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Right from its founding, the state of Israel became the Holocaust-state. But we are not a helpless ghetto anymore – we have powerful armed forces, we can indeed do unto others as others have done unto us.
The old existential fears, mistrusts, suspicions, hatreds, prejudices, stereotypes, sense of victimhood, dreams of revenge, that were born in the Diaspora, have superimposed themselves on the state, creating a very dangerous mixture of power and victimhood, brutality and masochism, militarism and the conviction that the whole world is against us. Can such a state survive and flourish in the modern world?
European nation-states have fought many wars. But they never forgot that after a war comes peace, that today’s enemy may well be tomorrow’s ally. Nation-states remain, but they are becoming more and more interdependent, joining regional structures, giving up huge chunks of their sovereignty. Israel cannot do that.
The vast majority of Israelis believe that there will never be peace. They are convinced that “the Arabs” are out to throw us into the sea. They see mighty Israel as the victim surrounded by enemies, while our “friends” are liable to stick a knife in our back any time. They see the eternal occupation of Palestinian territories and the setting up of belligerent settlements all over Palestine as a result of Arab intransigence, not as its cause.
They insist that Israel be recognised as the “nation-state of the Jewish people”. This means that Israel does not belong to the Israelis (the very concept of an “Israeli nation” is officially rejected by our government) but to the worldwide ethnic-religious Jewish Diaspora, who have never been asked whether they agree to Israel representing them. It is the very negation of a real nation-state that can live in peace with its neighbours and join a regional union.
I have never laboured under any illusions about the magnitude of the task my friends and I set ourselves decades ago. It is not to change this or that aspect of Israel, but to change the fundamental nature of the state itself.
It is far more than a matter of politics, to substitute one party for another. It is even far more than making peace with the Palestinian people, ending the occupation, evacuating the settlements. It is to effect a basic change of [or “in”] the national consciousness, the consciousness of every Israeli man and woman.
It has been said that “you can get the Jews out of the ghetto, but you can’t get the ghetto out of the Jews.” But that is exactly what needs to be done. Can it be done? I think so. I certainly hope so.
Perhaps we need a shock – either a positive or a negative one. The appearance here of Anwar Sadat in 1977 can serve as an example of a positive shock: by coming to Jerusalem while a state of war was still in effect, he produced an overnight change in the consciousness of Israelis.
So did the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993. So did, in a negative way, the Yom Kippur war, exactly 38 years ago, which shook Israel to the core. But these were minor, brief shocks compared to what is needed.
A Second Herzl could, perhaps, effect such a miracle, against the odds. In the words of the first Herzl: “If you want it, it is not a fairy tale.”
(Excerpted from the article ‘The Coming Shock’ posted on www.counterpunch.org)
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist.
Source: The News

The Jewish question by Uri Avnery


The New York Times carried an article by Bruce Reidel, on October 14 titled ‘Containment – a new policy for dealing with Pakistan’ and followed it up only three days later with yet another front page report captioned ‘Suspicions of Pakistan grow with attacks’.
Bruce Reidel, once a key Obama adviser on South Asia, now works for Brookings, one of the numerous ‘think tanks’ that abound in Washington DC and vie for influence on policy making. These institutions promote their brand of politics and many of them who work in those elite outfits are not really scholars but publicists. Reidel, a former CIA sleuth, is one of those so-called scholars, while the New York Times often doubles up as an apologist of Israeli foreign policy.
Both Bruce Reidel and the New York Times seem to have launched on a twin crusade to get the Obama administration worked up sufficiently to teach Pakistan a lesson for blocking the United States from making an honourable exit from Afghanistan if not for denying an outright military victory.
Reidel’s article is the work of a publicist. Had it been the work of a scholar, it would have been less jagged, more rounded and much better informed. Nor is it a serious re-examination of the present US policy. Reidel’s basic contention is that the only recourse left to America is ‘containment of the Pakistan Army’s ambition until real civilian rule returns’ to Pakistan.
For a start, this is puzzling because Pakistan cannot really ‘return’ to ‘real civilian rule’ since it has never existed before. A scholar would have known, for instance, that the Constituent Assembly, elected prior to partition, was supposed to draft a constitution and although it subsequently acted as a legislature, it failed on both counts and was dissolved.
Subsequent attempts by Major General Iskander Mirza and Field Marshal Ayub Khan to give Pakistan a durable constitution also failed. The latter’s bespoke constitution fitted him but not the country. The ‘civilian’ interlude which followed under ZA Bhutto was an aberration since Bhutto assumed power as a martial law administrator, being the only civilian in the world to have enjoyed that dubious distinction.
Admittedly Bhutto did give Pakistan a constitution in April 1973 but the very next day he suspended provisions of the constitution that granted citizens the right to approach the courts. Not a democrat by instinct, Bhutto finally fell victim to his own vanity. Thereafter the military has seated and unseated governments much as it has wished. Hence, for Washington to wait out the military ‘until real civilian rule returns’ would be like mistaking a mirage for an oasis in the desert.
Reidel’s second piece of advice for Obama is equally impractical. He suggests a policy of ‘containment’ towards the Pakistani establishment which is not aimed at ‘hurting Pakistan’s people but at holding its army and intelligence branches accountable’.
Implicit is such advice is the belief that the Pakistani public is averse to the army’s involvement in politics. That might have been true for a while but not after the mess created by the Zardari-Gilani duo. They have mired the country in governance issues, corruption has soared to unprecedented heights under their watch and the country is assailed on all sides by terrorists, while their political opponents and a disgruntled public are now hollering for their removal. Once again, sadly, many are looking to the army to act as the proverbial deus ex machina. Ironically if the current dispensation is still in power it is because of the army’s restraining influence.
Furthermore, even a cursory reading of Pakistan’s history will show that it is the military that has had a soft spot for the US albeit, as many believe, for selfish and ill-advised reasons. The people have never been able to work up a similar enthusiasm for the US or its policies.
Thus, it was the military that pushed for Pakistan’s membership of Cento and Seato in the 1950s when the foreign office advised caution; and it again prodded the government of the day in 1956 to support the western intervention in Egypt, during the Suez crisis which infuriated the public.
Moreover, two recent parliamentary resolutions calling for a military response to the US drone and ground attacks, which the military has repeatedly ignored, shows that left to parliament, the US-Pakistan relations would have been a lot worse by now. So much for Riedel’s notion that with the ‘return’ of real civilian rule, all would be hunky dory between Washington and Islamabad.
However, Riedel is spot on when he says the strategic interests of the US and Pakistan ‘are in conflict and not (in) harmony’. Indeed the two countries stand on opposite sides of the fence. Our enemies are different; our thoughts and plans for what is best for the region are poles apart; the roles we envisage for each other are in stark contrast; our respective positions on controversial matters of international law as much as on current world issues such as Palestine, Kashmir, Iran, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, nuclear and disarmament, etc, are very different if not completely at odds. How can a return to ‘real’ civilian rule make a difference when there is so much divergence?
Riedel is right to ask why Pakistan seems so obstreperous and why it has not yet buckled under. But his answer (that ‘they seem to think they are invulnerable because they control Nato’s supply line from Kabul to Karachi and have nuclear weapons’) is far too simplistic and irresponsible, not being based on facts and hard analysis.
Admittedly, the nuclear shield does help Pakistan to deter India and hence generates a sense of confidence within the country. It ended Pakistan’s perennial need for allies, like America, to offset India’s conventional military superiority. In that sense American goodwill for Pakistan though important is no longer essential. But that is by no means the only reason why the Pakistani worm finally turned.
Poor American diplomacy made worse by some crass insensitivity towards Pakistan has played a bigger role. Obama callously bypassed Pakistan during his visit to India; the US-India civil nuclear power deal is estimated to vastly augment India’s ability to multiply its stockpile of nuclear warheads; the opening of America’s armories to India; the failure to push harder on Kashmir after initial promises to do more; the Raymond Davis matter and Obama’s personal assurance that that the violence prone murderous CIA thug was a diplomat and scores of niggly incidents that remain unreported but take place almost daily in dealings between their respective officials. All these have accelerated the decline of the US-Pak relations.
Other developments have also done further damage, sometimes dramatically, like over the Bin Laden raid and Mullen’s diatribe in the Congress against the ISI and that, too, just after he had a constructive session of talks with Kayani. The latest bone of contention is, of course, the safe haven granted by the US-Afghan forces to the murderous Fazlullah gang whose attacks into Pakistan from across the border have resulted in the death of nearly a hundred Pakistani soldiers.
No wonder then many Pakistanis too are willing to throw caution to the wind and risk ending a relationship that is still, in some important respects, clearly in the interests of both countries.
Currently the US really has very little to offer given the mood prevailing in the Congress and the dire warnings and threats that have been pouring out of Washington. These are identical in many respects to Riedel’s own advice to consider sanctions, hot pursuit, targeted killing of ISI officials and who knows perhaps also an invasion eventually.
Far from reducing the army’s role in the country’s political life these ill-conceived threats will make it more intrusive even as politicians clamber over each other, for their own reasons, to come to the defence of the armed forces, thereby postponing even further the inception (not the return) to real civilian rule in Pakistan.
Aristotle’s words seem to apply aptly to the current US-Pakistan imbroglio: If you have to get angry ‘let’s get angry at the right things and with the right people and in the right way and at the right time and for the right length of time’.

Let’s get angry in the right way by Zafar Hilaly


SOME people change history others censor it. A much-acclaimed 1987 essay by Prof A.K. Ramanujan about the many written and oral legends of Lord Ram was deleted last week from the history syllabus of Delhi University.
The tinkering with high academia had an insidious purpose. Previous assaults on scientific history writing in India occurred when the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party was in power. The latest outrage came under the Congress’s watch. Some background would be useful.
As a young boy in Lucknow I was exposed to the legend of Ram as a benign god. Allama Iqbal and Hasrat Mohani were regarded among his better-known Muslim fans. The nawabs of Awadh had ensured enough amity between upper-caste Hindus and Muslims to last a century or more.
This is the time of Diwali; that’s when the elderly Mrs Puri would inaugurate her overnight, uninterrupted readings of the Ramayan in our Lucknow neighbourhood of Nirala Nagar. I was almost always roped in to continue the readings of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, which was in Awadhi — that is whenever the ladies had to leave for their tea or gossip.
The opportunity may not influence the hereafter for me, but it did yield enormous amounts of fruit and sweets as reward. The standard greeting among ordinary Hindus of Lucknow or when they met their Muslim friends was either Aadaab or Ram Ram, occasionally Jai Ramji Ki, long live Ramji.
In the 1990s, the phrase suddenly turned into Jai Shri Ram. One could smell social engineering. It is akin to turning Khudahafiz into Allah Hafiz in Pakistan.
Fundamentalist, however, is not a description we can readily apply to Hindus, no matter how right-wing they may be in politics. Hindus do not have a written code to refer to, nor do they claim fundamental precepts that are shared among close to a billion people who answer to that utterly flexible description.
Hafez, the 12th-century Persian poet, is credited with using ‘Hindu’ early on, to mean black — in his case, a black mole on the beloved’s cheek. Before that Hinduism was know as arya dharma, and one or two other names.
‘Hinduism’ is thus a flexible term, so flexible that many of its votaries feel enthused to include Buddhists and Sikhs in their fold despite strong protests from both. When assorted shades of Hinduism are laced with a strident sense of nationalism it becomes Hindutva.
Hindutva has a political agenda, whereas Hinduism is a way of life with countless variables in beliefs and customs. The points of difference range from castes and sub castes to the vertical and horizontal design of the sandalwood paste adorning the forehead of Tamil Brahmins. Maharashtrian Brahmins have a rigid hidebound hierarchy of their own, so do the Saryuparis, Kanyakubj and Maithili Brahmins of the Indo-Gangetic plains.
It was in this great churning of ideas, of castes and religious beliefs, peaceful and violent as well as secular and communal, that Prof Ramanujan stepped in with an array of insights into Indian history.
The social metamorphosis was not old. It was in fact linked to a 1987 TV serial on the story of Ram. Ramanujan claimed, and so did Prof Romila Thapar, that it was just one of the thousands of stories about Ram and that by broadcasting just one version the state-run TV was harming the cornucopia of traditions surrounding Ram.
“The number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past 2,500 years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan — to say nothing of western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story,” wrote Ramanujan.
Sanskrit alone, according to him, contains some 25 or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas or old mythological stories, and so forth).
“If we add plays, dance-dramas and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and shadow plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures.”
Obviously, these hundreds of tellings differ from one another. “I have come to prefer the word ‘tellings’ to the usual terms ‘versions’ or ‘variants’ because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or urtext — usually Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, the earliest and most prestigious of them all.”
This version was the basis for the TV serial, and was watched with enthusiasm across the border in Pakistan. But, as we shall see, it is not always Valmiki’s narrative that is carried from one language to another.
“One may go further and say that the cultural area in which Ramayanas are endemic has a pool of signifiers (like a gene pool), signifiers that include plots, characters, names, geography, incidents and relationships. Oral, written and performance traditions, phrases, proverbs and even sneers carry allusions to the Rama story.”
When someone is carrying on, you say, ‘What’s this ramayana now? Enough’. In Tamil, a narrow room is called a ‘kiskindha’; a proverb about a dimwitted person goes, ‘After hearing the Ramayana all night, he asks how Rama is related to Sita’; in a Bengali arithmetic textbook, children are asked to figure the dimensions of what is left of a wall that Hanuman built, after he has broken down part of it in mischief.
And to these must be added marriage songs, narrative poems, place legends, temple myths, paintings, sculpture and the many performing arts. It is this cultural variety of India that is being snuffed out by Hindutva and its closet supporters in schools and universities.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

Can’t change history? Rewrite it by Jawed Naqvi


Whenever we are challenged by the enemy (excluding Taliban and al Qaeda) we feel an upsurge of ghairat. These days, it is America which is arousing it. It is a magic word: the arousal it causes should lead to war.
Honour is a tribal characteristic. Feudal societies are also based on honour because of their strong tribal memory. Urbanised and literate societies don’t function on the basis of honour. Tribal Pathans and the Baloch often refer to the ‘dishonourable’ Punjabi because he is more urbanised.
Honour cannot exist without the condition of requital. When hurt is received to pride, it must be avenged. An ‘honourable’ person will never be a slave. He will be independent and will guard this independence by disagreeing, if agreeing threatens it.
‘Ghairat’ is the word which is used in honour killing in Pakistan, not ‘izzat’. Therefore, ‘ghairat’ is a special word. It can be linked to a just war, respect cannot. Why is honour killing a characteristic of the primitive?
Why are the educated without ‘ghairat’? What did the word actually mean when it began its rather strange journey?
Societies that develop towards commerce leave ‘ghairat’ behind because peace is the irreducible condition of commerce. One has to overlook matters of honour to secure one’s investment and trade routes.
Islam, like democracies of today, ordains fighting only defensively.
‘Ghair’ means ‘strange’ in Arabic. In a tribal society, an outsider could be a target of hatred. In many societies, ‘ghair’ is the ‘other’ that must be eliminated for the sake of survival. In Urdu ‘ghazal ghair’ is the rival in love: ‘the other man’.
This could obviously explain how ‘ghairat’ became the bogey word that leads to the killing of women by males that prize their honour in Pakistan. But what does etymology say?
We all know that in Arabic ‘taghayyur’ means ‘change’. Change is not compatible with honour and ‘ghairat’. A dishonourable person is the one who changes. A ‘ghairatmand’ person stands firm and opposes those who shift loyalties.
The Quran talks of ‘ghairat’ in totally different terms. It definitely does not sanction the kind of revenge-based tradition we are following in Pakistan. Tragically, the word has come from a physical function. The Quranic meaning is ‘adjustment’, the very opposite of revenge-killing.
The physical action it has come from is related not surprisingly to the camel. When a camel carries its load, its motion tends to make the division of the load on both sides of its back unequal. You have to correct the balance again and again. That is called ‘ghairat’!
Today, the term ‘bayghairat’ is the most insulting term you can apply to a person in Urdu. Strangely it has a subtext explaining a man’s inability to avenge his wife’s tendency to disloyalty. Pakistanis admire Iran for standing up to America; they call their own country ‘bayghairat’.
We use the word ‘ghairat’ for honour while it means something that is simply its opposite: changeability and adjustment and accommodation! Islam is more in favour of wisdom (‘hikmat’) than ‘ghairat’. ‘Hikmat’ denotes survival while ‘ghairat’ aspires to martyrdom.
English ‘revenge’ is from Latin ‘vindex’ which began by meaning ‘a claim’. This indicates that the beginning of the fight of honour was really a plaint which later got complicated and became vendetta, which is closer to the origin, ‘vindex’.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 20th, 2011.

Is your ‘ghairat’ up? By Khaled Ahmed


Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan is a powerful speaker and he punctuates his speeches with pertinent data. And when it comes to dealing with the PPP and particularly its leadership, he becomes a one-man demolishing squad. But not once in his parliamentary career has he ever attempted to disrupt the proceedings leading to absolute anarchy. Thursday was different. He triggered an unprecedented bedlam in the house and it was clearly premeditated. It could have led to vicious fist-fight amongst youthful members of the PML-N and the MQM.
I am not able to fathom as to why he acted so differently.
In the middle of a tediously routine proceeding, he asked for the microphone. His opening remarks suggested as if he just wanted to express his party’s ire over inclusion of a bill in the day’s agenda for appropriate presentation. Being the opposition leader he wanted to put it on record that the PML-N had serious reservations over the proposed bill.
Through an act of parliament, the proposed bill aimed at providing legal cover to building of new houses by the Defense Housing Authority (DHA) in areas that fall in vaguely demarcated no man’s land between Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Nisar charged that the DHA, through this scheme, wanted to ‘grab’ huge tracts of land owned by the Punjab government.
The DHA is believed to have acquired the services of a renowned real estate tycoon. Nisar didn’t name the said tycoon, but kept calling him a “don of the biggest Qabza group in this country.” The unnamed Don, he went on, was also known for his friendship with President Asif Ali Zardari.
While on the subject Nisar conveniently forgot that only a few days ago his friend, Shahbaz Sharif, had publicly eulogized the “services” of the same tycoon for helping the provincial government in building cheap houses doled out to low-income groups. He also disregarded rumours that the son of the same ‘don’ was a partner in a business venture with Hamza Shahbaz. Politicians are known for exercising selective memory; however, what was more important was Nisar’s threat that his party would “physically block the tabling of the proposed bill.” Even if the assembly passed the said bill, the PML-N would go to courts to prevent its execution, he added.
After spending many years in parliamentary reporting, I genuinely believe that the opposition leader had delivered a forcefully lethal speech on a substantive issue. Yet, without any prior warning he suddenly turned his guns against the MQM provoking the Muttahida members to jump in their seats.
With contempt he recalled attempts by some MQM members to scandalise the Punjab government on Monday by mentioning the arrest of a lady claiming to be lawful wife of Hamza Sharif. Aggressively referring to the same, Nisar recalled another lady while only mentioning her surname – Gabol. He didn’t end there and went on to express solidarity with Dr Fehmida Mirza, who he said had gracefully swallowed stinging remarks passed on the person of her husband, Dr Mirza, by some MQM members a few days ago. The MQM could swallow this passionate defence no more. Someone from its backbenches shouted an insulting remark and that provoked absolute chaos and scenes you mostly see in dangerous streets of downtown areas.
Eventually calm prevailed after desperate efforts made by saner elements. For how long, though? It was obvious that Nisar and his colleagues are adamantly determined to create divisions within the ruling party and the coalition government, while drawing on very sensitive emotional issues.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 14th, 2011.

Nisar triggers a brawl in the House By Nusrat Javed


Diplomatic efforts have helped in the past week to defuse the latest crisis to rock Pakistan-US relations. Although the immediate tensions have dissipated these developments have reaffirmed the tenuous quality of the relationship.
This was the third crisis in a rollercoaster year which started with the protracted row over the Raymond Davis affair and was followed by the bigger blow to relations delivered by the May 2 covert US raid in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.
Each crisis has inflicted more damage, weakened the relationship and added another layer of complication to already fraught ties. Once described as strategic, relations seemed to have slipped from being transactional to coercive.
But in every crisis both sides have tried to avoid an open rupture in recognition of their mutual need. It was no different this time. High-level dialogue quickly resumed to try to ‘reset’ relations by diplomatic endeavours that nonetheless remain inconclusive.
In the latest crisis the pendulum swung in a risky direction. When America’s top military official, Admiral Mike Mullen publicly accused Pakistan of complicity in the Haqqani network’s September 13 attack on the US Embassy in Kabul this set off a diplomatic firestorm. His remarks outraged Pakistani officials and provoked public anger. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta pronounced that Washington would do whatever it takes to stop such attacks. All this fuelled concerns in Pakistan that the US was contemplating some kind of unilateral military incursion into Pakistani territory.
This prompted a sharp response from Rawalpindi and Islamabad. It was conveyed clearly to Washington that such action would be unacceptable and lead to grave and irreversible consequences for the relationship.
Consequently Washington distanced itself from Mullen’s assertions and rolled back the harsh rhetoric against Pakistan. Remarks by President Barack Obama, following those by White House and State Department spokesmen, declined to endorse the Mullen formulation. Other officials stressed the importance of ties with Pakistan in order to walk back from the verbal confrontation. But they insisted that the ‘Haqqani problem’ had to be addressed.
The crisis seemed to ease but leaving problems unresolved. At the heart of this crisis lay the divergence between the two countries over the appropriate strategy for Afghanistan – the US intent on waging more war even as it declared its desire to move towards a negotiated peace and Pakistan wanting a de-escalation of kinetic activity to pave the way for peace making with all combatant groups engaged in the fighting.
The trigger for the verbal assaults on Pakistan by American officials came from a string of Taliban attacks last month including on a US base near Kabul on September 10. These embarrassed the US military and challenged its carefully constructed narrative of progress in the war. It gave a more pronounced edge to the longstanding US demand for Pakistan to act against “safe havens” from where these attacks were claimed to have come.
For years Pakistani and American perspectives have clashed on this. The US has long characterised Taliban sanctuaries as the principal reason for Nato’s inability to quell the insurgency. Pakistan has always insisted that the cause and solution for the insurgency lies in Afghanistan. Sanctuaries are a consequence not the cause of the insurgency. These clashing perspectives were evident during the latest crisis.
The audacious attacks on Kabul also provided an opportunity to elements in the American administration, sceptical of talks with insurgents, to push back on Obama’s support for Afghan reconciliation and raise doubts about the Taliban’s interest in peace. They tried as well to use the developments to question and undercut the centrality of Pakistan’s role as a peace broker in the reconciliation process. The strident criticism of Pakistan and the ISI seemed to have a purpose beyond mounting pressure.
The Obama administration acknowledges that peace cannot come to Afghanistan without a political settlement. But it has remained intent on following an approach of escalating the fighting yet wanting to reach out to the Taliban. This has produced two parallel policies, one focused on reconciliation and the other on ramping up the war effort.
This fight-and-talk strategy has injected strains into relations with Pakistan by making conflicting demands: for Islamabad to help reconcile with Taliban leaders and to eliminate them at the same time.
Intensification of drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas and night raids in Afghanistan are the most evident – and controversial – aspects of the US military strategy still centred on kinetic actions. The American military’s belief that the will of the Taliban has to be broken before their leaders are forced into talks underpins this escalation once described by General David Petraeus as “whacking the Taliban to the negotiating table”.
Pakistan regards the pursuit of these incompatible objectives as dysfunctional and counter productive to the goal of initiating serious negotiations. Aggressive military actions are seen as undercutting not advancing the prospect of talks. That is why army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has repeatedly stressed that having committed itself to finding a negotiated solution Washington’s military strategy should serve this political objective and not be the other way around.
The conditions for progress in reconciliation involve in the first instance a mutual reduction in violence to offer space for negotiations. This also opens up a way to deal with the ‘Haqqani problem’ and other groups by ‘including’ them in talks and not ‘excluding’ them by military action. The latter would encourage ‘spoilers’ intent on seeking to wreck peace talks and recalcitrant splinter groups, none of which will be conducive for a stable solution.
America expects Pakistan to pursue a kill-capture-or-reconcile approach by simultaneously facilitating contacts with Taliban leaders, launching efforts to target them, and also going after those who do not reconcile. Pakistan has been making the case for Washington to carefully think how to ‘sequence’ efforts aimed at a political settlement rather than follow a contradictory strategy.
Pakistan’s top military officials regard the calibrated reduction of hostilities and other confidence building measures as necessary accompaniment – and incentive – for serious talks. Otherwise violence will continue from both sides in an escalatory cycle. A strategy predicated on the premise that one side holds fire while the other carries on shooting and bombing will not work.
Instead Islamabad has asked Washington to clarify four aspects of the envisaged peace process: who to talk to, tasks to be accomplished, sequencing of the process and timelines for this. Once high-level dialogue resumes between the two countries forging a consensus on these four points will determine whether a common operational plan can be evolved to advance the reconciliation track.
What will also affect progress in this regard is whether differences are resolved within the Obama administration between those who want to accelerate reconciliation and others who don’t fully support this. This internal rift has contributed to the recent turbulence in ties with Pakistan. The American military and intelligence establishment which has been driving a tougher line on Pakistan still appears to resist the notion of talking to the Taliban. Many among them equate reconciliation with defeat. But the White House and State Department seem keen on accomplishing progress on reconciliation ahead of a landmark Nato Summit in Chicago in spring 2012.
Because President Obama has declined to vigorously engage or throw his weight behind his own policy, proponents of different views have managed to run with their version of policy. Unless these policy tensions are resolved, they will continue to spill into and destabilise relations with Pakistan, as the latest crisis demonstrated.
This makes the task of normalising Pakistan-US relations even more challenging. But stable ties are vital for both countries. In the near term the fate of this troubled relationship hinges on being able to align their interests and chart out a specific path to secure the common goal of an Afghan peace settlement and square this with the 2014 milestone for Nato to complete its combat mission. The surge in tensions between Kabul and Islamabad will also have to be purposely addressed. Ultimately peace has to be forged and sustained by the Afghans themselves.
The writer is special adviser to the Jang Group/Geo and a former envoy to the US and the UK.

Crux Of The Crisis By Dr Maleeha Lodhi


The recent episode of the thirteen-year-old Christian girl accused of blasphemy and expelled from her school has yet again showed how the blasphemy law can be misused. But allow me to highlight another related and important issue.
In this episode, it is significant that the girl was not in an Islamiat class during the alleged incident. According to news reports, she was commenting on a ‘naat’— a poem written in honour of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), in an Urdu class.
According to Article 22 of the Constitution of Pakistan, no person can be asked to study another religion, or be forced to take part in any ceremony or event associated with another religion. This article was inserted in the 1973 Constitution to safeguard the minorities and to allay their fears that even after the declaration of Pakistan as an ‘Islamic Republic’ they would not be forced to practically become Muslims. After all, this was exactly the same fear that led the Muslims of South Asia to demand a separate homeland for themselves.
In 1937, when the Congress formed ministries in nine out of eleven provinces of British India, several of their policies irked the Muslims. The singing of the Bande Matram (‘Ode to the Motherland’), which was composed during Hindu resistance to Muslim rule in Bengal in the eighteenth century was considered especially offensive, and thought of as exhibiting the non-acceptance of Muslims and Indian Muslim history, by the Congress. Whatever the truth in this perception, the result of such policies of the Congress ministries was that the Muslims of South Asia (barring some significant sections), were alienated from the Congress and threw in their lot with the Muslim League, thereby reinvigorating an almost dead organisation. Subtle policies like the singing of songs with Hindu overtones and the slighting of Muslim rule were the bedrock of Muslim support for the Muslim League.
Pakistan is an Islamic country and so Islam has a public role. But this does not mean that it has to be inserted in everything. Asking a non-Muslim student to study something which is clearly Islamic is a clear violation of the rights granted to minorities in the Constitution.
The insertion of religion in every sphere of life in Pakistan has meant the religion has lost its special value. Shallow and rash understandings of the religion have become the vogue, and a meaningful study of the religion has been relegated to the domain of the few religious scholars. It would be much better if the aforementioned ‘naat’ were studied by Muslims in an Islamiat class. There they would have been able to not only appreciate the literary qualities of such a composition, but also be able to analyse and understand the theological concepts which underlay the poem.
Putting in religion in every school textbook, not only alienates non-Muslims, it also makes Muslims take the study of faith for granted, and makes the mere appellation of something Islamic enough for the people. It is time that the study of religion is returned to its proper sphere, so that we can develop citizens who have a deep understanding and appreciation of the tenets of Islam. Only grounded Muslims can become good Pakistanis, and this project cannot be achieved through piecemeal learning of Islam through Urdu or other subjects, and can only be achieved through a scholarly approach to the study of Islamiat.
The usage of Hindu symbols alienated the Muslims of South Asia from the Congress and fractured the unity of India which had been the crowning achievement of the British Raj. It gave rise to the religious polarisation which not only led to the creation of Pakistan, but also sowed the seeds of the religious massacres during the partition and riots thereafter. Pakistan is already a fractured country, with little sense of citizenship and a confused notion of nationalism. In this scenario we should not deliberately exclude non-Muslims and make them feel like second-class citizens, especially when they have contributed, and continue to contribute, towards the betterment of Pakistan.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 4th, 2011.

The Insertion Of Faith In Public Discourse By Yaqoob Khan Bangash


The Afghan government has accused Pakistan of being involved in the killing of its former president and peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani, saying the killer was a Pakistani citizen and that the killing was “plotted” in Quetta.
Now Afghan president Hamid Karzai is coming to Delhi tomorrow, but that is not the point of this column. Sunday’s indictment by the Afghans is a grim reminder of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were also carried out by Pakistani citizens.
Perhaps the time has come for the elected Pakistani government as well as the Pakistani intelligentsia to look inward and ask itself : Why are ordinary Pakistani citizens so angry with two of their three immediate neighbours that they embark on murder missions to kill innocent people in those countries?
After all, what harm did the people of Mumbai or Kabul — specifically, the victims of the Mumbai attacks and Rabbani and his family — do to Pakistan and Pakistanis, that their lives were so brutally cut short?
Is it because India refuses to talk straight about Kashmir to Pakistan, that innocent Pakistanis are being used pawns in some grand, strategic war to bleed India with a thousand direct and indirect cuts? Is it because the Pakistani intelligentsia has clearly stated that with the withdrawal of the Americans from Afghanistan, Pakistan as its closest neighbour, must have a direct stake in the endgame?
But how does killing Rabbani or innocent people in Mumbai help achieve those desired outcomes?
The Haqqani attack on the US embassy in Kabul some days ago, which has precipitated such American anger against Pakistan, is an irrevocable turning point in US-Pakistan-Afghan relations. Remember that the Haqqani group — at least in New Delhi’s and Kabul’s eyes —is responsible for attacking not only the Indian embassy in 2009, but also last year was accused of killing several Indian medical doctors and those in the army’s education corps who had been stationed in Kabul to help teach Afghan soldiers English.
Everything Hillary Clinton and Mike Mullen and several other wise Americans are telling the Pakistanis these past few days, the Indians have already said for several years : Which is, that you can’t make a distinction between “good” terrorists and “bad” ones, because sooner than later the good ones will also turn within, and upon you.
The people of Pakistan can certainly not be held responsible for the policies of its government and the military or the ISI. Certainly, too, there was a great deal of anger and commiseration by ordinary Pakistanis when the Mumbai attacks took place, as well as several shows of solidarity.
When Karzai comes to Delhi this week, it is believed that India and Afghanistan will sign a strategic partnership agreement. What a far cry from those early years when Karzai first visited Delhi after the September 2001 attacks and hesitated to forge strategic ties because he said he never wanted to forget the generosity of the Pakistan people when they hosted several million Afghans in the time of the Russians, the ensuing civil war as well as during the Taliban years.
Still, the truth of why nation-states keep “good” terrorists on a leash was brought home to me by Bangladesh home minister Shahara Khatun in Dhaka early last month when I asked her why her government had decided to hand over Indian insurgents based in Bangladesh, back to India.
“Why should we keep them here? They only instigate criminal elements and create more problems,” Khatun said.
Maybe Pakistan should listen to her more closely.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 4th, 2011.

When Karzai Comes To Delhi By Jyoti Malhotra


Pakistan is again at the crossroads. Either the country pulls out of the ‘War on Terror’ or it does not. As I have said several times earlier it cannot do both as it has been doing in the past. Whether Admiral Mullen was right about the Haqqani network being a “veritable arm of the ISI” or not is not really the point. In any case columnists like myself are not privy to special information so I cannot pronounce any judgment on this matter. What seems to be the more relevant point to me is that Pakistani authorities have taken no action in North Waziristan even when there is evidence, in the daily press and the electronic media, that many members of terrorist outfits do reside there; that suicide bombing training is given there and hostages are taken to private jails there. Action is not taken not because the army cannot do it but because it will not. And it will not because, as some people have bluntly stated, the United States will leave Afghanistan one day, the present Afghan government will fall, and the Taliban will take over the government of Kabul. In such a scenario the Haqqanis will be powerful players in Afghanistan and the Pakistan Army’s logic says it would be in Pakistan’s national interest to have friends among the winners.
This logic ignores some realities. First,if this was always the rationale for supporting some factions of the Taliban then Pakistan should not have taken financial help for its military to pretend to be an ally of NATO. True, some al Qaeda operatives were handed over to the Americans but it was never stated by any decision-maker of Pakistan in an official capacity that this country will also favour, or at least not fight against, the enemies of those whose allies they pretend to be. As this is a moral argument I know it will cut no ice with any decision-maker in the world of realpoltik whether Pakistani or American.
I now come to the second argument: that if the Taliban really take over in Afghanistan their influence will come to Pakistan and our society will become more Talibanised. The Taliban and allied Islamist groups have an ideology in which they fervently believe and which they want to impose upon the whole country. We have seen how they actually do impose it in the areas under their command whether it be Afghanistan, parts of Fata or Swat. Do we want this to happen or do we not? This question has never been seriously debated nor are our people aware of what aspects of their lives will change and how if this happens. What we need are clear cut blueprints of what will happen based on the past models of such rule and even interviews of Islamist thinkers. Since people respond emotionally to sacred terms and the rhetoric used by the Islamist thinkers abounds in such terms people appear to favour the Taliban’s discourse or, at least, so not oppose it. Perhaps this is because by Islamic law people often mean just ‘good governance’ and democracy is often considered synonymous with political and pecuniary corruption. So, even a referendum may not tell us what people really want but it is still better than not discussing the issue at all.
The third argument is that Pakistan has lost its sovereignty in parts of FATA, including North Waziristan, where it is not possible to move without the permission of local commanders. This does not seem to bother the media but it is a point worth making because people talk so much about the loss of our sovereignty vis-a-vis the US drones (which operate by our military’s permission and were praised by a major general recently for eliminating militant leaders). So, if militant networks operate here and in Afghanistan there is the possibility of losing FATA fully to them.
The fourth argument is that most Pakistanis respond in a hysterical manner to the Americans because of anti-Americanism in our society. Now, surely the Americans are here in their perceived national interest. But to overreact to their demands — and such demands are made of allies — means that we are not taking care of our interests. Our real interest is to take as much real civilian aid from the US to create the kind of infrastructure in medicine, education, security and transport which will bring about a real relief in the lives of our people. I know that most aid goes back to donor countries in the name of experts, monitors and consultants but still there is some left to make real changes not only in the bank balances of English-knowing Pakistanis but also in the country as a whole. Someone really farsighted has to channel the aid money into projects where the infrastructure improves and not into chimerical projects of which examples abound but it would be invidious to go into them.
The matter of anti-Americanism is not a small issue. If our media goes wild at every issue we will make it impossible for our government to seek aid and to change policies which keep changing every other day because reality shifts fast. What we have to tell our people is that Pakistan and the US have both sought their respective national interest in their past relationship. Pakistan joined Seato and Cento and gave bases to the American in the fifties and sixties so as to get military aid as the governments then considered India their enemy and for that they wanted military aid. Later, in 1971 the US did not actually send troops to help Pakistan but it did warn India against continuing the war on the western front after December 16. In the 1980s, Pakistan helped the US fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union in exchange for aid, for American silence on Pakistan’s development of a nuclear weapon and support to General Zia’s rule. And now Pakistan has, since Musharraf’s days, done what it thinks is enough to ensure the constant flow of military aid without actually eliminating the Taliban. These facts are not known to our people who think all their leaders are paid stooges of the Americans.
So now that we are on the crossroads let our leaders make an informed choice but, for a change, make it public and honest. Let its pros and cons be clearly stated. If we had always been neutral we could also have avoided all American wars in this area and not have terrorist groups on our soil to begin with. But then we would have made friends with India and not initiated wars ourselves. But now even if we opt for neutrality we would still have to impose the writ of the state in Pakistan. This would mean not having armed groups or no-go areas on our soil. But we do not seem to care about these things. Can it true that nobody really wants peace and nobody is afraid of the militants or even Talibanization and that I am out of tune with the real strategic minds of the country?
Published in The Express Tribune, October 4th, 2011.

Which Road To Take? By Dr Tariq Rahman