Taking stock

GIVEN our history, and in the absence of an extradition treaty, there can be no question of Pakistan handing over suspects who India believes were connected to the assault on Mumbai. That is simply not an option for a democratic government that is answerable to the people. The futility of pursuing such a course now seems to have become apparent to the US as well, with the Bush administration signalling that any and all accused should be prosecuted within Pakistan. This change of tack has naturally disappointed India. Every passing day also reinforces the impression that New Delhi is not sharing information directly with Islamabad but is instead acting through intermediaries such as the American FBI. Why this is so has not been explained to anyone’s satisfaction. Despite the mutual distrust, however, it is heartening to note that the clouds of war have lifted to a degree and both sides are refraining from upping the ante.

That said, there is an urgent need for Pakistan to decide on the path the country must choose from this point onwards. Reports in the US press that at least one alleged Lashkar-i-Taiba operative currently in Pakistani custody has confessed to his involvement in the Mumbai carnage have not been denied at the highest levels in Islamabad. Foot-dragging will get us nowhere, and we need to explain what headway, if any, has been made in our own investigations. Full disclosure, of course, cannot be expected in a matter as sensitive as the case in hand until every avenue of inquiry has been explored. A progress report, though, is the need of the hour. Otherwise Islamabad will not be in a position to counter criticism that facts are being withheld and we will continue to be deemed guilty until proven innocent. It is said that the US has passed on intercepts of telephone conversations between Lashkar-i-Taiba commanders and militants holed up in a hotel in Mumbai. Given Pakistan’s intelligence resources, it is within the realm of possibility to verify the authenticity or otherwise of these alleged communications. The sooner this is done, and the facts placed before the nation and the world, the better. And if any Lashkar-i-Taiba commander has admitted to his role in the carnage, that confession too should be acknowledged. New Delhi, for its part, needs to provide Islamabad with the ‘evidence’ it claims to have found linking the Lashkar-i-Taiba to the deadly assault.

There will be no loss of face if it turns out that Pakistanis were among the militants who attacked Mumbai. Egged on by India, much of the world believes that anyway. We need to act decisively against militants and terrorists operating from Pakistani soil, not on account of pressure exerted by India or America but because therein lies our own salvation. The enemy within is a far greater threat than any external foe.


REPORTS that a National Counter-terrorism Authority (NCA) is to be set up by the government with the express purpose of improving coordination among the various agencies dealing with counter-terrorism issues should be greeted with cautious optimism. At the level of operations, one of the obvious impediments in the business of counter-terrorism is that the different agencies do not ‘talk’ to each other in an effective way. Given that terrorists have demonstrated their presence across the length and breadth of the country and are understood to have excellent lines of communication, no one agency can be expected to be omniscient. For example, if a terrorist plot is hatched in Fata, the ‘assets’ are assembled in Punjab and the attack occurs in Karachi, the FIA, ISI, IB and provincial intelligence-gathering agencies may catch a whiff of different stages of such a plot — but individually may not have enough information to connect the dots. If the NCA can improve the likelihood of timely action against terrorists, it will mark a real turning point in the state’s fight against terrorism.

However, the NCA faces some daunting hurdles. First is the nature of governance in this country. When a problem is identified, the government of the day often responds by adding yet another layer of bureaucracy and setting up yet another organisation to deal with it. Oftentimes the government’s ‘solution’ is neither well thought out nor properly implemented. A body such as the NCA has great potential, but its best-laid plans will come to nought if the stakeholders, the various intelligence agencies, are not fully on board. The nature of counter-terrorism is such that secrecy is paramount, and the world over agencies involved in such activities are loath to share information with an ever-widening circle of professional and political stakeholders.

Then there is the problem of political interference. Ramping up Pakistan’s counter-terrorism capabilities requires a professional approach with key appointments made on the basis of merit. If the NCA is stuffed with political appointees, it may actually cause more harm than good to counter-terrorism efforts nationally. Finally, there is the issue of resources. While the NCA is being conceptualised as a coordination agency, it will nevertheless need equipment and trained personnel that are not readily available in Pakistan. This is where our allies in the war against terrorism must help. Instead of harping on the fact that Pakistan doesn’t ‘do enough’ to fight terrorism, they must help us when we do try something new.


ON new year’s day America and China marked the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, with presidents George Bush and Hu Jintao eulogising the benefits the two powers have derived from America’s recognition of the world’s most populous nation on Jan 1, 1979. Despite “twists and turns”, China’s official news agency Xinhua said, their relationship had made “steady progress” because of the “concerted efforts made by the two sides”. Here, one cannot but recall the role played by Pakistan in bringing the two Cold War adversaries together, for it was from Nathiagali that Henry Kissinger flew on a secret mission to Beijing to probe the possibility of a rapprochement between the two countries. In one of his books Richard Nixon, then in the White House, gives a detailed account of how the two Pacific Rim powers came together and how his secretary of state ran all the way from his office to give the president the glad tidings of the right response from Beijing.

“It was here” [in the White House],” Nixon wrote “that I received what Henry Kissinger described as the most important communication to an American president since the end of World War II. I had been sitting in this same chair catching on some of my reading material after a state dinner that evening. It was almost eleven o’clock. Henry [Kissinger] burst into my room. He was breathless. He must have run all the way over to the residence from his West Wing Office. He handed me a message. It was Chou En-lai’s invitation to visit China, which he had sent through President Yahya Khan of Pakistan. As Chou put it later it was a message from a head, through a head to a head.” Sino-American relations have had a positive impact on the world, especially South and Southeast Asia. China has given up the military option vis-à-vis Taiwan, while in the aftermath of the Mumbai attack the views of Beijing and Washington have converged on the need to defuse tension in South Asia.


FOR Bangladeshis the new year of 2009 starts with a bang. We have had our elections, we have voted our candidates to parliament and we have provided a massive majority to the AL to form an effective government. The nature, the direction and tone of that parliament and government has been already set by the premier-to-be Sheikh Hasina in her press conference on Dec 31, 2007 where she spelled out the broad and general principles on how the AL intends to conduct parliament and governance for the next five years.

The issues are all contained in the AL election manifesto and have been well publicised during the election campaign and therefore, need not be gone into here but what needs to be understood is the tenor, the trend of how AL and Sheikh Hasina view Bangladesh as it is today and as they desire to see it after five years of their government. In the words of Sheikh Hasina, “This win is for good governance against misrule, peace in opposition to terrorism and secular democracy as opposed to communalism.”

If the AL can effectively mobilise national resources to achieve the goals set out by Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh would indeed have changed, for the better, beyond recognition…. If, on the other hand, these goals cannot be achieved at all because of AL’s detraction from its guiding principles … Bangladesh would be far worse off than it ever was.

As citizens it is our bounden responsibility to see to it that the AL is helped along its way to achieving these goals…. We need to support it and nurture it and we can only do that if we all together respect whatever laws we have, keep our individual desires, needs, greed and ambitions within bounds and work hard — without all these, no one, not the AL not the BNP, not the 300 MPs can make Bangladesh a prosperous nation.

But the AL, for its part, has also got to understand that our support is qualified by its adherence to its manifesto and its publicly announced guiding principles because it is on this that we have elected them to government.

If they detract, support will diminish; if they detract further, support will vanish and if they throw them overboard, there will be resistance, conflict and overthrow. The year 2009 has started with good omens; let’s all see the year end on an equally good feeling, with hope and enthusiasm. — (Jan 02)


YET another official inauguration of the Gwadar seaport last month — this time by the Balochistan chief minister — will not allay the misgivings of the people of the province whose sense of deprivation runs much deeper than the deep, blue sea.

What is really needed is a truth and reconciliation commission, comprising public representatives (elected and unelected) from the province and the federation, to probe into the roots of alienation of the people of Balochistan from the national mainstream.

Balochistan is physically the largest and, ironically, the poorest and the richest of the provinces given its economic deprivation and the wealth of its natural resources, respectively. While Balochistan has been wholeheartedly sharing its wealth with the rest of the country, it has been burdened with a very unfair share of the poverty prevailing in Pakistan.

Thorny issues as to why the people of this province are so alienated from the national mainstream need to be identified, analysed and resolved with a consensus among all stakeholders. Home to significant multi-ethnic communities that include the Baloch, the Hazaras, the Pakhtuns and the Brahvis, with a sizable sprinkling of Punjabis and Urdu speakers, Balochistan in microcosm reflects the greater diversity of the macrocosm that is Pakistan. Like the rest of Pakistan, it is also dogged by decades of bad governance, tribal feuds and a clash between the old and the new. These are factors which in turn define who gets what, when, how and at whose expense. If left in its present state of unravelling, Balochistan is nothing short of a disaster waiting to happen.

The list of injustices meted out to the province and its people is long and harrowing. The state has literally waged wars on this federating unit to make it fall in line with Rawalpindi and Islamabad. There is little that trickles down to the people from whatever rental fees the federal government pays to the all-mighty sardars from whose lands the government extracts minerals, oil and gas. The royalties given to the provincial government barely meet its running expenses, with the result that there is little left for annual development programmes. In the current fiscal year the amount stands at zero. And nobody cares.

The coastal belt of Makran, as the emerging scene of the new great game owing to the location of the Gwadar seaport there, is very different from the provinces’ hinterland which has been cohabited mainly by Baloch and Pashtun tribes for centuries. The Makran region is almost entirely inhabited by the Baloch, without any history of a tribal, sardari system behind them. Society is based on egalitarianism, and respect for all, regardless of their social or economic status, is an ingrained social value. The Baloch of Makran take pride not in their history of war amongst tribesmen and conquests of one another’s territories but in sharing the high moral values of equality among all individuals, of respecting the other person’s privacy, and practising cooperation among communities as opposed to competition. This should have been a ready constituency for democratic governance, one that can take root easily without being diverted by vested and opposing feudal interests, and accountable only to the electorate. But this has not happened for several reasons, due mainly to the way the federal government has treated the province over the decades.

The traditionally ruling feudal-mullah duo at the provincial level also ensured that only a subsistence level, if any, funding reached Makran, because it had nothing to gain from the empowerment of the people there (as indeed elsewhere). The sardars meanwhile ran their personal fiefdoms in their respective domains, raising private armies and taking turns to side with or oppose successive federal governments to settle scores with rival clans. The Marris, the Mengals and the Bugtis, all have played such games over the years.

At critical junctures in the past, too, they even ganged up on Islamabad but such solidarity in their ranks pleading for the rights of the Baloch has been short-lived. What is different today is the all-pervasive feeling of a Balochistani nationalism; it has never been this widespread, shared and owned by ordinary people across the province. There is now talk among various nationalist groups of seeking justice for Balochistanis, an all-inclusive term applied to all residents of the province, and not just the Baloch. That some of the old names and faces of Baloch sardars are part of this popular new movement is not a coincidence but a coming together of disparate forces that derive their legitimacy from popular sentiment.

Thus, it can be argued that the alienation of Balochistanis is near complete. The February 2008 election results and subsequent decisions taken by elected MPs also help make the reading of the emerging picture clear. While nationalist and most Islamist parties boycotted the polls, the incumbent PML-Q (backed by Islamabad) emerged as the largest party with 17 seats out of the total 51 that were contested; the right-wing MMA got just seven because many religious-minded voters heeded the boycott call; the PPP grabbed seven, the ANP two, the BNP five, while 10 independent candidates made it into the provincial assembly.

But the public sentiment of anger and alienation was so strong that despite their respective party positions on issues concerning Balochistan, all MPAs were unanimous in condemning the killing of the nationalist leader, Nawab Akbar Bugti, and demanding that President Pervez Musharraf be impeached and brought to book for initiating military action in the province. This ‘uprising’ of the elected House mirrored the province’s resolve vis-à-vis the centre. Baloch nationalists, who boycotted the election, showed only a lukewarm response to Mr Zardari’s post-election apology to the people of Balochistan, as his PPP formed a new government at the centre. They said they would judge the PPP chief on what he did as opposed to what he said.

Nearly a year down the road, kidnappings, bombings and attacks on targets seen as representing the state and its apparatus have continued. The present provincial government is as ineffective as its predecessors, and Islamabad’s promise of righting the wrongs done to Balochistan has remained just that. Democracy has changed little for the people of Balochistan in everyday terms; they cannot be expected to be happy with self-promoting and cosmetic development projects such as setting up a medical college named after Benazir Bhutto!

Unless a truth and reconciliation commission is formed and all stakeholders are brought to a negotiating table to resolve the many issues Balochistan is suffering from, the province’s integration into the national mainstream will remain a distant cry.


THE British government is pressing other European countries to take a common position on resettling inmates from Guantanamo Bay detention centre, but will not take any more terrorist suspects released from the jail by Barack Obama’s administration.

The US president-elect has promised to close Guantanamo Bay within two years and it was reported last week that America is asking as many as 100 countries to take some of the released suspects.

Germany is considering taking some under strict conditions, and Portugal has offered to take some too, but the Spanish and Dutch have already said they will not be taking any. Germany and France have called for a common European position.

The UK’s Foreign Office said on Thursday: “We have made it clear that we think Guantanamo Bay should be closed. We recognise the legal, technical and other difficulties, and that the US will require assistance from allies and partners to make this happen.”

But a spokeswoman insisted Britain would not be taking any more suspects. “The Foreign Office is not pushing for a deal to allow other Guantanamo terror suspects into the UK,” she said, adding there had been no approach from the US. Guantanamo has held about 750 prisoners since 2002, most captured during military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It currently holds 255 prisoners, including 50 already found “not guilty” who cannot be repatriated for fear of persecution.

It is thought as many as 150 remaining inmates will be returned to their homelands. Another 50 suspects are likely to be tried, possibly in specialist US courts.

Britain, through the Foreign Office and the Lord Chancellor’s Department, put extensive private pressure on President George Bush to close Guantanamo, but had to settle for securing the release of British nationals and residents. Britain has already taken charge of nine detainees who are British nationals and four British residents. Two remaining former British residents, Binyam Mohamed and Shaker Aamer, have yet to be released.

Obama has proposed that instead of trying to prosecute men through military commissions proposed by Bush, suspects should be taken to the US and prosecuted before terror law courts, overseen by civilian judges with specialist backgrounds.

— The Guardian, London

__________________
Regards,
P.R.