The Taliban wave

WHILE the Taliban wave continues to gather strength, the presentation made to the National Security Council’s June 4 meeting, with President Pervez Musharraf present, is scary. The 15-page report warns that the Taliban have reorganised and regrouped, that their influence has spilled over from Fata into the ‘settled’ districts, and that the law enforcement agencies’ morale is low. The deal with the militants in North Waziristan is holding, though the peace is fragile; in South Waziristan the expulsion of the Uzbeks has only marginally improved the situation, and one militant commander is harbouring terrorists, including foreigners. It is disturbing to note, as the presentation to the NSC pointed out, that the geographical range of non-Fata areas affected by the Taliban militancy ranges from D. I. Khan in the south, through the Peshawar, Mardan and Charsadda districts in the centre to Dir, Swat and Malakand in the north. The clerics, it said, were operating illegal FM radio stations and preaching an extremist philosophy, while some madressahs continued to recruit young boys for ‘jihad’. The presentation was confined to the NWFP, but one hears from time to time of reports from Balochistan about attacks on hair-cutting salons and video shops, and on Friday the Hafsa brigade raided a massage parlour in the federal capital and kidnapped several Chinese, most of them women (they have since been released) — part of the ongoing Rasheed-Ghazi brothers’ ‘jihad’ to enforce Sharia in Pakistan.

Since Pakistan joined the US-led war on terror, the Taliban zone of influence has increased, not shrunk. The US is waging a war on Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan, but in America itself the people are safe. In Pakistan, however, the people are not safe, because the militants, foreign as well as Pakistani, make civilians a target of their terror, as seen in the bomb blast in an Islamabad hotel in January, in addition to regular attacks on Pakistani security forces. Nearly 1,000 Pakistani soldiers have been killed, and there is no sign yet of an improvement in the situation, even though Islamabad has deployed 80,000 troops along the Afghan border and is still regularly reminded by Kabul to “do more”. Evidently, both the use of force and such ‘deals’ and agreements as the Fata Political Agents have struck with the militant leaders have failed to yield results. More regrettably, the MMA, which is the ruling group in the NWFP, has failed in its duty to prevent attacks on civilians in the ‘settled’ districts. One reason could be the sympathy which the MMA leaders have for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. What is more, they do not seem to cooperate with the federal authorities because of their opposition to President Pervez Musharraf’s policies. The issue thus gets mixed with Pakistan’s domestic politics.

The military-led government might have secured F-16s for Pakistan, but it has failed to control the Taliban wave. If the religious right is the enemy of the government, the liberals have no love lost for the Musharraf government, as shown by the wave of support for the ‘non-functional’ Chief Justice throughout Pakistan. It is time the military realised that only democratic forces can challenge the Taliban and save Pakistan from a takeover by psychopaths like the Lal Masjid brigade. The lack of democracy is one of the major reasons for the Taliban’s success and has contributed in no small measure to the liberal opinion’s alienation from the government’s war on religious militancy.

For an early warning system

THE Pakistan Meteorological Department is to be commended for devising a comprehensive early warning system which, if implemented with due diligence, could save countless lives in the event of a natural disaster. On paper at least, the ‘Multi-Hazard Early Warning and Response System’ outlines a viable strategy for predicting almost every natural catastrophe in the making, from floods and cyclones to tsunamis and drought. It also envisages an Earthquake Prediction Study Centre, though seismologists the world over generally agree that quakes cannot be forecast with any degree of accuracy. At best, what can be predicted is the likelihood of a major earthquake over a period spanning decades. Still, the nine recommendations put forward by the Met department cover vast areas and, in a systematic manner, address issues that have so far been ignored at our peril. Floods, for instance, are an annual feature, yet they continue to destroy not just property — which is perhaps inevitable, not just in Pakistan but in the developed world as well — but also claim a human toll that is clearly preventable. The National Disaster Management Authority is to serve as the focal point for component bodies across the country, coordinating their efforts and disseminating information in a timely manner. Funding, meanwhile, is to be sought from the donors’ consortium formed by former US President Bill Clinton.

The initiative’s success will depend on how effective the leap is from the drawing board to actual implementation. Red tape and a failure to follow an idea through to its logical end have, in the past, led to the untimely demise of many a sound proposal. This must not be allowed to happen in this case or, for that matter, the measures that come under the purview of the recently promulgated National Disaster Management Ordinance 2007. Besides accurate prediction of natural disasters, what is of critical importance is a mechanism to ensure the timely evacuation of affectees and the provision of temporary room and board. Also, funds need to be set aside to help people rebuild their homes and replenish livestock and seed supplies once the worst is over. This responsibility cannot be shirked.

Rabies threat in the NWFP

ONE of the most cruel and barbaric methods still being used to deal with the threat of rabies is the killing of stray dogs. This has never solved the problem. As a report on Saturday from Peshawar revealed, the issue has more to do with the unavailability of anti-rabies vaccines in hospitals, which are provided to them by the National Institute of Health to administer to patients free of cost. About 27,000 persons, including children, were bitten by stray dogs in the province last year, but it is difficult to ascertain the number of deaths from rabies. Those who are bitten by stray dogs say that they cannot afford to buy the Rs4,000 vaccine from the market while the government hospitals do not have it. It is not just a matter of getting the NIH to ensure a steady supply of anti-rabies vaccines in hospitals. The vaccine itself has to be changed as it is one that was declared ineffective by the World Health Organisation 20 years ago. The WHO recommends using a cell culture vaccine (CCV) which can be imported from India, making it cost-effective. This option has been under consideration since last year, without any decision being taken. It is estimated that 150,000 people are bitten by stray dogs every year in the country of which 5,000 die because they do not receive treatment on time.

The practice of killing stray dogs must be stopped for it is ineffective and, above all, cruel. A more effective and less costly option is to adopt an animal birth control programme which involves neutering and vaccination. A report by the WHO says that effective immunisation of 70 per cent of dogs in a given area can break rabies’ transmission. Results of this method in other developing countries have been promising and it must be adopted here too.

New arms race: its implications

IT would be rather a hasty generalisation to say that the honeymoon between the neocons and authoritarian Putin regime has weared off in the face of the former’s pursuit of strategic ascendancy over the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. For, in spite of Putin’s barbed broadside against George Bush for riding his high hobby horse, BMD, the belligerent Russian leader still called him partner.

Their meeting at Heiligendamm, a German seaport on the Baltic coast, on March 7, was far from stormy as Vladimir Putin took his partner-adversary unawares by offering him to share the use of Gabalin, a Russian base in Azerbaijan, rented by Moscow. The Russian leader went on to explain that the Azerbaijan base would be a far better site than the Czech republic for detecting any long-range missile test by Iran and, at the same time cover the whole of Europe rather than a part of it and the missile debris will fall into the sea and not on the soil of Europe.

Over and above all, the arrangement will allay any Russian misgivings about US ballistic missile defence plan. Vladimir Putin had come prepared at the G-8 meeting to counter the controversial BMD plan of George Bush since the former had obtained the consent of Ilham Alieve, the Azerbaijan President.

The Putin plan defused the tension for the time being which was engendered by his Cold War rhetoric backed by successful testfiring of a 10-warhead RS-24 missile from the Plestesk cosmodrome on May 29 that could overcome any missile shield developed so far amid widespread panic in Europe, especially in Poland and Czech republic. It sounded as a return to the bad old days of the Cold War when the two titans, the US and the Soviet Union, were flexing their missiles and accelerating the arms race.

This was Moscow’s counterblast to Washington’s plan to deploy ten interceptor missiles in Poland supplemented by a radar system installed in Czech republic on the flimsy pretext of protecting Europe against the on-coming long-range attack form Iran and North Korea.

Clearly, this was seen as a sinister imperialist plan to target Moscow after casting what the Bush administration naively believed to be a fool-proof impregnable shield over the US territory and certain of its bases in Europe.Now Bush finds himself in a quandary.

If it is the threat of Iranian or Korean missile that the US wants to ward off, then it must at once seize on Putin’s offer of Azerbaijan base, but the fact that Washington is mulling it shows that the rogue state argument was used as a ploy to distract Moscow’s attention from the American design to increase Russia’s vulnerability.

The Cold War had established a strategic balance mainly by Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972. According to it, the US and the USSR were to construct two missile shields – one to cover their capitals, and the other, to cover parts of their inter-continental ballistic missile sites. The two systems were to be separated by 1,300 kilometres with each having a radius of 150 kilometres and equipped with 10 launchers. These were static and contained a single warhead.

This system left large tracts of territories of both the US and the USSR vulnerable to a missile attack by each other. The mutual fear of exposure to a nuclear attack served as a deterrent to nuclear war. If any power tries to make itself completely invulnerable to an attack by the other, while the other does not expand its defence shield, it will find itself at the mercy of the other power. This is precisely what would happen to Russia since George Bush threw away America’s allegiance to ABM treaty in 2001.Both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China had expressed their alarm at this development, but it was overshadowed by the September 11 episode which brought them together in a war against terror. The 1996 Shanghai Agreement that was concluded primarily to promote intra-regional co-operation in trade and economy was reoriented to combat separatism in Xinjiang and Chechnya espoused by religious extremism. To invade the Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, the US, with Moscow’s blessings, obtained military air bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The US spread tentacles over the central-eastern Europe in the form of a string of bases in Poland, Czech republic and the Baltic coast. At the same time, it financed the anti-Russian forces in Georgia and Ukraine to oust the pro-Moscow regimes there while backing the tiny republic of Estonia to remove the memorial of Russia’s war dead from the capital’s central part to some unknown remote place.

Russia’s reprisals against the US infiltration into what traditionally had been part of the former Soviet territory has been the same as in the days of the Cold War.

Moscow suspended the supply of crude oil to Lithuania’s Mazeikiu refinery by blocking the Druzhbe pipeline and earlier, in 2006, it temporarily cut off the gas supplies to Ukraine over a price dispute and banned the import of meat from Poland. This is how the Berlin crisis brewed in 1948 when the Soviet authorities imposed blockade around the US-occupied west Berlin, cutting off food and fuel to the besieged population.

Then General Lucius Clay of the US mounted a massive airlift of food and fuel to west Berlin which continued for nine months. It seemed as if the two were about to go to war. Though the present situation has not reached that point, if this power struggle continues some dangerous conflict may erupt.

The former Warsaw Pact allies of Moscow have become America’s allies, some of whom have joined Nato which has been expanding in both members and its role. Russia wanted to join the Atlantic Alliance but was denied admission. It was a good opportunity for partnership for peace in Europe as the US and the Russian Federation could have worked as partners to assist the United Nations in its peace-keeping operations.

In fact, Nato, whose scope of operations was initially limited to the defence of western Europe against any communist attack, extended its operation to the Gulf and beyond since its forces are assisting the American occupying troops not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. It must be worrying the Russians that Americans have established military bases in Iraq, a former ally of the Soviet Union, and in neutralist Afghanistan, thus encircling both Russia and China if one were to point to US bases in Diego Garcia, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

The Gulf is being patrolled by two US aircraft carriers which held military-naval exercises in the proximity to the Straits of Hormuz in a naked display of gunboat diplomacy to bring Iran to its knees. While the Americans are on the rampage on land and at sea, the littoral states in the region, especially those which do not kowtow to the US hegemonic designs, feel threatened.

In order to tip the strategic balance against Russia and China, the Bush administration went the whole hog to wean India away from Russia by striking a nuclear deal with it last July, which, though not finalised yet, exempts 35 per cent of India’s nuclear plants from the IAEA safeguard, thus colluding with that country in proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Consequently, the deal will enable India to manufacture fifty nuclear bombs annually. America’s another protégé, the expansionist state of Israel, possesses, according to a CIA estimate, four hundred nuclear bombs, more than the number possessed by Britain or France. The UN Security Council and the IAEA are after North Korea which may be having just a few crude bombs and Iran which has none. Furthermore, Britain launched an attack on a nuclear submarine called Astitute.

Under urgings from the US, Germany and Japan have decided to embark on an ambitious armament plan, raising alarm in Europe and East Asia. No wonder, the Chinese now engaged in doing business were alarmed over these developments, and successfully experimented with their anti-satellite missile and launched JIN-class submarine which can deliver ballistic missiles oover a range of 8000 kilometres; in addition they are preparing a mobile land-based intercontinental ballistic missile which can reach targets in the US from coast to coast.

The Pentagon and US Vice-President Dick Cheney have questioned China’s armaments programme. This amounts to saying that the US has the divine right to build BMD, ICBMS and SLBMS but Russia and China have no right to arm themselves. Britain can launch an attack on a nuclear-powered submarine but China cannot. Israel can make nuclear bombs, but Iran and North Korea cannot; India can possess nuclear arsenal and keep nuclear weapons manufacturing plants but Pakistan should be dispossessed of its bombs and its nuclear plants dismantled.

This logic does not make any sense. What is needed is general and complete disarmament by all nations, large and small. That makes sense.

The writer is professor-Dean, Faculty of Management and Social Sciences, Balochistan University of Information Technology and Management Sciences, Quetta.