Before it is too late

PAKISTAN seems to have reached the edge of the precipice. The political rumpus that has erupted in the country in the aftermath of Nawab Akbar Bugti’s killing signals a national crisis of grave proportions. The situation is more serious than it appears. It is not just a clash between political centres of power that we witness today. Akbar Bugti’s killing has spawned a sense of deep alienation among all sections of the Baloch people. They feel that the events of the last few weeks have vindicated the sentiment they had nursed for decades about being discriminated against by the non-Baloch powers who control the province. They are therefore venting their anger against the Pakistan Army. This scenario is reminiscent of the happenings in East Pakistan in 1971 when the Bengalis rose in revolt as one man against those they perceived as their West Pakistani oppressors.

It appears that the Baloch today feel no differently. How else would one interpret the BNP’s decision to quit the Senate, the National Assembly, the provincial assembly and all the local bodies? BNP leader Sardar Mengal’s statement describing this as a fight between the army and the Baloch people also confirms the deep alienation that has set in. It is indeed distressing that this impression should have been created among the Baloch nationalists. But rather than adopting an ostrich-like approach towards this Balochi perception and denying it or condemning it as traitorous, it is important that measures be taken to reassure the Baloch that they are regarded as an integral part of the population of Pakistan. At least quite a preponderant section of civil society in the country has extended its moral and political support to the Baloch struggle for their political and economic rights. It is a positive development that many political parties and leaders of opinion in the other provinces have condemned the Establishment’s approach to Akbar Bugti and the insurgency he led. In this context, the Baloch should feel that they are not alone and isolated. The whole country shares with them their grief and resentment at the government’s military operation that led to the mysterious death of Nawab Akbar Bugti. The latest to lend weight to the chorus of opinion condemning the official policy on Balochistan are some retired army generals who have termed the operation ill-conceived and mishandled.

The time has come to initiate a process of healing wounds. But obviously such a move can only be undertaken after the political-cum-judicial aspects have been taken care of. The ARD and the MMA have demanded that a judicial commission be set up to probe Bugti’s killing. The former ISI chief, General Hameed Gul, has called on the Chief Justice of Pakistan to take suo motu notice of the Kohlu episode. The immediate need is to call a halt to the military operation which is still going on. A dialogue has to be started between various sections of the Baloch population and Islamabad but this will have to be conducted by a civilian leadership. The problem with the army assuming the leading role in any such process is that, given its lack of credibility, it will alienate the Baloch further and divide the country. Hence the civilian government will have to come forward to do this job. Exchanging charges and counter-charges at this point in time will not help matters. But sympathy and acknowledging one’s mistake will.

Rain deaths & damage

THE tragic deaths caused by recent torrential rains in Lahore, Gujranwala and Sialkot districts underscore the need to take stock of the situation. Introspection is required on the part of both the people at large and the civic agencies concerned. Every year, before the monsoon, it is customary for the latter to identify dangerous houses and buildings and advise the property owners to either get the needed repair done or vacate such buildings. The advice often falls on deaf ears, with the result that most of the rain-related deaths occur because of roofs caving in or entire buildings collapsing. As for the working of the civic agencies and the sanitation staff concerned, a heavy downpour nearly always leads to an emergency situation, one that the authorities are found to be inept at coping with. This is because of the absence of a working drainage system. Is it not surprising that even a city the size of Lahore should have no proper drainage? Every time it rains, the water level rises up to several feet in large parts of the city, inundating homes, causing damage to public and private property and bringing normal life to a standstill. Does it have to be this bad, each time, year after year? There is a dire need to revive what was touted by the former government as the national drainage programme which, for reasons unknown, never took off.

The fear is that the current spell of torrential rain and the ensuing flooding caused over vast areas of central Punjab will also leave the standing crops damaged. The situation will only become clear once flood waters have receded from the countryside where the rice and sugarcane crops stand. The former is a cash crop in the context of basmati export, and the latter feeds the sugar mills. With the sugar crisis and the commodity’s spiraling price hike not fully behind us, any damage to the sugarcane crop as a result of flooding could cause more difficulties in the months ahead. The government must plan now for addressing these factors before another crisis is upon us.

Allegations against Erra chief

JUDGMENT must be reserved until innocence or guilt is established. There is little doubt, however, that a cloud of suspicion hangs over the chairman of the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (Erra) and, by association, the government agency itself. The propriety of Mr Altaf Saleem’s business dealings in the private sector are being questioned not just by the government’s political opponents but also by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP). An investment bank owned by Mr Saleem’s Crescent Group has been charged by the SECP with hiding assets worth over five billion rupees in parallel company books, operating at least six fictitious bank accounts, engaging in unlawful investments in real estate as well as the stock market, and various other financial irregularities. These are serious charges. Last month, Crescent Standard Investment Bank also circulated an unsigned, one-page, annual accounts statement that was neither audited nor approved by the company’s directors. This too is a violation of the law. It has also been reported that the SECP, fearing that the Crescent Group chief may flee the country, has asked the government to place him on the exit control list.

Mr Altaf Saleem clearly has some explaining to do. Unfortunately, there is no tradition in the country of government officials voluntarily stepping down to clear their names when embroiled in controversy. As such, Islamabad must take the lead and suspend or remove the Erra chairman from his post until such time that a verdict is delivered on his conduct as a businessman. A government keen on promoting a positive image of Pakistan cannot afford to have a man accused of financial fraud heading an agency that oversees the donor-driven earthquake reconstruction plan. Keeping Mr Saleem in his Erra and other public-sector positions is also bound to raise questions about the prime minister’s close personal relations with business leaders. Such perceptions of impropriety must be removed.

Shift in US public opinion

AMERICA has returned to 1968. On August 31, a vital deadline at the very top of George Bush’s agenda passed, and no one died at the deadline. Instead, the intended victim was frisky to the point of being cocky.

Thursday was the day given by the international community, led by the United States and followed by the United Nations, for Iran to submit to pressure and abjure its nuclear programme. The weight of the Security Council lay behind the ultimatum.

Far from cowering, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited over 150 journalists to Tehran, including those from the American media, to taunt Bush to a one-to-one debate, lecture America and its allies on good and evil, and litter the world with one-liners. In essence, he asked two questions (to echo Stalin’s question to the pope): how many divisions does the Security Council have? The second question was to America: how many divisions does the Pentagon have to spare for Iran?

Washington, for a change, did not need additional evidence in its search for the fabled “weapons of mass destruction”, this time in Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran continued to produce enriched uranium, albeit on a small scale and at relatively low levels, at its Natanz facility. Iran’s answer remained what it has always been, and one which should be familiar enough to the Indian subcontinent: its nuclear facilities were there only for peaceful purposes.

On the domestic front, Ahmadinejad is a touch more forthcoming. He accuses the West, alias America, of mouthing human rights while maintaining the world’s most notorious prisons, and being the source of all the problems we face, while behind him banners declare: “Nuclear Energy Is Our Inalienable Right.”

Compared to Ahmadinejad on a nuclear future, Saddam Hussein was an overblown mouse when shock and awe smashed his regime and toppled his preposterous statue. Saddam was always less than what met the eye and, like any bully-cum-dictator, vulnerable to a deal. Ahmadinejad is not interested in stupid statues. Everyone who has met him has returned impressed with his intelligence. He could be more than that meets the eye.

Strength is a relative matter. You are not as good as your arsenal. You are only as good as your capability. When George Bush was planning the invasion of Iraq, one country that kept very quiet indeed was Iran. Three years later, Iran is doing the talking, and America is wondering what to do. Bush has snared America in a self-made trap, and Iran is laughing all the way to a nuclear bank. It is still a long walk. Iran is nowhere near weapons-making capability yet. But it is on the way.

If there is one alphabet that George Bush would love to have changed in the four-letter word that has begun to haunt him, it is surely “q.” He will never say this himself, but everyone around him, both his friends and his opponents, are saying it. There is a palpable sense of regret in Washington that a mistake was made three years ago. The mistake was not going to war. The mistake was going to war with the wrong country. How they wish today that Bush had gone to war with Iran rather than Iraq. This is the unstated, or at least understated, revisionist view. After all, the rationale against Iraq was simulated, so it could easily have been whipped up against Iran — mullahs make a better target for racial profiling in any case than clean-shaven Baathists.

David Remnick of the New Yorker gave some hint of this manipulation of the media recently: “...the administration and its surrogates have issued a stream of disinformation about intelligence and Iraq; paid friendly ‘columnists’ like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher tens of thousands of dollars to parrot the White House line; accredited to the White House press corps a phoney journalist and ex-prostitute (Jeff “Bulldog” Gammon aka James Dale Guckert) as a reliable pitcher of softball questions; lightened the Freedom of Information Act requirements; and pioneered a genre of fake news packaged video ‘reports’.” He goes on, but I won’t.

If only all this had been directed against Iran ... Bush might even be triumphantly holding a few traces of future weapons of mass destruction before the cameras, possibly protected by some spacesuit type of clothing.

Iran’s current confidence is based on some solid parameters. Start counting:

— The Pentagon’s infantry capability is seriously degraded by Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the British, who always brought up the tail, have stopped wagging. There have been cases where infantry units sent on leave have been turned back after barely touching down in the United States, such is the shortage of troops.

— The proponents of the air-power-is-sufficient school have plaster on their lips after Lebanon. Israel’s failure to destroy the Hezbollah despite overwhelming air power has made the old wisdom the new wisdom: air power alone cannot bring victory. Ground troops have to follow through. So what will the bombing of Iran achieve, except a political fallout that might go out of control? — On the ground, the two most powerful militias in the region are allies of Iran: Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah in Lebanon and Moqtada Sadr’s militia in Iraq. By one of those ironies made in heaven, both are also functioning members of their respective governments — and so leave America in the unhappy position of not knowing quite what to do. Sadr’s men inflict serious casualties on Iraq’s America-sponsored army whenever the army attempts to control them. America’s human losses in both Iraq and Afghanistan are rising at haemorrhage levels, without a bandage in sight.

— The credibility of both America and its principal ally in the region, Israel, has been damaged. There is a new mood in the air. This has affected America’s political credibility as well in the world’s toughest neighbourhood.

— Washington’s seemingly inexhaustible treasury has been discovered to have limits. Bill Clinton, who has begun campaigning for his wife Hillary, has gone on the offensive. He left a budget surplus, he says: Where has this five trillion plus dollar deficit appeared from? Misadventures, of course.

— The sanctions aimed against Iran are either innocuous or unimplementable. The best that Nicholas Burns (he who negotiated the nuclear deal with India) can come up with is sanctions against nuclear parts, a freezing of Iran’s overseas assets and a ban on the travel of their officials who have anything to do with their nuclear programme.

Iran has long removed its assets away from American reach, and Vladimir Putin has already asked why any sanctions should apply to Iran’s peaceful nuclear sites, as for instance at Bushehr, where Russia is supplying equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. No one has any answer. Nuclear poker is not easy when you don’t have too many cards.

The most important change in America is that of public opinion. The majority seems finally to have lost its appetite for war, and does not believe that Iraq has anything to do with the war against terror. A desperate Bush is raising the most extraordinary demons. He now considers the “Islamic” threat to be as dangerous as fascists, Nazis, communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century. Each one of those threats had the power and institutionalisation of a state. Bush’s “Islamic fascists” have become as big a danger to the world as communists without being in power in a single country, from the shadows. For Bush, “It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”

This is what makes America 2006 akin to America 1968. The mood had begun to shift against Vietnam in 1967, but it was in 1968 that the shift became decisive. The response of the establishment then (which was Democratic) was to call the battle against those dirty Vietnamese communists the “decisive ideological struggle of the 20th century.”

It didn’t work in 1968.

It won’t work in 2006.

The writer is the editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.

Science festival

CHARLES DICKENS pilloried it as the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything. Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended the 1833 meeting and challenged the use of the term “philosopher”.

So the founders of the British Association for the Advancement of Science promptly coined a new word for themselves: scientists. Each year the British Association — anyone who knows it shortens the name to the BA — invades a university town to advance science and entertain the public. It became one of the world’s great calendar events.

The engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel argued the case for transatlantic steamships at a BA meeting in 1836. Thomas Henry Huxley championed the cause of Darwinian evolution against Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce at a BA meeting in 1860. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke agreed to debate the source of the Nile in 1864.

Last week the annual festival of science began, this time at Norwich. Times have changed, science has moved on. But Dickens could still find much to mock, and Brunel and Huxley could still find battles to fight, because the BA remains what it always was: beanfeast, yes but also brainstorm.

—The Guardian, London