The fault lies elsewhere

ADDRESSING the nation in the aftermath of the London bombings, General Musharraf has rightly said that England too needs to do more to deal with the problem at hand. Evidently, he was responding to the British prime minister’s pointed accusations of the role of Pakistani madressahs in the bombings.

The sense of outrage expressed by British, US and western leaders is certainly understandable; what, however, cannot be so is their collective amnesia of their own role in first introducing terrorism in Afghanistan in the 1980s and, in the process, building the terrorist network in Pakistan; of which the madressahs were an integral part.

Now, when the menace of terrorism is affecting their own societies, western governments are continuing to rely on the same traditional allies that had been their instruments in spawning terrorism until recently. The West certainly needs to do more, but what it needs to do is to introspect and try to fathom the underlying institutional factors spewing militancy and terrorism in states run by their own client regimes.

The bombings in London and the involvement in it of men of Pakistani origin with alleged links to religious seminaries in Pakistan has refocused international and national attention on madressahs in the country. However, madressahs comprise only a part of the problem. After all, just about one per cent of school students are enrolled in madressahs, while over 70 per cent of them are enrolled in public schools. The larger problem is, as such, the education system as a whole. Defining the education system, however, is the political superstructure that has come to be dominated by the military-mullah nexus that was patronized by the West — particularly in Pakistan — up until the end of the 1980s.

Education in Pakistan reflects the prevalence of social inequality in the country and suffers from a situation akin to apartheid. There are two broad streams of education, characterized basically by the medium of instruction. One stream uses English and the other uses Urdu. Elite English-medium schools represent one end of the spectrum and madressahs the other end.

However, the bulk of the students occupy the middle: non-elite English medium schools and Urdu medium schools. They follow the official curricula that may be described as secular, but with a heavy stress on ‘Islamic Ideology’. Income is the primary determinant of the type of school a child goes to. Upper income households generally send their children to English-medium schools and lower income households send their children — if at all — to Urdu-medium schools or madressahs.

Education plays a key role in shaping concepts, ideas, opinions and worldviews. In this respect, education in Pakistan has been conspicuous more for its role in indoctrination than in promoting pedagogy or learning. The element of indoctrination begins with the teacher.

The National Education Policy 1998-2010 considers the teacher as “the focal point for dissemination of information on fundamental principles of Islam as laid down in the Holy Quran, and as applicable to the development of an egalitarian Muslim society. For this purpose, an extensive in-service training programme will be conducted. The curricula of pre-service teacher training shall have a compulsory component of Islamic education ... This concept shall be interwoven in all the subjects of professional training institutions”

The guidelines for training programmes are explicit in that “Pakistan being an ideological state, all efforts towards the reconstruction of curricula have to be based on Islamic foundations of life”. Training in selection of content is required to emphasize “understanding the process of Islamization of the curriculum in Pakistan”.

The aims of teacher education, as described in the Curriculum and Syllabus of the Primary Teaching Certificate (PTC), include: to inculcate the spirit of Islam and develop the qualities of tolerance, universal brotherhood and justice, to help teachers understand that an educational system is the action plan for translating a nation’s philosophy into practice, to acquaint the teachers with the ideological basis of education in Pakistan and to sensitize them to their key role in nation-building and social development, to acquaint teachers with Islamic world-view, Islamic epistemology and Islamic approach to teaching, and so on.

The curricula, syllabi and officially prescribed textbooks for students are loaded with sermonizing and moralizing in the name of Islam. The National Education Policy 1998-2010, which informs the curricula, syllabi, textbooks and teaching methods, states thus: “Education is a powerful catalyzing agent which provides mental, physical, ideological and moral training to individuals so as to enable them to have full consciousness of their purpose in life and equip them to achieve that purpose. It is an instrument for the spiritual development as well as the material fulfilment of human needs. Within the context of Islamic perception, education is an instrument for developing the attitudes of individuals in accordance with the values of righteousness to help build a sound Islamic society”.

It goes on to amplify that: “The only justification for our existence is our total commitment to Islam as our sole identity ... the National Educational Policy should take into consideration the development of an integrated educational system in which our Islamic values, principles and objectives must be reflected not only in the syllabi of Islamic Studies, but also in all the disciplines”

With specific reference to the curricula and textbooks, it states thus: “Curricula and textbooks of all the subjects shall he revised so as to exclude and expunge any material repugnant to Islamic values, and include sufficient material on the Quran and Islamic teachings, information, history, heroes, moral values, etc., relevant to the subject and level of education concerned.

The framework provided by the ministry of education to the curriculum wing decrees “The highest priority has been assigned to the revision of the curriculum with a view to update the entire course contents so that the ideology of Pakistan could permeate the thinking of young generation and help them with necessary conviction and ability.”

The statement of objectives of the Curriculum of Early Childhood Education designed for children aged 3-5 years states thus: “to mature in children a sense of Islamic identity and pride in being a Pakistani.” The result is contents of textbooks with titles such as ‘Freedom or Death’ and ‘Martyr’.

The curriculum for Class 1-5 Urdu language lists the following as some of the purposes of teaching the national language. The student should: be able to lake pride in the Islamic way of life, and should try to acquire Islamic knowledge and to adopt it; read religious books in order to understand Quranic teachings, listen to events from the Islamic history and derive pleasure from them, and know that national culture is not local culture or local customs, but it means the culture whose principles have been determined by Islam.

It continues thus: Students should be made aware that they are members of the Muslim nation and that is why, according to Islamic values, they must aim to become honest, virtuous, patriotic, serving humanity and daring mujahids and that the ideology of Pakistan should be presented as the absolute truth and never made subject to dispute or debate, and there should be no concept of distinction between the worldly and religious way of life, instead learning material should be produced according to the Islamic point of view.

The learning of language itself is designed to serve religious purposes. Thus, the image that the child develops is that there is a special place for the Muslims and the ‘Islamic’ way of life, which overrides the right of all citizens to be viewed as being equal and to take pride in their own beliefs and ways of living. In view of ideologically motivated suggestions from the education policy and the curriculum, it is not surprising that the textbooks have a markedly communal and chauvinistic attitude.

History books too have been distorted to suit the purposes of indoctrination. Pakistan Studies textbooks, which contain the history portion, do not mention the ancient pre-Islamic civilizations and cultures of the Indus valley (Moenjodaro, Harappa, Taxila, etc.). They commence with the first Arab invasion of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim, which is treated as the beginning of history for all practical purposes. They also largely bypass the Buddhist, Hindu and British periods in the history of the South Asian subcontinent and jump to the movement for Pakistan led by the Muslim League.

The specific ideological basis of this structuring is to make children regard the Muslim eras as the only relevant and glorious part of history. The pervasive attitude that is promoted through the textbooks is that only Muslims can be good, courageous and patriotic; thus, cultivating a kind of petty chauvinism.

Clearly, education in Pakistan is crying out for reform. First, however, the West has some critical choices to make. It can no longer command the privilege of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. If a part of the education system in Pakistan is identified as a factor in world terrorism, it also needs to be recognized that the problem cannot be looked at in isolation from socio-economic and political factors.

The essential prerequisite of effective reform of education in Pakistan is the dismantling of the overarching ‘Praetorian’ apparatuses dominating the country. If the West wants to make the world safe for itself and for all the peoples of the world, it will have to abandon its client regimes and support the process of democratization of societies in Muslim countries. It will also have to accept the fact that democratization will bring nationalist forces to the fore, which may not play the tune required by western financial and commercial interests. The choices are stark, but they can no longer be avoided.

Prospects of US-Iran detente

It is reassuring that despite US President George Bush’s uncharitable remarks about him and questioning the legitimacy of his election, Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative, has expressed himself in favour of a rapprochement with the United States.

He has categorically said: “it remains Iran’s decision to re- establish relations with America”.

President Ahmadinejad has also said that his country’s foreign policy will be based on “peace, moderation and coexistence”. It seems that he is keen on reaching out to the United States, which remains a key factor in Iran’s foreign policy, to begin a process of reconciliation with that country. This, indeed, is a positive development and could change the dynamics of relations between the two countries.

Regrettably, however, there are indications that the hawks in Washington, who apparently have an upper hand in the foreign policy decision-making, are opposed to the very idea of reconciliation with Tehran and may opt for a tough stance against it. A sudden upsurge in Washington’s harsh rhetoric against Iran, at the highest level, particularly after President Ahmadinejad’s election, lends credence to this impression. It may also be noted that Israel, which wields great influence on the US administration, is also opposed to the normalization of relations between Washington and Tehran, which it considers would be an obstacle to its strategic interests in the Middle East.

It may be recalled that in February this year, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, had hinted at the possibility of military action against Iran if it does not give up its ambition to build a nuclear bomb. She, however, clarified that a US attack on Iran was “not on agenda at this point”. In other words, it might consider such action at a later stage.

It may be noted that Ahmadinejad has defended his country’s nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, claiming it to be “Iran’s inalienable right”. It follows from this that the nuclear issue, which is of vital concern to Washington, will continue to be a friction point in US-Iran relations in the foreseeable future, with all its consequences, and may only be resolved if the two countries move towards ending their prolonged standoff.

There is a wide body of public opinion in the United States and Iran that supports reconciliation between the two countries.

These elements argue that the diplomatic stalemate that has lasted for more than 25 years has served the interests of neither country and they should, therefore, ameliorate their tense and estranged relations. This they can do this in a spirit of flexibility, realism and broader understanding. The leadership of Ahmadinejad offers an opportunity for this.

The United States and Iran are locked in a bitter struggle against each other since 1979, when the victory of the Iranian Revolution changed the political structure of the country from a monarchy to a democratic system, based on Islamic principles, that was perceived by Washington as a threat to its interests in that country. It imposed sanctions on Iran in addition to freezing its assets in America. It also unleashed an extensive propaganda against it, which continues unabated. As a matter of fact, it has been stepped up after the election of Ahmadinejad as president of his country.

The ever-worsening state of relationship between the US and Iran is a source of considerable concern, particularly to the countries in the region, as it could lead to undesirable consequences. This underlines the need and urgency of a reconciliation between the two countries, which may be possible only if they give up obduracy and handle the festering crisis by showing pragmatism and statesmanship. They should let bygones be bygones and normalize relations in their larger interest. Both of them must realize that they cannot remain adversaries in perpetuity and sooner this realization comes the better.

It seems that the lack of trust between the US and Iran has been the main obstacle in the way of normalization of relations. The two sides should, therefore, make an earnest effort to bridge the chasm of distrust between them. As a first step in that direction, Washington should recognize the legitimacy of the victory of Ahmadinejad, as the president of Iran.

Simultaneously, the venomous propaganda being carried on by the two sides against each other should also be stopped, followed by a dialogue between them, on the basis of sovereign equality, to normalize their relations. It would be unrealistic, however, to expect complete normalization between the two estranged countries immediately and for them to forget the bitter memories of the past. However, once the process of rapprochement starts it may yield positive results, paving the way further improvement in ties.

It must, however, be realized that President Ahmadinejad may not be able to break the impasse without bringing about a change in Iran’s attitude which, over the years, has become increasingly antagonistic in response to Washington’s Iran-bashing policy. One should not also ignore the fact that Iran remains divided between the hardliners and moderates over the question of reconciliation with the United States. The new Iranian president has taken the first difficult step by publicly expressing his willingness to mend fences with the United States notwithstanding decades of strident anti-American feelings in his country. In doing so, we overlooked the possibility of a backlash from the hardliners who actually have overwhelmingly voted him into presidency.

It is, therefore, important to strengthen his hands to enable him to try to re-establish normal ties with the United States by creating conditions that could mollify the attitude of the hardliners — a task in which Washington too, must play a constructive role.

In any case, the United States, being the sole superpower, is also expected to set an example of living in peace with smaller nations, in accordance with the UN Charter, which demands from its members, in particular the powerful ones, to conform to standards that seek to lay the foundation of an international system of peaceful coexistence of nations.

The dangerous dichotomy

THAT fine French historian of the 1914-18 world conflict, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, suggested not long ago that the West was the inheritor of a type of warfare of very great violence.

“Then, after 1945,” he wrote, “... the West externalized it, in Korea, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Iraq... we stopped thinking about the experience of war and we do not understand its return (to us) in different forms like that of terrorism... We do not want to admit that there is now occurring a different type of confrontation...”

He might have added that politicians — and here I’m referring to Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara — would deliberately refuse to acknowledge this. We are fighting evil. Nothing to do with the occupation of Palestinian land, the occupation of Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the torture at Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo. Oh no, indeed. “An evil ideology”, a nebulous, unspecified, dark force. That’s the problem.

There are two things wrong with this. The first is that once you start talking about “evil”, you are talking about religion. Good and evil, God and the devil. The London suicide bombers were Muslims (or thought they were) so the entire Muslim community in Britain must stand to attention and - as Muslims — condemn them. We “Christians” were not required to do that because we are not Muslims — nor were we required as “Christians” to condemn the Christian Serb slaughter of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica just over 10 years ago. All we had to do was say sorry for doing nothing at the time. But Muslims, because they are Muslims, must ritually condemn something they had nothing to do with.

But that, I suspect, is the point. Deep down, I wonder if we do not think that their religion does have something to do with all this, that Islam is un-renaissanced and potentially violent. It’s not true, but our heritage of orientalism suggests otherwise.

It’s weird the way we both despise and envy the “other”. Many of those early orientalists showed both disgust and fascination with the East. They loathed the punishments and the pashas, but they rather liked the women; they were obsessed with harems. Westerners found the idea of having more than one wife quite appealing. Similarly, I rather think there are aspects of our western “decadence” which are of interest to Muslims, even if they ritually condemn them.

I was very struck some years ago when the son of a Lebanese friend of mine went off to study for three years at a university in the south of England. When I passed through London from Beirut, I would sometimes bring audio tapes or letters from his parents — these were the glorious days before the Internet — and the student would usually meet me in a pub in Bloomsbury.

He would invariably turn up with a girl and would drink several beers before setting off to her flat for the night. Then in his last term at college, he called home and asked his mother to find him a bride. The days of fun and games were over. He wanted Mummy to find him a virgin to marry.

I thought about this a lot at the time. He was — and is — a most respectful, honourable man who has passed up much wealthier job opportunities abroad to teach college kids in Beirut. But had he been a weaker man, I can imagine he might have quite a few problems with his life. What was he doing in Britain? Why was he enjoying himself like “us”, only to turn his back on that enjoyment for a more conservative life?

Take another example — though the two men have nothing in common — that of Ziad Jarrah. He lived in Germany with a Turkish girlfriend — not just dating but living with her — and then on September 11, 2001, he called up the girl to say “I love you”. What’s wrong, the young woman asked. “I love you,” he said simply again and hung up the phone. And then he went off to board an airliner and slash the throats of its passengers and fly it into the ground in Pennsylvania.

What happened in his brain as he heard the voice of the girlfriend he said he loved? His father, whom I know quite well, was as stunned as the parents of the London suicide bombers. To this day, he still cannot believe what Ziad Jarrah did. He is even waiting for him to come home.

It’s not difficult to be cynical about the way in which Arabs can both hate the West and love it. In Arab capitals, I can read the anti-Bush fury expressed in the pages of local newspapers and then drive past the American embassy where sometimes hundreds of Arabs are standing round the walls in the hope of acquiring visas to the US. The Quran is a document of inestimable value. So is a green card.

But from the many letters I receive from Muslims, especially in Britain, I think I can understand some of the anger generated among them. They come, many of them, from countries of great repression and from lands where the strictest family and religious rules govern their lives. You know the rest.

So in Britain — and even the Muslims who were born in the country often grow up in traditional families — there can be a fierce dichotomy between their lives and that of society around them. The freedoms of Britain — social as well as political — can be very attractive. Knowing that its elected government sends its soldiers to invade Iraq and kill quite a lot of Muslims at the same time might turn the “dichotomy” into something far more dangerous.

Here is a land — Britain — in which you could live a good life. Pretty girls to go out with (note, we are talking about men), or marry or just live with. Movies to watch — no snipping of the nude scenes in our films — and, if you like, a beer or two at the local. These things are haram, of course, wrong, but enjoyable, part of “our” life. Most British Muslim men I know don’t actually drink alcohol and they behave honourably to women of every religion (so please, no angry letters). Others enjoy our freedoms with complete ease.

But those who cannot, those who have enjoyed our freedoms but feel guilty for doing so — who can be appalled by the pleasure they have taken in “our” society but equally appalled by the way in which they themselves feel corrupted (especially after a trip to Pakistan for a dose of old-fashioned ritualised religion) have a special problem.

Palestine or Afghanistan or Iraq turn it incendiary. They want both to break out of this world and to express their moral fury and political impotence as they do so. They want, I think, to destroy themselves for their own feelings of guilt and others for the crime of “corrupting” them.

Even if that means murdering a few co-religionists and dozens of other innocents. So on go the backpacks — whoever supplied them is a different matter — and off go the bombs. Something happens, something that takes only a second, between saying “I love you” and then hanging up the phone.— (c) The Independent

The reward of suffering

IT must have taken great courage — albeit post-bellum courage — for a person like Robert McNamara (secretary, defence, in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) to write his self- damning apologia for the Vietnam war, a book he said that he “planned never to write”.

He gave it the admissive title: In Retrospect — the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). He wrote it to put Vietnam in context, to explain why he and many of his bellicose colleagues in the two administrations took the decisions they did, and to confess belatedly that those decisions “were wrong, terribly wrong.”

The book appeared almost thirty years after McNamara was removed as secretary, Defence, by President Lyndon B Johnson and sent into gilded exile as president of the World Bank, where he served from 1968 until 1981. During the intervening years, President Nixon negotiated the peace accord with the North Vietnamese that was signed in 1973, and enabled the United States to withdraw its troops from South Vietnam — that distant, defoliated graveyard where over 58,000 US soldiers nationals were killed and uncounted millions of Vietnamese decimated in a futile war that had lost its raison d’etre but not its lethal velocity.

David Frost once asked Nixon during a television interview whether he saw himself as the final casualty of the Vietnam war. McNamara would have contested that claim. As the man responsible for escalating the conflict to unspeakable levels of mass killings, he had better credentials than Nixon who negotiated the peace.

In his published confessional, McNamara identified eleven major causes for the US disaster in Vietnam. They deserve to be re-read in the context of the United States’ present involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first cause he identified was a misjudgment by the US of the geopolitical intentions of its opponents and a consequential exaggeration of the dangers they posed to US interests. The second was the mistaken assumption that the people and leadership of South Vietnam were as determined as the US had once been during its own independence struggle for freedom and democracy. The third was an underestimation by the US of the power of nationalism as a motivating force.

More generally, McNamara felt that the US suffered from a profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the area, and the personality traits and foibles of its leaders. He thought the US had relied upon and been misinformed by spurious specialists. It had also failed to recognize, for example, the limitations of specialized high-technology military equipment when confronted by unconventional people’s movements.

He regretted that the administrations he served had not taken Congress and the American people into confidence before entering the Vietnam war, forfeiting popular support for an unpopular war. The US had departed at its cost from the principle that US military involvement (except where its own security was concerned) should have been carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces “supported fully (not merely cosmetically) by the international community.”

He acknowledged that the US must reconcile to living in an imperfect, untidy world, and conceded that neither its people nor its leadership were omniscient. “We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose.”

In summary, McNamara concluded that he thought that the United States had overestimated the impact of the loss of Vietnam to US security, and it should have left the Vietnamese to fight their own war. America had made “an error not of values and intentions but of judgments and capabilities.” He quoted the Greek Aeschylus: “The reward of suffering is experience”, leaving it for the reader to decide whether the suffering of the Vietnamese people justified the reward of experience that accrued to the United States.

Interestingly, most of the points McNamara made in his analysis of the failures of US policy in the Vietnam war had to do with entry into and conduct of the war rather than to a recommended exit strategy. Perhaps it was because in Vietnam, the Americans had none until it was too late, and then expediency became the only way out.

Whatever may be the US options cultivated in the Petri dishes within the Pentagon for a dignified escape from Iraq and/or Afghanistan, they are, understandably, like experiments in genetic engineering, not being thrown open to the public for examination. One thing, though, is quite obvious: the US did not enter Iraq or Afghanistan intending to pull out in a hurry.

There are many who will detect from Mr McNamara’s book a recognizable, recurring pattern in US military involvement in other countries, an involvement that often masquerades as foreign policy, even though it more often than not emanates from the Pentagon rather than from the State Department. The restrictive provisions of US constitution notwithstanding, war beyond the borders of the United States is regarded as too serious a business by the Pentagon to be left simply to Congress or to the State Department.

In today’s conflicts, McNamara’s regulars and conscripts (depleted by draft dodgers who sought refuge in Canada), have been replaced by Rumsfeld’s reservists and volunteers, trawled tirelessly from hamlets, towns and cities across the United States. Debates are taking place within school boards whether recruitment should be permitted at school level, and the Pentagon has revealed that it has been compiling for some time a database of students as potential recruits.

To replenish itself, therefore, the US army has begun to use innovative techniques to bring in fresh blood to be recruited. Peak time television viewers are offered a choice, in between programmes, of crunchier breakfast cereals, more efficient washing powders and a website — goarmy.com — that invites members of the American public (especially its youth) to join the US army. Ring a toll-free number, enlist, and you get a free watch, as a reminder that there is a time to live and a time to die.

Although less than two thousand US nationals have died so far in Iraq, their funerals are having a direct impact on the consciousness of Middle America, because these casualties are quite literally the boy or girl nextdoor who has left a job and joined the reserves to fight abroad. Even the hallowed Arlington cemetery in the nation’s capital is being expanded by another ten acres, because it is running out of space faster than America is running out of war heroes.

Wherein, therefore, one wonders lies the greater sacrifice? To be killed force-feeding US style democracy to a foreign country and then to be buried with military honours at home, or to be killed defending your own country and to be interred without a headstone in its soil? Only time, not a watch, will tell.

More bombs in London

LAST week’s bombings in London thankfully did not cause serious injury. What remains to be seen is whether they will damage the sense of assurance and relative political unity with which Britain so far has responded to the terrorist assault on its homeland.

Londoners inspired the world three weeks ago when they quickly returned to buses and subway trains despite synchronized suicide attacks that killed 56 and wounded more than 700. But the shorthand many adopted for that day, 7/7, reflected the idea that the strikes, like those of 9/11 in the United States or 3/11 in Spain, were an exceptional event — not one that might be repeated with chilling precision, if not the same deadly results, 14 days later.

Though it’s not yet known what connections may exist between the attacks, Britain contemplated the possibility of a sustained terrorist campaign focused on targets, such as urban transport, that are impossible to fully defend.

To their credit, police and municipal authorities in London pushed for another quick return to normal. Within hours most trains and buses were running again, even as the search for suspects and evidence continued. Not all returned to their routines, however: Lots of nervous commuters chose to walk or drive home. Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was resuming his schedule — but Mr. Blair already is working on new anti-terrorism measures, including some that could curtail civil liberties or freedom of speech.

Since the July 7 attacks, British authorities have come under criticism both at home and elsewhere in Europe for permitting London — or “Londonistan,” as the critics would have it — to become a haven for Islamic extremists preaching or inciting violence.

On Wednesday Mr. Blair’s government announced a series of measures to prevent known militants from entering the country, and to deport some already there. One Palestinian-born cleric considered an al Qaeda ally may soon be turned over to Jordan — a step that would resemble the controversial “renditions” of terrorism suspects by the Bush administration and that could violate the Convention Against Torture.

Mr Blair is expected to propose further measures in the fall, including laws that might allow police to act preemptively against suspected terrorists.

—The Washington Post

Europe’s economic woes

THE economy of the eurozone is going from bad to worse judging by a new report by the 30-nation OECD. It is bad enough that growth is expected to slow down to only 1.25 per cent this year, but over the next 25 years — thanks to an ageing population — the underlying growth rate is forecast to drop from 1.6 per cent to only 0.9 per cent unless drastic action is taken.

In a hard-hitting report the OECD says that problem is not the oft-maligned European central bank’s reluctance to cut interest rates, but the lack of radical reform to Europe’s labour markets, plus slowness to open up services to competition.

Its solutions have an eerily British ring about them, including cutting long-term unemployment benefits, reducing taxes on low-paid work and adjusting the 3% ceiling on budget deficits to include public investment.

In a separate OECD presentation in Sydney, Britain was singled out — along with Australia, Canada and Sweden — as economies that had nearly “extinguished” the business cycle while enjoying above-trend growth. The magic formula the OECD urges is a strong monetary policy that targets inflation, plus flexible frameworks in labour, product and financial markets.

Ironically, this UK-style prescription may be being urged on the eurozone when its shelf life in the UK may be starting to fade. Britain’s recent period of super-growth, while helped by labour reforms and inflation targets, was mainly due to an old-fashioned consumer boom (now fizzling out), plus exceptional growth in spending on education and health.

The figures showing a fall in UK employment and a rise in claimant unemployment may be early evidence of that. But that is not to say that similar policies would not work in the eurozone. As the OECD admits, an increase in domestic demand must be the main engine of short-term growth, while structural reforms will help in the longer term.

On the brighter side, the eurozone’s lack of progress in these areas at least offers huge potential for future growth if politicians can grasp the nettle. So far very few have had the courage, as was confirmed during the economic summit, when President Bush’s unexpected challenge to G8 countries to end all agriculture subsidies by 2010 got short shrift from Europe and especially France.

You do not have to be passionately in favour of the euro for the UK to wish it well in Europe. A vibrant economy is vital for Europe’s growth and self-respect. If only the eurozone had sorted out its economic problems before turning its attention to the constitution, it might not have been reduced to its present straits. —The Guardian, London