completed “a delightful hour-and-a-half conversation” with the Pakistani prime minister and she was talking mostly about India.
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment for any sovereign country should be when a visitor tells its leaders how he or she was responsible for mending the host’s ties with their neighbours. And this is precisely what President Bill Clinton was allowed to get away with when he addressed India’s parliament in March 2000. To add to the embarrassment, fawning MPs milled around him to touch him after he told them tersely how he had helped India evict the Pakistanis from Kargil, not militarily as New Delhi claimed, but with America’s diplomatic help.
Similarly, does any Indian or Pakistani leader realise how ridiculous they look when they allow themselves to be shepherded to shake hands by their foreign hosts? Dr Singh has been prime minister for more than six years but there is nothing on the horizon to indicate that that he is planning a visit to Pakistan any time soon. He is, however, strangely happy to meet a Pakistani counterpart on foreign soil.
Not only this, the meeting often results in path-breaking pronouncements, more often than not to ease the tensions. Sharm el Sheikh and Havana come to mind where landmark decisions were made. Why not in Delhi or Islamabad?
A significant fallout for India in this attitude of Brahminical aloofness is the contradictory signals it sends to foreign interlocutors. It tells them on the one hand to assiduously avoid hyphenating India-Pakistan issues. On the other its diplomats and politicians spare no opportunity to snarl at each other in self-wounding public spats. To make it worse they then start to highlight the negatives of each other in witless conversations with a third party. There are several ways for India and Pakistan to develop a more mature policy regarding each other.
The most successful of these could be to listen to their people — not the TV watching sound-byte fanatics, but ordinary people who seek visas only to be cruelly denied them. These people want to move on to a durable and trusting relationship between their countries. Whatever be the grouse between their countries — terrorism, the water dispute, Kashmir or ways to find influence in Afghanistan — none of these could or should be resolved by foreign mediators.
Practically all visitors to Delhi are subjected to a routine question. Do they support India’s quest to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council? They all say it is a good idea. However, few go on to discuss the big impediment in this. How can one nuclear gate-crasher be offered the exalted seat it covets when it cannot conduct a simple dialogue with a nuclear neighbour without being nudged by others?
If the leaders of India and Pakistan cannot find the courage to take the first step, they should go back to Ghalib’s simple sagacity. Why should any of the two countries grovel before Washington or any other capital? How about learning from China or Russia or Venezuela or even Iran on how to keep their dignity and be a global player.
Mirza Ghalib presciently captured the futility of India’s Pakistan-centric foreign policy in the following self-mocking verse he penned in the 19th century:
‘Maine kaha jo bazm e naaz, chahiye ghair se tihi
Sun ke sitam-zareef ne, mujhko utha diya ki yun!’
(‘I asked the sweetheart to evict the intruder from the boudoir. She acquiesced, and instead had me thrown out quite far!’)
The verse written a century before the two countries were created still depicts the way most world leaders have responded to India’s unending petitions against Pakistan as Delhi seeks to check its own waning influence in Afghanistan and over its other quests including what has proved to be elusive access to a mysterious terror mastermind locked up in an American jail.
This man has a Pakistani connection but is also believed to have worked for US intelligence. So that’s a big quandary.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s plea in Washington for “zero tolerance” for nuclear delinquents had Pakistan in its crosshairs. The cliché of zero tolerance is of course best applied to traffic rules. Its excessive emphasis for serious problems could convey the impression that all other issues have been settled, i.e. zero tolerance for terrorism, communalism, corruption, poverty, internal rebellions and so on.
To use a cricketing idiom the Indian prime minister’s appeal against Pakistan’s nuclear waywardness can be seen as a wicket-keeper’s ploy to distract the umpire from calling a wide ball. Nobody believes India’s nuclear weapons are not ill-gotten, or that under the terms of the NPT they are any more legal than Pakistan’s or Iran’s if it acquires them.
Kolkata’s Telegraph newspaper ran a Ghalib-like assessment of India’s habit of venting its spleen about its difficult neighbour to all and sundry. In a dispatch from Washington, where the nuclear summit was the main agenda, the newspaper’s correspondent counted at least 30 direct or indirect references to Pakistan by India’s foreign secretary Nirupama Rao in a briefing which should have been about global proliferation.
This was of course not Ms Rao’s fault. As India’s spokesperson at the Agra summit in July 2001 she faithfully followed a totally different tack on Pakistan only because then foreign minister Jaswant Singh was keen to walk the “high road to peace” with the neighbour. It was in response to the Indian media’s 13 questions in Washington, all related to Pakistan instead of nuclear worries, that the 30 references to Islamabad became perhaps inevitable.
The Pakistan-obsession may not be a problem of the Indian media alone. It runs deeper and is clearly more systemic. I asked a foreign ministry official in Delhi about the procedure for Indian journalists to get accreditation to the Saarc summit in Thimpu this month. My friend said with concern: “Good question, boss. We are going too slowly on this. I am sure the Pakistanis will land there with a huge delegation.”
Of course the India-Pakistan obsession is a mutually counter-productive element in South Asian diplomacy. Pakistan has its own bee in the bonnet with regard to India. Its leaders never tire of complaining bitterly about Delhi to anyone they can buttonhole.
On one occasion a high-profile listener didn’t know who the petitioner was and who the accused. On April 6, 1995, recalls The Telegraph’s correspondent, when Benazir Bhutto was escorted to the US Senate floor by the late Jesse Helms, he introduced her thus: “The Foreign Relations Committee has had the honour of welcoming the distinguished prime minister of India and I wish to bring her to the floor.”
With Benazir looking horrified, the Republican senator compounded the error by saying he had just completed “a delightful hour-and-a-half conversation” with the Pakistani prime minister and she was talking mostly about India.
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment for any sovereign country should be when a visitor tells its leaders how he or she was responsible for mending the host’s ties with their neighbours. And this is precisely what President Bill Clinton was allowed to get away with when he addressed India’s parliament in March 2000. To add to the embarrassment, fawning MPs milled around him to touch him after he told them tersely how he had helped India evict the Pakistanis from Kargil, not militarily as New Delhi claimed, but with America’s diplomatic help.
Similarly, does any Indian or Pakistani leader realise how ridiculous they look when they allow themselves to be shepherded to shake hands by their foreign hosts? Dr Singh has been prime minister for more than six years but there is nothing on the horizon to indicate that that he is planning a visit to Pakistan any time soon. He is, however, strangely happy to meet a Pakistani counterpart on foreign soil.
Not only this, the meeting often results in path-breaking pronouncements, more often than not to ease the tensions. Sharm el Sheikh and Havana come to mind where landmark decisions were made. Why not in Delhi or Islamabad?
A significant fallout for India in this attitude of Brahminical aloofness is the contradictory signals it sends to foreign interlocutors. It tells them on the one hand to assiduously avoid hyphenating India-Pakistan issues. On the other its diplomats and politicians spare no opportunity to snarl at each other in self-wounding public spats. To make it worse they then start to highlight the negatives of each other in witless conversations with a third party. There are several ways for India and Pakistan to develop a more mature policy regarding each other.
The most successful of these could be to listen to their people — not the TV watching sound-byte fanatics, but ordinary people who seek visas only to be cruelly denied them. These people want to move on to a durable and trusting relationship between their countries. Whatever be the grouse between their countries — terrorism, the water dispute, Kashmir or ways to find influence in Afghanistan — none of these could or should be resolved by foreign mediators.
Practically all visitors to Delhi are subjected to a routine question. Do they support India’s quest to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council? They all say it is a good idea. However, few go on to discuss the big impediment in this. How can one nuclear gate-crasher be offered the exalted seat it covets when it cannot conduct a simple dialogue with a nuclear neighbour without being nudged by others?
If the leaders of India and Pakistan cannot find the courage to take the first step, they should go back to Ghalib’s simple sagacity. Why should any of the two countries grovel before Washington or any other capital? How about learning from China or Russia or Venezuela or even Iran on how to keep their dignity and be a global player.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa - what the fuss is all about
By Chaudhry Javed Iqbal
I have been watching with bemusement the rumpus in the political circles in Pakistan caused by discussions around renaming of the North West Frontier Province - a name which does not represent anything other then a effigy of the British Raj in India.
Right wing media in Pakistan, including my personal favourite daily newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt that I grew up reading has been up in arms at the thought of the province being named Pakhtunkhwa - reminding the audiences that this is in some way giving in to the long dead Pashtun nationalist leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's demands who wanted independence for NWFP and having failed to see that happen continued another struggle to get the province named as Pakhtunkhwa.
I am failing to understand that if the province inhabited by majority of Punjabi speaking Punjabis is called Punjab, that of Sindhi speaking Sindhis is called Sind, that of Balochi speaking Blauchs is called Baluchistan and that of Kashmiri speaking Kashmiris is called Kashmir then what is the harm in shedding the legacy of the Raj and calling NWFP - a province of Pashtu speaking Pakhtun majority as Pakhtunistan.
Worth noting that I am not, in anyway suggesting splitting up the country in small unmanagable provinces split on linguistic lines. It is worth acknolwedging that in Punjab the number or real Punjabi speakers is not more than 75.23% and the second bigger lingistic group Saraiki speakers (17.36%) have for quite some time been raising their voices for a provincial status. Similarly in Sind only 59.73% of the population speaks Sindhi, while 21.05% speaks Urdu - and they have in the past raised similar voices for a provincial status for Karachi. In Baluchistan 54.76% people speak Balochi compared to 29.64% Pashto speakers.
There are already protests in Hazara region where speakers of other languages are unhappy at the naming of the province as Khyber-Pakhtunkwa. At the moment various political parties are being compelled to back the demand for Hazara province in view of the growing support for the idea. Lets not go down that road.
I have been watching with bemusement the rumpus in the political circles in Pakistan caused by discussions around renaming of the North West Frontier Province - a name which does not represent anything other then a effigy of the British Raj in India.
Right wing media in Pakistan, including my personal favourite daily newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt that I grew up reading has been up in arms at the thought of the province being named Pakhtunkhwa - reminding the audiences that this is in some way giving in to the long dead Pashtun nationalist leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's demands who wanted independence for NWFP and having failed to see that happen continued another struggle to get the province named as Pakhtunkhwa.
I am failing to understand that if the province inhabited by majority of Punjabi speaking Punjabis is called Punjab, that of Sindhi speaking Sindhis is called Sind, that of Balochi speaking Blauchs is called Baluchistan and that of Kashmiri speaking Kashmiris is called Kashmir then what is the harm in shedding the legacy of the Raj and calling NWFP - a province of Pashtu speaking Pakhtun majority as Pakhtunistan.
Worth noting that I am not, in anyway suggesting splitting up the country in small unmanagable provinces split on linguistic lines. It is worth acknolwedging that in Punjab the number or real Punjabi speakers is not more than 75.23% and the second bigger lingistic group Saraiki speakers (17.36%) have for quite some time been raising their voices for a provincial status. Similarly in Sind only 59.73% of the population speaks Sindhi, while 21.05% speaks Urdu - and they have in the past raised similar voices for a provincial status for Karachi. In Baluchistan 54.76% people speak Balochi compared to 29.64% Pashto speakers.
There are already protests in Hazara region where speakers of other languages are unhappy at the naming of the province as Khyber-Pakhtunkwa. At the moment various political parties are being compelled to back the demand for Hazara province in view of the growing support for the idea. Lets not go down that road.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
On constitutional changes
By Humayun Akhtar Khan
Since Pakistan came into existence there has been a tussle between politicians and generals. When they get into power, generals seek legitimacy and the politicians seek more power. Together, they shred the constitution to pieces. The generals must remember that no matter what the causes of their takeovers, they may never be able to secure legitimacy. The politicians should remember that no amendments to the Constitution can protect them from their inadequacies and shortcomings.
We seem to be going through another effort to amend our Constitution. We have a problem with the powers of the president. Agreed, that in a parliamentary form of democracy the chief executive should be the prime minister. What we should ensure is that, as in a true parliamentary system, the prime minister, the cabinet and parliament are all empowered, and not just the prime minister.
The most notorious section of our Constitution at present seems to be Article 58(2)(b). Although it should not be there, a number of coups have been avoided and the democratic process has resulted from Article 58(2)(b). For the time being we need a safety valve in the shape of 58(2)(b). The judicial review we have in the 17th Amendment is not appropriate. We politicians should try and resolve our problems politically.
The president’s power under this section should remain, but with adequate political checks. One check may be the president’s being obligated to seek a vote of confidence in the newly elected National Assembly resulting from the exercise of that power, failing which he or she should be stripped of power.
We have the very important issue of provincial autonomy. Nobody can disagree with the concept but a few fundamental questions arise. Is it not true that our provinces now are more autonomous than the Indian states? Is the abolition of the concurrent list the only way more autonomy may be given to the provinces? Or is the main problem the present structure of the federation, where Punjab constitutes over 60 per cent of the population? As the federation stands today, when Pakistan grows, Punjab grows at a faster rate than the rest of the country, and thus becomes still richer.
The creation of new provinces should not be based on ethnic or linguistic reasons. Their capitals should be reachable by the populations easily. The current balance in the Senate should not be distorted, meaning that the balance Punjab, Balochistan, Sindh and NWFP have in the Senate at present should be retained after the creation of any new provinces. This criterion can only be met if we split the existing provinces in equal numbers. The process to create a new province should be simplified in the Constitution.
Creation of more provinces in Pakistan will strengthen the federation as it exists today. These provinces should be given direct control of more sources of revenue. At present a major chunk of the combined revenues of the federal and provincial governments are collected by the federal government. Almost three- fourths of all provincial expenditures are met through resource transfers from the federal government in accordance with the NFC awards. More autonomy may also be given to the provinces by making their share in their natural resources more equitable, and by giving them adequate employment quotas in all government services.
The Constitution as it existed on Oct 12, 1999, should be restored, but the amendments relating to joint electorate, the reserved seats for religious minorities and women, the lowering of the voting age and the increase in the number of seats in parliament should be retained. The term of the National Assembly should be reduced to four years.
The concurrent list is a list of areas where both the provinces and the federal government can legislate. In case of a conflict, the federal legislation currently prevails. We seem to believe that abolition of the concurrent list and reduction of the federal legislative list is the means for more provincial autonomy. No one seems to have done any homework on the implications of such a move for the federation as it now exists. It may entail a major dismantling of the federal structure and major enhancement of the capacity of the provincial governments. The federation may cease to function and become redundant.
We should reduce the federal legislative list somewhat and add these items to the concurrent list. The existing concurrent list should be retained. However, in the concurrent list we should have two sections. One section should be laws and areas where the federal legislation will prevail. The other should be laws and areas where provincial legislation will prevail in case of a conflict. This will give adequate autonomy to the provinces without jeopardising the federal structure.
The concept of a judicial commission making initial recommendations is fine. Parliamentary scrutiny in the end is done in many countries. The prime minister should have some say too. The Charter of Democracy’s clause of three recommendations of the judicial commission to be sent to the prime minister, who then forwards one to the parliamentary committee, seems appropriate.
The appointment of the chief justices of the provincial and supreme courts should be made by the prime minister. These should not only be based on lengths of service but also on competence and reputation. The appointments must also come before the parliamentary committee, which having equal representation of the opposition and the treasury, should be able to block them with a two-thirds majority. Similarly, the appointments of the head of the accountability organisation or the chief election commissioner again should be made in a similar fashion as the appointment of the chief justices.
Our first-past-the-post electoral system is biased towards the larger political parties of the country. As in the case of reserved seats for women and religious minorities in the national and provincial assemblies, a new category of technocrats should be added to the list of reserved seats. All the reserved seats should depend on the actual percentage of votes a particular political party is able to get in an election, and not on the number of members it is able to get elected. A serious problem in Pakistan is the non-existence of adequate capacities within the ranks of political parties to govern once they get into power. The addition of the category of technocrats in the legislatures would give the political parties an improved capacity to govern. Also, the minorities still remain unrepresented in the Senate, for which provisions should be made in the Constitution.
Most legislation in Pakistan is done through ordinances, which essentially is a legacy of our colonial past. In the presence of elected bodies no country in the world permits the issuance of ordinances. If we look at the history of our legislation, no ordinance, apart from the NRO, has subsequently been removed or significantly changed by an assembly. If we want to empower our assemblies, we must get rid of the power of the executive to issue ordinances.
The last local-governments system had a lot of positive points. The system had its teething troubles, though. Revenue and law-and-order functions should be taken away from these local bodies. Other powers should remain intact. The process for the election of nazims, naib nazims and reserved seats for district/tehsil councils should be simplified, so that it is less prone to malpractices.
With respect to the status of Fata, the options are for the territory to continue as it is, administratively and politically; to become part of our existing provinces; to become a new province; or to be given special status like Gilgit-Baltistan. Obviously, the people of Fata must be consulted in what they want for themselves. My recommendation would be for them to be given that status which Gilgtit-Baltistan has received.
Years of mismanagement, political manipulation and corruption have made Pakistan’s civil services incapable of providing effective governance. The last regime’s devolution plan led to further confusion. Reforms of the civil service should be prioritised for it to become a more effective and accountable institution. The recommendations of the National Commission on Government Reforms, which was set up by the last government in 2006 and which presented a report to the prime minister in May 2008, could be the starting point for the debate to reform the civil services.
The 18th Amendment, a good effort, is necessary, but certainly not sufficient. If we really want to strengthen democracy, let us start delivering to the people and let us learn to protect the interests of the state rather than our own. What happened in Washington should be an eye-opener: only two years after the election, the red carpet was rolled out for our army chief, with politicians nowhere to be seen. Such is the level of vacuums we create, which of course take no time being filled.
Since Pakistan came into existence there has been a tussle between politicians and generals. When they get into power, generals seek legitimacy and the politicians seek more power. Together, they shred the constitution to pieces. The generals must remember that no matter what the causes of their takeovers, they may never be able to secure legitimacy. The politicians should remember that no amendments to the Constitution can protect them from their inadequacies and shortcomings.
We seem to be going through another effort to amend our Constitution. We have a problem with the powers of the president. Agreed, that in a parliamentary form of democracy the chief executive should be the prime minister. What we should ensure is that, as in a true parliamentary system, the prime minister, the cabinet and parliament are all empowered, and not just the prime minister.
The most notorious section of our Constitution at present seems to be Article 58(2)(b). Although it should not be there, a number of coups have been avoided and the democratic process has resulted from Article 58(2)(b). For the time being we need a safety valve in the shape of 58(2)(b). The judicial review we have in the 17th Amendment is not appropriate. We politicians should try and resolve our problems politically.
The president’s power under this section should remain, but with adequate political checks. One check may be the president’s being obligated to seek a vote of confidence in the newly elected National Assembly resulting from the exercise of that power, failing which he or she should be stripped of power.
We have the very important issue of provincial autonomy. Nobody can disagree with the concept but a few fundamental questions arise. Is it not true that our provinces now are more autonomous than the Indian states? Is the abolition of the concurrent list the only way more autonomy may be given to the provinces? Or is the main problem the present structure of the federation, where Punjab constitutes over 60 per cent of the population? As the federation stands today, when Pakistan grows, Punjab grows at a faster rate than the rest of the country, and thus becomes still richer.
The creation of new provinces should not be based on ethnic or linguistic reasons. Their capitals should be reachable by the populations easily. The current balance in the Senate should not be distorted, meaning that the balance Punjab, Balochistan, Sindh and NWFP have in the Senate at present should be retained after the creation of any new provinces. This criterion can only be met if we split the existing provinces in equal numbers. The process to create a new province should be simplified in the Constitution.
Creation of more provinces in Pakistan will strengthen the federation as it exists today. These provinces should be given direct control of more sources of revenue. At present a major chunk of the combined revenues of the federal and provincial governments are collected by the federal government. Almost three- fourths of all provincial expenditures are met through resource transfers from the federal government in accordance with the NFC awards. More autonomy may also be given to the provinces by making their share in their natural resources more equitable, and by giving them adequate employment quotas in all government services.
The Constitution as it existed on Oct 12, 1999, should be restored, but the amendments relating to joint electorate, the reserved seats for religious minorities and women, the lowering of the voting age and the increase in the number of seats in parliament should be retained. The term of the National Assembly should be reduced to four years.
The concurrent list is a list of areas where both the provinces and the federal government can legislate. In case of a conflict, the federal legislation currently prevails. We seem to believe that abolition of the concurrent list and reduction of the federal legislative list is the means for more provincial autonomy. No one seems to have done any homework on the implications of such a move for the federation as it now exists. It may entail a major dismantling of the federal structure and major enhancement of the capacity of the provincial governments. The federation may cease to function and become redundant.
We should reduce the federal legislative list somewhat and add these items to the concurrent list. The existing concurrent list should be retained. However, in the concurrent list we should have two sections. One section should be laws and areas where the federal legislation will prevail. The other should be laws and areas where provincial legislation will prevail in case of a conflict. This will give adequate autonomy to the provinces without jeopardising the federal structure.
The concept of a judicial commission making initial recommendations is fine. Parliamentary scrutiny in the end is done in many countries. The prime minister should have some say too. The Charter of Democracy’s clause of three recommendations of the judicial commission to be sent to the prime minister, who then forwards one to the parliamentary committee, seems appropriate.
The appointment of the chief justices of the provincial and supreme courts should be made by the prime minister. These should not only be based on lengths of service but also on competence and reputation. The appointments must also come before the parliamentary committee, which having equal representation of the opposition and the treasury, should be able to block them with a two-thirds majority. Similarly, the appointments of the head of the accountability organisation or the chief election commissioner again should be made in a similar fashion as the appointment of the chief justices.
Our first-past-the-post electoral system is biased towards the larger political parties of the country. As in the case of reserved seats for women and religious minorities in the national and provincial assemblies, a new category of technocrats should be added to the list of reserved seats. All the reserved seats should depend on the actual percentage of votes a particular political party is able to get in an election, and not on the number of members it is able to get elected. A serious problem in Pakistan is the non-existence of adequate capacities within the ranks of political parties to govern once they get into power. The addition of the category of technocrats in the legislatures would give the political parties an improved capacity to govern. Also, the minorities still remain unrepresented in the Senate, for which provisions should be made in the Constitution.
Most legislation in Pakistan is done through ordinances, which essentially is a legacy of our colonial past. In the presence of elected bodies no country in the world permits the issuance of ordinances. If we look at the history of our legislation, no ordinance, apart from the NRO, has subsequently been removed or significantly changed by an assembly. If we want to empower our assemblies, we must get rid of the power of the executive to issue ordinances.
The last local-governments system had a lot of positive points. The system had its teething troubles, though. Revenue and law-and-order functions should be taken away from these local bodies. Other powers should remain intact. The process for the election of nazims, naib nazims and reserved seats for district/tehsil councils should be simplified, so that it is less prone to malpractices.
With respect to the status of Fata, the options are for the territory to continue as it is, administratively and politically; to become part of our existing provinces; to become a new province; or to be given special status like Gilgit-Baltistan. Obviously, the people of Fata must be consulted in what they want for themselves. My recommendation would be for them to be given that status which Gilgtit-Baltistan has received.
Years of mismanagement, political manipulation and corruption have made Pakistan’s civil services incapable of providing effective governance. The last regime’s devolution plan led to further confusion. Reforms of the civil service should be prioritised for it to become a more effective and accountable institution. The recommendations of the National Commission on Government Reforms, which was set up by the last government in 2006 and which presented a report to the prime minister in May 2008, could be the starting point for the debate to reform the civil services.
The 18th Amendment, a good effort, is necessary, but certainly not sufficient. If we really want to strengthen democracy, let us start delivering to the people and let us learn to protect the interests of the state rather than our own. What happened in Washington should be an eye-opener: only two years after the election, the red carpet was rolled out for our army chief, with politicians nowhere to be seen. Such is the level of vacuums we create, which of course take no time being filled.
Prelude to a new province?
By Rahimullah Yusufzai
It is the fate of the people of our province to have long and hyphenated names. Upon its creation by the British rulers of India in 1901, it was named the North-West Frontier Province having 25 characters, or 26, if one were to include the hyphen. If all goes well and the constitutional reforms package is approved by parliament, as expected, the province will become known as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. That is 18 letters, or 19, if the second name were spelt “Pakhtoonkhwa.”
As Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is a long name, its abbreviation KP is likely to be commonly used. Besides, those who don’t like “Pakhtunkhwa” would simply call it “Khyber.” The majority in the NWFP, though, would ensure that the usage of Pakhtunkhwa, for which the nationalists have been campaigning all these years, becomes common because it asserts their Pakhtun identity.
Pakhtun ultra-nationalists are angry with the ruling Awami National Party (ANP) for conceding the PML-N’s demand for “Khyber” being prefixed to Pakhtunkhwa and thus diluting a name that was finally going to give an identity to their Pakhtun-majority province. Some Pashto poets and intellectuals are accusing the nationalist ANP of compromising its principled position on the renaming issue and wasting a historic opportunity to give the 109-year old province a proper name. The ANP was also accused of giving up its long-held stance that the NWFP Assembly resolution favouring only “Pakhtunkhwa” be honoured.
Maulana Fazlur Rahman didn’t miss the opportunity to embarrass the ANP and belittle its achievement. The Maulana, whose own party supported “Pakhtunhkwa,” entered the fray by saying the new name had come from “Takht-e-Lahore,” or throne of Lahore, as agreement on “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” became possible only after it had been accepted by the PML-N leadership belonging to Punjab.
Like the ANP, the PML-N, which presented the hyphenated new name as a victory vindicating the party’s stance in the renaming issue, also faced criticism from supporters. In particular, in its Hazara stronghold the PML-N is now confronted with a combined challenge by all rival political parties and candidates who were defeated by its nominees in the last general elections or who are hoping to seize this opportunity and win the next polls.
The PML-Q, which was the only party in the parliamentary constitutional reforms committee to oppose “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,” insisting on the meaningless name of “Sarhad” for the province, is spearheading the agitation in parts of Hazara. Obviously, the PML-Q has to oppose anything done by the PML-N, but in this case there was an opportunity to snatch Hazara from it, as well as use the renaming issue to seek votes from those opposed to “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” elsewhere in the province and in the country.
The PML-N was apparently mistaken if it thought that, because of the “Khyber” prefix, it could sell “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” to its electorate in Hazara. While it earned the resentment of Pakhtuns who wanted an undiluted Pakhtun name for their province, it is losing the respect and support of many Hazarawals and other non-Pashto-speaking people in the province for failing to protect their identities.
One is at a loss to understand why the name of a mountain pass was prefixed, because it cannot confer an identity on any ethnic group, and certainly not the people of Hazara. Still, certain PML-N leaders are claiming it as an achievement since “Khyber” will precede “Pakhtunkhwa.” This is a negative approach aimed at political point-scoring, instead of giving an appropriate name to a province where 74 per cent of the population speaks Pashto, and many others are ethnic Pakhtuns who speak Hindko and other languages in place of their original mother tongue.
The PML-N could have insisted on “Afghania” as the new name, which some of its leaders had hinted was acceptable. Afghania was certainly more appropriate than Khyber and was also one of the three names suggested by the ANP, besides Pakhtunkhwa and Pakhtunistan. Though no opinion survey in Hazara or elsewhere has been carried out to find out if Afghania was acceptable, there are reports that many Hazarawals would have preferred it to Khyber and Pakhtunkhwa. As someone pointed out, even Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah didn’t object to Afghania, as he must have known that Chaudhry Rahmat Ali had suggested this name for NWFP when he coined the word “Pakistan” for the new Muslim homeland in India. The ANP had reasons to be happy with the renaming of the province even if it had to accept the addition of Khyber to its preferred name, Pakhtunkhwa.
At the same time, the proposed constitutional amendments will accord all the provinces unprecedented provincial autonomy. In fact, these have been the cherished goals of the ANP, together with the rejection of the Kalabagh Dam project and more recently the battle against religious militancy. The party is hoping to cash in on these achievements in the next general elections. Each election, though, has its own dynamics and the outcome is determined by the situation at that particular time. However, it was felt that the ANP and its government in NWFP overdid its celebrations on the renaming issue. It is possible that this provoked opponents of “Pakhtunkhwa” to mobilise likeminded people and start a movement for a separate Hazara province.
The PPP didn’t arrange any celebrations in the province or elsewhere, despite the fact that its support was crucial in getting the province renamed. In fact, President Asif Ali Zardari ensured that Pakhtunkhwa was part of the new name even if that meant annoying some of his NWFP party leaders. He overruled all opposition in his party to Pakhtunkhwa and almost sealed the name by mentioning it in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly session in New York.
Celebrations by ANP members and supporters were visible, and at times they were spontaneous. But there wasn’t much excitement among ordinary people that their province had been renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Mostly preoccupied by the daily struggle to survive amid the terrorism, insecurity, displacement, inflation and unemployment, ordinary people in many cases have other priorities.
The strongest reaction to “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,” as expected, has been in Hazara division, particularly in its headquarters, Abbottabad. There have been some protests in Mansehra, the second-biggest city in Hazara, and Haripur, and apparently none in Battagram, where more than 80 per cent of the population is Pashto-speaking, and in Kohistan, where Kohistani is the dominant language and many people also speak Pashto.
The demand of protestors in Hazara is for provincial status for their region. Even the JUI-F has joined the movement, and so have local leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf and other parties. Some PML-N leaders too are being compelled to back the demand for Hazara province in view of the growing support for the idea.
Creation of a new province isn’t going to be a priority in a present-day Pakistan plagued by serious security and economic problems. However, a popular movement cannot be ignored for long. The agitation in Hazara hasn’t reached the stage of a movement and the ruling political parties are hopeful that the protests will subside. Rather than making an effort earlier to seek support for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in Hazara and elsewhere, the ANP-led government in the province is planning to do so now. Already, there have been demands that the net hydel-generation profits the province is receiving from Tarbela Dam should be given to Hazara, where the project is located.
Some serious political work needs to be done to control the damage and keep the province intact by listening to those offended by the name Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. For years the demand for Hazara province had been being championed by fringe political elements, but the bigger parties and known politicians now demanding it cannot be ignored for long.
It is the fate of the people of our province to have long and hyphenated names. Upon its creation by the British rulers of India in 1901, it was named the North-West Frontier Province having 25 characters, or 26, if one were to include the hyphen. If all goes well and the constitutional reforms package is approved by parliament, as expected, the province will become known as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. That is 18 letters, or 19, if the second name were spelt “Pakhtoonkhwa.”
As Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is a long name, its abbreviation KP is likely to be commonly used. Besides, those who don’t like “Pakhtunkhwa” would simply call it “Khyber.” The majority in the NWFP, though, would ensure that the usage of Pakhtunkhwa, for which the nationalists have been campaigning all these years, becomes common because it asserts their Pakhtun identity.
Pakhtun ultra-nationalists are angry with the ruling Awami National Party (ANP) for conceding the PML-N’s demand for “Khyber” being prefixed to Pakhtunkhwa and thus diluting a name that was finally going to give an identity to their Pakhtun-majority province. Some Pashto poets and intellectuals are accusing the nationalist ANP of compromising its principled position on the renaming issue and wasting a historic opportunity to give the 109-year old province a proper name. The ANP was also accused of giving up its long-held stance that the NWFP Assembly resolution favouring only “Pakhtunkhwa” be honoured.
Maulana Fazlur Rahman didn’t miss the opportunity to embarrass the ANP and belittle its achievement. The Maulana, whose own party supported “Pakhtunhkwa,” entered the fray by saying the new name had come from “Takht-e-Lahore,” or throne of Lahore, as agreement on “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” became possible only after it had been accepted by the PML-N leadership belonging to Punjab.
Like the ANP, the PML-N, which presented the hyphenated new name as a victory vindicating the party’s stance in the renaming issue, also faced criticism from supporters. In particular, in its Hazara stronghold the PML-N is now confronted with a combined challenge by all rival political parties and candidates who were defeated by its nominees in the last general elections or who are hoping to seize this opportunity and win the next polls.
The PML-Q, which was the only party in the parliamentary constitutional reforms committee to oppose “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,” insisting on the meaningless name of “Sarhad” for the province, is spearheading the agitation in parts of Hazara. Obviously, the PML-Q has to oppose anything done by the PML-N, but in this case there was an opportunity to snatch Hazara from it, as well as use the renaming issue to seek votes from those opposed to “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” elsewhere in the province and in the country.
The PML-N was apparently mistaken if it thought that, because of the “Khyber” prefix, it could sell “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” to its electorate in Hazara. While it earned the resentment of Pakhtuns who wanted an undiluted Pakhtun name for their province, it is losing the respect and support of many Hazarawals and other non-Pashto-speaking people in the province for failing to protect their identities.
One is at a loss to understand why the name of a mountain pass was prefixed, because it cannot confer an identity on any ethnic group, and certainly not the people of Hazara. Still, certain PML-N leaders are claiming it as an achievement since “Khyber” will precede “Pakhtunkhwa.” This is a negative approach aimed at political point-scoring, instead of giving an appropriate name to a province where 74 per cent of the population speaks Pashto, and many others are ethnic Pakhtuns who speak Hindko and other languages in place of their original mother tongue.
The PML-N could have insisted on “Afghania” as the new name, which some of its leaders had hinted was acceptable. Afghania was certainly more appropriate than Khyber and was also one of the three names suggested by the ANP, besides Pakhtunkhwa and Pakhtunistan. Though no opinion survey in Hazara or elsewhere has been carried out to find out if Afghania was acceptable, there are reports that many Hazarawals would have preferred it to Khyber and Pakhtunkhwa. As someone pointed out, even Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah didn’t object to Afghania, as he must have known that Chaudhry Rahmat Ali had suggested this name for NWFP when he coined the word “Pakistan” for the new Muslim homeland in India. The ANP had reasons to be happy with the renaming of the province even if it had to accept the addition of Khyber to its preferred name, Pakhtunkhwa.
At the same time, the proposed constitutional amendments will accord all the provinces unprecedented provincial autonomy. In fact, these have been the cherished goals of the ANP, together with the rejection of the Kalabagh Dam project and more recently the battle against religious militancy. The party is hoping to cash in on these achievements in the next general elections. Each election, though, has its own dynamics and the outcome is determined by the situation at that particular time. However, it was felt that the ANP and its government in NWFP overdid its celebrations on the renaming issue. It is possible that this provoked opponents of “Pakhtunkhwa” to mobilise likeminded people and start a movement for a separate Hazara province.
The PPP didn’t arrange any celebrations in the province or elsewhere, despite the fact that its support was crucial in getting the province renamed. In fact, President Asif Ali Zardari ensured that Pakhtunkhwa was part of the new name even if that meant annoying some of his NWFP party leaders. He overruled all opposition in his party to Pakhtunkhwa and almost sealed the name by mentioning it in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly session in New York.
Celebrations by ANP members and supporters were visible, and at times they were spontaneous. But there wasn’t much excitement among ordinary people that their province had been renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Mostly preoccupied by the daily struggle to survive amid the terrorism, insecurity, displacement, inflation and unemployment, ordinary people in many cases have other priorities.
The strongest reaction to “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,” as expected, has been in Hazara division, particularly in its headquarters, Abbottabad. There have been some protests in Mansehra, the second-biggest city in Hazara, and Haripur, and apparently none in Battagram, where more than 80 per cent of the population is Pashto-speaking, and in Kohistan, where Kohistani is the dominant language and many people also speak Pashto.
The demand of protestors in Hazara is for provincial status for their region. Even the JUI-F has joined the movement, and so have local leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf and other parties. Some PML-N leaders too are being compelled to back the demand for Hazara province in view of the growing support for the idea.
Creation of a new province isn’t going to be a priority in a present-day Pakistan plagued by serious security and economic problems. However, a popular movement cannot be ignored for long. The agitation in Hazara hasn’t reached the stage of a movement and the ruling political parties are hopeful that the protests will subside. Rather than making an effort earlier to seek support for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in Hazara and elsewhere, the ANP-led government in the province is planning to do so now. Already, there have been demands that the net hydel-generation profits the province is receiving from Tarbela Dam should be given to Hazara, where the project is located.
Some serious political work needs to be done to control the damage and keep the province intact by listening to those offended by the name Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. For years the demand for Hazara province had been being championed by fringe political elements, but the bigger parties and known politicians now demanding it cannot be ignored for long.
Minimising nuclear risks
By SYED MUHAMMAD ALI
US expert David Albright’s latest book, Peddling Peril warns that theft of nuclear material by terrorists poses a serious risk to international peace and security.
In order to cope with this challenge there is a need for international cooperation and relocation, where necessary, of nuclear arms storages and watchful care of nuclear technology sources that are spread in well over 40 countries. At their 2002 summit, G-8 leaders committed to spend $20 billion over a decade to secure the weapons of mass destruction in the world. But that effort appears to have lost its way and only $3.5 billion have been spent, said Robert Einhorn, co-author of a CSIS report and former assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB), more than 250 incidents of unauthorised possession and related criminal activities, theft or loss of nuclear or other radioactive materials, and unauthorised disposal of radioactive materials had been reported to the UN till 2008. With 20 of the 28 Indian states ablaze with Naxalites insurgency across the length and breadth of the nuclear-armed India, the Maharashtra police arrested three people for stealing around 5kg of uranium from Mumbai last December. Last November, according to daily Indian Express, an incident of tritium leak took place at the Kaiga Nuclear Plant in Karnataka’s north Kannada district. It left 55 of its employees with radiation poisoning after they drank water from a water cooler in the operation area. Till the last reports, they were still under treatment. Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, is used in thermo-nuclear weapons.
Coming to Europe one finds that in Georgia, 79.5 grams of 89 percent-enriched uranium was seized in February 2006. The US Department of Energy’s Intelligence office Chief, Rolf Mowatt Larssen, testified before the US Congress in April 2008: “Beyond some basics, we do not know what a terrorist nuclear plot might look like.”
It is unfortunate that Albright’s book, despite the hype that it has received, is not devoid of technical inaccuracies and reflects either a personal bias or a motivated agenda of maligning Pakistan’s nuclear programme. He has expressed the concern that the terrorists are more likely to use an implosion device as compared to a gun-type nuclear weapon. Most nuclear design experts are aware that implosion type nuclear weapon design is extremely sophisticated and requires complete mastery over more than dozen different high-tech and diverse technologies such as theoretical physics, chemical engineering, diagnostics testing, solid-state physics, metallurgy, radioisotopes, geology, enrichment and reprocessing techniques, electrical and mechanical engineering, high-speed electronics, computers, advanced explosives design, machining and manufacturing facilities.
And then, only highly-trained and professional manpower consisting of hundreds of scientists and thousands of technicians working over many years can put together a system, which has been mastered by nine out of 192 UN member states has been in the past seven decades. When even Iraq and Libya despite massive investment could not produce nuclear weapons, makes it extremely improbable for a non-state actor to have the resources to put together a nuclear weapon.
Although terrorism continues to be a major challenge to the stability of this region, its capability should be viewed from an objective and realistic perspective. In this age of Google Earth, independent media and remote sensing satellites, no country can hide its nuclear infrastructure. It is unlikely that the required infrastructure could be hidden by groups like Al-Qaeda in the caves of Afghanistan or the deserts of Yemen. Writers who continue to talk about the possibility of proliferation by Pakistan need to realise that with the employment of strict legal, physical, financial and personnel-based control mechanism that is enviable for even the US Department of Energy, it is simply not likely. The complex and multi-layered safety, security and reliability protocol based systems, which Pakistan has evolved, is being considered worthy of emulation by senior officials of US Department of Energy, the authority charged with the custodial control and maintenance of nuclear weapons.
It is ironic that despite President Barack Obama’s desire for a Nuclear Zero and end of cold war, the fact remains that, the US continues to maintain tons of weapon-grade fissile material stockpiles and most massive and deadly nuclear weapon arsenal in various parts of the world, including Turkey, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, certain parts of Asia and US aircraft carriers afloat in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. According to International Panel on fissile Materials (IPFM), the US declared: “As of May 2009, the United States had 2,126 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads, which meets the limits set by the [2002 Moscow] Treaty for 2012.” In addition, it currently has an estimated 500 non-strategic weapons and more than 6,500 inactive weapons in reserve or awaiting dismantlement, bringing the total US inventory to about 9400 warheads.
But what will really be shocking for most readers is the news that during the past six decades, only the US and Russia have lost at least 92 nuclear weapons in 15 different parts of the world, which still remain unaccounted for. With a safety record like this and availability of a massive nuclear arsenal clearly disproportionate to the current global security architecture and availability of sensitive and dual-use technology and materials in over 40 countries, to raise alarm over the possibility of terrorists choosing only Pakistani nuclear weapons for attacks, is not a convincing argument.
In the forthcoming much talked-about Nuclear Security Summit and Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Pakistan must present a confident and responsible posture, consistent with its commitment to international non-proliferation, its resolve to fight terrorism and desire to pursue international cooperation for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy to meet its economic, industrial and domestic requirements. Most importantly, it must express a clear determination not to be browbeaten by those states, whose own nuclear safety record needs major improvement, and which aspire to regional or global hegemony.
US expert David Albright’s latest book, Peddling Peril warns that theft of nuclear material by terrorists poses a serious risk to international peace and security.
In order to cope with this challenge there is a need for international cooperation and relocation, where necessary, of nuclear arms storages and watchful care of nuclear technology sources that are spread in well over 40 countries. At their 2002 summit, G-8 leaders committed to spend $20 billion over a decade to secure the weapons of mass destruction in the world. But that effort appears to have lost its way and only $3.5 billion have been spent, said Robert Einhorn, co-author of a CSIS report and former assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB), more than 250 incidents of unauthorised possession and related criminal activities, theft or loss of nuclear or other radioactive materials, and unauthorised disposal of radioactive materials had been reported to the UN till 2008. With 20 of the 28 Indian states ablaze with Naxalites insurgency across the length and breadth of the nuclear-armed India, the Maharashtra police arrested three people for stealing around 5kg of uranium from Mumbai last December. Last November, according to daily Indian Express, an incident of tritium leak took place at the Kaiga Nuclear Plant in Karnataka’s north Kannada district. It left 55 of its employees with radiation poisoning after they drank water from a water cooler in the operation area. Till the last reports, they were still under treatment. Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, is used in thermo-nuclear weapons.
Coming to Europe one finds that in Georgia, 79.5 grams of 89 percent-enriched uranium was seized in February 2006. The US Department of Energy’s Intelligence office Chief, Rolf Mowatt Larssen, testified before the US Congress in April 2008: “Beyond some basics, we do not know what a terrorist nuclear plot might look like.”
It is unfortunate that Albright’s book, despite the hype that it has received, is not devoid of technical inaccuracies and reflects either a personal bias or a motivated agenda of maligning Pakistan’s nuclear programme. He has expressed the concern that the terrorists are more likely to use an implosion device as compared to a gun-type nuclear weapon. Most nuclear design experts are aware that implosion type nuclear weapon design is extremely sophisticated and requires complete mastery over more than dozen different high-tech and diverse technologies such as theoretical physics, chemical engineering, diagnostics testing, solid-state physics, metallurgy, radioisotopes, geology, enrichment and reprocessing techniques, electrical and mechanical engineering, high-speed electronics, computers, advanced explosives design, machining and manufacturing facilities.
And then, only highly-trained and professional manpower consisting of hundreds of scientists and thousands of technicians working over many years can put together a system, which has been mastered by nine out of 192 UN member states has been in the past seven decades. When even Iraq and Libya despite massive investment could not produce nuclear weapons, makes it extremely improbable for a non-state actor to have the resources to put together a nuclear weapon.
Although terrorism continues to be a major challenge to the stability of this region, its capability should be viewed from an objective and realistic perspective. In this age of Google Earth, independent media and remote sensing satellites, no country can hide its nuclear infrastructure. It is unlikely that the required infrastructure could be hidden by groups like Al-Qaeda in the caves of Afghanistan or the deserts of Yemen. Writers who continue to talk about the possibility of proliferation by Pakistan need to realise that with the employment of strict legal, physical, financial and personnel-based control mechanism that is enviable for even the US Department of Energy, it is simply not likely. The complex and multi-layered safety, security and reliability protocol based systems, which Pakistan has evolved, is being considered worthy of emulation by senior officials of US Department of Energy, the authority charged with the custodial control and maintenance of nuclear weapons.
It is ironic that despite President Barack Obama’s desire for a Nuclear Zero and end of cold war, the fact remains that, the US continues to maintain tons of weapon-grade fissile material stockpiles and most massive and deadly nuclear weapon arsenal in various parts of the world, including Turkey, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, certain parts of Asia and US aircraft carriers afloat in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. According to International Panel on fissile Materials (IPFM), the US declared: “As of May 2009, the United States had 2,126 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads, which meets the limits set by the [2002 Moscow] Treaty for 2012.” In addition, it currently has an estimated 500 non-strategic weapons and more than 6,500 inactive weapons in reserve or awaiting dismantlement, bringing the total US inventory to about 9400 warheads.
But what will really be shocking for most readers is the news that during the past six decades, only the US and Russia have lost at least 92 nuclear weapons in 15 different parts of the world, which still remain unaccounted for. With a safety record like this and availability of a massive nuclear arsenal clearly disproportionate to the current global security architecture and availability of sensitive and dual-use technology and materials in over 40 countries, to raise alarm over the possibility of terrorists choosing only Pakistani nuclear weapons for attacks, is not a convincing argument.
In the forthcoming much talked-about Nuclear Security Summit and Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Pakistan must present a confident and responsible posture, consistent with its commitment to international non-proliferation, its resolve to fight terrorism and desire to pursue international cooperation for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy to meet its economic, industrial and domestic requirements. Most importantly, it must express a clear determination not to be browbeaten by those states, whose own nuclear safety record needs major improvement, and which aspire to regional or global hegemony.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
State, politics and mass media
By Shafqat Mahmood
It is not easy to find heroes among contemporary politicians. Clean image is a rarity and incompetence seems to be a shared trait. The exceptions in this unsavoury milieu stand out like a beacon of light.
Yes, flowery language is being unashamedly used because it requires an iron will to spurn opportunities of corruption in this environment. And keeping one’s sanity or inherent abilities intact in a sea of mediocrity is no joke either.
One person who has done this in style, ever since he entered politics is Senator Raza Rabbani. The much used word “integrity” does not do justice to him. He is truly above the sordid world of wheels and deals and money-making.
He is also immensely gifted: a bright mind, steady determination and great interpersonal skills. It is these qualities that helped him steer the inter-party committee towards a broad constitutional overhaul. As a shepherd of the historic 18th Amendment he is truly a hero.
Accolades also need to be shared around, because every party made a contribution. The PPP as initiator of the process deserves congratulations, as does the PML-N for not only pushing the repeal of the infamous 17th Amendment but also showing flexibility when things got difficult in the end.
The relatively smaller parties, such as the ANP and the MQM, while having reservations on many clauses, still went along in a spirit of national conciliation. They agreed to ground rules that allowed dissent to be recorded, without derailing the process. The historic result is a tribute to the entire political class.
While much mutual praise is in order, the role that mass media has come to play in the process is relatively unrecognised. Nawaz Sharif was probably only reflecting misgivings in his party when he expressed some last-minute reservations. But the media truly took him to task.
The PML-N grandees kept protesting that this was no crisis and issues will soon be resolved. But the media would not let up. The explanations given did not make logical sense to it and seemed bereft of any moral content. This created so much pressure that it literally pushed the PML-N across the finish line in haste.
This is just one example of the context that mass media has created for our governance and politics. It is no longer possible for individuals, institutions or political parties to get away with actions that do not pass the bar of logic and morality.
And there are no consistent heroes either. It is entirely possible for one individual or an institution to get total media support on an issue and then lose it if the context changes. Individual writers and commentators may consistently support a party or an institution, but the media in totality will order its responses according to a given situation.
The mass media reflects mainstream norms of the society. These are in essence based on a code of morality derived from religion, culture and history. Some parts of this value code are obvious: family and country are revered and democracy is good. Corruption, cheating and lying is bad.
Similarly, institutions such as parliament, judiciary, and military are valued, but any transgression of authority beyond the prescribed mandate is not tolerated. Leaders are to be respected because they represent the people but pursuit of individual or political interest without an ethical content is not acceptable.
It is this value structure that has subliminally become a framework for mass-media responses. Institutions and individuals in the public eye understand this and try to cover, or spin, their actions to fit this code of morality. Those that do not, suffer a media backlash.
There is no better example of this than the perceptions regarding Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and the judiciary. On March 9, 2007, Mr Chaudhry became a media and public hero. This happened because of the perception that Musharraf dismissed him illegally and then mistreated him and his family.
Thus began the lawyers’ and people’s campaign for an independent judiciary. This was not individual adulation, although it seemed so. The chief justice symbolised society’s protest against a wrong done. And the lawyers who were in the forefront of the struggle were champions of liberty and freedom.
Fast-forward to 2010. There are increasing voices in the media that the superior judiciary is transgressing its mandate and at times behaving like a political institution. By frequently visiting the bars, it seems to be cultivating lawyers and often senior advocates and bar officeholders speak on its behalf.
Serious transgressions by lawyers are also ignored. For a lawyer to slap a judge and for the superior judiciary to arrange a rapprochement is just not right. This man should have been behind bars.
But congratulatory sounds emanating from all levels of the judiciary indicate as if a great conclusion to the crisis has been arrived at. Earlier, too, the judiciary had ignored lawyers beating up policemen and media representatives.
This is not about the NRO or Asif Zardari. The media welcomed the NRO, and Asif Zardari does not pass the bar of morality as far as society is concerned. The problem is that the PPP’s charge of one-sided accountability is beginning to get resonance. And the language and attitude being shown in open court by the judges is creating a backlash.
Enough about the judiciary. A few words about another national institution, the military. Musharraf had brought the image of the army down because in the eyes of the media and the public his actions did not pass the bar of morality. Gen Kayani has resurrected this by daring campaigns in Swat and South Waziristan and by staying away from political wrangles.
The sacrifices given by officers and men in this war against militancy have evoked deep appreciation among the society and the mass media. It is therefore unfortunate when an incident like the Rangers kidnapping a police official happens.
Policemen are often rude and poorly trained. There is little doubt that this constable would have misbehaved. But the Rangers’ hierarchy should have lodged a complaint. The law of the land does not permit a paramilitary organisation to detain anyone, let alone law enforcement officials.
The reaction in the media was thus not unexpected. None of the explanations coming forth from the Rangers were either logical or based on any moral code. This is the key. In the age of the mass media all actions have to be justified. They have to appeal to logic and to the ingrained moral code of the society.
Of course, this does not mean that the media itself is above any code. There always has been serious criticism of individuals and institutions in the media that go beyond what is acceptable by the society. The moves by the electronic media to regulate itself have come about because of such a pressure.
As our democracy matures, every institution will find adjustment within a framework of social morality. Until such time, everyone in the public eye will have to watch each step taken, carefully.
It is not easy to find heroes among contemporary politicians. Clean image is a rarity and incompetence seems to be a shared trait. The exceptions in this unsavoury milieu stand out like a beacon of light.
Yes, flowery language is being unashamedly used because it requires an iron will to spurn opportunities of corruption in this environment. And keeping one’s sanity or inherent abilities intact in a sea of mediocrity is no joke either.
One person who has done this in style, ever since he entered politics is Senator Raza Rabbani. The much used word “integrity” does not do justice to him. He is truly above the sordid world of wheels and deals and money-making.
He is also immensely gifted: a bright mind, steady determination and great interpersonal skills. It is these qualities that helped him steer the inter-party committee towards a broad constitutional overhaul. As a shepherd of the historic 18th Amendment he is truly a hero.
Accolades also need to be shared around, because every party made a contribution. The PPP as initiator of the process deserves congratulations, as does the PML-N for not only pushing the repeal of the infamous 17th Amendment but also showing flexibility when things got difficult in the end.
The relatively smaller parties, such as the ANP and the MQM, while having reservations on many clauses, still went along in a spirit of national conciliation. They agreed to ground rules that allowed dissent to be recorded, without derailing the process. The historic result is a tribute to the entire political class.
While much mutual praise is in order, the role that mass media has come to play in the process is relatively unrecognised. Nawaz Sharif was probably only reflecting misgivings in his party when he expressed some last-minute reservations. But the media truly took him to task.
The PML-N grandees kept protesting that this was no crisis and issues will soon be resolved. But the media would not let up. The explanations given did not make logical sense to it and seemed bereft of any moral content. This created so much pressure that it literally pushed the PML-N across the finish line in haste.
This is just one example of the context that mass media has created for our governance and politics. It is no longer possible for individuals, institutions or political parties to get away with actions that do not pass the bar of logic and morality.
And there are no consistent heroes either. It is entirely possible for one individual or an institution to get total media support on an issue and then lose it if the context changes. Individual writers and commentators may consistently support a party or an institution, but the media in totality will order its responses according to a given situation.
The mass media reflects mainstream norms of the society. These are in essence based on a code of morality derived from religion, culture and history. Some parts of this value code are obvious: family and country are revered and democracy is good. Corruption, cheating and lying is bad.
Similarly, institutions such as parliament, judiciary, and military are valued, but any transgression of authority beyond the prescribed mandate is not tolerated. Leaders are to be respected because they represent the people but pursuit of individual or political interest without an ethical content is not acceptable.
It is this value structure that has subliminally become a framework for mass-media responses. Institutions and individuals in the public eye understand this and try to cover, or spin, their actions to fit this code of morality. Those that do not, suffer a media backlash.
There is no better example of this than the perceptions regarding Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and the judiciary. On March 9, 2007, Mr Chaudhry became a media and public hero. This happened because of the perception that Musharraf dismissed him illegally and then mistreated him and his family.
Thus began the lawyers’ and people’s campaign for an independent judiciary. This was not individual adulation, although it seemed so. The chief justice symbolised society’s protest against a wrong done. And the lawyers who were in the forefront of the struggle were champions of liberty and freedom.
Fast-forward to 2010. There are increasing voices in the media that the superior judiciary is transgressing its mandate and at times behaving like a political institution. By frequently visiting the bars, it seems to be cultivating lawyers and often senior advocates and bar officeholders speak on its behalf.
Serious transgressions by lawyers are also ignored. For a lawyer to slap a judge and for the superior judiciary to arrange a rapprochement is just not right. This man should have been behind bars.
But congratulatory sounds emanating from all levels of the judiciary indicate as if a great conclusion to the crisis has been arrived at. Earlier, too, the judiciary had ignored lawyers beating up policemen and media representatives.
This is not about the NRO or Asif Zardari. The media welcomed the NRO, and Asif Zardari does not pass the bar of morality as far as society is concerned. The problem is that the PPP’s charge of one-sided accountability is beginning to get resonance. And the language and attitude being shown in open court by the judges is creating a backlash.
Enough about the judiciary. A few words about another national institution, the military. Musharraf had brought the image of the army down because in the eyes of the media and the public his actions did not pass the bar of morality. Gen Kayani has resurrected this by daring campaigns in Swat and South Waziristan and by staying away from political wrangles.
The sacrifices given by officers and men in this war against militancy have evoked deep appreciation among the society and the mass media. It is therefore unfortunate when an incident like the Rangers kidnapping a police official happens.
Policemen are often rude and poorly trained. There is little doubt that this constable would have misbehaved. But the Rangers’ hierarchy should have lodged a complaint. The law of the land does not permit a paramilitary organisation to detain anyone, let alone law enforcement officials.
The reaction in the media was thus not unexpected. None of the explanations coming forth from the Rangers were either logical or based on any moral code. This is the key. In the age of the mass media all actions have to be justified. They have to appeal to logic and to the ingrained moral code of the society.
Of course, this does not mean that the media itself is above any code. There always has been serious criticism of individuals and institutions in the media that go beyond what is acceptable by the society. The moves by the electronic media to regulate itself have come about because of such a pressure.
As our democracy matures, every institution will find adjustment within a framework of social morality. Until such time, everyone in the public eye will have to watch each step taken, carefully.
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