Prolonging US control

FACED with mounting casualties, the US has finally opted for an early withdrawal from Iraq and transfer of power to the Iraqi people. By June next, power would be transferred to a provisional government, and with this, Jalal Talabani, the current chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council said on Saturday, the occupation would come to an end. However, this transitional government will be named by an assembly which itself will not be an elected one. Instead, “caucuses” in Iraq’s 18 provinces will select members of this provisional assembly. Seemingly, the US has revised its earlier position of transferring power to the Iraqi people only after a constitution had been drafted and elections held. However, the new plan, approved by Paul Bremer, America’s pro-consul in Baghdad, bypasses the electoral process. Besides, no date has been given for the withdrawal of the 135,000 US troops now in Iraq. President George Bush himself gave no date for the withdrawal. Welcoming the plan, which followed Mr Bremer’s flying visit to Washington and came in the immediate wake of a suicide bomb attack that killed 26 Italian military personnel, he said US troops would stay on until Iraq was “free and peaceful.” When that state comes remains obscured by many imponderables of post-war Iraq. In fact, the vagueness of the term “free and peaceful” could come in handy for the US government to prolong its monopoly control of Iraq’s oil resources. After all, the Bush administration has quite a few representatives of America’s oil industry in key positions.

One can understand the reason for Washington’s anxiety to pull out early. With the American presidential election due next year, Mr Bush’s chances of re-election would not be very bright if body bags were to come in at a faster rate. Resistance is growing in daring and strength, and anti-occupation elements are now bold enough to use rockets to bring down US helicopters. Gen John Abizaid, commander of the US Central Command, has himself said that America is facing a “classical guerilla war.” The problem for Washington is that no one is willing to share its burden of occupation. A major Muslim country to have announced its readiness to send troops to Iraq was Turkey. However, the offer was withdrawn following objections from the Iraqi Governing Council and the Arab League. Japan, too, has cancelled its plans to deploy troops in Iraq. Obviously, no country would like to send troops to the cauldron that is Iraq without the country coming under interim UN authority, and this is something Washington is most unwilling to allow.

The December 2005 date given for a general election is too far away. The Iraqi Governing Council does not command the Iraqi people’s allegiance. The position of the unelected provisional government that is to take over in June will be no different. If the US does not want to sink deeper and deeper into the Iraqi mire, it should prepare a realistic exit strategy. This should consist of handing over Iraq to the UN and withdrawing American forces in phases while troops from other countries take over peacekeeping. Once in control of Iraq, the UN can organize election and hand over power to an elected government. Any election held during the presence of American troops will lack transparency and will be suspect in the eyes of the world, the Iraqi people in particular.

Clampdown: what next?

THE government’s banning of three militant and sectarian organizations, the sealing of their offices and of several seminaries run by these organizations may be a right step in the short term, but it will prove of little help in containing the problem of extremism and bigotry in society. The three organizations — Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan, Jaish-i-Muhammad and Tehrik-i-Jafaria Pakistan — were banned earlier also but had managed to re-emerge under different names. This is because their leadership and militant cadres were left free and intact, presumably for lack of credible evidence against them. This time, too, only Allama Sajid Naqvi, the head of the defunct TJP, has been detained. But that is not because the government has any direct evidence against him; rather, the arrest has been made because the Allama has been named in the FIR lodged in the Maulana Azam Tariq murder case by a rival group. The case for the closure of the seminaries run by the three organizations could turn out to be even weaker, as no charges of illegal or criminal activity have been levelled against these seminaries. If these were indeed involved in the training of militants and sectarian terrorists, then the government should have also arrested the people who are indulging in such activities.

Several factors have gone into the phenomenal rise in the number of madressahs and seminaries during the last two decades. Under Gen Zia’s military rule, the government itself, together with some Middle Eastern States and the CIA, played an active role in promoting the establishment and the funding of many seminaries. These were set up with the implicit purpose of training militants who were then sent to Afghanistan to fight ‘Jihad’ against Soviet occupation and the Soviet-backed governments in that country. The Taliban themselves were largely a product of such seminaries. But after the latter’s coming to power in Kabul, a realization began to dawn on the political and military establishment in Pakistan that many of these seminaries were becoming a breeding ground for religious extremism, intolerance and bigotry. Then came September 11, and in its wake the official policy shift away from support for religious militants.

The Registration and Regulation of Madressahs Ordinance 2002 was a step in the right direction, and had the government not backtracked on its key provision of making the registration of madressahs a mandatory requirement, the situation perhaps would have been different by now. Instead, it succumbed to pressure exerted by religious parties and groups and settled for voluntary registration. The Madaris Education Board set up under the ordinance also has remained a dormant entity. The provisions pertaining to the mandatory auditing of funds that many religious institutions receive from abroad, especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and the teaching of English, Urdu, mathematics and science as part of the madressah syllabus also have not been implemented. The important point to remember is that not all madressahs are engaged in militant activities. In fact, the large majority of these fill the wide gap created by the extremely limited reach as well as the partly dysfunctional state of the existing public education system. Madressahs partly fill this gap by giving the poorer sections of society an affordable alternative to the public school system, but in doing so, they leave out the more practical and economically desirable aspect of modern education. The government should, therefore, enforce the provisions of the madressah ordinance without any exception, making the registration of madressahs, the audit of their accounts and funding and the implementation of the Madaris Education Board syllabus mandatory for all madressahs. Arbitrary clampdowns, such as the present one, cannot be a long-term solution to the problem of militancy and intolerance troubling the country, however pressing the need to cheek both these tendencies.