Not without consensus

DISAPPOINTMENT is in store for those who believe that the fate of the Kalabagh dam is to be announced in the next few days. True, the Technical Committee on Water has finalized its report after two years and the extension of four deadlines and its chairman’s meeting with the president on Wednesday to discuss the report’s findings. But according to our reporter, some members of the committee raised objections to the report which has now been sent to the ministry of water and power. In other words, a consensus has not been evolved though the committee has found the five big dams it studied as being technically feasible. The saving grace of the whole exercise is the consensus the committee has reached on the construction of big water reservoirs. But its members have been tight-lipped about what the report says. One hopes the president will not announce a decision on the matter unilaterally.

The fact is that the dispute over the Kalabagh dam — as any water dispute can be — is a sensitive one and has proved intractable so far. That is understandable because water being fundamental to basic human, ecological and agricultural needs, its sharing can always pose difficult problems. In such cases, it is essential to find a solution through compromise and give-and-take so that no party feels aggrieved and understands the problems of the other. It is the lower riparian that finds itself at a greater risk, hence the need to show proper understanding of its concerns. In the case of the Kalabagh dam which has put Punjab against Sindh, the protests have been loud and the issue has been politicized. The discussion it has provoked has tended to be more polemical and peeved than substantive. This simply does not help in working out a practical and agreed solution of the problem. But it needs to be understood that the matter simply does not have a technical and engineering dimension alone. There are other aspects that should be carefully and coolly considered — for instance, the questions of water apportionment, the quantum of water discharged into the sea, and the construction of storage facilities. These issues have cropped up time and again since 1870 when differences arose between Sindh and Punjab when they were under British rule. No wonder the Kalabagh dam has been on the cards for over 40 years and its construction has been shelved because no government wanted to create a water crisis.

The impression given is that the government has already made up its mind to build the dam. There has been talk of creating a consensus, as the president has said a number of times. But the effort to create the consensus appears to take place behind closed doors. The parliamentary committee which was set up for the purpose has not been much in the news. The consensus building process should be a public one. Why don’t our leaders go to Sindh and visit the places which will be affected by the construction of the dam? There they can talk to the people, with experts explaining the pros and cons of the project. For that it is important that they are armed with necessary facts and have profound knowledge of the subject. Rhetoric will not convince anyone but solid logic and reasoning will. Meanwhile, work on the reservoirs on which a consensus already exists should be taken in hand.

No more blame game

IT is a measure of the distrust between Islamabad and Kabul that Pakistan has to renew assurances periodically that it is interested in peace and stability in Afghanistan. At a tripartite meeting in Rawalpindi on Wednesday, Pakistan assured the other two sides that it would do all it could to ensure peaceful elections in Afghanistan next month. The meeting saw the level of the talks enhanced because it was attended for the first time by Pakistan’s Vice-Chief of Army Staff Gen Ahsan Saleem Hayat and Afghan army chief Gen Bismillah Khan. Lt.-Gen. Karl Eikenberry represented the US-led coalition forces. The statement issued at the end of the meeting spoke of “recent improvements” in information-sharing and pledged continued cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda. However, all such meetings at the level of military officials cannot hide the fact that the Karzai government has often blamed Islamabad for the recent upsurge in Taliban activity. This is unfair, because Pakistan has done all it could to check Taliban activity on this side of the border. However, the terrain on both sides of the Durand Line is mountainous and provides opportunities for guerillas to hide. To seal off the border, Pakistan has deployed 70,000 troops, but guerillas still do manage to carry on their activities, especially because there is administrative chaos in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has a vital stake in peace in Afghanistan. As the history of the last three decades shows, whatever happens in Afghanistan invariably affects this country. Conditions of anarchy in that country spill over into Pakistan and create a law and order problem. Conversely, political stability in Afghanistan helps Pakistan because it leads to enhanced trade as well as greater cooperation in rebuilding that war-ravaged country. As Pakistan’s permanent representative at the UN told the Security Council on Tuesday, no other country had a greater stake in peace in Afghanistan than Pakistan. Most of the coalition force’s requirement for fuel, food and other supplies, he said, went from Pakistan. This is because Islamabad wishes to advance the day when Afghanistan’s own army will fully assume security responsibility. Let us hope that the sentiments expressed in the joint statement do not fall victim to the blame game that often characterizes Kabul-Islamabad relations.

Action against poll spoilers

ACTING on its earlier warning to those seeking to prevent women from participating in the local body polls, the Election Commission has ordered a fresh ballot in seven polling stations in the districts of Swabi and Nowshera in the NWFP where women were kept from voting. It has also directed the police in the two districts to start legal proceedings against those found to have been involved in this illegal exercise. Considering the strict social restrictions that govern the lives of women in the NWFP, these steps are a positive development and will boost efforts to promote socio-political emancipation of women living in some of the most conservative areas of the country. The pervasiveness of the patriarchal system here can be judged from the fact that in the last local government polls, even those claiming to stand for democracy joined hands with the more conservative political elements to bar women from voting or contesting.

While there is no doubt that the situation is gradually improving — this time 390 women’s seats remained vacant in the NWFP as opposed to 1,043 in the last local body polls — there is a long way to go before the political empowerment of women can become a reality. For, while the law is behind them, women remain shackled by regressive social traditions that impact on every sphere of daily life. This is apparent from the appalling figures for literacy, health, employment and education for women, most of whom are treated no better than chattel. Besides enfranchising women, it is also important to bring them into the mainstream of national life so that their contribution to society is enhanced and does not go unnoticed and unappreciated. This is crucial to winning the battle against obscurantist forces that are at present casting a long shadow over the socio-political landscape.

The price tag of alliance with the US

IN HIS Independence Day message President Pervez Musharraf reiterated his vow to defeat terrorists and extremists. He took that vow after the United States began its war against “Islamic terrorism.” On July 18 Benazir Bhutto accused him again of not “doing enough to combat terrorism.” The message: She can do the job better.

Never in Pakistan’s history has its military and political leadership competed so openly for an American mandate to rule Pakistan. Never has Pakistan identified so completely with an American agenda that rejects Pakistan’s key values and threatens to undermine its integrity.

Today’s Pakistani campaign to combat Muslim terrorism reminds me of the days Muslim youth fought Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan and Indian forces in Indian-held Kashmir. We called them mujahideen and bowed our heads when we ran into them or heard of their martyrdom.

A peace process is underway in Kashmir, and one hopes the Kashmiris’ nightmare will someday be over. Many Afghans think they can’t do much about their president’s American tutelage or about the American troops and bases on their soil. But there are youth in Kashmir and Afghanistan who believe they should keep the pressure on the occupation forces, and many Pakistanis support them.

Americans call them terrorists, as they do in case of Muslim freedom fighters everywhere else. The delegitimization of Muslim struggle for rights and freedom is an interesting development, which was spotlighted by an American bureaucrat.

John R. Bolton, then US deputy secretary of state (now UN ambassador), was briefing journalists and went at a tangent about Iran’s complicity with the Lebanon’s “Hezbollah terrorists.” I mentioned that Hezbollah had expelled Israeli troops from southern Lebanon in the manner “Minutemen” guerrillas chased British colonial troops in Massachusetts.

“How would you define terrorism?” I asked. The neoconservative’s eyes blazed as he looked at me. “I know a terrorist,” he growled, “when I see one.”

America doesn’t bother to define terrorists. It decides who’s one and just goes after him. Arabs resisting Israeli occupation of their lands have long been called terrorists by Americans. A more discriminating attitude prevailed awhile towards people fighting occupation forces in other parts of the world. In the 1980s, at the Washington Times news desk, I would be editing a dispatch from Peshawar about “mujahideen” shooting stinger missiles at Soviet troops. Later that evening I would receive another story from Jerusalem about Palestinian “terrorists” attacking Israeli troops. We called Kashmiri, Sikh, Tamil, Kurdish and East Timorese guerrillas “rebels,” “insurgents,” “militants,” or “fighters,” but not “terrorists.” The US government hadn’t taken positions on many of those insurgencies, and we believed journalistic ethics didn’t permit making value judgments on their struggles (except in the Palestinian case).

The end of the Cold War gradually changed the yardsticks of values of American elites, including most media managers, as America emerged as the sole superpower. In 1992 a group of mostly Jewish neoconservatives conceived a grand mission to preserve America’s sole-superpower status. They got the then Defence Secretary Dick Cheney to approve of it. After much preparation, the Project New America Century (PNAC) was launched in 1997 and became the foreign policy guide for this administration. The core PNAC goal is to maintain US global domination by preventing any nation or ideology from “challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” China and Islam are viewed as the main obstacles to that mission.

For the neocons, 9/11 confirmed the prognosis about the Islamic threat, and they viewed it as an opportunity to eliminate that threat. They think Muslim anti-Americanism stems from an “ideology,” and Wahhabi and Deobandi madressahs and “Islamist” political organizations are spreading it. Pakistani madressahs are particularly suspect because many of them follow Deobandi curricula.

The neocons viewed Iran and Iraq as the states most hostile to their Middle Eastern agenda and subsequently masterminded the Iraq war, but they believe that the real challenge to their mission comes from non-state Muslim groups from around the world. To work people up against these groups, they gave them a blood-curling name: “Islamic terrorists.” Because “Islamic terrorism” calls for a global war, America needed allies worldwide. Calls went out to nations of the world to decide “whether you are with us or with the terrorists.” Among the first to come aboard were countries facing Muslim insurgencies: India, China, Russia and the Philippines.

As the price of their collaboration, the United States slapped the “terrorist” label on Kashmiri, Chechen, Uighur and Abu Sayaf guerrillas. Muslim monarchies and autocracies such as in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, which are facing domestic challenge to their repressive rule, also jumped on the bandwagon and got America to designate their dissidents as “terrorists.”

Pakistan is important for America’s global anti-terrorist and strategic agenda for two broad reasons. First, its proximity to Afghanistan, its madressahs and its youth with Islamic fervour supposedly make it a hub of international “terror infrastructure.” Second, Pakistan’s location makes it attractive for the US strategic planning. The PNAC mission calls for the US military presence in the oil-rich Gulf and Caspian Sea basin. Pakistan is at the junction of both, and its importance has increased with the Iraq disaster and budding Russo-Chinese alliance.

The Iraqi mayhem has unsettled US plans to make that country the bastion of American military power in the Middle East. Meanwhile, China and Russia, operating through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, are poised to challenge US bases in their neighborhoods. They already have got Uzbekistan to ask Washington to fold up its Karshi-Khanabad airbase.

Useful as Pakistan is to America’s strategic interests, its political fluidity is of concern to American policy planners. Attempts on Musharraf’s life has heightened those concerns, which can be allayed by his partnership with Benazir. In order not to antagonize the Pakistani president, they’ve kept Benazir at arm’s length but know she has embraced their agenda. Two weeks after 9/11 she wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal citing her clashes with “many of these people, including Osama bin Laden” and her crackdown on “their madressahs that turned children into fanatics and criminals.”

During her frequent US visits she has blasted Muslim terrorism and applauded Bush for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. One interesting refrain in her statements: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” The emphasis obviously is on “all your eggs,” as she knows that the United States, despite its rhetoric about democracy, wouldn’t want her as the substitute for its ties to the Pakistani military. The Pakistan Muslim League being divided, Americans expect the Pakistan People’s Party to win the 2007 elections handily. And Benazir knows that electoral victory in Pakistan doesn’t guarantee getting or keeping the prime minister’s job; American blessings will.

A Musharraf-Bhutto partnership could make Pakistan the kind of dependent ally of the United States it never was. Pakistan has historically been schizophrenic about American tutelage. Washington was always able to lure Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic brass with aid and other favours, but its political leadership usually held out.

The schizophrenia began in 1953 when the Eisenhower administration offered Pakistan a package of military aid in return for its joining an anti-Communist alliance. The alliance wouldn’t commit America to defending Pakistan against foreign (read Indian) aggression. Gen. Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief, and Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad, a former bureaucrat, jumped at the offer. Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin didn’t “see much in it for Pakistan” and decided to sit on it. One afternoon Nazimuddin was summoned to the governor-general’s house and was “pleasantly surprised” to see Ayub Khan in a portico. Minutes later the prime minister was fired by Ghulam Muhammad and soon afterward-replaced, unsurprisingly, by Mohammad Ali (Bogra), Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington.

Nazimuddin didn’t challenge his unconstitutional dismissal. He was warned, he told visiting East Pakistan Chief Minister Nurul Amin that such a “foolish step” would trigger martial law. Nazimuddin had played a major role in the Muslim League’s historic victory in the 1946 elections in Bengal that facilitated the creation of Pakistan. Martial law and regional feud, he explained to Nurul Amin, could tempt India to wreck “the infant state.”

The last of this breed was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who resisted relentless American pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear programme and, according to Benazir, paid for it with his life. In her autobiography, she writes that then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had warned of making her father “a horrible example” for defiance of America. A year later, she adds, the CIA conspired with Gen Ziaul Haq to have him overthrown. In any case, Z.A. Bhutto ended the era in which America coddled Pakistan’s military and military-backed dictators while democratic forces were held at bay.

If Pakistan continues to pursue the American agenda, with or without a Musharraf-Bhutto partnership, it could pay a price for it. Already, Musharraf’s support for the Afghanistan war, campaign against Islamic institutions, etc., have spawned regionalism in Pakistan.

The writer is a columnist with the Nexus Syndicate in Washington.