No easy solution

THE news from Swat and Muridke is the latest evidence that militancy and terrorism are a hydra that defies an easy solution. Begin with Swat. Both the armed forces and the militants are changing tactics as fighting escalates. At the moment, the militants are in the ascendant and pressing ahead with the enforcement of their version of the Sharia. The Tehrik-i-Taliban have now demanded that some 50 prominent local political figures appear before a ‘court’ to answer what will presumably be ‘charges’ of ‘opposing’ Islam, i.e. the Swati Taliban. The charade is of course little more than a thinly veiled death threat. Given the disastrous security situation in the area, the Pakistan Army claims it has developed a “new strategy” to fight the militants which involves beefing up the troops in Swat and going after militants hiding among the locals and using them as human shields. Meanwhile, in Muridke the Punjab government has taken over the Jamaatud Dawa’s headquarters and appointed an administrator to oversee the welfare operations run by the group, including schools and hospitals.

Muridke, with its pro-poor face, and Swat, with its uninhibited, brutal militants, represent the two ends of the militancy spectrum in Pakistan. The tactics for uprooting the Jamaatud Dawa/Lashkar-i-Taiba in Punjab and the TTP in Swat must therefore necessarily be different. However, there are at least two commonalities between the two very different battles.

First, no military or law enforcement action will be successful without full political support. In Swat, the TTP has successfully cowed the politicians and across the political divide there are voices questioning whether the state should use force to reassert its writ. While there can be no purely military solution to militancy, the politicians must not be bullied into appeasement. Today the TTP has a hit list of prominent Swatis; what’s to stop them from issuing another list of politicians from Peshawar or the NWFP or even Islamabad? In fact, appeasing the TTP in Swat today virtually guarantees the militants will spread their tentacles further afield in Pakistan. The same goes for the Jamaatud Dawa. If the provincial and federal governments do not work together to ensure the group is shut down for good, in all likelihood it will re-emerge later in a new form, and perhaps with an even more virulent ideology. Second, a winning counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism strategy has to focus on the welfare of local populations. The Jamaatud Dawa’s welfare network must be absorbed by the state and its beneficiaries continue to get the services. Similarly, in Swat the terrorised locals must be looked after and shielded from attack. Militancy will only be defeated when the population sees the state as a protector and ally, and not as part of the problem.

As the economy worsens

FOR the first time since 1991, Britain is “officially” in recession. It joins other major European economies on this side of the Atlantic and the United States on the other, as well as Asian economic giants like China and Japan. Everybody, save Prime Minister Gordon Brown, saw it coming. As a modern economy integrated so deeply with the global economy, Britain could not remain insulated from whatever was going on just across its borders. Even the most protected countries have started feeling the pressure. The country’s gross domestic product contracted by 1.5 per cent in the final quarter of 2008 to December, the biggest fall in GDP since 1980, compared with the previous three-month period when it contracted by 0.6 per cent. The slowdown has forced Mr Brown to plead for “renewed international help”. The opposition Conservative Party feels the nation is “running the risk” of being forced to go to the International Monetary Fund to prop up the economy, a comment the ruling Labour rejects as “‘irresponsible”.

While Mr Brown might be using “every weapon at our disposal” to fight the economic crisis, the global economic meltdown triggered by financial crisis in the United States is not going to go away before putting hundreds of thousands of people out of job worldwide and thousands of companies out of business. The repercussions of the global crisis for Pakistan could be far more serious than anticipated by our finance managers, who had until recently been insisting that we remain unexposed to the impact of this recession.

As much as our economy depends on foreign inflows in the form of investment and assistance, remittances and exports revenues to support our balance-of-payments account, the situation in Pakistan is likely to worsen — sooner than later. Foreign capital inflows have almost dried up in spite of the IMF’s approval of our macroeconomic policies, exports are sluggish and factories closing down, people are losing jobs, and workers from the Middle East and elsewhere are returning home causing fears of substantial reduction in remittances in the next six months. The recession in Britain, which is home to around 800,000 Pakistanis, can exacerbate our deteriorating economic conditions. But some expect the recessionary pressures in Britain to also force the richer Pakistani expatriates living there to invest in Pakistan’s economy. It is a reflection of our times that we are reduced to searching for such silver linings in the dark clouds.

BBC and Gaza appeal

THE BBC argues that it cannot compromise on its commitment to impartiality. Its director general has voiced the concern that the corporation cannot be seen “as taking a political stance on an ongoing story”. But this is precisely what the BBC has done, unwittingly or otherwise, with its refusal to air an emergency appeal to raise funds for the war-ravaged residents of the Gaza Strip. Compassion in the face of acute distress is grounded not in political considerations but the morality of what it is to be human. The logic behind the ill-advised move — described variously as “weak-minded”, “feeble” or “untenable” — has rightly been slated in the British media and roundly criticised by members of the UK government. The Independent went so far as to accuse the BBC of spinelessness, of moral cowardice perhaps, implying that the broadcaster’s actions were rooted not so much in journalistic ethics but a fear of offending the Israeli government.

The BBC’s argument that it is unsure whether the funds raised will reach civilians has also been dismissed with contempt for the most part. The Disasters Emergency Committee, which issued the appeal, is an umbrella group of 13 reputable charitable organisations with proven track records of delivering aid to those who need it most sorely. As for the BBC’s claim that the corporation had previously refused to air aid appeals for Lebanon and Afghanistan, The Independent pointed out the DEC was not involved in those campaigns. The paper adds: “the fact that a committee of 13 aid agencies is able to agree [on] an appeal ought to be testimony to the degree of consensus that the humanitarian crisis is above politics.”

It remains to be seen if the BBC will change its stance. But distasteful as it is, the decision not to air the appeal might have generated more publicity — and much-needed funds for Gaza — than what might have been possible had the BBC done the right thing at the outset. The corporation’s deeply flawed reasoning has unleashed a storm of protest which will, hopefully, translate into increased contributions to a cause that is more than just.

OTHER VOICES - Sindhi Press

Kawish

War of words

THERE are hopes that a war of words between the PPP and PML-N which has been going on for the past few months will come to an end following a meeting between Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and President Asif Ali Zardari. Though the meeting is reported to have failed to yield a positive result, progress has been reported. At this … meeting at President House, both the leading political parties which have been issuing fiery statements on … the implementation of the Charter of Democracy and the Murree Declaration … agreed to continue the political dialogue. War does not start with arms but with words. …Therefore, politicians who know the art of using words properly emerge victorious…. It is unfortunate that in our country there has been much … misuse of words…. After the installation of the present democratic government, a confrontation between the two major parties led to a new polarisation.

In this war of words, first the lower cadre and later the top leadership was involved and the situation became tense and serious. It is important that both parties check their rank and file where some unwise elements are engaged to heat up the atmosphere and push it to a point of no-return.

History is witness to this. …Before time runs out … they should be united and stand up against the undemocratic forces so that these may not harm … democracy. Both parties, in the race to gain political mileage, forgot that democracy is more important than any other issue. After … years of dictatorship when an elected government has the opportunity, why have they pushed the situation towards confrontation, proving the allegation of non-political forces that politicians are ineligible to run the affairs of the country?

The PPP and PML-N have agreed not to issue controversial statements. This should also be implemented. Whoever violates this … would be counted on the side of anti-democratic forces. In fact, this ‘ceasefire’ between the two sides is a big achievement because it will open many avenues for reconciliation.

The PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif was on record that he would not be party to efforts to destabilise the PPP government. Likewise President Asif Ali Zardari had reiterated [his willingness] to cooperate for the stability of the PML-N government in Punjab. Practically speaking, they failed to act on their words.

Now these leaders along with their political ‘army’ should go back to the position where they were before the beginning of the confrontation. This is in the best interest of democracy. — (Jan 25)

Selected and translated by Sohail Sangi.

The threat to ME peace

THE Obama administration should build on the Israeli and Hamas ceasefires to promote a durable truce between them but realise that Hamas’s survival in the Gaza war has unravelled the basis of the current peace process.

Of the nearly 1,200 Palestinians killed in the war, only about 300 were Hamas fighters. And despite the havoc the Israelis wreaked on Gaza’s infrastructure and economy, they have failed to achieve their main goals: to “topple Hamas” and stop its missiles. Meanwhile, Arab states invited Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal to a summit in Qatar to discuss the Israeli invasion. Responding to Meshaal’s call for a boycott of Israel, Qatar and Mauritania have suspended trade relations with the Jewish state.

The Israeli invasion has sidelined Fatah, the secular Palestinian organisation that the Islamist Hamas has expelled from Gaza and now rules the West Bank. “This is the first time in its history that [Fatah] is neither leading nor participating in the conflict against Israel,” Qadourah Fares, a former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, told England’s Guardian newspaper.

“The Palestinian people are fighting the occupation, while Fatah is playing the role of the spectator.” Given the growing Palestinian antipathy for Fatah, it may well be that Hamas will replace it as the vanguard of the Palestinian independence movement.Hamas wouldn’t settle for a disarmed Palestine within its pre-1967 borders or renounce the Palestinian refugees’ demand for their return to Israel from where they were driven out in 1948, as Fatah would. Someday somebody will have to work out a peace model that would enable the Palestinians and Jews to share the holy land as they had for centuries before the establishment of the ethnically cleansed Israel. One doesn’t know when and at what cost in terms of the blood spilled.

As an Islamist movement, Hamas is also part of the regional struggle against foreign domination. The Gaza war has bolstered that struggle, which was galvanised by the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s. The Soviets’ defeat at the hands of Afghan Mujahideen was “a Eureka moment” for the Islamists, Khurshid Ahmed, a Pakistani Islamic intellectual and politician, told me in Islamabad in October 1989. If Muslim militants could roll back the world’s largest conventional military power, he said, they could one day end the American-Israeli hegemony in West Asia. During research trips in 1991, 1995 and 2007 some of my Islamist interviewees in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates echoed his assessment.

The Arab and Muslim quest for a strategy to challenge Israeli and American domination of the Middle East began right after the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel had defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. That drove home to Arabs and Muslims that their postcolonial states could not free Palestine from Israeli occupation or throw off American tutelage over other Muslim societies. A clue to effective “anti-hegemonic” struggle was revealed by the 1983 suicide attack on US military barracks in Lebanon. A single blast by an Islamist militant, which killed 241 American troops, forced the Reagan administration to call off its military intervention in that country.

A string of subsequent Muslim guerrilla successes seemed to confirm the belief that Islamist militants could overcome non-Muslim domination. Among those successes: the expulsion of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah in 2000, abandonment of US bases in Saudi Arabia in the wake of 9/11, Israel’s retreat from Gaza under Hamas fire in 2005 and Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

People don’t have organic ties to artificially created postcolonial states, which make up most of the Middle East. They have a deeper sense of belonging to their religious and ethnic communities and the urge to fight and die defending them. The Iraqi state’s army of 400,000 crumbled within days of the 2003 US invasion, but Shia and Sunni Islamic guerrillas have forced the world’s only superpower to plan for a retreat from Iraq.

Lebanon has a 61,000-strong army, 60 per cent of it Shia. And the Lebanese state lost all its many military encounters with Israel and no longer has the will to engage the Jewish state militarily. Yet, as mentioned, a couple of thousands of Shia Islamic militants under the Hezbollah banner rolled back the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and faced down the invading Israeli force in the Second Lebanon War.

The Palestinians’ is the mother of all Muslim anti-hegemonic movements. The passing of the leadership of that struggle to the Islamist Hamas will not only change the goals of the Palestinian struggle but also reinforce Islamist domination of the Muslim anti-hegemonic movements elsewhere.

Successful anti-hegemonic movements have often been propelled by religious upsurge. The American Revolution was spurred by the First Great Awakening (1730-1770). In my native Indian subcontinent, the epic struggle for independent from British colonial rule followed the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-1924), fuelled by Islamic and Hindu religious fervour. I suspect that US-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East will eventually be eroded by Islamist movements. Among them Hamas which has been chastened by the Gaza war.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.

New way of protest

IN one week’s time, in a supermarket somewhere in or around Paris, a couple of dozen young French activists are going to choose an aisle, unfold tables, put on some music and, taking what they want from the shelves, start a little picnic.

The group “L’Appel et la Pioche” (The call and the pick axe) will have struck again — fruit and veg, dairy or the fish counter will have been transformed into a flash protest against global capitalism, rampant consumerism, bank bail-outs, poor housing, expensive food, profit margins and pretty much everything else that is wrong in the world.

The “supermarket picnic” will go on for as long as it can — before the security guards throw the activists out or the police arrive. Shoppers will be invited to join in, either bringing what they want from the shelves or just taking something lifted lightly from among the crisps, sweets or quality fruit already on the tables.

“L’Appel et la Pioche” have struck four times so far and have no intention of stopping what they claim is a highly effective new way of protesting. “Everyone is bored with demonstrations. And handing out tracts at 6am at a market is neither effective nor fun,” said Leila Chaibi, 26, the leader of the group.

Linked to a new left-wing political party committed to a renewal of politics and activism, Chaibi’s group represents more than just a radical fringe and has been gaining nationwide attention.

A veteran of fights to get pay and better conditions for young people doing work experience, Chaibi claims to represent millions of young Frenchmen and women who feel betrayed by the system.

“We played the game and worked hard and got a good education because we were told we would get a flat and a job at the end of it. But it wasn’t true,” said Victor, 34, another member of the group. “We have huge difficulty getting a proper job and a decent apartment.”

Chaibi, who works on short-term contracts in public relations and is currently looking for work, told the Observer that the group’s aspirations were limited. “I am not asking for thousands and thousands of euros a month as a salary or a vast five-room apartment. Just something decent.”

In recent years, the problems of France’s “Generation Y” or “babylosers” have made headlines. As with many other European societies, after decades of growth, this is the first set of young people for centuries who are likely to have standards of living lower than their parents.

According to recent research, in 1973, only six per cent of recent university leavers were unemployed, currently the rate is 25-30 per cent; salaries have stagnated for 20 years while property prices have doubled or trebled; in 1970, salaries for 50-year-olds were only 15 per cent higher than those for workers aged 30, the gap now is 40 per cent. The young are also likely to be hard hit by the economic crisis.

New ways of working mean new ways of demonstrating, too. So far reactions have been good, the group claims. In one supermarket in a suburb of Paris, the activists say they got a spontaneous round of applause from the checkout workers. Elsewhere, security guards have been “friendly”. Everywhere in France, the problem of a weakening “pouvoir d’achat” — the buying power of static wages — is a cause for resentment.

With the French Socialist party in disarray, alternative forms of political protest on the left, particularly a breakaway communist faction led by charismatic postman Olivier Besancenot, have made inroads.

— The Guardian, London