Justice for Malala?

When the Taliban failed to kill Malala Yousufzai on October 9, 2012, they could have little imagined how the story would play out. She survived the attempt to murder her by the Taliban (who both claimed and justified their actions in unrepentant fashion) as did her two schoolmates, Kainat Riaz and Shazia Ramzan. Kainat and Shazia were relatively lightly wounded, Malala critically so. She was eventually airlifted to the UK where she received treatment at a hospital specialising in treating battlefield injuries, recovered, co-authored a bestselling book, made an address to the United Nations and was dubbed by a German newspaper “the most famous teenager in the world.” Kainat and Shazia led less prominent lives and both now live and study in the UK. For better or worse Malala is a global icon, her life and its story only in its early chapters. The day after the shooting the then interior minister, Rehman Malik, announced that the identity of the assassin was known, and Atta Ullah Khan was arrested as were six other men but all were later released for lack of evidence. Little more was heard of the hunt for the attempted killers until the announcement on September 12, 2014 by the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) that those allegedly behind the attack had been identified and arrested. Ten people are in custody, six have been named and all will stand trial in an anti-terrorism court. Details of how the military came to identify and apprehend the men are scanty, but it was said that an “intelligence-led” operation with the military and the police working together led to her attackers. The men were operating on the instruction of Mullah Fazlullah, leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and had plans to kill 22 other prominent people from the Swat Valley.

Whilst the world feted and hailed her, Malala Yousufzai was the object of considerable vilification in her own country. She was accused of being a CIA spy, of never having been shot at all and the entire incident staged and she and her family mere tools of American imperialism. The reality is altogether more prosaic — she had become a threat and a challenge to the TTP so they decided to kill her. They have reiterated that desire on a number of occasions and were she to return she would be a dead woman walking. Her father, Ziauddin Yousufzai, has issued a statement saying the detentions are ‘good news’ for his family and for the civilised world, and expressing the hope that the lives of those affected by terrorism in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are eventually beneficiaries as well. Interesting as the story of the arrests may be, the DG ISPR was briefing about the wider success of the Zarb-e-Azb operation in North Waziristan, on which there has been virtually no independent reporting. More than 1,000 militants are said to have been killed in 2,200 operations, those that attacked the Ziarat Residency arrested, and the militants who attacked Quetta airport and Khalid naval base arrested. A “proper strategy” is being chalked out with the civilian government, said the DG ISPR. The ordinary man might wonder why it is that it took so long for all parties concerned to get to the ‘chalking out’ stage of developing a common civil-military policy for combating terrorism and extremism in Pakistan. The DG ISPR also put down a marker saying that… “The army has nothing to do with the government’s affairs” — this in respect of the ongoing protests in Islamabad — which would be interesting if it were true. The attempted murder of Malala Yousufzai and its global consequences are, in big picture terms, a footnote to the existential struggle for the heart and collective mind of the state of Pakistan itself. Much talk needs to be done. The army needs to be commended for locating and detaining Malala’s attackers and it is now upto the government to prosecute them and the courts to convict them.

Keep the death penalty moratorium

With an age-old record of convicting people over fabricated charges, it is simply embarrassing that the justice system of Pakistan has the audacity to hand out a sentence as severe as that of death. That the Lahore High Court ordered the immediate execution of a Haripur jail inmate in the coming week on charges of murder not only makes light of the informal moratorium on death penalties by the PML-N regime, but also conveys a sense of self-assuredness which hardly becomes a judicial apparatus warped in chronic politicisation, bias and corruption. It is quite alarming that convicts — specially those charged with non-lethal crimes such as blasphemy or drug trafficking — are being handed down black warrants by a police and court system which can neither guarantee the absolute veracity of charges nor claim complete transparency of trial. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in its statement of September 11, only echoes the alarm over the court’s haste in hanging the Haripur prisoner to death.

Despite an informal moratorium which, incidentally, came through a quick, almost perfunctory announcement in the Lower House, prisoners across Pakistan continue to be condemned to death and several thousand on death row continue to languish in solitary confinement, suffering ghastly prison conditions, their lives at constant risk. Why, if at all, are death sentences being tossed around by the lower courts in the wake of an indefinite stay on capital punishment? For how long can an inmate languish in solitary confinement, anticipating his/her death? The crippling mental trauma that accompanies the anticipation of death probably exceeds the intended severity of punishment but alas, these sensitivities are alien to a system which has been completely ossified in the colonial era and remains resistant to reform.
Most of the death warrants are given by the lower courts and there is universal acceptance that this tier of the judiciary is plagued by endemic corruption and miscarriage of justice. Part of the problem, also, is the ‘informality’ of the moratorium. Steady legislation needs to be written into the books to firstly, completely do away with capital punishment and secondly, to fine-tune the justice system and bolster its credibility.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14th, 2014.

The cost of inflexibility

For a party that made the most effort to highlight the technical soundness of its economic agenda, the PTI seems remarkably indifferent to the damage the obstinacy of its leader has done to the economy and to the government. There have been conflicting reports of how much the total economic damage has been, with the government quoting figures as high as Rs547 billion. The calculations behind that number are highly crude, but the government’s attempts to quantify the losses do raise an important point: the PTI leadership has been just as callous to the needs of the people of Pakistan as it accuses the Nawaz Administration of being. Consider the following facts. As a result of the protests, the seat of government — the Pakistan Secretariat — has been almost completely shut down, hindering the functioning of several important ministries. Strange as it may seem to the more cynical ears, but the government of Pakistan actually does provide some essential services to its people. Is the PTI really willing to deprive people of those services while it continues protests that have long since ceased to make any sense?

Schools in Islamabad were shut for several weeks. We were under the impression that the PTI planned on making education a priority. In addition, police deployments for security in the Red Zone mean fewer policemen available elsewhere to keep the streets safe. If this were a high-minded battle against a ruthless dictatorial regime, perhaps some level of disruption in government services may have been justified. But these protests are against an elected prime minister. Perhaps, the PTI has forgotten, but we as voters have the right to throw him out of office if we do not like his performance over his five-year term. The Nawaz Administration has many, many flaws and it has made several mistakes for which its leaders deserve to be held to account. But what is going on in Islamabad is now a farce that will only serve to mask those flaws by creating a ridiculous spectacle that serves no purpose.

America’s muddled strategy against ISIS

After six years of trying to extricate itself from the Middle East, President Obama indicated how emphatically that effort failed when on September 10 he became the fourth consecutive American president to officially bomb Iraq. America’s decision to seriously escalate its military operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) comes months after the militant outfit violently emerged as the one of the most formidable and terrifying groups in the Middle East. The recent massacres of religious minorities coupled with the high-profile murders of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff — all of it filmed and put on YouTube — convinced Obama, who up until now had been resisting any form of American involvement, to step up American air strikes and military cooperation with local groups and governments. To be fair to the president, none of the options he had were any good. After decade-long occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little domestic consensus in a war-weary nation for yet another protracted military operation that has already exacted so much from the US in both human and economic terms. Obama also admitted that as awful as ISIS is, it hardly poses a direct threat to American national security. Having (rightly) been accused of a history of meddling in the Middle East, doing nothing was also politically expedient for the US.

But doing nothing is exactly what has gotten the US — and the Middle East — to this current crisis. The US ignored the warning bells that started ringing very early in the Syrian Civil War that large sections of the rebel groups are getting radicalised. The US also ignored the tyranny and oppression with which the Maliki-led Shia government ruled Iraq, alienating and antagonising its Sunnis. The US didn’t arm moderate rebel groups in Syria in fear of the weapons falling into the wrong hands (the ISIS ended up taking over more American arms left behind by the exiting forces than they ever could have by leaks in the Syrian rebel camps). Had the US decided to expand its aerial campaign back in 2011, the crisis — and its consequences — would definitely not have been so acute. But how does this belated decision affect the Middle East now? Obama repeated his avowal not to commit ground troops, which is sensible. This means that the campaign will look more like its operations in Yemen, Somalia, — and Pakistan to an extent — rather than Iraq or Afghanistan, but wars against militant groups like ISIS are definitely not won from the air. They never have been.

ISIS militants are not hiding in remote areas, but actually manage and rule over large population centres like Mosul, Raqqa, and Tikrit; bombing large cities and population centres is not quite the same as inaccessible villages and the US cannot bomb them with the impunity with which they bombed Fata, for instance. The ISIS is also better equipped, better prepared, and better funded than its extremist competitors; it will bide its time and weather the storm, given that the US is looking to keep its operations at a minimum anyway. But even if the air strikes are as effective as the United States hopes they will be, drone strikes and assassinations are only effective in the short term; the amount of al Qaeda ‘number 3s’ that the US has taken out verges on the farcical. Air strikes hardly do any damage to operations or organisational infrastructure. Questions also need to be asked about how American intervention will tilt the balance of power in Syria in particular. Obama has gone back from saying ‘Assad must go’, speaking of ‘red lines’ that were crossed and then crossed again. Surely an American campaign against the ISIS will only strengthen Assad’s control over Syria. This president is not the cavalier, trigger-happy buffoon that his predecessor was. But when it comes to the Middle East, Obama does not seem to be doing much better than him.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 15th, 2014.

__________________
"I am still learning."

Getting away with it

The rape of a woman be she rich or poor, moral or immoral, is not just a crime, but a scathing slight on the entire society. Under no circumstances, ever, is a woman ‘asking for’ this heinous physical brutality — be it a prostitute, a dancer, a street woman or a woman dressed in any ‘provocative’ way. The horror of rape is multiplied by the experience of gang rape, the very pinnacle of human depravity. Gang rape is not uncommon in Pakistan with most weeks throwing up at least one such incident reported somewhere in the country. This type of rape has had heavy precedent from every province of Pakistan and the victims are typically poor women or girls. One such case has achieved brief prominence, mainly because the victim was able to register a case against those accused of sexually assaulting her. Three of the men accused of the act were the sons of a PML-N MNA. The case was soon stopped dead in its tracks as the victim was unwilling to give blood for a DNA test. The victim had been medically examined and it was established beyond a doubt that she had been raped multiple times by more than one man.

It is more than likely that pressure, in the form of bribing and harassment, has been brought to bear on the victim and her family owing to which the case has been withdrawn. The victim is poor, so is her family. Her alleged assailants are rich and powerful, well connected in all the right places and are able to manipulate the scales of justice to their own advantage. She was not raped by ghosts, but by flesh-and-blood men, who now walk away, protected by the impunity their position, a flimsy legal system, and a society likes to lie by its silence whenever a woman undergoes such a plight. Part of the problem is the invisible social pressure faced by a rape survivor in a self-righteous society, which has a habit of exonerating a rapist and humiliating those who have been raped. This traps all the discourse on rape in a ‘they-asked-for-it’ narrative, forever making the rape survivor a victim of slut-shaming.

Tough decisions

It hardly came as a surprise when the government missed the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) deadline to notify up to a seven per cent increase in electricity prices, casting doubt on the country receiving its next tranche of the three-year, $6.6-billion Extended Fund Facility (EFF). The international lender, through the EFF, had set forth structural reforms as part of conditions in return for the assistance. The reforms included privatisation of loss-making state entities and notifying a four per cent increase in power tariffs — with another three per cent now being added on account of special surcharge to recover losses caused by the delay in implementing the increase. The delay in notifying the increase hardly raised eyebrows as the government, facing massive protests in Islamabad by Imran Khan-led PTI and Tahirul Qadri’s PAT on account of alleged election rigging, feared further public backlash if it decided to raise power tariffs. The situation has now pitted the government in a dark corner.

While raising electricity prices will take its toll on every citizen, the reform had been promised to the IMF as part of the loan agreement. Not implementing it will be a reminder of the chequered history that has always strained relations between Pakistan and international lenders. Knocking on doors the next time when the country is facing a weak balance of payments position might not be welcomed. Suffice it to say that the IMF will not want to approve the fifth tranche if the tariffs are not increased. Until the protests ends, the government will probably not be able to increase the power rates. It is amazing to see that even the government’s economic decisions are seemingly influenced by groups that can make the loudest noise. Tax concessions and subsidies are offered that way. Local industries will even lobby for protection — citing their nationality as a trump card — over, in some cases, cheaper imports. It is time the government manned up, made some tough decisions and acted out on at least some of its promises.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16th, 2014

__________________
"I am still learning."

Punjabi Taliban and Afghanistan

The Afghan reaction to the news that the Punjabi Taliban was renouncing violence on its home soil in favour of proselytising — but would continue the armed struggle in Afghanistan — was swift. On September 15, 2014 a senior Pakistani diplomat was summoned to the Afghan foreign ministry to hear that the Afghan government was displeased to hear what it described as ‘a declaration of war’ by the Punjabi Taliban. There was strong language from the Head of Political Affairs at the Afghan foreign ministry, Abdul Samad Samad. He described the Punjab Taliban announcement as a conspiracy against the security and stability of Afghanistan — and in a strictly literal sense he is correct to say so. He went on to allege that Pakistani intelligence agencies had been funding, equipping and training terrorist groups that operate in Afghanistan, including the Taliban in their various iterations.

Despite many Taliban groups clustering under the flag of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), they are far from homogenous and divided along lines of sect, ethnicity and tribe. There is currently a churn in the wider Taliban corpus, possibly triggered in part by the ongoing operation in North Waziristan, but equally likely because of divisive internal tensions that are beginning to fragment the TTP. If there is a unifying struggle it is the fight for power in Afghanistan. That fight is intensifying as Western coalition forces continue to withdraw, with large parts of the country to the south and east already under defacto Taliban control. It is difficult to predict on what front the Punjabi Taliban may fight in future in Afghanistan or who they might be allied with, but there can be little doubt that the North Waziristan operation has pushed Taliban groups over the border into Afghanistan, there to regroup and battle the incoming Afghan government. This has to be a matter of concern for the Afghan administration as it transits out of the Karzai regime and into an uncertain but probably violent future. Pakistan has a stake in that future as well, more so than any of the other players jockeying for position, and should carefully maintain its balance.

Time to lift the YouTube ban

Forget the millions of students that could have been educated at home. For free. Forget the hundreds of budding talents, musical prodigies, artists, and filmmakers just aching to be discovered. Forget the thousands of ‘how-to’ programmes that teach millions of people everything from tying ties to coding, from playing a guitar to algebra. Forget the hours of footage that news organisations such as ourselves are struggling to put up as the country’s politics overwhelm us. Forget the documentaries, the music videos, the cute cats — forget every tiny, visual micro-addition to the human experience of living in the 21st century that millions of people the world over are adding to every second. Forget all of it because in Pakistan, YouTube continues to be banned. The government stopped pretending to have any moral rectitude regarding the ban a long time ago. The case in the courts has stalled despite numerous NGOs’ best efforts; politicians stay mum; and as the country lurches from crisis to crisis, they hope people will just accept the ban as it is. Like dictatorships, catcalling, corruption, and other unsavoury phenomena that seem to be part and parcel of the Islamic Republic, they want the YouTube ban to be here to stay.

The ban was ostensibly put in place to ‘protect’ this country’s vulnerable citizens from blasphemous content — content that YouTube itself has long since removed. The people and places that needed protection — Pakistan’s cinemas and cinema-goers — were wilfully forgotten as mobs set fire to everything they could get their hands on. Nobody banned them. Instead, a website with more than six billion hours of footage viewed every month, was shut down for a video lasting 15 minutes. But there’s more. How is it that a country that has done so little for its unfortunate citizens remove yet another lifeline in the name of acting on their behalf? This is not about piety. This is about governments that cannot forego control. It is about quashing dissent. It is about limiting freedom. It is about trying out the latest technology in censorship. It is about deciding — wrongly and patronisingly — about what is good for Pakistanis without their consent. It is about flailing, pathetic attempts to control information. It is about insulting the collective intelligence of this country by saying the ban was put in place for our protection. But the governments — the previous one that put the ban in place, and this one for keeping it — through all this have not surprised. Governments the world over would like to keep themselves away from censure and criticism. They would like to have a monopoly over information. It is civil society’s responsibility to keep those authoritarian ambitions in check. In this regard, Pakistani citizens’ reactions have been meaningful, if limited.

YouTube star Ali Gul Pir and co. did their part by singing a song about it. The Pakistan for All-led KholoBC initiative has been both subversive, and a draw for young internet users. NGOs Bolo Bhi and Bytes For All have put in countless hours in court dates, petitions and advocacy. But if we are to end the ban, the government needs a greater push. The two-year anniversary in that regard provides an ideal opportunity for citizens to press their representatives about the ban’s reversal. The courts, while willing to hear the petitions, have not decreed this way or that. The Senate Committee on Information Technology conducted hearings of its own on this issue and in the end its members unanimously agreed that the website need to be reopened. The fact is that even Saudi Arabia doesn’t ban YouTube anymore and the only Muslim country that does is Iran, but its reasons may also have to do with curbing political dissent in general. One, unfortunately, get the impression that the government seems to think that people have just forgotten about the ban and will get on with their lives as usual. However, it misses the point that the site is invaluable to millions of citizens, especially students, artistes, musicians, and afficianados of music/drama.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 17th, 2014.

__________________
"I am still learning."

No-fly zone

Whatever the real reason for the delay of flight PK-370, whether it was for what PIA called ‘technical reasons’, or because former minister Rehman Malik caused it to be held to suit himself; what was at issue was the pernicious VIP culture. It was at issue later on the same day when the captain of PIA flight PK-757 allegedly refused to fly to London because the wife of Nawaz Sharif and her daughter had brought their cook who was travelling with them in the first class section. The cabin crew protested to the pilot, he stood his ground, the members of the Sharif family reportedly told him that it is ‘the Sharif family airline’ and the cook eventually went back to economy class where she had a paid-for seat. The incident with Rehman Malik was captured on cellphone cameras by several passengers, complete with audio and spread rapidly across the social media on the morning of September 16. Few, if any, sprang to the defence of the senator (and former interior minister), and some saw the incident as the start of a revolt against VIP culture. The blame-and-denial game started within minutes of the video going viral, statements were issued right and left and the waters swiftly muddied and remain muddied 24 hours later. The people of Pakistan are heartily sick of being inconvenienced and brushed aside by their politicians — and others of elevated position — who believe in their unassailable right of primacy of passage. Whether it is in the air or on the ground these people demand and get ‘protocol’ and ‘respect’ on the entirely specious grounds that they are in some way more deserving than everybody else using the roads or airways. They stop traffic sometimes for extended periods, jump queues automatically, have their thugs intimidate anybody that might object to their behaviour and generally act like the kings and queens that they most assuredly are not. They are supported by obsequious police and grovelling captains of aircraft fearful for their jobs and the pernicious cycle goes round and round.

Privilege even extends to those who no longer hold office — Rehman Malik is no longer a minister — and the saga of the defeated MNAs who refused to vacate their parliamentary lodge accommodation after the last election dragged on for months. They eventually had to be forcibly evicted, protesting a violation of their ‘rights’ as they were, by the Capital Development Authority (CDA). Whilst nobody in Pakistan has yet gone as far as those protesting against corruption in Ukraine who manhandled a senior politician into a rubbish skip and then beat him with his own briefcase, one suspects that there will be many who would not raise a demurral were that ever to happen. The evicted ex-parliamentarians in Islamabad garnered not one iota of sympathy. Two threads are intertwined with the incidents noted above. One is a deepening mistrust and outright dislike of politicians particularly those of the ‘Old Order’; and the other is an awakening that appears to be gathering pace by the day to the realisation that direct action can occasionally have dramatic results, all the more amplified if there is a cell phone with camera enabled waiting to capture every detail. Social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook in Pakistan, are avid consumers — and propagators — of gossip that is sometimes ill-founded, and a growing play-bill of the gaffes of those that purport to rule the nation. However, in this particular situation, they were important vehicles in channelling public resentment against the ruling elite. Embarrassing a politician with an inflated sense of his own importance is all very well, but vigilantism is a slippery slope in a society as volatile and prone to violence as exists in Pakistan. The mob does not come equipped with a handbrake, and events all too quickly can slip out of control. By all means let us challenge the VIP culture at every juncture, expose those who abuse their position, but do so within the bounds of the law — a revolution we sense the people may welcome.

A good suggestion

The government’s decision to make imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) the primary source of fuel for compressed natural gas (CNG) stations in the country is one of the few sound measures in energy policy that seems to be going ahead as planned. Imported LNG, while it may end up being slightly cheaper than oil, is still going to be an expensive fuel. Given the diminishing domestic gas reserves, it makes sense to ration the remaining gas to industries that produce the most direct economic benefits, such as the power sector. CNG, currently available at artificially cheap rates, amounts to a massive subsidy to Pakistan’s upper middle class and is among the more wasteful aspects of the current energy policy. Having said that, while we welcome this current decision of the government, we do believe that a far better mechanism for dealing with gas shortages in the country is to allow for market pricing rather than keeping prices artificially low. Rather than having to ration out gas on the basis of which lobby is best able to get its voice heard in Islamabad, the government would be better off simply by letting prices rise to a market equilibrium and then letting people make their own gas consumption decisions on the basis of the market clearing price.

We understand that the government is currently distracted by the drama playing out in Islamabad, but we do believe that the obligation to govern does not end just because there are distractions. The government of Pakistan consists of more than 1.4 million employees and the machinery of the state should not grind to a halt just because a caravan of political activists have parked themselves in front of the Pakistan Secretariat over the last few weeks. Energy policy must once again take centre stage, and the prime minister must move forward with the tough but necessary actions that need to be taken with regard to realigning the government’s role in the energy markets. That starts with removing the government’s unnecessary subsidies to those who least need them. Removing the subsidy from CNG users would be a good start, but much more is needed.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18th, 2014.

__________________
"I am still learning."

Time to end the hunting permits

The houbara bustard hunting season is once again imminent and these migratory birds will be hunted by assorted dignitaries and ‘notables’ from the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf region. Up to 17 permits a year are issued, allowing permit holders to hunt up to 10 birds a day in specified areas, a number that is reportedly widely flouted. Also flouted is the requirement that the birds are hunted with falcons but they are more frequently shot, instead. The Arab hunters come to Balochistan for its bustards because of the alleged aphrodisiac qualities of its meat, a myth unsupported by a shred of evidence. The hunters bring with them their cooks, cleaners, drivers and other servants as well as their courtiers, and have been known to benefit local communities by building airports and roads. They distribute money, Hajj tickets and food to those local ‘influentials’ that facilitate them but the trickle-down to the common man is minuscule. The Balochistan Forest Department has protested the issuing of permits, saying that bustard numbers are in decline — they are — and that at the very least there needs to be a moratorium on hunting to allow the numbers to recover.

Houbara bustards are an endangered species and are nominally protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). In a miserable irony the hunters all come from countries that are signatories to CITES, and earlier this year the United Arab Emirates sent a hunting party to Balochistan as it was simultaneously signing a treaty to protect them with the government of Kazakhstan, where many of the birds commence their fatal migration. The hunting permits are issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and have been for decades. It is time to call a halt to this annual slaughter and for the ministry to stop issuing permits, no matter whose toes it may tread on. Pakistan needs to impress upon its friends in the Gulf and the Middle East that it is serious about protecting its endangered wildlife. It is time that we shed the ways of the past and stopped appeasing the princes at the expense of these beautiful birds.

Militants in Karachi

After another police-led operation killed seven alleged militants in Karachi on September 18, questions arise about the scope and scale of the state’s battle against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Vastly outnumbered in fighters, weapons and capital, it made little sense for the TTP to stay and fight the military in Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Predictably, most militants have fled to either Afghanistan, (where may even find safe haven granted by sections of the Afghan government) or in urban hubs like Karachi. ‘Fund-raising’ activities like kidnapping, extortion rackets, smuggling and the drug trade are all conducted in Karachi as well. In the meantime, they’ve also made considerable efforts to control territory, targeting policemen, political parties, and ordinary citizens in the process. It was inevitable that the fight in Fata would spill over elsewhere, and it already has had lethal consequences for Karachi’s already violence-plagued citizens. What is to be done? Evidently Zarb-e-Azb, though ostensibly effective, is a limited approach.

Counterterrorism activities need to be expanded to include urban centres as well. To an extent, that has been the case in the sustained Karachi operation, but it needs better organisation. One hopes for better coordination between the military and law-enforcement agencies (LEA) to target escaping TTP militants, and cut their financial supplies as well. This does not necessarily mean more military action, but it requires better intelligence gathering and communication. A word also needs to be said about transparency, of which there has been very little in both Zarb-e-Azb and the Karachi operation. Without enough — or independently verified — information, the public has little idea about who we are fighting or the actual success — otherwise — of the action. Frequent protests from families of alleged ‘miscreants’ claiming their innocence, and a failure to present those arrested in court makes it imperative that the LEAs come clean about who they target, how, and what happens to them once they are in custody.

The measles battle

Pakistan has a chronic shortage of good — or even barely adequate — public health provisions. Even in places where public health is of passing quality, the capital Islamabad for instance, it can take very little to disrupt its delivery. The anti-measles vaccination programme in Islamabad has to say the very least a chequered history, and is far behind schedule for a range of reasons associated with underfunding and poor management. This year the funds arrived and the campaign was due to kick off when it ran straight into the buffers of a deteriorating security situation linked to the ongoing protests there. The drive lasts 12 days and the teams delivering the vaccines need mobility and security. A range of vaccine-preventable illnesses in children are resurgent — measles and polio being the headline examples — and their rise is directly linked to high volumes of displaced persons as in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and highly variable local security deficits that have seen an attack on a polio team this week that left a policeman dead.

Un-immunised children are themselves a threat to other children, and can carry a disease without themselves displaying symptoms. The successive failure of the measles campaigns in the national capital is going to degrade whatever there was of herd immunity and open the door for the measles virus to run riot. The 20 schools earmarked as bases for the campaign are currently occupied by the police and army providing security to the centre of the capital. The effects of the ongoing demonstrations are reaching into every corner of the country. The national and provincial governments are transfixed like rabbits in the headlights of the oncoming car that eventually runs them over. Islamabad needs its children to be vaccinated against measles if this and future generations are to be protected from this preventable disease. The longer the demonstrations continue, the more they erode the health of our children, both today and tomorrow.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 19th, 2014.

__________________
"I am still learning."

President Xi in India

President Xi Jinping of China is currently in India on a three-day visit, there to service an important strategic partnership. He is going to sign a slew of MoUs that centre around trade and investment and discuss the festering border dispute — currently spiking as about 200 Chinese apparently entered territory claimed by India intent on building a road. They left, seemingly amicably. The Modi government has a hill to climb in terms of revitalising the Indian economy that is close to being dead in the water, and needs all the help it can get. Both China and India were on a par with each other in economic terms in the 1980s, but the speed of growth in the Chinese economy has left India panting in its wake. For the Chinese their interests in India are very similar to what they are in Pakistan — investment in infrastructure that will be of benefit to the Chinese economy and open new markets for Chinese goods, and the creation of industrial zones — or trade corridors in the case of Pakistan. India is reportedly uneasy about the way in which China is active in what it regards as its ‘back garden’ — the Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Myanmar — and no happier about the deepening Chinese relationship with ourselves. Although there was much huffing and puffing about the delayed visit of the Chinese premier to Pakistan as a result of security concerns, the reality is that the Chinese are not about to walk away from Pakistan any more than they are from India, simply because the benefits to China are potentially so great that a little cross-border irritation is not going to get in the way of doing business. For its part, China is less than delighted with the warming-up of relations between India and the US, but as America pivots towards the Pacific — events in the Middle East notwithstanding — this has to be seen as another factor in the re-balancing of the geopolitical scales. President Xi Jinping will eventually pay us a visit, and it is in our best interests to have our house in order when he does. Pakistan will probably benefit from such a visit much more than India, as a number of infrastructural projects in Pakistan are dependent upon Chinese funding and technological collaboration.

Scotland — can we learn?

Democracy is alive and in robust good health in the United Kingdom (UK). The people of Scotland have voted not to dissolve a union that has lasted more than 300 years and will remain a part of the UK. Opinion polls had put the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ camps neck-and-neck, but the final result gave the ‘No’ campaign 55 per cent of the vote at 2,001,926; and the ‘Yes’ campaign 45 per cent and 1,617,989 votes. The turnout was very high at 84.6 per cent, and it may fairly be said that the majority of the people of Scotland have had their say. The mainstream parties in the UK now have to make good on the promises of additional devolved powers to Scotland if they are not to lose yet more credibility. The referendum was outside the political sphere in that it was not a vote along party lines, but it is going to define the political landscape for a generation to come. According to reports both the campaign and the ballot were closely watched by representatives of the Quebec and Catalan separatist movements, and Kashmiris. That the referendum was held at all was a political risk for the sitting UK government, and had it gone in favour of the ‘Yes’ campaign the consequences would have been profound and felt geopolitically. Sighs of relief have been breathed in a number of places, not least the US and the countries of the EU. Now the dust has to settle and a polarised Scotland will work out what the result will mean in practical terms. As an exercise in inclusive democratic consultation the Scottish Referendum of 2014 has set the benchmark. Strategic tiffs and territorial battles mark many other regions of the world and the Scottish Referendum has proved that disagreements can be resolved with peace and grace, and that nationalistic sentiments need not be rowdy. Can we in Pakistan perhaps learn something from the way this was done? We have issues — such as more provinces — which could be put to a referendum. Of course, the most obvious would be the maturity shown by all sides with the loser, the pro-independence camp, readily and graciously excepting defeat. Time will tell.

An iconoclast silenced

Muhammad Shakil Auj, the dean of the Islamic Studies faculty at Karachi University, was shot and killed on September 18. Typically, his killers were not identified. Dr Auj was an outspoken citizen never afraid to disagree with orthodoxy, but he always voiced those disagreements with academic diligence, intellectual integrity and moral clarity. That mix has become lethal as challenging religious orthodoxy looks increasingly like a death sentence, as it indeed was for Dr Auj. The police have said that he was accused of blasphemy in 2012, with calls for his decapitation circling on text messages. Given the gravity and consequences of these accusations, Dr Auj was well aware of the threats he faced to his life. That he lodged an FIR against his accusers, but it was to no avail. No one pursued his case; no one searched for his would-be killers. It must also be asked why the university did not make adequate arrangements to protect its senior staffer; the university must also have known about the danger to his life. In fact, as a bastion of secular learning and diverse discourse, the university was equally threatened, and Dr Auj’s loss has been a mortal blow not just to his family, but to his students, his university and to academia in Pakistan as well. There is a sinister cycle of violence in this city. Those who seek to challenge select narratives of faith are not safe on the streets, in the mosques or in institutions of secular learning. When bigotry seeps into the university — the one site which is regarded to be the haven of different views, a place where minds are nourished — there are few spaces left for critical thought, diversity of opinion, or any kind of academic conviction that strays outside the tyranny of the mainstream. That mainstream itself has been, and continues to shift unceasingly to the right, and its presence demands an oppressive silence, if not outright conformity. On September 18, an iconoclast was silenced and the murderous bigots had won.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20th, 2014.

__________________
"I am still learning."

Slow to learn

If Pakistan were to be assessed by an educational psychologist he or she may conclude that as a nation it was a slow learner. ‘Slow learner’ describes students that have the ability to learn, but do so at a rate and depth that is below the average of their peers of the same age. They need more time, frequent repetition and more resources from their teachers to be successful. Their reasoning skills are delayed making new concepts difficult to grasp, and they may have an impairment of perceptions of self worth, as well as presenting behaviours that are ‘acting out’ and a form of denial. There is also a tendency to repeat the same mistakes, and the floods of 2014 and the collective response to them at the federal and provincial level conforms broadly to the slow learner model outlined above. Over the last five years Pakistan has suffered a succession of weather events which in and of themselves were not necessarily ‘extreme’, but which for a complex nexus of reasons had extreme consequences. All are associated with an annual event — the monsoon — and all involved large bodies of water moving down the Indus River system in both India and Pakistan. All have produced catastrophic floods whose effects are now cumulative, with ample empirical evidence that communities are taking longer to recover each time they are inundated, poverty indicators rise as does food insecurity, and homes destroyed are not replaced on a ‘build back better’ basis where they are replaced at all. The cycle of flooding is not going to abate and is going to continue year-on-year, and in all likelihood worsen as the effects of global warming begin to massively affect the countries of the subcontinent. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), based in Islamabad, has recently looked in detail at events that occurred in the floods of 2010. Officials both federal and provincial opined that ‘poor planning’ lay behind much of the dysfunctionality and bad decision-making which magnified rather than mitigated the effects of the flood.

There was insufficient temporary shelter with families waiting days under open skies before getting any relief. When the IDPs eventually returned to their homes or what was left of them and approached local NGOs and government departments, they found there was minimal coordination between the public and private sectors with the consequence that many fell through the gaps in service provision. Humanitarian services in some places were ‘influenced’ by major landowners, causing some NGOs to decide to withdraw. Disaster management committees that had Plan A and a backup Plan B, found themselves undercut when ‘higher authorities’ imposed Plan C — for which they were unprepared. Despite the floods Pakistan is rapidly becoming a water-poor nation, and responses to both flooding and water management generally tend to be reactionary and tokenistic, driven by short-term political expediency rather than the joined-up thinking so desperately needed. The dams that should have been built were not; the ones that were built are poorly maintained. The challenges presented by climate change are cross-generational and transcend cycles of electoral governance. Slow-learning Pakistan is going to be repeatedly struck by disasters that are essentially the same every time, only varying in magnitude. Earthquakes are unpredictable, the monsoon and its effects entirely predictable and with considerable accuracy, and the response to them can and should be better than it is. Services such as Rescue 1122 which is now well established in Punjab need to be rolled out and appropriately equipped and trained nationally. The National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) in response to the 2010 floods issued in 2013 a National Disaster Risk Reduction Policy that details how to respond to future extreme events by reducing the risks associated with them, and is an excellent building block in what needs to be a much larger planning and implementation process. Slow learners do — eventually — learn, but it can be a painful process for all concerned.

Credit to our white-hats

Hackers — people who make a habit of burgling other peoples computers and security systems — come in all shapes and sizes, with those who are malicious in their intent being called ‘Black Hats’ and those who are rather more benign ‘White Hats’. They tend to be at the top end of the Uber-Geek spectrum, young, predominantly but not exclusively male, and sometimes prodigiously good at what they do. So good that large and prestigious corporations and global entities with a heavy reliance of information technology and an awareness of the vulnerabilities thereof, often employ them to test the security of their systems on a rolling basis. Pakistan has its share of both black and white-hatted hackers, and one of them, a 21-year-old called Rafay Baloch has just identified and written the code for a fix of a major security flaw in the Google Android operating system, which sits at the heart of millions of smartphones worldwide. The bug allows access to private data which can be either sold-on to criminal networks or used to exploit the victim’s computer activity — online banking and credit and debit card purchases for instance. Baloch earns his living as a cyber-bug bounty hunter. He was awarded $10,000 and had the offer of a job from PayPal for detecting vulnerabilities in the online payment system, but it seems he is to get no reward for his efforts — which will have saved Google and Android from a potentially damaging attack — because Android does not have a vulnerability rewards programme, and Baloch does not qualify under the Android Patch Rewards Programme either, which seems unfair to say the very least. The Google representative in Pakistan has not returned calls regarding this matter and it seems that this is one White-Hat who is not going to get his just reward. Pakistan is just beginning to wake up to the realities of cybercrime, with our systems and networks no less vulnerable to criminal hackers than anywhere else in the world. It is to be hoped that our White-Hats will be able to rise to the challenge.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 21st, 2014

__________________
"I am still learning."

Drowning in polio

Pakistan says it is ready to face an Ebola outbreak should it occur here. The deadly virus has claimed thousands of lives in Africa. Meanwhile, Pakistan has had more than 160 cases of polio thus far this season and remains one of the three countries alongside Afghanistan and Nigeria that continues to struggle with the epidemic. The entire world has managed to control the disease, while the epidemic seems to be exacerbating here. The need to devise a new strategy is apparent. It is a positive development that the national manager of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation has recognised this need. However, there is a sense of urgency here as the history of implementing the polio campaign is not favourable; Pakistan began the campaign in 1974 but began eradication in 1993. Today, additional factors have complicated eradication in Pakistan. The first factor is terrorism and the threat to polio workers, who risk their lives for a few hundred rupees to go door to door and immunise children. Then, there is the unwillingness on the part of parents to allow their children to be vaccinated due to mythical beliefs that the vaccine causes impotence. Third, there is the shameful lack of hygiene across the country and the lack of hygiene awareness amongst our population. Poliovirus has been found in our sewages which is relevant because the virus spreads through faecal-oral routes or through contaminated food and water. And now, we are also dealing with decreased morale as officials are fearful to venture into ‘no-go’ areas in cities such as Karachi because of security threats. Globally, since 1988, there has been a 99 per cent reduction in cases. However, Pakistan might soon offset that statistic. The number of cases of the virus rose by 37 per cent in 2011 even though, according to Amnesty International, Pakistan had vaccinated 83 per cent of children in 1991. It is welcome that there is aid coming from international organisations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to help mitigate polio in Pakistan. However, these resources must be used with utmost strategic planning, for which outside help should be sought as we have suffered the disease for too long.

IDPs’ protest

If there is one group of people who are entirely justified in protesting about anything they might choose to protest about, it is the internally displaced persons (IDPs) from North Waziristan Agency. There is no universally agreed figure as to how many there are, but about a million would not seem to be far off the mark — and this is also the figure given by the government. For many they have, quite literally, lost everything. Their homes, their livestock and their crops that were standing when they left, in many cases all gone. Pictures of the shops and market places in the centre of towns in the Agency show wholesale devastation. Once thriving communities blasted to rubble. They have lost their dignity as well, going from self-reliance to beggary in a matter of days as they were forced to move out by the ongoing Zarb-e-Azb operation. Hundreds of thousands live in makeshift camps in and around Bannu, and on September 18 their frustrations came to a head in the form of a confrontation with the police on the Bannu-DI Khan road. The complaints of the protesters were many but boiled down to a sense of having been abandoned and ignored by both the provincial and federal governments, despite the obvious and undeniable sacrifices they had made in the service of the state. They were also protesting against the prolonged power cuts in Bannu that is adding to their misery, and claimed that Wapda officials were deaf to their pleas. Some of the demonstrators agreed with the claims by the army that large areas of the Agency had been cleared of militants but there appeared to be no move to get the IDPs repatriated. The threat they made was to take their protest to the Parliament House in Islamabad and there stage a sit-in, presumably jockeying for space with the several thousand already camped there. There was brawling between the police and demonstrators and live rounds were fired into the air. The North Waziristan IDPs have much to justifiably complain about, and they deserve not only to be heard but also relieved of the burden of injustice that the state has heaped upon them.

A dangerous illness

There is rising concern about the increased incidence of cases of illness usually leading to death caused by the Naegleria Fowleri (NF) amoeba. This is a protozoic that lives in fresh water and if it gets into the human body, usually via contaminated drinking water, it attacks the nervous system and quickly causes paralysis and death. The survival rate globally is about one per cent, which makes it considerably more deadly in terms of mortality rates than the Ebola virus currently rampaging across the countries of West Africa. The amoeba lives in poorly chlorinated potable water and therein lies the source of current concerns. It is often wrongly diagnosed as meningitis in its early stages and by the time it can be diagnosed it is usually too late for the patient, and many diagnoses are made post-mortem. It has a relatively low incidence in Pakistan with the majority of reported cases being from Karachi. Ten people have died in Karachi since May 2014. There are a handful of cases nationally most years but now a spike has appeared, and it is difficult not to associate this with deficiencies in the chlorination of potable water in the city. There were 3,141 water samples taken in different parts of the city of which 561 were shown to be chlorine-deficient, or around 16 per cent of the total, a worryingly high figure. Chlorine is the globally used deterrent for NF. Some 30 per cent of the water in the city is inadequately chlorinated. It is true as pointed out by a chief chemist of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, that too much chlorine in the water is itself harmful, but this fails to address the point. The potable water system in the city is ancient, badly maintained and underfunded. Contamination with sewage is not unknown. Until the matter is resolved the residents of Karachi need to ensure that their drinking water is from a clean source and preferably boiled for a minimum of one minute. Prevention is better than cure — especially when there is no cure.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 22nd, 2014

__________________
"I am still learning."

Burying the hatchets in Afghanistan

The origins of the phrase ‘burying the hatchet’ lie in the language of a Native American tribe called the Iroquois, and are first recorded (in French) in 1644. It is an expression that can be both literal and figurative, with real hatchets being buried as a symbolic act that signals the onset of peace or the resolution of a dispute. Hatchets in industrial quantities and of military-grade specification are going to have to be buried very deep if the announcement that Ashraf Ghani has been named as the Afghan president-elect on September 21, 2014 — is to produce a durable peace in a much-troubled country. The announcement was made by the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan which in an unusual move decided not to release the figures that would prove or disprove the victory of Mr Ghani, which itself may have sown the seeds of further dispute. The contest for the post of president has been acrimonious from the outset, made worse by a flawed original election and a second round that produced the demand for an audit of every ballot paper cast. The audit — which was agreed by both parties — was itself challenged but carried on regardless, eventually to produce this less-than-transparent result. What has been brokered is essentially a power-sharing agreement between the two men, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah. Ghani is to share power with a chief executive who will be nominated by Abdullah who, it transpires, was the one to insist that the final figures not be released. He is widely believed to have been far behind Ghani in the audit of the votes, and would have wanted to save face. Electoral rigging is a creature of many facets. The results are now delayed ‘to a later date’ — hardly a recipe for sweetness and light to break out and a hatchet that lies still on the surface.

The new president is due to be sworn in on September 29, and there is much detail work to be completed before then. The model of governance is untested but it is going to have to hit the ground running. The security pact with the US that has been stymied for months by president Karzai — needs to be ratified. This will allow foreign troops to remain beyond the 2014 deadline for withdrawal. Secondly, the role of the newly created chief executive has no ratification (or definition) in law. Thirdly, the economy is about to go over a cliff. Revenues are down by 30 per cent and will drop further as aid pipelines close. Fourth, donor relations, or the lack thereof. The confidence gap between donors and the donation-receiver which is of colossal proportions. Fifth, the Taliban, the extremely large elephant in the room. They remain undefeated, are able to mount attacks at will, and control large swathes of the country in the south and east. They may — or may not — be open to re-opening talks. Ghani is seen as a reformist, and may have made inroads in terms of popularity into the Pakhtun community that voted for Abdullah. The audit would have revealed that if true, much to the chagrin of Abdullah. The deadlock between the two men is more than being about a clash of egos — which it is as well — but is based on profound cultural and ethnic differences that have long been behind the swinging of hatchets and their subsequent burial in the skulls of the opposing parties rather than beneath a lonely tree and accompanied by a smoking of the pipes of peace. The five points outlined above are the sketchiest of outlines of the agenda for the incoming government. Foreign relations, not least relations with Pakistan, are on the ‘to-do’ list, likewise relations with China and India, a complex and volatile matrix that will require deft handling. We wish the new Afghan government well, and equally wish for hatchets to truly be buried. In the ground.

IK in K-Town

The Revolution Roadshow came briefly to Karachi on September 21 and supporters of Imran Khan who is currently, but so far unsuccessfully, trying to bring down the sitting government, welcomed him. Mr Khan brought with him his by now familiar position statements, modified to take account of his local audience that had turned out in their tens of thousands. He spoke of wanting to bring unity to Punjabis, Sindhis, Baloch, Pakhtuns and Mohajirs, a litany that would be familiar to the ears of those who have lived in Karachi for decades — many of who will have viewed the turnout for Mr Khan with a gelid eye. There can now be no doubt that Mr Khan can command the kind of support in numbers that may for the first time in decades somewhat challenge the political primacy of the MQM in our largest city, and largest revenue generator for the national economy. Turning supporters at a Sunday rally into a force that would challenge the political status quo in Karachi may not be such an improbability after all. Mr Khan was careful to tick the right boxes for his audience. He promised to depoliticise the police force of Karachi, long seen as a major hurdle in the way of bringing any sort of peace and stability to the city, and to end the blight of targeted killing. He vowed to eliminate the water and land mafias in Lyari, a part of the city notorious for its gang warfare as well as the desperate poverty and deprivation of basic services of many of its inhabitants. He promised a great deal, none of it much different from what every other politician in Karachi has promised, and he did it all without a single mention of dominant political parties, something of a feat by itself. Whatever one thinks of Imran Khan and his methods — particularly seeking to overthrow a government by something other than democratic process — there can be no doubt that he has touched a chord with a section of the population that had been politically inert for many years. A conventional revolution it is not — but a harbinger of change it is.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 23rd, 2014

__________________
"I am still learning."