This meddling must stop

IT is a matter of concern that India should have chosen to stoke the fire in Balochistan by sending arms and ammunition to the militants. On Monday, while President Musharraf informed a high-level meeting about the routes through which terrorists in Pakistan were getting Indian arms, the Foreign Office spokesperson accused New Delhi of trying to destabilise this country. The president’s statement is significant, for it absolves the Afghan government of any involvement against Pakistan. Even though Afghan territory was being used for subversion in Pakistan, the president did not believe the Karzai government had anything to do with it. Instead, he said the Indian consulates in Afghanistan and Iran were organising the supply of weapons to militants in Balochistan. According to the president, the arms were being smuggled across the India-Pakistan border at Rahimyar Khan, reaching Balochistan via Sanghar and Jacobabad, while on the western border Zhob and Chagai served as the conduit for arms. RAW, India’s intelligence agency, was pumping arms and money into Balochistan, but the president said his government had sealed all the routes.

It is difficult to see how the peace process can move forward if the present slide in relations between the two countries continues. The big blow to the detente came with the Mumbai blasts of July 11, with the Indian media accusing Pakistan of involvement in the carnage even before preliminary investigations had begun. Then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh implicitly accused Pakistan of involvement in the blasts and announced a freeze of the peace process. Visiting Mumbai after the tragedy, Dr Singh said the peace process would remain frozen “until Islamabad starts acting on its assurances to crack down on terrorists”. The Indian government took a unilateral step towards freezing the peace process by cancelling the secretary-level meeting scheduled for Islamabad on July 20-21. The secretaries later met at Dhaka on the sidelines of the Saarc ministerial committee meeting, but, like all Saarc conferences, it produced nothing positive. Instead, India accused Pakistan of failing to carry out its obligations under the South Asia Free Trade Area. August saw two more unpleasant developments: first, there was a tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats, and on Aug 15, speaking on India’s independence day, Dr Singh repeated the threat that the peace process would remain frozen unless Pakistan took “concrete steps” to rein in terrorists. Things hit a new low when, following Nawab Akbar Bugti’s killing, India came out with a bit of gratuitous advice to Pakistan on how to deal with its domestic problems. This was astonishing, since Balochistan is Pakistan’s internal problem and it does not need to be told how to go about it.

In sharp contrast, the Pakistani attitude towards India’s domestic problems has been one of restraint, even though India is vulnerable on several counts. For instance, whatever is happening in India’s north-east has attracted the attention of international rights agencies and some of India’s own NGOs, besides censures from the US State Department’s annual reports on the atrocities being committed on the civilian population by India’s security forces. Yet Pakistan has chosen not to meddle in India’s internal affairs. The basic question is India’s sincerity about the peace process. New Delhi has two choices: either it should push the process forward, or it can choose to destabilise Pakistan. Pursuing the two objectives at the same time is contradictory.

Karachi power blues

RESIDENTS of Karachi are once again enduring long and unannounced power cuts. On Monday the situation was made worse by the snapping of a 220,000-volt cable that connects the city’s grids with the KESC’s Bin Qasim station; power outages lasted several hours in many areas grounding normal business and domestic activities to a halt. Since this is the state of affairs in the country’s commercial hub that cries out for foreign investment makes it even a sorrier matter. Even before Monday’s fault occurred, and the utility explained why it had to resort to load-shedding all too frequently, there was no plausible explanation for the regular, long outages that have become the norm. This, at a time when admittedly there is no shortage of power supply to the city. But, as it turns out, there is another common excuse that is to blame for recurring breakdowns: old and rickety transmission and distribution lines. It has been well over a year since a new private-sector management has taken charge of the utility, but little has been done to put the house in order. The company continues to incur operational losses, claiming that it should be allowed to raise power tariffs to minimise losses and start investing into improving its existing infrastructure. All this makes one wonder as to why these questions were not settled prior to putting the KESC under the hammer and its handing over to the private bidder. Such matters should not have been left unaddressed.

As the irksome power outages continue, the situation seems incurable but cannot go on indefinitely. It is the responsibility of the government to revisit the terms and conditions of the KESC’s sale to the private party concerned and resolve the matter in a swift and fair manner. A formula must be worked out whereby work on upgrading and refurbishing of power transmission lines and other related infrastructure can be started forthwith. This should be done without having to raise power tariff which in most categories is already higher than what consumers elsewhere in the country pay for the basic utility.

Wedding tragedy

THAT people don’t learn from past events was proved rather tragically on Sunday when a young man died from bullet injuries received during aerial firing at a wedding in Karachi. There have been numerous such accidents in the past does not seem to have deterred people from continuing with the practice of gun fire and fireworks as part of ceremony, irrespective of the consequences in some cases. As recently as June, a man also died during celebratory aerial firing at a wedding in Karachi. That such senseless deaths occur despite a ban on aerial firing - or for that matter, a ban on using fireworks which have often caused grievous injuries - shows how little regard there is for the law. Time and again we have seen the police enforce certain restrictions with a great deal of zeal only to lose interest or become lax in their enforcement of these even though they involve safety of the public. The motorcycle helmet law is one example which was initially strictly enforced but within a few weeks the police began to ignore violators.

In the past, people living in localities where wedding parties were ignoring the ban on gun fire or fireworks called the police to intervene but as expected, they either ignored the pleas or were bribed into inaction by the hosts. Until strict enforcement is ensured, many people are going to continue with the dangerous practice, knowing that they can get away with it. The police have registered an FIR after Sunday’s incident but who really will be punished for the death of an innocent man? Those who indulge in dangerous practices at weddings need to be taken to task for their irresponsible conduct. At the same time, the police have to get their act together and seriously enforce laws that prohibit gun fire at weddings.

Afghanistan: no ray of hope

“THE main groups of ... conspiratorial paramilitary organisations are fighting against the Afghan people from bases and strongholds in Pakistan and Iran...” This particular complaint has not been voiced by Hamid Karzai. Nor is it attributable to a military officer or politician representing the variety of mainly western powers propping up his fragile regime.

It comes from Fighters for the Faith? No, Hired Killers!, a clumsy but nonetheless revealing Novosti Press Agency pamphlet published 20 years ago, in which the author, Mikhail Koloskov, also notes: “The democratic government’s efforts to abolish literacy and expand the public education system are particularly hated by the bandits, who regard them as a threat to their plans of keeping the people ignorant. For this reason, schools and teachers have been among the main targets of their attacks.

“In 1984 alone they killed 92 teachers and educationalists (sic) and destroyed six schools in Kabul and eight schools in the provinces. In all, from 1978 to 1985 they destroyed 1,864 schools, or more than half of all schools in Afghanistan.”

I obviously cannot vouch for the accuracy of the figures, but it is common knowledge that schools — particularly schools for girls and coeducational institutions — were ruthlessly targeted by the Mujahideen. It is not particularly surprising that the Taliban today appear to have similar priorities. In recent months plenty of anecdotal evidence has emerged of teachers and pupils being threatened, assaulted or murdered.

Koloskov’s booklet also mentions another favourite Mujahideen target: clerics loyal to the pro-Soviet regime. Late last month, a report from Declan Walsh in The Observer spoke of a campaign against “clerics who have thrown their moral weight behind Karzai”. He quoted the Afghan independent Human Rights Commission’s Ahmad Fahim Hakim as saying: “The maulvis tell people jihad is over and now is the time for rebuilding. That is a severe blow for the Taliban. So, to obtain silence, they kill them.”

The perpetrators at least cannot be accused of inconsistency, although there is, of course, one crucial difference between now and two decades ago. Back in the 1980s, the Mujahideen were the grateful recipients of operational guidance (not to mention all manner of lethal weaponry) from the very sources that are today scrambling for means to neutralise the Taliban threat. “In Pakistan,” Koloskov wrote, “the CIA has published a book under a dummy name about ‘guerilla warfare from the point of view of Islam’. The book describes terror as an important part of warfare and the only means of reducing the time needed to achieve the set goal. The manual is an enlarged and more detailed version of the notorious manual ‘Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare’, prepared by the CIA for the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries.”

Like the shoulder-launched Stinger missiles, it is not inconceivable that tattered — or perhaps revised and updated — versions of such manuals are still in circulation. At the time, let’s not forget, Islamic fanaticism was a virtue in the eyes of the CIA and the Washington administration. Ronald Reagan is said to have posited a moral equivalence between the Mujahideen and the founding fathers of the United States. That isn’t quite true: he used words to that effect in praise of the Nicaraguan contras, another vicious bunch of US-armed marauders, whose task was to destabilise the revolutionary Sandinista administration. But there can be little question that he felt much the same way about their Afghan counterparts.

The fate of Afghanistan and its people was of little interest to those who were running the CIA’s largest covert operation since Vietnam. The primary purpose of the American intervention was to give the Soviet Union a bloody nose: an objective that was successfully accomplished. The apparatchiks in Moscow may have solemnly desired stability on the southern flank of the USSR, but they erred grievously in getting embroiled militarily in an unwinnable war. Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, openly boasts of his country having successfully set the “bear trap” that the Soviets stumbled into, and it is now widely acknowledged that the CIA was actively involved in fuelling the insurgency well before Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan. The mitigating circumstances, however, don’t quite add up to a reasonable excuse for Moscow’s folly.

Pakistan, of course, was up to its neck in the Afghan imbroglio, not least because General Ziaul Haq spotted an opportunity for international rehabilitation; Iran inevitably got in on the act (the Shah was an inveterate American ally, while the ayatollahs’ antipathy towards the US did not mean they were any softer on the USSR); the Saudis, who were not only keen to suck up to Washington but also perceived communism as a dire threat, pitched in with petrodollars as well as a few volunteers (including Osama bin Laden); the Egyptians found a suitable destination (Peshawar) for their Islamist political prisoners (including Ayman Al Zawahiri). Everyone had an axe to grind. The welfare of the Afghans wasn’t on anyone’s mind.

Some Americans now admit that their complete loss of interest in Afghanistan once the Soviet Union pulled out was a huge mistake (and they vow, ominously, that it won’t happen again). On the face of it, there might have been some virtue in pouring large amounts of reconstruction aid.

But had it ended up in the hands of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, what are the chances that it would have done much good? Pakistanis, on the other hand, are far more reluctant to accept any culpability for their role in Afghanistan’s unending distress.

In an article last month, Benazir Bhutto spoke of “the political madressahs which I spent years as prime minister dismantling”, without mentioning that many of their students and alumni were despatched to Afghanistan, with the Pakistani military presumably providing logistical support. Thus was the Taliban phenomenon conjured up. And if the idea behind it was to rid Pakistan of sizable bands of fanatics, well, it didn’t quite work, did it?

This is not to suggest that the fundamentalist scourge in Pakistan is a product of the Benazir years: the seeds for that were sown in the Zia era, and the US was generous in supplying planeloads of fertiliser. The regime of General Pervez Musharraf can be faulted on numerous grounds, but the supposed democrats who presided over the semi-civilian interim between Zia’s explosive exit and Musharraf’s dramatic entrance didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory in the Islamist/Afghan (or, for that matter, any other) context. A democratic Pakistan would indeed be preferable to the sordid khaki-mufti hybrid of today, but it is far from certain whether that would suffice for it to transcend its status, as Benazir put it in a rather laboured metaphor, as “the petri dish of the pandemic of international terrorism”.

Musharraf and Karzai are frequent sparring partners on international television broadcasts, and the former’s semi-surreptitious trip to Kabul in the coming days wasn’t considered likely to improve their brittle relationship. Karzai has hitherto blamed Pakistan for providing refuge, succour and assistance to the Taliban, and his allegations have been backed up by US and British military commanders, much to Musharraf’s annoyance.

Lately, however, the Afghan leader has been attracting the ire of his western benefactors, who were taken aback by the rioting that erupted in Kabul late in May after a US military vehicle was involved in an accident and panicky troops fired into the angry crowd that gathered at the scene. Karzai’s appointment of a dozen certified human rights abusers as police officials also caused considerable concern.

There’s plenty of hypocrisy at work here, given that the overthrow of the Taliban involved an American alliance with all manner of minor warlords and other dubious characters. Besides, the current US-Nato onslaught, ostensibly against the Taliban, invariably involves large numbers of civilian casualties, which in turn incites popular anger against foreign forces and facilitates militant recruitment drives. Meanwhile, in a largely futile attempt to placate the rural population, few serious attempts have been made to curb poppy cultivation. A bumper harvest has been predicted this year. Proceeds from the precious cash crop reportedly help to keep the Taliban in business. The old Marxian aphorism has been turned on its head: in a large number of cases, it seems, opium is the religion of the people (often alongside an obscurantist interpretation of Islam).

Notwithstanding the gory details of Taliban misrule, it is extremely difficult to contend that the overall situation in Afghanistan today is an indubitable improvement on the conditions that existed five years ago. The Americans seem to be handing over responsibility to the British, whose experience of abysmal failure in the Afghan region goes back much further. The British army’s losses in Afghanistan during the past month exceed the casualties it has suffered in Iraq throughout 2006.

It is far from certain whether Britain has an appetite for the rate of attrition that an enhanced commitment in Afghanistan will inevitably entail. And even if it did, it’s far from clear whether a foreign military presence aimed at sustaining the Karzai regime will prove any more fruitful than did the Red Army’s efforts to prop up Babrak Karmal and Najibullah.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com