If the shoe fits

IF only President George W. Bush had consulted a fairy godmother before he had embarked on his unfortunate final visit to Iraq.

He might have been warned that instead of losing a glass slipper, he would be receiving instead a used, size-10 men’s shoe.

In many respects, the presidency of any country — especially that of the United States of America — contains all the ingredients of a fairy tale. The central figure is supposed to overcome all odds and adversities, to battle on behalf of righteousness, to destroy demons and vanquish ogres, restore order in the world, provide reassurance that nothing untoward will ever happen again (until the next fairy tale, that is), and then to retire and live happily ever after.

That is what Aesop and the Grimm brothers and more recently J.K. Rowling have always led us to believe. We as children and in turn our own children have grown up in a magical world of their making, in which right always prevails over wrong, in which conflicts and wars are justifiable only because they restore social order and a natural equilibrium.

One wonders therefore which bedtime fairy tales Mrs Barbara Bush must have read to her son — the boy who grew up to become President George W. Bush. Whatever those stories may have been, it is obvious that at some time during the night, somewhere in the laboratory of his fermenting mind, the experiment went horribly awry. As a result, today, we, Iraqis and non-Iraqis alike, between the Bosphorus and Indus, are being made to suffer the consequences.

Five years ago, President Bush blundered into Iraq, relying on intelligence that as he now claims was flawed. Unlike President John F. Kennedy who lost his innocence over the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba and then wept for having relied upon his errant military advisers, Bush has not found the time to waste a tear either on his misadventure or over the damage caused by it.

Ordinarily, persons with blood on their hands rarely revisit the scene of crime. Did President Bush seriously imagine that his recent visit to Iraq would be welcomed as a last hurrah, lauded as a final victory lap, an opportunity for an avuncular valedictory address by a victorious Caesar to an audience that had been cowed into grinning submission?

Had he forgotten that the Iraqis had celebrated the fall of Saddam Hussein and the demolition of his statue in Firdos Square by US marines in April 2003 by beating it, once it was safely down, with shoes?

Did he believe that millions of Iraqis would feel grateful that in place of Saddam Hussein and his iron-brained militia, they now have the steel frame of 150,000 US troops underwriting their fledgling democracy?

Had he been deluded by his own propaganda? In April 2003, President Bush told his troops while standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Five years later, he professed the same optimism, with diminished conviction: “The war is not over, but it is decisively on its way to being won.”

Bush could have done worse than to have read Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches before he left for Iraq. He might have understood why many Iraqis find less comfort in his own fading reassurances than they do in the defiant words of Winston Churchill.

Harassed by German onslaughts and a wavering French government, Churchill addressed the Canadian parliament in the winter of 1941. He quoted the advice given to the then French prime minister by his timorous generals, that “in three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken”. Churchill added laconically: “Some chicken; some neck.”

Iraq’s neck has been stretched for over five years already, and may well be elongated for as long a period again. Whatever may be the crucial determinants that hasten the end of war, they are not visible at the moment. Human casualties for sure are not a factor. Over 4,200 American lives have already been lost. No one has the time to calculate how many Iraqis have been misplaced — a hundred thousand? Many hundreds of thousands? A million? More than a million?

The cost of the war is also not the tourniquet. More than $570bn have been spent already, and no one knows when or where that figure will finally stop. With the US economy in a state of recession, the last jobs president-eject Bush and president-elect Obama will want to touch will be those of America’s Military Inc.

That might explain why Obama has chosen to include key components of Bush’s national security team into his own administration. These include Robert Gates as Obama’s defence secretary, and retired Gen Jim Jones, who supported John McCain (Obama’s opponent in the race for the presidency) as his national security adviser. To many — and they are not all necessarily Iraqis — who had hoped to witness with the election of Obama a change in US policies, continuity of the same faces signals instead a linear persistence. Old ammunition is simply being reissued in new casings. They will however be no less lethal. Carnage is a permanent resident in every front page.

For the 170 million surviving here in Pakistan, life has never been a fairy tale. Our frogs do not transform into coachmen, our rodents do not become footmen, and our undersized pumpkins do not balloon into golden coaches. Most importantly, our fairy godmother has changed gender. Our former fairy godfather is paying more attention to our stepsisters than to us.

Living in a world of one’s making is challenge enough; living in a world of some one else’s making is even more difficult. Living in a world of our own make-believe is unforgivable. Gradually, as the juggernaut of the war against terrorism moves inexorably towards and across our frontiers, we need to remind ourselves that fairy tales are the product of peacetime tranquillity. War spawns its own stories, in which the footwear is not a glass slipper, not even a size-10 shoe, but a hobnailed boot. n

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

No-war pact idea

A NO-WAR pact between India and Pakistan is a good idea and Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif is very earnest about it. On Dec 11 he told a TV channel in Pakistan, “We should sign a no-war pact for peace.”

Around the same time he said in an interview to Harinder Baweja of Tehelka, “I would say that there should be a no-first-attack pact, a no-war pact between the two countries and this includes both conventional and nuclear (weapons).”

It bears recalling that he had made this very offer on Sept 22, 1997 when he addressed the UN General Assembly as prime minister of Pakistan. “I offer today from this rostrum to open negotiations on a treaty of no-aggression between Pakistan and India.” As it happens ‘aggression’ has a wider connotation than ‘war’. It includes acts short of troops crossing boundaries; methods direct and indirect. He had initiated the peace process that year and the Islamabad joint statement of June 23, 1997 defined the structure of a composite dialogue which is still in place today.

Nawaz Sharif sought to put a seal on that process with a no-war pact. Such offers always have a purpose. When Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru handed to Pakistan’s high commissioner M. Ismail the draft of a no-war pact on Dec 22, 1949, he sought to freeze the status quo in Kashmir. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan accepted the draft almost verbatim but stipulated an undertaking to “resort to arbitration on all points of difference”. Nehru pointed out that Kashmir was a political question which is non-justiciable.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had a different notion. Reporting to the National Assembly on July 17, 1963 on his talks on Kashmir with Swaran Singh, he said that the pact would enable India to contend that “now that a no-war pact exists, Pakistan has accepted the ceasefire line”. Even at Tashkent in January 1966 he rejected such a pact. Also at Simla in July 1972.

The UN’s charter has an explicit provision enjoining members to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” The Simla Agreement and the Tashkent Declaration have similar injunctions.

Where, then, is the need for a bilateral pact? The answer is that crimes continue to be committed despite the penal code. But if two feuding neighbours solemnly sign an agreement, in or out of court, not to harm each other, it helps to create mutual confidence.

In 1981 it was Pakistan’s turn to make the offer. But it did so in a statement on Sept 15, 1981 announcing its “formal acceptance of the US package” of military aid to Pakistan. It proposed “mutual guarantees of non-aggression and non-use of force in the spirit of the Simla Agreement”. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi stipulated two conditions — bilateralism and no bases to or alliances with a foreign power. In May 1984 at Murree, representatives of the two countries nearly resolved the issue. The Simla Agreement helped on the first and NAM formulations on the second.

A communication gap prevented accord. The parleys continued till 1987 only to fizzle out. Agha Shahi, minister of state for foreign affairs, and one of the most accomplished diplomats South Asia has produced, categorically said on Jan 28, 1982 “the proposed no-war pact applies to Kashmir and war is ruled out. Only peaceful means would be employed for solution of this problem”. The methods used to resolve Kashmir from 1989 onwards were not exactly an example of peaceful methods.

It is one of those might-have-beens of history as to how events would have shaped if India had accepted the offer in 1984 and also settled Siachen under the June 1989 accord when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister.

Dare one hope that both countries are wiser for the two wasted decades? Mr Nawaz Sharif’s offer today in 2008 also has a purpose; a very good one, indeed. It is to instil confidence which is all but non-existent today. It is however, an integral part of his advice on the TV interview on Dec 11: “Pakistan should seriously engage India. We should invite them and we should go to India to take a look at the evidence (in the Mumbai’s blasts). We should do whatever is possible to help India and combat terrorism jointly. The blame game is not in favour of Pakistan and India”. Without that engagement and a successful one too the no-war pact will have no takers even though neither country desires war.

There is another aspect to the offer of a non-aggression pact. Will it impose a duty on each state to prevent a non-state actor on its soil from committing aggression on the other?

In his excellent book India and Pakistan: The Cost of Conflict and the Benefits of Peace, Maj Gen Mahmud Ali Durrani recommended a list of confidence-building measures. One of them was “reduce the role of intelligence agencies acting against each other”. This can be amplified to cover non-state actors; private organisations which are bent on war. He is now national security adviser and had an excellent meeting with his Indian counterpart M.K.Narayanan in New Delhi on Oct 14.

President Zardari has offered to send “a representative” of the ISI. A delegation can come to India to begin a sincere dialogue on the immediate crisis in an effort to resolve it. We must at some point of time talk about a non-aggression pact which reckons with the realities of our times. But that will have to be an icing on a cake which is yet to be baked. Public opinion in India and Pakistan yearns for peace. It will endorse a no-war pact only after the major disputes are resolved.

That is sad. But that is the reality in 2008. Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz came to New Delhi at the height of the Kargil crisis. A senior minister or official can well come to New Delhi for exploratory talks to pave the way for a full-fledged delegation, which would go into the substance of the differences. Meanwhile rhetoric deserves a good holiday. Quiet, secret and sincere diplomacy is the need of the hour.

The writer is a lawyer and an author.

When artists and scientists make music

HAWORTH Parsonage in Yorkshire lives up to its reputation as one of the most evocative literary sites in Britain. On entering, visitors find it virtually unchanged since the Bronte sisters lived there, still full of their ephemera. What you won’t read about in the guidebooks, however, is the Bronte’s haunted tool shed.

You may stumble across this unsettling edifice while exploring the parsonage garden. At the side of the house is an old lean-to from which strange sounds emanate. As you stand outside and listen, you can make out chickens clucking, bells tolling and the ghostly laughter of children playing. The door is locked.

In fact, the door is not a gateway to the paranormal, but a component of the Fragmented Orchestra, a nationwide musical experiment based on the working of the human brain. The shed acts as a ‘neuron’, feeding sounds picked up at the Haworth tool shed to a central computer installation — the brain — at FACT gallery across the country in Liverpool. The sounds are replayed almost immediately on one of the 24 speakers in the gallery. Then they are bounced back to speakers at each of 24 sites across the country — the other ‘neurons’ — whereafter they vanish into the ether.

The other neurons are sited in locations ranging from the nave of Gloucester cathedral in the middle of England, to the main stand at Everton Football Club’s Goodison Park stadium in Liverpool.

The human brains behind the Fragmented Orchestra are Jane Grant, John Matthias and Nick Ryan; a team of artists, composers and computer scientists. The Fragmented Orchestra pushes the idea of remote music-making. “It’s an attempt to test the limit of what is possible,” says Matthias, a physicist and musician who has collaborated with artists including Coldcut and Radiohead.

Although the science behind the project is very complex, the concept is relatively simple. The system is based on computer models developed by neuro-physicists to map the human brain. Information is conveyed through the cerebral cortex in the form of electric pulses and, as Matthias says, “the scientist in me is interested in how these pulses connect. The musician in me loves the rhythms they produce.”

To experience the full effect you need to visit the main gallery at FACT, where an installation of loudspeakers bursts into action each time a neuron ‘fires’. You can see activity within the system represented as dots and dashes on a computer screen. The strange thing is that the outcome of all this complex technology resembles nothing so much as the perforations of an old piano roll.

The question is whether these random sound events can actually be interpreted as music. Nick Ryan considers the issue. “Sometimes it’s musical,” he says, “and sometimes it’s not. The beauty is that it’s completely unpredictable.”

It all depends on your definition of music, though there are precedents for the Fragmented Orchestra, particularly in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. Stockhausen’s electronic piece Telemusik manipulated sound sources via a mathematical formula; and he also experimented with sound transmitted over distance, most ambitiously the 1995 string quartet in which the players perform from separate helicopters.

John Cage’s Variations VII (1966) is so vast it didn’t receive its British premiere until earlier this year. In its original form, Variations VII opened multiple telephone lines to locations in New York, including a newspaper office, the dog pound, Merce Cunningham’s dance studio and a tank of terrapins belonging to a friend of the composer.

Depending what time of day you visit FACT, you might also be able to detect the influence of minimalist composer Steve Reich. I arrived mid-morning to find the Fragmented Orchestra in a festive mood, playing two different versions of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, one of which was emanating from a mother and toddler group in London, while the other came from the morning service at Gloucester cathedral. The carols become alternately harmonious and dissonant at they drifted in and out of phase — an effect remarkably similar to Reich’s experiments with two tape recorders, which are set to play the same piece of music but gradually slip further and further out of sync.

Though you’ll never be entirely certain what you’re going to hear, there is a programme of events designed to test the system’s potential. On Feb 21 there will be a simultaneous performance from all 24 locations, when Elbow, Johnny Marr and the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain will be contributing pieces from around the country. There’s also a prize-within-a-prize, as the PRS New Music Award winners are launching their own competition for composers to create a score specifically for the Fragmented Orchestra.

“The idea was to build something that could become bigger than ourselves,” says Jane Grant, a visual artist who designed the overall look of the installation. “The interesting thing will be to see what other people do with it. And because it’s based on a model of the human brain, it’s as if the whole thing has a mind of its own.”

— The Guardian, London