Bombing is blow to ‘anti-terror war’

WASHINGTON: Nearly two years after the September 11 attacks, the US-led “war on terrorism” seems to be losing ground as a deadly strike on UN headquarters in Iraq and mounting violence in Afghanistan undermine stability in both countries.

Tuesday’s truck bombing of the UN headquarters, which killed the UN special representative and at least 14 others, reflected a devastating new level of assaults against non-military targets in Iraq and US officials said the involvement of Al Qaeda could not be discounted.

President George W. Bush vowed not to be intimidated by “terrorists” and those supporting ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But calls mounted for Washington to make changes, such as increasing its own troop presence in Iraq and bringing the international community more fully into the security and rebuilding effort.

“There’s a clear escalation in the amount of resistance, the dimension of the resistance and the texture of the resistance” in Iraq, said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert with the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service.

Soon after Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, Sunnis who were members of Saddam’s Baath Party began an almost daily assault on US soldiers.

But in the last six weeks, a widening array of insurgents, including Iraqi Shias and foreign militants, are believed to have become active and the target list has broadened to include oil pipelines, utilities, the Jordanian Embassy and now, UN headquarters.

HEIGHTENED RISKS: The attacks are “clearly giving the impression to the Iraqi people that the United States with all its might is unable to preserve security, keep the electricity on and the water running,” Katzman said. Some 140,000 US troops are in Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the last seven days, at least 90 people have been killed in Afghanistan in a series of ambushes, attacks and factional clashes, many involving Taliban fighters, whose leaders were overthrown by US troops in 2001 for harbouring Al Qaeda members.

A 12,500-strong US-led military coalition remains in Afghanistan pursuing remnants of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network more than 22 months after the United States attacked the country.

Ellen Laipson, former vice president of the US National Intelligence Council, said, “I don’t think the level of violence in either place suggests we’ve got a full outbreak of civil war or chaos in which international forces cannot operate.”

But the risk to US and international forces “remains high and raises serious questions” about whether more troops are needed to improve security or whether they would just become additional targets of attack, she said.

David Mack, a former US diplomat now with the Middle East Institute, believes a key problem is that Americans “have been kidding ourselves about the nature of what we face in Iraq.”

RUMSFELD FAULTED: Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was right to oppose deployment of 300,000 troops in the war against Saddam but erred in not heeding top US army chiefs who argued such a large force was needed to stabilize the country once the fighting ended, Mack said.

Mack faulted the administration for underestimating the post-war challenges and for inadequate planning, despite repeated advance warnings from experts that winning the peace in Iraq could be even more important than winning the war.

If the United States had a better plan for securing Iraq, it could have better protected infrastructure from sabotage and provided Iraqis more quickly with basic services that are still lacking, thus gaining more support from the civilian population and perhaps undermining insurgents, he said.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Democratic contender for president, demanded that Bush reassess the situation.

“We must immediately and thoroughly review the security situation in Iraq, accelerate the training programmes for indigenous Iraqi military and police security forces to protect those already working in Iraq and we must move quickly to add more international troops in Iraq through an expanded United Nations Security Council mandate,” he said in a statement.

Judith Yaphe of the National Defence University predicted Tuesday’s bombing would encourage more attacks.

But “it doesn’t say we’ve done anything wrong. It’s saying that we’re unable to totally control and orchestrate the peaceful transition of Iraq,” she said.

US experts and officials say only a minority of Iraqis are hostile to what America is trying to do in Iraq, and Washington must do a better job of promoting awareness of progress that has been made and engaging Iraqis in the process.

Iraq “is not a losing proposition but it’s going to be difficult and expensive in terms of money and personnel and time. Ultimately the way you get at this is having Iraqis do policing and security but we’re not there yet,” Yaphe said.—Reuters

Badin, Thatta emergency: the political dimension

THE recent rain floods in Thatta and Badin have inundated and devastated two whole districts. More than 130 people have died and more bodies are surfacing as the flood water recedes. Two weeks after the rain stopped falling, most of the area is still under water. Roads and railway embankments are causeways, cutting through the floods. Trees and the roofs of traditional reed-thatch houses protrude from the water on either side.

Some of the villages built on higher ground stand now as islands, marooned. In all 3,400 villages have been flooded. Here and there piles of belongings and hapless groups of peasants camp on the embankments, waiting for the chance to trudge home. As you reach the bigger villages and district headquarters, the groups of flood evacuees are bigger — some 70,000 people have taken refuge in the schools and other government buildings that make up the 272 official relief camps. But as you enter each one, the first thing that hits you is the stench of excrement, the consequence of hundreds of people cramped into each poorly serviced building.

This is clearly a humanitarian disaster and the overwhelming national priority is to help its victims survive and recover. But beyond the humanitarian rhetoric, there is a political dimension to the post-flood situation. In a sense Thatta and Badin have become a test case for the new political institutions, the first major natural disaster that we have faced since both devolution and the revival of the provincial assemblies. How have the new and revived institutions coped with this predictable crisis? And how have they managed to mediate and reconcile the national, provincial and local political pressures with the technical requirements of running an effective humanitarian operation?

These were the questions I asked as I covered over 500 kilometres, touring the flood affected areas last week. I was there as part of a delegation of relief agency representatives that visited the two district centres of Thatta and Badin and went deep into the disaster affected areas, including Keti Bandar, Ahmad Raju, Tando Bagho, Ghora Bari and Kadhan. That all is not well is evidenced by the daily protests that flood victims are themselves now staging about the state of the relief operations. President Musharraf himself must have noticed these protests when he visited Badin on August 7. The flood victims say they are going hungry because of inadequacy of relief measures; some have resorted to desperate measures, snatching relief trucks. Already the law enforcement agencies have killed one protester.

As we toured the two districts we found that the health department is active, working to its well-rehearsed emergency plan, and has mobilized its personnel to provide treatment in numerous temporary camps. Otherwise, at all levels of government and administration, it seems there is utter chaos in relief distribution.

The lack of coordination is highlighted by the way that various officials are issuing statements blaming each other for the mess. Lower Sindh’s flood plain provides the new playing field on which tensions between different levels of government (district versus provincial) and between different levels of elected representative (nazim versus MPA and MNA) and the political party and the family rivalries are played out. In Badin, the tussle is District nazim versus provincial government and DCO. In Thatta, the tussle is District nazim versus union nazims and a woman MPA.

The Sindh government has exacerbated the situation by forming district relief committees (DRC) headed by a provincial minister in each affected district.In protest,eight district nazims and the Badin District Council have rejected the formation of DRCs through a council resolution. As many as 35 Union nazims have also refused to participate in the relief operation in Badin. The provincial government has publicly accused District nazim, Badin, of corruption and malpractice. At the union level, tension exits between councillors, union nazims and naib nazims. The opposition parties have accused the Sindh government of mismanagement. In over 10 years of participating in humanitarian disaster response with the Pattan Development Organization, I have rarely seen political interference and consequent paralysis of decision-making on the scale of what is now happening in Sindh.

The National Reconstruction Bureau, as midwife of the devolved institutions, is going to have to consider intervening to mediate between the different levels of government. The devolution plan had clearly allocated district government the key role in responding to flood emergencies (Sindh Local Government Ordinance 2001 amended as March 15, 2003, Sixth Schedule, Para 81).

Intervention by the provincial government at district level, through formation of its DRCs is a direct encroachment on the responsibilities of the district governments. District governments have anyway found it an uphill struggle to maintain clear reporting lines for officials allocated to them, especially the DCOs and EDOs. Now on relief matters, these officers are left to decide whether to listen to the nazim or the DRC. And few will be surprised to hear that most complaints about unresponsive officers come from the districts, like Badin, where the nazim belongs to the political opposition.

The move to bring in high level politicians at the head of district relief committees looks uncomfortably like a case of competitive political patronage, on the back of an aid programme. It is a move that can easily backfire, precisely because people on the ground are so frustrated at the blatant manipulation of relief. Devolution was meant to mark the reinvigoration of civilian institutions. But people in Thatta and Badin are already lamenting that this year’s relief operation is much more poorly organized than the response to Cyclone 2A in 1999, when the army took charge, leaving little role for the civilians.

The most solid indicator of the inadequacy of the relief effort is the unacceptable living conditions in most of the relief camps. Despite the fact that the establishment of relief camps has always been at the heart of the district administration emergency planning, people living in the camps are subjected to unhygienic conditions, shortages of tankered water, few latrines, and inadequate, sub-standard rations. One look at the worms cooked with the rice tells you the standard of grain allocated to our fellow citizens.

And yet relief supplies are pouring in, and cash is being allocated. We saw government buildings filled with tents, bedding, and dry food rations. Trucks had been waiting for many hours to take receipt of relief items for onward distribution. But all our discussions with different officials and politicians told us that the basic tussle over who is in charge and who has the right to nominate beneficiaries has created a logjam in the distribution of aid goods.

Devolution was meant to enhance accountability and insulate basic functions of service delivery from exploitative patronage. Instead, no effort was made to consult local councils about the relief operation. The district nazims themselves, instead of distributing relief assistance according to need,seem to be favouring their own party workers and union nazims. As ever, the ministers, MNAs and MPAs are trying to muscle in and use their positions on DRCs to manipulate distribution. While the reality on the ground is so worrying, people’s cynicism can only increase, as they watch the familiar stream of VVIPs visiting the disaster hit areas, announcing relief packages and basking in the publicity.

The scramble for control of the immediate relief items has meant little attention has yet been paid to the even bigger problem— that of recovery. The flood has wiped out livelihoods in two of the country’s poorest districts. It is feared that if water does not recede soon, crops of sugarcane and rice will be destroyed.

Eighty per cent of standing crops on 443,188 acres, it is feared, may vanish. The poultry and fish farms, popular rural industries, have already vanished. Farmers, tenants and labourers alike will be forced into the labour market at a time when few employers have the capacity to employ them.

An effective recovery operation, as well as relief work, will require a cease-fire in the battle between tiers of government. It will require elected representatives and government servants to agree to allow the local government system to work. No politician has a right to distribute relief items to any victim. That is the job of the field departments. Let our representatives formulate relief operation policy and pass it on to the relevant departments to implement it.

The writer is national coordinator of Pattan Development Organization.