Nation Topics - Pakistan | The Nation

The article reflects on protests in Islamabad, Pakistan over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were published in several European newspapers. The article suggests that the demonstrations are also a challenge to Pakistani President-General Pervez Musharraf. His main challenger is the Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), a parliamentary coalition of Pakistan's main Islamist parties. It insists that the large-scale protests were instigated by the Jamaat Islami, the dominant faction of the MMA, which has forged an alliance with its middle-class cadre and alienated youth.

The author comments on the credibility of the Bush Administration and the timing of national security alerts, in light of an alert sounded just after the Democrats concluded a successful convention. In launching the Iraq war, Bush peddled false information and maintained that the threat was far more serious than the intelligence (even the overstated intelligence) claimed. In the middle of the latest terror-alert controversy, his Administration leaked the news that a computer whiz who had been passing on information about Al Qaeda had been arrested in Pakistan. One result of such questionable actions and misuses of intelligence (often barely challenged by a supine press) is that Bush has made it difficult to fulfill one of the most vital job duties of a President: to warn the public at home and abroad about true threats and to persuade people here and overseas to take appropriate measures. When it comes to the war on terrorism, little that Bush says can be taken on faith.

The author reports on the issues discussed at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. To the beat of drums by India's Dalits (former Untouchables) and Adivasis (forest-dwelling tribes) celebrating indigenous popular movements that refuse to be subdued, the World Social Forum opened in Mumbai. There were peace campaigners and labor unionists from the Arab world, feminists and sexual fights activists from Pakistan, refugee fights defenders and ad-busters from Western Europe, anticorporate campaigners and grassroots environmentalists from North America, artists and citizen weapons-inspectors from Central Europe, indigenous fights activists and media-freedom campaigners from Africa, and secularists working against politicized religion from around the world. It was highlighted at the inaugural and concluding plenaries, where speakers, including India's former President K.R. Narayanan and former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, Iraq's Abdul Amir Al-Rekabi and Brazil's Chico Whitaker, described the "war on terrorism" as an attempt to demonize Islam and establish US hegemony. Prominent in this dialogue process were India's Communist Party (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India, which command high moral and political importance despite having suffered a halving of their national vote (now under 3 percent each). Until the 1998 India-Pakistan nuclear blasts, they looked at the issue of nuclear weapons through a cold war prism.

The author claims that the U.S. and other major powers are in a battle to control the oil reserves of the Caspian countries of Central Asia. In this rerun of the first "Great Game," the nineteenth-century imperial rivalry between the British Empire and czarist Russia, powerful players once again position themselves to control the heart of the Eurasian landmass, left in a post-Soviet power vacuum. Today the United States has taken over the leading role from the British. Along with the ever-present Russians, new regional powers such as China, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan have entered the arena, and transnational oil corporations are also pursuing their own interests in a brash, Wild East style. The aggressive US pursuit of oil interests in the Caspian did not start with the Bush Administration but during the Clinton years, with the Democratic President personally conducting oil and pipeline diplomacy with Caspian leaders. Significantly, President Putin has signed new security pacts with the Central Asian rulers and last October personally opened a new Russian military base in Kyrgyzstan. The US-supported overthrow in November of strongman Eduard Shevardnadze in neighboring Georgia, a linchpin country for the pipeline export of Caspian oil and gas, showed that protecting strategic energy interests can, however accidentally, go hand in hand with promoting democracy.

The article contains news and commentary briefs. Recently the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 "The Battle of Algiers" for a group of forty officers and civilian experts, on the theory that the film's highly praised quasi-documentary realism would help them understand urban guerrilla warfare in Iraq. A better analogy to the situation in today's Iraq is Israel's predicament in southern Lebanon in 1982. But even if the The Battle of Algiers analogy isn't perfect, it's still worth contemplating. Senator Edward Kennedy charged that a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office showed only about $2.5 billion of the $4 billion now being spent monthly on the Iraq occupation could be accounted for. For daring to criticize the President, Kennedy came under fire from a well-drilled squad of GOP senators, but his office has already released figures showing how foreign aid is being used to attract support for the occupation, including troop contributions present and future, by countries like Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Pakistan. Senator Kennedy's interview, cited above--in which he also called the war in Iraq a" fraud" cooked up in Texas for political advantage--outraged House majority leader Tom DeLay. As he puts it, "It's disturbing that Democrats have spewed more hateful rhetoric at President Bush than they ever did at Saddam Hussein." A group of twenty-seven active reserve pilots and former pilots in the Israeli Air Force have signed an open letter declaring that they will no longer take part in the assassination campaign in the occupied territories. The move, taken by a group regarded as the elite of the military, should give new encouragement to a refusenik movement that has fallen out of the headlines in recent months.

Republicans in Washington DC have begun preparing the ground for United States action, perhaps even war, against Iran. Iran is charged with harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. But Al Qaeda and the Taliban waged a vicious campaign of assassination and pogroms against Shiites in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and came close to war with Shiite-dominated Iran. Neoconservatives tag Iran as a backer of terrorism because of its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon. It has, however, been many years since Hezbollah was significantly involved in international terrorism. As for the charge that Iran is interested in nuclear weapons, it may or may not be true. In 1998 Iranian President Muhammad Khatami called for 'a dialogue of civilizations' and suggested people-to-people diplomacy between Iran and the United States. The Bush administration has been uninterested in such efforts. If the U.S. is sincere about support for democracy in Iran, it could profitably respond to Khatami's call.

The aim of the Iraq war has never been only to disarm Iraq. George Bush set forth the full aim of his war policy in unmistakable terms on January 29, 2002, in his first State of the Union address. It was to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, not only in Iraq but everywhere in the world, through the use of military force. He underscored the scope of his ambition by singling out three countries--North Korea, Iran and Iraq--for special mention, calling them an 'axis of evil.' Other possible war aims--to defeat Al Qaeda, to spread democracy--came and went in Administration pronouncements, but this one has remained constant. Stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction is the reason for war given alike to the Security Council and to the American people. It has turned out that the supplier of essential information and technology for North Korea's uranium program was America's faithful ally in the war on terrorism, Pakistan,which received missile technology from Korea in return. Pakistan, in short, has proved itself to be the world's most dangerous proliferator, having recently acquired nuclear weapons itself and passed on nuclear technology to a state and, possibly, to a terrorist group. Indeed, an objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of menace would place Pakistan first on the list, North Korea second, Iran third, and Iraq fourth. What is of most desperately immediate concern, however, is that America's pre-emptive war will lead directly to the use of the weapons whose mere possession the war is supposed to prevent. Critics of the war have concluded from the disparity in America's treatment of Iraq and North Korea that the Administration's aim is not to deal with weapons of mass destruction at all but to seize Iraq's oil, which amounts to some 10 percent of the world's known reserves. Still other critics place the emphasis not on oil but on political reform of Iraq and even the entire Middle East.

In my days as a student activist in the 1970s, the use of the term "imperialism" to describe U.S. policy was generally used only in the antiwar and international solidarity movements, the writings of left-wing academics or the newspapers of small socialist splinter groups. Three decades later, the notion of American empire is gaining a degree of mainstream respectability, this time promoted by a strange convergence of right-wing unilateralists and humanitarian interventionists who see unbridled American power as the last, best hope for building a more stable world. Never mind that there is no evidence to suggest that Iraq has operational links to Al Qaeda or that the most likely sources of nuclear weapons for nuclear materials for global terrorist groups lie in Russia or Pakistan, not Iraq. Why would a human rights advocate like Ignatieff embrace American imperialism? Current key players in PNAC include neoconservative hawks William Kristol and Robert Kagan, joined by former Lockheed Martin vice president Bruce Jackson, who helped draft the 2000 Republican foreign policy platform.

This article presents the author's views on the issue of using nuclear weapons during war. Throughout much of the cold war, nuclear weapons were largely justified as instruments of strategic deterrence rather than as weapons usable in combat. Since the end of the cold war new nuclear powers like India and Pakistan have emerged onto the world stage, but the older ones have significantly scaled back their arsenals. Moreover, as the U.S. led wars in Serbia and Afghanistan have shown, conventional U.S. military force has become so overwhelmingly powerful that Pentagon planners no longer need atomic explosives to create the tremendous shock required to obliterate hostile regimes.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was the patron of the Taliban until he was paid a fortune to stop. He was the protector of Al Qaeda until he was paid another fortune to stop that, too. His nuclear program was found to be harboring several senior bin Ladenites until his entire foreign debt was handsomely rescheduled. Then it was found that his army was using Al Qaeda fighters as a proxy in Kashmir, at which stage he won golden opinions and further praise for asking them, in a shocked mode, to cease and desist. Most recently, the ISI was discovered to have flown some 2,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda members out of Afghanistan around the time of the fall of Kandahar and Kabul.