Precision wars - RAFIA ZAKARIA

THE month of September has brought war before. It was on Sept 7, 1940, that the sustained bombing of London by Germany’s Nazi regime began.

Known now as the Blitz, this bombing campaign would last 267 days, or nearly 37 weeks. Night after night, German aircraft would ply the skies over the city, dropping bombs into the darkness below and hoping to cause as much damage as possible. Before it was all over, nearly 100 tonnes of explosives would be dropped on the city.

As history would tell it, war was different in those days. At the purely technological level, the pilots who flew over London were guided only by the city lights below. No lights meant no targets, so the inhabitants of London in September 1940 had to embrace darkness.

The blackout was a prominent feature of the Second World War: curtains had to be pulled, headlights and lamplights — all lights — had to be extinguished.

With the sound of the siren that signalled the German raids, those who did not have underground shelters in their own buildings or homes had to make their way to public shelters where they spent the night in cramped bunks amid complete strangers.

All night, citizen volunteers who had taken up the task of air-raid wardens walked up and down the darkened streets to ensure that no speck of light gave the city away. The bombs fell nevertheless.

Daylight would reveal the damage and also relieve the suffering. The Germans attacked only at night, and people could pause, pretend to follow their pre-war routines, and imagine that the threat of death did not dangle as close as the approach of darkness.

At the same time, with bombing so close and destruction so nearly complete, the war was all encompassing. In the accounts of those who lived in London during the Blitz, the complete disruption of society and culture by the bombings meant that everyone who experienced it was thrown into a sense of camaraderie.

The bombs, the citizens of London learned, could target anyone, rich or poor, famous or ordinary, old or young, and so everyone became in a sense the same, crouching in the darkness and hoping that the bomb that fell from above would not descend on them.

In the closeness of war was the togetherness of war, in the visible suffering was unity, and in all of it was an understanding of conflict as something real, proximate and transformative.

As the world ponders another war this September, the experience of Londoners during the Second World War provides an occasion for pause. Few of those young and alive today have experienced the sorts of complete war described here. If the bombs of old were blindly dropped and unguided by radars, and the targets selected a long while away, the bombs of today are surgical and precise.

Again and again, the vocabulary of exactness is presented as proof of war’s justification. There are no mistakes made by laser-guided missiles, we are all told; the world’s new instruments of destruction can ask for directions, knock at doors and practically ask for identification before they kill.

That, at least, is what we believe; in the rhetorical union of warmongering and precision, we imagine its cruelties dissipated, even eliminated. To enable the continuation of this metaphor, warmongers successfully stanch all news of mistakes, of blindly or wrongly dropped bombs, of accidentally struck houses and mistakenly killed people.

The success and popularity of the targeted war, one that can far more indulgently be inflicted on populations, depends on the myth of its precision.

If the wars of old were denounced by the sheer facts of destruction, witnessed night after night by those who lived through their terror and still emerged alive, the wars of today rely on the spared being oblivious to the danger they face, comfortably convinced that the targets are always someone else.

The truth of the faraway war applies to Pakistan today. Our own war is a war of small doses, taking from us bit by bit for over a decade — a war that leaves just enough tiny bits of normalcy for the deception that insists there is no war at all.

In our modern age, where enemies are murky and agendas even more so, many imagine the blunt and blind terrors of past wars as a condition far worse than our own. It is a crucial myth and, increasingly, a global one.

Perhaps in order to believe in the necessity of war after the horrors of the Second World War, a new lie was necessary — the idea that killing, when done carefully, is somehow not really war at all.

As the US mulls its march into Syria and the drums sound loudly over the rest of the world, the myth of precision will once again dominate the discussion. Pakistan, which is still living through that country’s last war of precision, has much to contribute.

When the US began its drone war in the country, many were in support, believing that the precise killing of marked men would rid the country of the disease of violent extremism.

As the American drones fired, the terrorists scattered, making new homes in dense cities and towns, winning the hearts of Pakistanis who opposed American imperialism.

In the continued survival of terrorism in Pakistan, the myth of modern war’s accuracy lies exposed, the blurry boundaries of armed conflict and the easy proliferation of a million new evils all revealed.

Proof, however, does not convince the passionate and proud; and in an America still enraptured with the myth of precision — the lie of a correct conflict carved with righteous exactitude — there is hunger yet for a new war.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Source: www.dawn.com

Read More

Limitations of power - Najmuddin A. Shaikh

ON Saturday, President Obama declared, “I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets”. But he went on to say that he had also made a second decision and that was “to seek authorisation for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress”.

While it was known that Obama had been ambivalent about the use of American military force this decision came as a surprise, especially since his faithful secretary of state, John Kerry, had been making the case for an attack on Syria. Also, the US intelligence community had pulled out all the stops to put together a dossier to convince the world that not only had chemical weapons been used but that they had been used by the Assad regime which alone among the warring parties possessed the means of delivery.

The president’s decision was accompanied by an impassioned call for the American Congress and the international community to recognise the imperative need for action, saying, “What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98pc of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?”

It was rather odd that such a plea should be made when only a few days earlier reports in the American media had shown through the publication of official documents that not only had the Americans been aware of the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis against their own Kurds and then against the Iranians but that they had provided the Iraqis with the satellite data on Iranian sites that were then subjected to chemical attack by Saddam.

(Readers might wish to see ‘Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran’ which appeared last month on the website of Foreign Policy).

Apparently the Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they could turn the tide of the war.

In any case, at this time it seems certain that this plea will fall on deaf ears. The hearings that congressional leaders have scheduled this week will bring only limited support for the president’s position because under international law it is clearly untenable — there is, as the vote in the British parliament showed, no international support for such action, and domestic public opinion is opposed to military involvement when they have ‘no dog in the fight’.

It is unlikely, in any case, that many congressmen will be influenced by the hearings since what the experts have to say has been well publicised in the media over the last few days.

The president’s eloquent call for congressional support is also not likely, according to most observers, to find resonance in Congress. Those, like Senator McCain, who support action want it to be such as would effect regime change.

This the president has ruled out saying “our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope”. Others will oppose it because they will reject anything that Obama proposes.

Yet others, like much of the world, will reject it because they will not accept the president’s assertion that this would be a vote “for our national security”. But most will reject it because of the apprehension that it will lead to a further entanglement in what Obama himself has described as “someone else’s war”.

Therefore, unless I am reading the signs entirely incorrectly, the congressional vote, which will take place shortly after Congress reconvenes on Sept 9, will be negative and even though Obama may say that legally he would still have the authority to order an attack it would clearly be political suicide for him to do so.

Obama’s current uncomfortable position follows essentially from the mistake he made of labelling the use of chemical weapons as a “red line” without thinking through the actions he would have to take to maintain credibility in case Assad did cross the “red line”.

He has belatedly recognised that the cost of maintaining credibility by attacking Syria in the present international ambience would be higher than even the world’s sole super power could bear and has chosen to have Congress share the blame for what the Syrian news media has gloatingly called “the beginning of the historic American retreat”.

Despite its economic woes from which it is slowly recovering and despite its dismal experience in the Iraq and Afghan conflicts from which it is seeking an exit the US remains the world’s sole superpower.

And yet in the absence of international support it finds the cost of military intervention in “someone else’s war”, no matter how noble the cause, too high. Too high because involvement in yet another war would not only impact American interests in other parts of the Middle East but would bring to a halt the slow recovery of the American economy from the debilitating effects of the last two military interventions.

It has forced Obama to talk of “pursuing a political resolution that achieves a government that respects the dignity of its people”.

For smaller, less powerful countries, there are lessons to be learnt. The consequences of proposed policies must be carefully thought through. There must be a readiness to change policies when costs become too high and no considerations of prestige or regional standing should be allowed to stand in the way of such correction.

Seeking to determine or dictate the course of events in an ongoing or incipient internal conflict in another country is hazardous because the power one has is limited. In Pakistan’s case, this would suggest a further rethinking of our policy towards Afghanistan, towards the Afghans who have exploited the shelter they found on our soil and lastly towards the interests of other regional powers in Afghanistan.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Source: www.thenews.com.pk

Read More

The security challenge - Mahmud Ali Durrani

Economic interdependence between nations is a reality of today. Even countries like the US or China are not totally self-reliant. An economic shock in one region sends waves throughout the world. The second trend is the explosive growth in information technology and the reach of the media. For example a violent happening in the Middle East moves people in Pakistan to protest.

A corollary of these development is that weak nations, especially economically weak nations like Pakistan, face greater challenge to their sovereignty. An event in the commodities market in Chicago has a direct impact on the price of cotton in Pakistan. We are painfully aware of the direct negative impact of the rise in the price of crude oil in the international market. 

Somewhat different from our security pundits, I look at national security without using the word ‘strategic’. 

There has been no fundamental change in the sweep of history. The major global powers and dominant regional groups want to continue their domination of the worlds markets and resources. The nations that form this group are: the US, western Europe, Scandinavia, Russia and Japan. Emerging powers like China, India, South Korea, Australia and the like want to expand their sphere of influence to gain access to resources and expand their markets. This, of course, causes conflict.

In essence the great game continues. The race for markets and resources results in power play, domination of trade routes, control of countries and possible wars and conflict by other means. The west’s hold over oil reserves is one classic example. The so-called spring offensive in Libya had more to do with the control of oil than with human rights and democracy. 

Western presence in Afghanistan, besides fighting terrorism, has to do with the domination of the energy-rich Central Asian states and check mating China. The cold war between the US and China has more to do with the domination of markets in South East Asia and resources in Africa and not just about human rights and democracy. A case in point is the turbulence in Balochistan which is intensified by the interests of external powers.

Another major factor in the global game is the competition between various ideologies like democracy, Communism, and religiosity. While communism has almost died, extremism and intolerance are causing conflict within and between nations. We are painfully aware of that in Pakistan; but let us not forget the devastation around the world caused by the likes of Ayatollah Cheney and Maulana Wolfowitz.

Iran, which was our staunch ally in 1965, now looks at us with suspicion and we seem to have a competitive relationship with them in Afghanistan. Western pressure on Iran to stop going nuclear will have an impact on Pakistan’s energy plans as the US is a major obstacle to the gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan.

With or without US presence, Afghanistan will continue to remain unstable for a variety of reasons. Despite what Pakistan has done for Afghanistan over the decades, a large number of Afghans mistrust us. Our alliance with the US to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan has fired up militancy and brought havoc inside Pakistan. The growing Indian presence in Afghanistan also gives sleepless nights to our military planners.

India is fast becoming a major regional power because of its economic growth and military muscle. It has developed strong links with Afghanistan and has growing relations with Iran. Today it is also a darling of the west, especially the US. India, I believe, has occupied critical space almost all around us. Because of the weakness of our economy it will be extremely difficult for Pakistan to maintain a military balance with India. Developing a stable and working relationship is critically important but as the current situation on the Line of Control shows, India will most likely continue to remain a security threat. 

With a troubling global and regional situation the only good news is the good relations we have with China, which continues to be a dependable friend and ally.

Pakistan is very well placed as the central hub of our region. The country is protecting the eastern flank of the oil-rich Middle East and is the gateway to the resource-rich Central Asian states, and a land and costal link between the Middle East and India. A north-south energy and trade corridor would bring millions to our coffers. Our current government, like the Musharraf government, has some grand plans of exploiting our assets. Hopefully, performance will match rhetoric. 

A review of our security environment would be incomplete looking at the domestic front. Though we have many ailments, the major domestic problems are: a weak economy, poor governance and of course an aggressive insurgency, especially in Fata, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Karachi, our economic hub, continues to remain turbulent. There are signs of eincreasing radicalisation in southern Punjab. 

As a matter of fact our external security challenges pale in comparison with our domestic challenges. A thriving militancy, if not arrested soon, will ruin all our grandiose plans of an economic revival. It is time for the current government to take charge and display leadership, commitment and wisdom.

The primary threat to our national security today is internal and not external. Poor leadership, a weak economy, poor governance, and injustice in our society feed the threat posed by intolerance and militancy. Yes, we are an Islamic state but we seem to be unsure of what that means. Do we follow the Turkish model, the Iranian model or the Afghan model or expand on what the Quaid-e-Azam wanted? My fear is that a well-organised minority is likely to take the silent majority in a direction it does not want to go. Our present economic state is unsustainable. We seem to be living on uncontrolled foreign and domestic borrowing. 

India will continue to be our adversary in the coming years and we need to defuse this threat diplomatically and politically. Use of force or proxies is no more an option. Afghanistan, with or without foreign presence, will continue to be unstable and will also be the cause of instability in Pakistan. The US has badly failed in Afghanistan and will try to make us the fall guy.

My only recommendation is that we get our house in order and stop blaming the world for our ills. Saying no to foreign aid will go a long way in restoring our dignity. Sovereignty cannot be demanded through loud rhetoric but will flow out of internal strength and national cohesion. 

The writer is a former general, ambassador to the US and national security adviser. 
Email: balusa@hotmail.com 

Source: www.thenews.com.pk

Read More

Taliban se Muzakrat kion aur kaisay - Saleem Safi

 

Read More

A martyr to the cause of Reason - Praful Bidwai

The assassination of Indian anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune is an ugly black mark on society. The forces of fanatical intolerance, superstition, irrationality and social reaction which killed Dabholkar did so not because he threatened their faith or freedom of expression, but because he believed that it’s wrong to exploit people through black magic, sorcery, and sleights-of-hand while invoking supernatural powers.

Personal rivalry cannot explain Dabholkar’s killing. As those knew him would testify – including this writer, who had the pleasure of knowing him and writing for the remarkable weekly ‘Sadhana’ which he edited – he was too amiable and disarming a man to inspire a personal animus.

Dabholkar was an independent intellectual with strong anti-superstition convictions, which are anathema to obscurantists, religious bigots and reactionaries. A society in which rationalist intellectuals are killed, but violent rituals to exorcise ‘evil spirits’ are condoned, cannot be called minimally civilised. India is hurtling towards that status: over the last 15 years, 2,500 women were killed in witchcraft rituals, according to anti-superstition activists.

The police still haven’t determined who planned Dabholkar’s killing, but it would be no surprise if caste panchayats or Hindutva groups like Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Janajagriti Samiti – which hated his committee for the eradication of superstition – plotted it, their denials notwithstanding.

Sanatan Sanstha founder Jayant Athavale wrote a sinister obituary on Dabholkar: “instead of dying bedridden through illness, or a painful death following a surgery”, he died instantly: this was, “in a way, a blessing of the Almighty”. This can rationalise any murder, however revolting.

Three days later, activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing) broke up a memorial meeting for Dabholkar in Pune, and assaulted members of the left-wing music band Kabir Kala Manch. They branded the organisers “Naxalites” because one of them refused to chant “Jai Narendra Modi” when ordered to do so.

Another pointer is the last anonymous threat to Dabholkar: “Remember Gandhi. Remember what we did to him”. This lays claim to Nathuram Godse’s hideous legacy. Even the normally mild-mannered Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan said that Dabholkar’s killers have “the same mindset” as Gandhi’s assassins. One must sincerely hope that the police investigation is scrupulous and “gets to the bottom of the conspiracy”, as Chavan promises.

The assassination is the latest in a series of explosions of intolerance witnessed in Pune, including the ransacking of the prestigious Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute by the Maratha-chauvinist Sambhaji Brigade in 2004 over a book on Shivaji, killing of five progressive social activists in 2010, and the cancellation of a screening of Sanjay Kak’s film on Kashmir in 2012.

Dabholkar’s killing marks a new low in Maharashtra’s cultural retrogression. This is especially tragic because Maharashtra was the crucible of India’s progressive social reform movement for a century, led by Shahu Maharaj, Jyotiba Phule, Savitribai Phule, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, DK Karve, MG Ranade, Ramabai Ranade, and not least, BR Ambedkar.

Social reform took roots among ordinary people mainly in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, where its leaders articulated the plebeian masses’ aspirations. The mobilisation of Dalits and Other Backward Classes, which followed later in North India, owes much to this early movement.

Maharashtra saw the flowering of India’s first Bahujan Samaj (non-Brahmin) mobilisation against religious orthodoxy, casteism, sati, gender discrimination, and barring of temple entry to Dalits. The movement championed girls’/women’s education and widow remarriage. It firmly embraced the Enlightenment values of reason and critical inquiry.

The reformists always faced venomous opposition, including social boycott, from traditionalists and upper-caste status-quoists. But they heroically resisted – and at times succeeded in pushing through pro-people measures.

The balance changed in the 1960s with the rise of the chauvinist-communal Shiv Sena, which worked to reverse the gains of social reform, with support from the ruling Congress. With this, says social critic Shanta Gokhale, the needle that had oscillated “between Maharashtra’s progressive and regressive heritage stopped on the side of regression.”

Dabholkar was a rationalist. But he didn’t campaign against faith per se, only against blind faith and exploitation of gullible people through witchcraft, tricks passed off as ‘miracles’, and infliction of harmful ‘magical’ rites such as beatings and torture to drive out the ‘evil spirits’ to which people’s health or financial problems are falsely attributed.

He trenchantly opposed tantrik-shamanic practices such as preventing medical treatment for illnesses, and relying on mantras instead; animal and human sacrifice to ward off ill-luck; falsely branding people as Satanical agents or carriers of misfortune; or claiming to perform surgery or change the sex of a foetus with one’s fingers.

Dabholkar lobbied hard for the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Bill, which hung fire for 18 years thanks to the Hindu Right’s opposition. This law seeks to prosecute people for claiming supernatural powers; defaming saints/gods by claiming to be their reincarnation; and ill-treating people in psychological distress in the belief that they are smitten by evil spirits.

It covers rituals performed to beget a male child, and claims to omniscience by virtue of being ‘possessed’ by supernatural powers. After Dabholkar’s killing, the Maharashtra government brought an ordinance to implement the Bill.

This only completes one part of Dabholkar’s unfinished agenda. The rest lies in extending such laws to the whole of India, and vigorously promoting the scientific temper and a spirit of critical inquiry – not just in classrooms, not just to earn degrees or jobs, but in daily life, while making crucial decisions about individual freedom, marriage, the family and religion.

This agenda has acquired great relevance and urgency in today’s South Asia. Liberalisation and globalisation have disrupted old social balances and faith systems and given rise to a politicised religiosity in our region. A ‘pop Hinduism’ thrives in India, centred on temples, pilgrimages, god-men and -women, with new, more ostentatious rituals – amidst an explosive growth of superstition, especially among the middle class.

In the 1960s, being superstitious was considered incorrect and infra dig among educated Indians. Now, it’s fashionable to rely on astrological predictions, wear flashy gemstones, get advice from outright quacks, and deify sadhus and self-proclaimed holy men.

Weird practices like wiccanism (literally, practising witchcraft), regression therapy (when you delude yourself to be the reincarnation of a mythological figure like Kaikeyi), and performance of elaborate havans and yagnas to bring fortune have pervaded middle class life. Observances like kathas, jagrans and bhajans are getting more public and raucous.

As Meera Nanda argues in The God Market, this religiosity is cultivated by “the emerging state-temple-corporate complex”, which is corrupting secular public institutions and embedding Hindu rituals and symbols in the affairs of the state. Hindu religiosity is also getting fused with national pride and the idea that India’s recent (and alas, fast-eroding) economic success is rooted in the superiority of its ancient (read, Hindu) civilisation.

This religiosity is supported by the state, temple-related bodies, and business groups. It’s easily harnessed to political causes and to greater intolerance towards the religious minorities. This is nowhere more evident than in Ayodhya, where a new kind of parikrama was invented to sow communal hatred. Opposing such pernicious practices and defending rationality would be the right homage to Dabholkar.

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.

Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in

Source: www.thenews.com.pk

Read More

Shaam ki taraf bharta khoon ashaam - Dr. Aamir Liaqat Hussain

 

Shaam ki taraf bharta khoon ashaam - Dr. Aamir Liaqat Hussain
Source: www.jang.com.pk

Read More