The Afghan constitution

ON November 3 the proposed Afghan constitution was unveiled. Under this constitution Afghanistan will be an Islamic Republic and no law repugnant to Islam will be permitted. But beyond that, all religions will be protected and implicitly there will be no emphasis on the implementation of the Sharia.

An earlier draft of the constitution made available to the media in September, while President Karzai was in New York had visualized both a president and a prime minister. Now there is provision only for a directly elected president along the lines of the American constitution. There will also be a vice president but, according to press reports, the constitution provides that in the event of the president’s death or incapacity the vice president will become an acting president and elections will be held within three months to choose a new president.

According to Karzai’s spokesman the Prime Minister’s office was done away with because Afghanistan has not yet developed the strong tradition of democracy and strong political parties that could support the parliamentary system. Other Afghan commentators suggested that they were learning from the Pakistan experience where the tussle between the president and prime minister had proved to be extremely destabilizing.

In a further emulation of the American constitution there is to be a bicameral legislature, the Afghan twist being provided by the fact that one-third of the upper house will be nominated by the president and that of these presidential nominees half will be women thus ensuring that at least in the upper house one-sixth of the legislators will be women. There is also a provision that in the lower house there will be at least one woman elected from each of the 32 provinces.

The most important provision and the most glaring departure from the reality on the ground is the highly centralized structure of power that the Constitution visualizes and the efforts it makes to prevent ethnicity or religion from being used as a political tool. It maintains that no political party based solely on religion, ethnicity or language will be permitted. Separately a law has already been promulgated that forbids military commanders from participating in elections. The president’s spokesman conceded that eventually Afghanistan would have to devise some means of power sharing among ethnic groups but Afghanistan’s current need was stability which could not be provided without, temporarily, setting such considerations aside.

As could be anticipated this has caused adverse comments from Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Tajik Jamiat-i-Islami party saying that the party is opposed to the concentration of power in the hands of one man. It advocates a parliamentary system of government that could help satisfy the aspirations of Afghanistan’s many diverse groups. Others have also criticized the concentration of power maintaining that the Afghans are instinctively averse to the authoritarianism that such a presidential system will entail.

Nothing however has happened to suggest that the critics are prepared to flex military or political muscle to prevent the adoption of this constitution. It is clear that in the last few weeks Karzai has been negotiating intensively not only with the members of the Commission but also with the other power brokers in today’s Afghanistan. It would be reasonable to conclude that he has had the full support of the Americans and the international community (UN’s Brahimi Lakdar) in getting the sceptics, including most notably the Panjsheris, to accept this draft. This is a good omen...

The Americans have of course welcomed the publication of the Constitution terming it “an important milestone in Afghanistan’s political development”. I believe that Pakistan and Afghanistan’s other neighbours too should welcome this as an important step — despite its flaws — towards the resolution of Afghanistan’s many problems.

But the publication of the constitution and its circulation to all corners of Afghanistan for further comments before a final draft is prepared for consideration at the Loya Jirga scheduled for December is only a first and an uncertain step towards restoring peace and stability in Afghanistan.

Every one, most notably the delegation of the Security Council members — which recently concluded a visit to Afghanistan — recognizes that Afghanistan’s main problem is security. In the last three months the level of violence in south and south-east Afghanistan has increased to higher levels than in the past. American military operations in the area are creating further resentment against the central government rather than building support for it. Not only have Taliban attacks multiplied but continued American reliance on interpreters from local warlords who provide false information to settle their own scores have led to attacks on government supporters. Reconstruction is not proceeding at all, nor is there any discernible effort to reduce the dependence of American forces on local warlords.

In the north, the quarrel between the Uzbek warlord Dostum and the Panjsheris-supported Tajik warlord Atta Mohammad has intensified rather than abated and while one wishes the new interior minister Mr Jalali succeeds in his efforts to merge the forces of the two warlords and to put them under a Kabul-nominated commander, the mind boggles at the thought that these two warlords will meekly acquiesce or even if they do so ostensibly will not continue to cause trouble.

Every one agrees that the expansion of the ISAF’s mandate to provide security in the provinces as it has been doing in Kabul is essential and the UN Security Council has approved such a mandate. The problem is that no country has yet offered additional forces for this purpose. The Norwegians have agreed to send two hundred troops but only for the limited purpose of providing security to the participants in the December Loya Jirga.

To make matters worse there have now been attacks in Kabul itself on the offices of the NGOs which, more than the PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams), have carried the burden of providing relief materials and education and health facilities to the Afghan people. There is speculation that this relatively new phenomenon is an emulation by the Taliban, either on their own initiative or under Al Qaeda guidance, of the success such attacks in Iraq have had in driving out the UN and such reputable and hitherto sacrosanct NGOs as the Red Cross.

InterAction, a US umbrella organization for international aid and development agencies, has bluntly told the Bush administration that the aid agencies regard the security arrangements as inadequate and that “during a six-week period from August to September, eight staff members from non-governmental organizations were killed in an apparent campaign to pressure humanitarian agencies to abandon the Afghan populations they are assisting”. Another think tank that has done good work in Afghanistan in monitoring developments calculates that the remnants of the ousted Taliban regime have increased their attacks on aid agencies from an average of one a month to one every two days over the past year.

The demobilising, disarming and reintegration (DDR) which started on October 24 with a somewhat symbolic collection of arms from militiamen in Kunduz (symbolic because these were arms that had already been surrendered but were reissued to the militia so that they could be formally surrendered) has not proceeded much further. The further reform of the defence ministry is still hanging fire as is the question of the withdrawal of Panjsheri forces from Kabul. The UN Security Council delegation drew pointed attention to the fact that the continued presence of these forces was a breach of the Bonn Agreement. The Commander of the ISAF has also called for the withdrawal of these forces. So far it has not happened.

The selection of delegates for the Loya Jirga is also problematic. Reports have already appeared about warlords using intimidation against candidates they deem unacceptable. Human Rights Watch reported early November that armed men and military commanders had threatened candidates in the north, forcing at least one to withdraw. The manner in which the Panjsheri used their intelligence and militia personnel during the last Loya Jirga remains an unpleasant memory for most Pushtun participants. This time round perhaps they will be kept in check during the meeting itself but they will have plenty of room to influence the selection of the candidates in the provinces.

Preparations for the elections are also far from proceeding at the desired pace. The lack of security is compounded by the fact that the UN body mandated to make the preparations still has not received the funds it needs.

The expectation in Kabul as far as one can tell is that the elections will have to be postponed. It is perhaps bearing this in mind that the constitution provides for the president to continue in office and to rule by decree in the event that elections cannot be held as scheduled.

There is one ray of hope in this picture of gloom. The Karzai government has been having talks with a breakaway faction from Hikmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami and Karzai has apparently appointed as his personal adviser a former key ally of Hikmatyar. Rumours continue to circulate also of the former Taliban foreign minister Mutawakkil being in negotiations with Karzai to work out a deal for the return and political accommodation of the “moderate Taliban”.

Karzai still represents the best hope for bringing ethnic balance and consequently the peace and stability in Afghanistan that Pakistan so badly needs. It would be in Pakistan’s interest if an agreement is worked out that strengthens his position among the Pushtuns and isolates the extremist Taliban. Equally important, it would mean that we will be rid of the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan. According to The Washington Post, Quetta has become “the new headquarters of the extremist Taliban movement”. It would bring to an end the stories proudly told by Taliban recruiters to American correspondents about the ease with which they take Pakistanis into Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Americans and against Karzai loyalists. It would make more credible our plan for “enlightened moderation”

The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.

How effective is the China card

THE euphoria generated by President Pervez Musharraf’s visit to Beijing earlier this month has glossed over some hard realities of international politics in South Asia.

The visit was described as “outstanding” and a “success” by the two sides. There was a lot of talk about the “all weather relationship” and their ties being as “high as the mountains and as deep as the oceans”.

No one would dispute all of this. One, however, hopes that the policy makers in Islamabad have noticed that behind the bonhomie was the shift in China’s approach vis-a-vis South Asia which has a direct bearing on the entire gamut of Pakistan’s external relations. The fact is that ever since the two countries negotiated their boundary agreement in the early sixties and entered into a special relationship, they have derived great strength from it. Needless to say, Pakistan as the smaller state and with an ambitious foreign policy has emerged as a more dependent partner.

Besides, China was quick to diversify its external relations with other countries. Within a decade it had established communications with Washington, thus reducing its dependence on the good offices of its friendly neighbour in the south. Although China has been signalling a shift in its policy for quite some time now, Pakistan has not responded to it and continues to proceed on the assumption that the China card is still available to it.

True, Beijing is a steady friend. The defence links and economic and trade relations that Pakistan and China have forged are undoubtedly phenomenal. The array of agreements signed during President Musharraf’s visit speaks volumes of the significance they attach to their ties.

Yet at the same time China has been normalizing and expanding ties with India. This could have been dismissed as one of those quirks of international relations which take place all too often. It is, however, important to take note of this development because of the fact that India is the country against which we have been using the China card. Does this not call for a modification in Pakistan’s policy vis-a-vis New Delhi?

One has just to see how things have been moving on the Sino- Indian front. If you read the People’s Daily on the web you would realize that howsoever warm the Chinese may be towards us they are not unmindful of their strategic and economic concerns. It must be noted that the People’s Daily reflects the views of the Chinese government and can be regarded as a barometer to test the mood in Beijing.

We have been told that the joint declaration signed in Beijing during the president’s visit gave a roadmap of the future relationship between the two countries. Strangely enough, the text of the joint declaration about which there has been a lot of hype in the media has not been published so far. A week has already elapsed since it was signed and though it was announced that it would “be released to the press after a couple of days”, it is not yet available.

On the contrary the People’s Daily had printed the full text of the joint declaration which was signed in June when the Indian prime minister paid a visit to China. It contained significant statements, such as: “The common interests of the two sides outweigh their differences. The two countries are not a threat to each other. Neither side will use or threaten to use force against the other.”

After this no one in Islamabad should still believe that China serves as a countervailing force against India. China’s ties with India have grown to such an extent that Beijing would want a very solid reason to upset its equation with New Delhi. What is more, according to the People’s Daily, bilateral trade between China and India exceeded 4.9 billion dollars in 2002, up 37 per cent from the previous year. It is expected to touch the 10 billion dollar mark in 2005. Compare this with China’s trade with Pakistan which stood at 1.8 billion dollars last year.

China is holding joint naval exercises with India for five days. How should this be seen when a similar three-day exercise last month with the Pakistan Navy was defined as a “milestone in their defence cooperation”? All this indicates that China’s South Asian policy is now directed at maintaining a balance in its ties with the two squabbling South Asian neighbours. This has been made clear by the Chinese themselves.

While emphasizing that any improvement in Sino-Indian ties is not directed at Pakistan, Chinese scholars have reaffirmed that China wants to deal with South Asia on a regional basis while forging good neighbourly relations with all states. Hence Beijing welcomes peace moves between Islamabad and New Delhi, but it would avoid getting involved in any way in an India-Pakistan peace process. It is essential for the “South Asian countries to solve their problems and disputes by themselves” a Chinese scholar said at a seminar on big powers and South Asia in Islamabad.

In view of this shift in the Chinese stance, should we not modify our hardline position on Kashmir? On a one-to-one basis, Pakistan lacks the strength to seek a military solution to the Kashmir problem — be it directly by fighting a war across the Line of Control (as was launched in Kargil in 1999) or indirectly through infiltration of the extremist groups. A resolution of the dispute has to be sought through a political dialogue. Even in this process, help is not forthcoming from any quarters. China which has always proved to be our most reliable ally has now made it plain that it prefers to adopt a neutral stance.

Past experience has shown that outside pressures can push India to the negotiating table but no further than that. India is too big a power to be forced to submit to the good offices of a third party without its voluntarily agreeing to it. So far New Delhi has not shown the propensity to talk about the core issue of Kashmir with Pakistan.

With the China card seemingly no longer available to it, Islamabad must plan its next moves accordingly. The imperative for peace in South Asia has increased only further. In Beijing President Musharraf joined the Chinese leaders in pledging to battle the “separatist Muslims” and not allowing anybody to use Pakistan’s territory to carry out any anti-Chinese activities. Although this has incurred him the wrath of the jihadis, it was the sensible thing to do.

Had he not adopted a firm anti-terrorism stand President Musharraf could have found himself in a tight spot in view of what Prime Minister Vajpayee and premier Wen Jiabao agreed to in June. They “recognized the threat posed to them by terrorism” and agreed “to promote cooperation on counter-terrorism through their bilateral dialogue mechanism”.

Wouldn’t it be wiser if Pakistan were to avoid creating a situation which will force China to drop its neutral posture and join hands with India to fight the “terrorists”?

Our own Hyde Park corner

THERE have been a couple of news items recently about Mian Manzoor Ahmed Wattoo, once Chief Minister of Punjab. One was that his (one-man) Muslim League has also joined the bandwagon which now comprises eight or nine Pakistan Muslim Leagues except the asli te waddi (as we say in Punjabi) PML founded and funded and remote-controlled by Mian Nawaz Sharif. The second was that the accountability case against him about the Bait-ul-Maal is still being heard.

Nowadays whenever I read Mr Wattoo’s name in the papers it takes my mind back to his days in power when he wanted to put an amusing plan into operation in Lahore but then forgot all about it. Maybe the affairs of the Bait-ul-Maal were too engrossing. The plan was to set apart a spot in one of the public parks which could serve as our own Hyde Park corner where one could spout any nonsense against the government and remain inviolate.

You need to know the background though this was not in Mr Wattoo’s mind. After every public rally of an opposition party, the police, listening to the speeches, quietly registers a few cases as a matter of habit. These speeches may have contained invective against the person of the top government leader or even remarks that, with a little effort, could be construed as treason. Since no one is taken to account for these utterances, or arrested and then bailed out, you would think this is a waste of time and stationery. But you’ll be surprised how useful this measure can be.

For instance, a chief minister sends for his inspector- general of police and says to him, “This Malik Mukhalif Khan is exceeding all limits. If I were not a gentleman and a true democrat I would have him bumped off. Unhappily that can’t be done. Can’t the police of his district find something to run him in for?” The IGP nods in obedience, for only those police officers are made IGP who can nod in obedience. It becomes almost a reflex action with some who keep on nodding even when they really mean to shake their heads to say no.

A couple of days later we read in the press that Malik Mukhalif Khan has been arrested under section X, read with sections Y and Z, of the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance or some such lawless law, for an “inflammatory speech” made by him five years ago and calculated to spoil the relations of Pakistan with Outer Mongolia, a more than friendly country. His application for bail is opposed by the advocate-general on the ground that, if accepted, Outer Mongolia would stop exporting sheep’s trotters to Pakistan on which depends the country’s peaceful nuclear programme.

So Mukhalif Khan is in the soup. Such cases go on in court for years, but sometimes people like him announce after a suitable interval that they “along with thousands of followers” have joined the chief minister’s party. The cases are then withdrawn or are thrown out by the magistrates (after taking the advice of the deputy commissioners) for want of evidence from the prosecution.

Chief Minister Wattoo, a democrat at heart like all past and future chief ministers of all the provinces, was reported at that time as having expressed the view that Lahore should have a ‘speakers corner‘ where anyone from the opposition could have his say without being hauled up for it by the police. He even envisaged a sort of law to make the place inviolable because, as he said, you couldn’t trust those in power for ignoring the sanctity of the ‘corner.‘

As you probably know, at the speakers corner in London’s Hyde Park, anyone, whatever his views, sane or madcap, radical or crooked or crazy, a crackpot or a lunatic, or an emotional idealist, can say what he likes, even to the extent of being treasonable, without inviting the mischief of any law. Although, as I would have said to Mr Wattoo if I had the opportunity, the speakers’ corner is a superfluity, a redundant luxury and a showpiece, because otherwise there is complete freedom of speech in Britain.

I have never read in any British newspaper of anyone being hauled up for exceeding the limits of free speech. Nowadays especially, if people were to be proceeded against for criticizing PM Tony Blair in the matter of Iraq, more than half the newspapers would have been closed and the editors put in jail.

Actually, when Mr Wattoo had mooted the idea it was not to give his political opponents a safe platform from where they could speak any nonsense against him or the government in Islamabad. It was more in response to the general feeling in Lahore that the daily processions on The Mall were becoming an insufferable nuisance. He had thought that an alternative like the speakers’ corner might abate the pestilence somewhat. Whatever the real reason behind it, the idea was genuinely his. Let me therefore conjure up some of its implications if such a corner had really come about.

The first thing that comes to mind is, what would happen to all those Special Branch and IB chaps who snoop around with a shorthand notebook, taking down everything that is considered blasphemous from the ruling regime’s point of view? How will they pass their time? They can’t be dismissed from service, for that is the only thing they now have to do.

Another thing. Will there be prior booking for the corner in the district magistrate’s office or will anyone who has the muscle go and capture it early in the morning? Will just one platform do? I don’t think so. In fact there will be a great rush for the free facility even if there are a dozen in one location. In that case confusion is bound to prevail, resulting in a sort of Tower of Babel.

Personally I wouldn’t mind the confusion except that those who have come to hear, say, an ASSP leader advocating that all Shias be deported to Iran, may end up having to listen to a crazy drunk demanding that alcohol should be provided free to the poor in Pakistan so that they may forget their troubles and that all kinds of beards should be banned, including the one worn by the Christian leader Julius Salik.

Problems like these, and more of a like nature, will inevitably crop up with the speakers’ corner. If Mr Wattoo were chief minister he would know how to tackle them, but then other leaders have to take turns to be chief executive of Punjab, assuming that the beginning is to be made in that province.

During his tenure as CM he displayed such mastery over the administration that no rules or regulations (or sometimes even the law) were able to stand in the way of his peculiar brand of chief ministership. He had to suffer from the effects of that mastery afterwards, and ended up by behaving like the imaginary Malik Mukhalif Khan.

Dark ages disclosure

“WHAT makes the Senate so special that it exempts itself from a key requirement of campaign finance disclosure law that applies to everyone else?” The nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute posed this query following the third-quarter filing deadline for presidential contenders, congressional candidates, political parties and political action committees.

Almost all these candidates and committees filed their reports electronically, meaning that the information was almost immediately accessible — and searchable — over the Internet. Thus, if you wanted to know, for example, how much of a candidate’s contributions came from a particular state, or from contributors who work for a particular company, or from particular occupations, an easy download and a few clicks of the mouse would yield the desired information.

Except, that is, for Senate candidates. The Senate has opted to remain in the disclosure dark ages, and exempted itself (and its party committees) from the electronic filing requirements that apply to everyone else in the political world.

Senate candidates file their disclosure reports on paper, and not even directly with the Federal Election Commission like all other political committees. Senate candidates mail their paper reports to the office of the Secretary of the Senate, which then scans them page by page into its computers and sends them on to the FEC.

The FEC then has to pay for the laborious task of keypunching data into computers for eventual inclusion in its electronic database. This can be done rather quickly — in a matter of weeks — but particularly in the final stretch of campaigns, it means that anyone interested in learning in a timely way who is bankrolling Senate campaigns has to do it the old-fashioned way, going page by page through the voluminous reports.

— The Washington Post

Export-quality democracy

IT isn’t often that one gets an opportunity to agree with George W. Bush, but his admission the other day that the nation he leads has for too long lent sustenance and support to unrepresentative regimes in the Middle East is a valuable acknowledgement. The analysis could, of course, have been extended to cover the rest of the world — not least the region that the United States has traditionally regarded as its backyard.

The Middle East, says Bush, needs a lot more democracy. Again, that sounds like a reasonable goal — although it depends, of course, on what is meant by democracy. And the attempt to posit Iraq as a paradigm in this context is bound to raise hackles as well as suspicions.

But what’s even more interesting is the main reason Bush has advanced for the supposed policy change. It doesn’t have much to do, mind you, with the people of the Arab world, with their predicament or their aspirations. It has to do with security. Whose security? That of the US, of course. And, even more important, that of Israel — although the latter claim remained judiciously unstated in Bush’s peroration.

The implication (obvious but, again, unstated) of this line of thought is that if the various dictators and despots had been able to deliver security, it wouldn’t have been necessary to threaten them with democracy. Which, in turn, prompts the realization that there is nothing really new about this policy.

Its application to Iraq, for example, follows a predictable pattern. Saddam Hussein was a perfectly acceptable tyrant for as long as it was Iraqis and Iran that bore the brunt of his aggressive impulses. With Kuwait, he overstepped the mark. Saddam wasn’t by any means the first Iraqi leader to lay claim to the tiny coastal emirate — and had he unequivocally been warned off by the US, he probably wouldn’t have blundered into Kuwait.

A dozen years on, it’s easy to forget that the liberation of Kuwait was described, inter alia, as a battle for democracy — even though the Al Sabahs could hardly lay claim to greater popular legitimacy than the Al Tikritis. And the restoration of the ruling clan wasn’t accompanied by any concessions to pluralism.

In the meanwhile, it is worth considering that the thrust of American inclinations towards regime change, beyond Baghdad, has been directed towards Damascus and Tehran — in both cases, nations that have not been at the receiving end of largesse or favours from the US. That is because Washington’s tendency to look at the Arab world through spectacles manufactured in Israel has been sharply reinforced in recent years, and from the vantage point of the Likudites, Syria and Iran appear considerably more threatening than Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia.

This aspect of the American outlook naturally provokes suspicions about US aims in the Middle East even when they are swathed in ostensibly democratic accoutrements. But the most powerful single deterrent to taking Bush at his word is the fate of Iraq.

Despite all that has happened since the war against Iraq was “won”, the fiction is being maintained that the nation will, in time, become a democratic exemplar in the Middle East. If the path to democracy lies through colonization, Arab nations could be forgiven for pursuing other alternatives. It doesn’t help that the Iraqi governing council, which is anyhow subservient to the colonial authority headed by Paul Bremer, is spearheaded by a convicted criminal.

There isn’t going to be a presidential contest between Ahmed Chalabi and Saddam Hussein, but were there to be one, it is quite conceivable that Saddam would win more votes. And that says less about him than it does about Chalabi.

Of late, evidence has emerged that just before the war erupted, Iraqi intelligence was desperate for a deal to avert the outbreak of hostilities. Through middlemen — notably a Lebanese businessman with Pentagon connections — it approached the Americans with offers that included a no-holds-barred weapons inspection by 2000 FBI agents, internationally supervized elections two years down the line, and even oil concessions.

Perhaps the Iraqis erred in approaching the likes of Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, ideologically motivated officials who were disinclined to accept anything short of complete surrender. At any rate, the Americans weren’t interested. A war had been planned, and the deployment of forces made it inevitable. Would they have acted differently had they realized the postwar costs? Who knows.

The point is, although the oft-repeated allegations about weapons of mass destruction have been exposed as a canard, links between Al Qaeda and Baath elements have turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The occupation forces are paying the price. And, much to Bush’s consternation, he cannot indulge in ostentatious public displays of grief over the mounting losses, because that would involve explaining the death toll to his progressively disenchanted electorate.

It’s far better, in the circumstances, to pretend that the project isn’t a failure. No, it’s just a beginning. In time, the beacon of democracy will shine everywhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and these nations will learn (the hard way, if necessary) to crumble to their knees in awe every time Uncle Sam flexes his muscles.

To fortify his case, Bush cited the example of Ronald Reagan, who attracted scepticism when he initially predicted that the “evil empire” of communism would crumble because of its moral deficiencies. The Soviet Union and its East European satellites eventually collapsed for rather different reasons, but one can’t expect something as mundane as mere facts to interfere with Bush’s reasoning.

With many of Bush’s leading ideologues tracing their ideological evolution to the dreadful Reagan era, it is hardly surprising that Ronnie — still alive but not quite kicking because of Alzheimer’s, an affliction that probably kicked in while he was still president — occupies one of the highest rungs in the Republican pantheon. In the event, it is relatively unremarkable that a CBS miniseries about Ronnie and Nancy that apparently offered too accurate a reflection of his reign was banished from the network.

In Russia or in China, similar censorship would have been put down to remnants of a totalitarian mentality. But what can one call it in the American context? Evidence of the respect for free speech. perhaps?

Besides, shouldn’t democracy, like charity, begin at home? Would there be any harm in bringing it to Florida before “encouraging” it in Syria?

One has got to understand, of course, that to the leading lights of the Bush administration, democracy doesn’t quite mean what it does to mortals such as you and me. Small wonder, then, that Israel is invariably trotted out as the regional paragon: the only country in the Middle East with an established democratic tradition.

It also happens to be the only colonial power in the area, with policies (and proposed solutions) reminiscent of apartheid. A serial violator of UN resolutions and international human rights conventions. And the only country in that part of the world whose ownership of weapons of mass destruction is beyond question. (Mordecai Vanunu, the scientist who blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear capabilities, remains in prison two decades after Mossad kidnapped him from Europe.)

Meanwhile, Likudite elements in Israel and among the diaspora lose no opportunity to tar with the newly fashionable terrorist brush all advocates of the Palestinian cause. Particular venom is reserved for exceptionally articulate and erudite spokespeople. The late Edward Said was hounded beyond the grave. And a furious smear campaign was launched by the Likudite lobby in Australia in an abortive attempt to get the Sydney Peace Foundation to rescind its decision to honour Hanan Ashrawi.

She doesn’t, it was claimed, unequivocally condemn terrorism. That is a bare-faced lie. She does. What the Likudites find unacceptable is that Ashrawi is vociferously opposed to all attacks on civilians, whether by suicide-bombers or by Israeli security forces. And what they invariably resort to in such cases is the anti-Semitism card, in the process drowning out Jewish voices of sanity.

This phenomenon is not limited to the diaspora. Prominent liberal and left-wing Israelis recently worked out a comprehensive settlement with Palestinian representatives — to prove that such a thing can be achieved, with reasonable concessions from both sides. And on Yitzhak Rabin’s death anniversary earlier this month, a gathering of 100,000 turned into a rally for peace and for an end to the occupation.

In a recent article in Yediot Aharonot, Avraham Burg, who served as speaker of the Knesset until earlier this year, noted: “We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew.”

That, unfortunately, isn’t quite how the Likudites and their neo-conservative allies in Washington see it. In the event, the only appropriate response to Bush’s offer — or was it a threat? to spread democracy in the Middle East can be: No, thanks. The Arab world would indeed benefit from democracy, but only if it evolves from within. It cannot be imposed from without. If you have any doubts on this score, just ask the Iraqis.

mahirali2@netscape.net