Muslims and the West

AMERICA has exacted blood revenge for the Twin Towers. A million Afghans have fled US bombs into the cold wastelands and face starvation. B-52s have blown the Taliban to bits and changed Mullah Omar’s roar of defiance into a pitiful squeak for surrender. Osama bin Laden is on the run (he may be dead by the time this article reaches the reader). But even as the champagne pops in the White House, America remains fearful — for good reason.

Subsequent to September 11 we have all begun to live in a different, more dangerous world. Now is the time to ask why. Like clinical pathologists, we need to scientifically examine the sickness of human behaviour impelling terrorists to fly airliners filled with passengers into skyscrapers. We also need to understand why millions celebrate as others die. In the absence of such an understanding there remains only the medieval therapy of exorcism; for the strong to literally beat the devil out of the weak. Indeed, the Grand Exorcist — disdainful of international law and the growing nervousness of even its close allies — prepares a new hit list of other Muslim countries needing therapy: Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. We shall kill at will, is the message.

This will not work. Terrorism does not have a military solution. Soon — I fear perhaps very soon — there will be still stronger, more dramatic proof. In the modern age, technological possibilities to wreak enormous destruction are limitless. Anger, when intense enough, makes small stateless groups, and even individuals, extremely dangerous.

Anger is ubiquitous in the Islamic world today. Allow me to share a small personal experience. On September 12 I had a seminar scheduled at the department of physics in my university in Islamabad, part of a weekly seminar for physics students on topics outside of physics. Though traumatized by events, I could not cancel the seminar because sixty people had already arrived, so I said, “We will have our seminar today on a new subject: on yesterday’s terrorist attacks”.

The response was negative, some were mindlessly rejoicing the attacks. One student said, “You can’t call this terrorism.” Another said, “Are you only worried because it is Americans who have died?” It took two hours of sustained, impassioned, argumentation to convince the students that the brutal killing of ordinary people, who had nothing to do with the policies of the United States, was an atrocity. I suppose that millions of Muslim students the world over felt as mine did, but probably heard no counter-arguments.

If the world is to be spared what future historians may call the “Century of Terror”, we will have to chart the perilous course between the Scylla of American imperial arrogance and the Charybdis of Islamic religious fanaticism. Through these waters, we must steer by a distant star towards a careful, reasoned, democratic, humanistic, and secular future. Else, shipwreck is certain.

“Why do they hate us?”, asks George W. Bush. This rhetorical question betrays the pathetic ignorance of most Americans about the world around them. Moreover, its claim to an injured innocence cannot withstand even the most cursory examination of US history. For almost forty years, this “naiveti and self-righteousness” has been challenged most determinedly by Noam Chomsky. As early as 1967, he pointed that the idea that “our” motives are pure and “our” actions benign is “nothing new in American intellectual history - or, for that matter, in the general history of imperialist apologia”.

Muslim leaders have mirrored America’s claim and have asked the same question of the West. They have had little to say about September 11 that makes sense to people outside their communities. Although they speak endlessly on rules of personal hygiene and “halal” or “haram”, they cannot even tell us whether or not the suicide bombers violated Islamic laws. According to the Virginia-based (and largely Saudi-funded) Fiqh Council’s chairman, Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani, “this kind of question needs a lot of research and we don’t have that in our budget.”

Fearful of backlash, most leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, and Europe have responded in predictable ways to the Twin Towers atrocity. This has essentially two parts: first, that Islam is a religion of peace; and second, that Islam was hijacked by fanatics on September 11, 2001. They are wrong on both counts.

First, Islam — like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion — is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about absolute belief in its own superiority and the divine right to impose itself upon others. In medieval times, both the Crusades and the Jihads were soaked in blood. Today, Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics in the US and kill doctors; Muslim fundamentalists wage their sectarian wars against each other; Jewish settlers holding the Old Testament in one hand, and Uzis in the other, burn olive orchards and drive Palestinians off their ancestral land; Hindus in India demolish ancient mosques and burn down churches; Sri Lankan Buddhists slaughter Tamil separatists.

The second assertion is even further off the mark. Even if Islam had, in some metaphorical sense, been hijacked, that event did not occur on September 11, 2001. It happened around the 13th century. A quick look around us readily shows Islam has yet to recover from the trauma of those times.

Where do Muslims stand today? Note that I do not ask about Islam; Islam is an abstraction. Moulana Abdus Sattar Edhi and Mullah Omar are both followers of Islam, but the former is overdue for a Nobel peace prize while the other is a medieval, ignorant, cruel fiend. Edward Said, among others, has insistently pointed out, Islam carries very different meaning to different people. It is as heterogeneous as those who believe and practise it. There is no “true Islam”. Therefore it only makes sense to speak of people who claim that faith.

Today Muslims number one billion, spread over 48 Muslim countries. None of these has yet evolved a stable democratic political system. In fact, all Muslim countries are dominated by self-serving corrupt elites who cynically advance their personal interests and steal resources from their people. No Muslim country has a viable educational system or a university of international stature.

Reason too has been waylaid. To take some examples from my own experience. You will seldom encounter a Muslim name as you flip through scientific journals, and if you do the chances are that this person lives in the West. There are a few exceptions: Abdus Salam, together with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces.

I got to know Salam reasonably well — we even wrote a book preface together. He was a remarkable man, terribly in love with his country and his religion. And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by his country and excommunicated from Islam by an act of the Pakistani parliament in 1974. Today the Ahmadi sect, to which Salam belonged, is considered heretical and harshly persecuted. (My next-door neighbour, an Ahmadi, was shot in the neck and hurt and died in my car as I drove him to the hospital. His only fault was to have been born in the wrong sect.)

Today’s sorry situation contrasts starkly with the Islam of yesterday. Between the 9th and the 13th centuries — the Golden Age of Islam — the only people doing decent science, philosophy, or medicine were Muslims. For five straight centuries they alone kept the light of learning ablaze. Muslims not only preserved ancient learning, they also made substantial innovations and extensions. The loss of this tradition has proved tragic for Muslim peoples.

Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because there was within Islam a strong rationalist tradition, carried on by a group of Muslim thinkers known as the Mutazilites. This tradition stressed human free will, strongly opposing the predestinarians who taught that everything was foreordained and that humans have no option but surrender everything to Allah. While the Mutazilites held political power, knowledge grew.

But in the twelfth century Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by the cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over reason, predestination over free will. He refuted the possibility of relating cause to effect, teaching that man cannot know or predict what will happen; God alone can. He damned mathematics as against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened faith.

Held in the vice-like grip of orthodoxy, Islam choked. No longer, as during the reign of the dynamic caliph Al-Mamun and the great Haroon Al-Rashid, would Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars gather and work together in the royal courts. It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al Rahman ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th century.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on. The Renaissance brought an explosion of scientific inquiry in the West. This owed much to Arab translations and other Muslim contributions, but it was to matter little. Mercantile capitalism and technological progress drove western countries to rapidly colonize the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco. Always brutal, at times genocidal, it changed the shape of the world. It soon became clear, at least to a part of the Muslim elites, that they were paying a heavy price for not possessing the analytical tools of modern science and the social and political values of modern culture — the real source of power of their colonizers.

Reasonable suspicions?

IN his 1970s film “The Outlaw Josey Wales” Clint Eastwood plays a tough brigand who fights for the rebel South during the American Civil War. When the war ends the Eastwood character is pursued relentlessly across America by enemy cavalry led by a zealous officer.

On the brink of snaring their deadly quarry a scout turns to his commander and remarks that they soon can return home since the hunt is nearly over. The officer sneers and tells the startled scout: “Doing good ain’t got no end.” He will go on chasing “evil doers,” forever.

So what exactly does President Bush, who enjoys talking in terms of pure good (everyone who backs him unquestioningly) versus pure evil (everyone else), have in mind when he says that the campaign will not conclude with the destruction of Al Qaeda and the deposing of the Taliban? Isn’t that what his allies, and most of the American public, signed up for? “There’s a lot of focus on Afghanistan these days,” Bush warned last week. “But there’s going to be other fronts in this theatre.”

Last week at the White House Bush met Philippines President Arroyo and acknowledged that American advisers are involved in counter-insurgency against Abu Sayyaf Muslim separatists, who allegedly are linked to Bin-Laden — an allegation which looks like a very handy licence for attacking anyone at all: “We’re going to fight terror wherever it exists.”

Bush did not even try to evade the tricky question whether he might commit the US combat troops in new adventures: “We will work with our allies and friends to use whatever resources we have to win the war against terror.” Why must the hunt for Bin Laden become an open-ended search for ill-defined terrorists wherever US authorities say they lurk? Did anyone read the fine print in the coalition deal?

Obviously, a lone superpower can award itself carte blanche but it is not always a smart thing to do. There evidently are smart people in Bush’s administration; the question is whether they will keep the upper hand as the intervention plays out.

Yet suppose Osama bin-Laden’s charred body is identified, Taliban remnants are bottled up in pockets of resistance, the leadership of Al Qaeda are killed or captured, and its members dispersed and hounded by police around the planet. How much further can a military mission go, and how can it be justified? To lift a term from US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who is busy eroding civil rights, there are grounds for “reasonable suspicion” that the Bush agenda merely merged a popular thirst for revenge for September 11 into typical long-range but short-sighted superpower schemes.

American elites, after all, have a bloated military budget to justify despite the absence of a threat of Soviet magnitude. Right-wingers accordingly leap at a chance to put on a carefully edited show of strength for ordinary citizens who now endure a recession and must get by with the most miserly health and social welfare system in the indutsrialized world. The United States, which feeds 80 per cent of its children properly, bombs and raids Afghanistan which is hardly able to feed 20 per cent of its children. Neither figure is anything to brag about.

New legal measures in the US and the UK smack of Orwell’s 1984 where a deliberately engineered state of permanent war abroad justifies permanent repression at home. Insert “anti-terrorist” for “anti-communist” in cold war era texts and you glimpse what a strong faction in the Bush administration want to recreate, although they may not succeed. Many Pakistanis in the US have become victim of this policy. Too quick a victory in Afghanistan, ironically, may thwart this belligerent agenda.

During the cold war the United States subverted the democratic regime of Chile and undermined liberation movements from Iran to Guatemala to East Timor. Another superpower, for all its own terrible faults, imposed limits on US actions, and even prodded it on occasion to set a few good examples at home and abroad — if only to show up the reds. After the Soviet collapse the ambitions of giddy rightwing American elites went unchecked, although they did miss having a plausible enemy.

Hardliners on opposing sides always need, and reflect, each other. To fill the empty space of the enemy “other” professor Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations) and Osama Bin Laden, and their respective disciples, have contrived to try to divide the world, delusionally and dangerously, between Islam and the West.

One might imagine that western powers would have enough post-intervention work to do stabilizing a new regime,rebuilding Afghanistan, and working out a Middle East peace accord. British prime minister Tony Blair encouragingly promised the Afghan people that “the conflict will not be the end” and that he would work for a “humanitarian coalition alongside the military coalition.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell has made similar remarks but Washington apparently is still debating what its role, if any, will be in a “peacekeeping mission” phase. The US administration is itching to go after Iraq where Bush wants to attend to his father’s “unfinished business.” (If any unfinished business needs attention, one ought to recall that during the Gulf war, Bush senior promised to solve the Middle East crisis too).

An indiscriminate hunt for militants beyond the lairs of Afghanistan is bound to expand the pool of discontented Muslims as a result of the brutalities of the hunt itself. Osama or Osama look-alikes will be sighted in every dark corner from Yemen to Somalia and forces will be dispatched to punish them and in the process ‘collaterally’ harm the poor masses in unlucky locales.

As in the cold war, the staunchest American allies coincidentally will be the richest and most repressive groups. The lamentable history of American foreign policy is that it often creates terrorists — Contras in Nicaragua, Mujahideen in Afghanistan — and once its purpose is served it treats them as if they can be switched off by a button.

Hunting for undefined terrorists also leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation. Behold the antics in Zimbabwe of imperious Robert Mugabe, former freedom fighter and terrorist, who faces the prospect of a well-deserved electoral “overthrow” and is desperately scrambling for any pretext to harass opponents.

“We would like [the Movement for Democratic Change] to know that we agree with President Bush that anyone who in any way finances, harbours or defends the terrorists is himself a terrorist,” the Mugabe-controlled Herald newspaper piously but menacingly stated. “We too will not make any difference between terrorists and their friends or supporters.” Indeed. these same sentiments could have been uttered by indignant rulers against the African National Congress in the 1970s, Irish rebels in 1920, and for that matter, the Continental Congress of the United States in the late 1770s too.

American foreign policy officials, hopefully, will pause and ponder carefully before embarking on a vindictive adventure in the most volatile area of the world. A likely result of war with Iraq, however repellent Saddam Hussein is, maybe the destabilization of shaky regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Bush will be left alone with Israel to face the Arab masses who will have nothing to lose and nothing to thank the US for. They will not need to be “Islamized” to be angry.

Given that prospect, how long will Europe support the US? Hopefully, some bright sparks in the Pentagon or CIA or State Department may mutter the right warning in the right ears. It is easy for Bush to perform on TV for an angry US audience but everything he does looks very different to the masses of the Muslim world. Treading carefully here will avoid the violent “blowback” that professor Chalmers Johnson, in his insightful book of that same title, finds American policy too often engendering. In international politics, as well as in cowboy movies, it pays to know when to ride off into the sunset.

The great disconnect: PRIVATE VIEW

IT is difficult to believe today that Pakistan was once a gentler, essentially tolerant country, largely free of violence and serious crime. There were no drugs and no drug addicts. Those who smoked pot or opium were seen as figures of fun rather than a social problem.

Nobody saw, much less own, automatic weapons. In any residential neighbourhood of any city in the country, one could count on the fingers of one hand those who owned a licence 12-bore shotgun to hunt wild pigeons with at weekends. There were no unlicenced weapons. Only some retired police or army officers retained their duly permitted service revolvers. One rarely saw them worn on the street. These weapons were kept more for sentimental reasons than for bringing down one’s neighbours.

Yes, there was no shortage of mad mullahs but they were at war with the devil, not their fellow Muslims. Neither did they operate armed militias or private armies for terrorism within and jihad without. Sectarian fights remained more or less in the realm of the private. It was inconceivable that men, women and children at prayer could be massacred in mosques, temples or churches. The authority of the state, even if manifested in the least important of its servants, was respected. Riding a bike without a light was a bit of an adventure for students.

And all that was not so long ago either. Today, we live in a harsh, unforgiving, violent society where the writ of the state is to be experienced more by its absence than by its presence. There is little sense of well-being and most people are genuinely concerned about their safety and the safety of their families. The police is seen more as an adversary than a friend. The state has nearly given up on what were once considered its basic responsibilities.

Education, health and protection against crime are now in private hands. Those who have the means employ private security guards (all of whom wear paratrooper wings without ever having flown). Only the children of the poor go to state-run schools. Public transport is also for the poor. The rich drive around in cars. State-run hospitals are viewed as butcher houses, and not without reason. You can enter them alive but your chances of emerging from there in the same state are none too bright.

We should ask ourselves one simple question. What is the image of Pakistan that is seen on the world’s television screens today? Wild-eyed, angry men, wearing round skull caps, brandishing effulgent, ill-kempt beards like weapons, screaming obscenities and burning effigies of their own or someone else’s leaders. Who are these people and how has it happened that Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar are now projected as our heroes? How are they our heroes? What have we got to do to them? I thought the only hero we had was Quaid-I-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah who got us a country we have done little to protect and even less to deserve. So you look at these hate-distorted faces and ask yourself: is this the real face of Pakistan or is the nation become hostage to ignorant, violent, irresponsible and dangerous men with guns and money?

Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian woman journalist who now lives in the United States, wrote a piece recently that could have been written by someone about Pakistan. Of Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s companion and chief of staff, she wrote, “I have looked into the eyes of Zawahiri’s followers and seen an intensity that can only be described as ferocious (she could have been writing about the “soldiers” of Lashkar-i-Taiba or Jaish-i-Muhammad). Defendants in Egyptian courts are kept in cages. The militants who stood before the military courts were always loud; they would start their religious chants as soon as the truck that brought them from jail pulled up at the courthouse. While their relatives sobbed outside the cage, the militants spewed rage. Nothing is as chilling as the sight of men cheering and congratulating each other on a death sentence.”

Mona Eltahawy asked herself a question that many of us today ask ourselves in Pakistan. “Where were the best Egypt had to offer? It was not that Egypt’s liberal intellectuals and civil rights activists lacked conviction. Many bravely bucked the tide. But how could they possibly outdo the intensity of someone convinced God was on his side? More insidiously, how could they offer any sort of resistance when their hands were tied by a repressive government that cracked down not just on Islamists bent on fighting it to the death but on intellectuals, whom it saw as equally threatening.”

In Pakistan since Zia-ul-Haq and even earlier, the ground has been ceded to just such people who believe that they alone have seen the light and their medieval vision of what the country should be is alone the true one. Anyone who does not share that vision is not only damned but deserves to be silenced, if not killed. Mona Eltahawy wrote that while the government fought the militants (which has never happened in our country), “it also tried to outdo them in religiosity (this happened in Pakistan). It helped foster an environment in which increasingly conservative interpretations of religion were acceptable.

Human rights leader I.A. Rehman told the new Lahore magazine ‘Independent’ the other day, “The progressive and liberal elements were marginalized by the state, whereas conservative and irrational elements were provided with a licence to carry on. These elements enjoyed state patronage in promoting irrationality and intolerance. It shows that the state was determined to decimate the civil society and only few will argue that it has not been decimated. It started with the demonization of the political party systems. The unity and organization of the working class was torn. How can there be a society without a labour movement? Academia was ousted from public affairs and the students have no unions. The state is not prepared to protect the rights of women. The concept of the state has flopped in Pakistan. We have just put trappings of assemblies and ministries on a framework that is essentially oligarchic in nature.”

My friend Akhtar Mirza writes an agonised letter to me from Lahore, “The people of Pakistan have waited for over fifty years for a change that would restore their self-respect to them. They are tired of running from pillar to post. Every institution has gone under and the average person is exhausted by the various government offices and courts where he is knocked about by one petty official after another. What is our life become? The day dawns and you leave home with a list of things you have to do, almost all of which involve a succession of uncaring, unresponsive outlets of the state machinery. A monster hand of steel is constantly at our throats. It doesn’t entirely strangulate us, but allows us to breathe just enough to stay alive.

There is no private enterprise here because the state refuses to cede authority or share power. If something good happens, it happens at the top; it never filters down. I challenge any wealthy Pakistani to state on his honour that his money was made honestly. Only the affluent have access to justice and it is only the bureaucracy and the politicians whom the system has benefited. A country where the better part of a citizen’s day is spent chasing paper in one government office after another can never move ahead. In other societies, things change, often for the better. Down here, we go from bad to worse.”

King Lear wanted an “ounce of civet” to “sweeten” his imagination. In Pakistan, we would need a billion tons of it, obtainable, I suppose, for a price on the Bara market.

How Bonn conference was different

ON March 7, 1993, after a hectic week-long joint efforts of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and to some degree of Iran, to arrange a peace accord among warring factions of Afghanistan, after all, did bear fruit. All major Afghan factions, so far engaged in a bloody and brutal civil war, reached an agreement and signed what was named as Islamabad Peace Accord. The Accord was a fairly comprehensive document.

According to the terms of the Accord, President Burhanuddin Rabbani was to remain president and Engineer Gulbadin Hikmatyar or his nominee would assume office of prime minister for a period of eighteen months. The powers and relationship of the president and prime minister were well defined. There was provision for setting up a powerful defence council with two representatives from each party (faction) that was to be responsible for the formation of a national army, taking possession of heavy weapons of all factions, and assuming complete operational control over the armed forces.

The Accord provided for an independent election commission that would hold elections to a Grand Constituent Assembly within eight months; this Grand Assembly would formulate a constitution under which general elections for the president and parliament would be held within the remaining period of 10 months. The most important point left unresolved was the role of Afghan defence minister, Ahmad Shah Masud, an arch rival of prime minister Gulbadin Hikmatyar.

Elated by this marvelous achievement, and to add a heavy dose of spirituality to a tiring bouts of diplomacy, Mr. Nawaz Sharif led a great caravan of signatories, pious and devout from outside, scheming and ambitious from inside, to the Holy city of Makkah. Moved by the spirituality of the event and fearful of the fragility and unpredictability of the commitments made by the signatories at Islamabad, it was decided to sign, once again, the Islamabad Accord, renaming it as Makkah Accord. As Dawn reported in its issue of March 13, 93, ‘Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd and Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif early on Friday signed as guarantors an Afghan peace accord aimed at ending the 11-month power struggle among Afghan guerilla factions.

At a ceremony at King Fahd’s palace the two leaders signed the agreement as “witnesses and guarantors” in response to a request by president Burhanuddin. All nine mujahideen factions, which have fought fierce battles since taking power last April, signed the accord. They included Shiite faction that had refused to initial the Pakistan-mediated agreement in Islamabad. King Fahd and Sharif called on the mujahideen to adhere strictly to the peace accord. “Signing the peace accord in Islam’s holiest places.... confirms that history will never forgive whoever violates it”, Sharif said’.

Immediately after this pious ritual every one returned to Afghanistan, some via Tehran. Burhanuddin Rabbani resumed the duties of president. Gulbadin Hikmatyar never entered upon the office of prime minister. Dostam rerfused to budge away an inch from his previous position. Ahmad Shah Masud never met, face to face, with Hikmatyar. Instead, finding it inhospitable, he started rocketing and shelling the capital. Dostam and Masud replied on the same terms. Hundreds of civilians lost their lives. More refugees fled to Pakistan. Elsewhere the local warlords reigned supreme. Rest is history.

However, there is one important difference. In 1993 while the Islamabad Accord was being developed, Afghanistan had become a nearly forgotten issue in the international memory. The endless internecine fighting was either dismissed as bad dream or accepted as a brute reality of Afghan history and destiny. During the previous two hundred years, an orderly succession was a rarity, and therefore it was considered too idealistic to suppose that after the collapse of Najibullah’s Regime, which was a direct result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, succession should be a peaceful affair.

During the preceding decade when a jihad was being fought against Soviet occupation and Soviet attempt to impose a foreign ideological and social system on the country, five evils gradually slipped out of the holy womb of jihad: weakening of Afghan identity, sharpened focus on ethnicity, emergence of sectarian aspect, the cult of warlordism, and the habit of foreign powers to interfere in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. The first undermined the pride, which all people of Afghanistan had in being known and called Afghans.

Ethnic realities, and religious sects had existed, but they were quietly respected and tacitly allowed for in the composition of the state structure without making these as issues, much less as ‘core issues’. Along with Afghan nationalism, Islam acted as a powerful common denominator and was considered an essential element of Afghan identity. The fact that Pakhtuns mostly inhabit the Southern provinces, are the largest ethnic group, and the rulers, traditionally, came from this group, was never paraded with drum beats on every occasion or while making major national decisions.

The life and lifestyle in cities such as Kabul, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif was always different, on occasions starkly different from the life and lifestyle of remote or rural areas. Kabul, the capital, was not a Pakhtun city. In fact Hazara, Tajiks and Uzbeks, along with many Sikhs and Hindu traders formed an overwhelming majority. Somehow, these ethnic groups inhabited different parts of the city. This is not an aberration in sociological terms. Unfortunately, when inter-ethnic bitterness overwhelmed the national identity, these separate and separated areas became excellent targets for area weapons such as rockets, mortars, artillery, and on occasions, air power.

This time around, Bonn was selected to be the venue for cobbling together an interim arrangement — which the UN representatives scrupulously avoid calling a government. The task also included chartering of a complete road map covering the next two years during which an authentic broad based government which should represent the ‘demographic realities’ and have a representative character would be placed on ground. The onerous task was given to a handpicked four groups, carefully selected by UN envoy Brahimi, who has a long, frustrating and exhausting experience of dealing with the situation in Afghanistan, extending over several years. The list was screened by the US intelligence agencies and further scanned by UK’s agencies.

The scene at the table was drastically different from the ones we saw at previous occasions created for a similar purpose. The group bore no resemblance in ‘shine, shape and shadow’ to the forerunners. The sartorial style was smart and European; the language was well polished and rich in current vocabulary. The theme of ‘one country, one nation, at peace with itself, marching confidently on road to modernity, and no threat to its neighbours’ was artfully designed and well rehearsed by several lips to act as music to the ears of West.

The Northern Alliance, with lion’s share of seats was trying its best to appear magnanimous in victory — a victory in which their role was no more than as front men, the real job having been done by US bombing, US dollars, and pooled intelligence from a vast array of willing sources. The next group, multi-ethnic once again, was wrapped around ex-King who was represented by his grandson. This group can speak with dignity and clear conscience, not having soiled their hands with the blood of any Afghan, but cannot be assertive as it owes its existence on the table due to courtesy of many outside well-wishers.

The Peshawar Group was small and feeble, having no physical control of any area within Afghanistan. The cyprus group is small but smart, and enjoys the backing of Iran. One Pushtun delegate from the Northern Alliance discovered his conscience in Bonn, and walked out in protest over the poor and non-authentic representation of Pushtuns!

The conference started inauspiciously. While the delegates were assembling at Bonn, a mysterious revolt took place in a mud-walled prison close to Mazar-i-Sharif. There are too many versions of the incident that led to a dreadful carnage of hundreds of prisoners. It was for the first time in the history that air power was used with full ferocity to suppress a prison revolt.

Ordinarily such cases, even involving hardened criminals, are resolved by skill, patience and by shutting off the life support systems. Strangely, whereas voices of anger and anguish were raised by individuals and institutions all over the world, the august body assembled near Bonn acted as if the carnage never took place! To them it was a diversion not worth attending to.

This conference was different from all previous ones held on the subject of forming a viable, effective and forward-looking government in Afghanistan. In fact, in the previous recipes, the ingredient ‘forward looking’ was never considered worth taking into consideration. That involved plenty of social engineering to give modern looks and insert fresh attitudes in place of long held beliefs of a medieval society. The Soviets had tried that and failed. Even though a host of powers were sitting on the sideline as observers, most of them have their own agenda.

The vital question is would the Bonn accord work? It may, for as long as the US forces are engaged in their own war against terrorism which involves hunting down Osama bin Laden, eliminating Mullah Omar and Al-Qaeda, destroying all sanctuaries. It may work till a multinational force is there, and if infrastructural rehabilitation works as well as social services are started on a massive scale to provide jobs and security to the youth.

The author is a retired Lieutenant-General of Pakistan army.