In My View

War is over, the cause is not

Vellupillai Prabhakaran is dead, but long will live the dream he spun for an independent Sri Lankan Tamil homeland. That dream can only be absolved if the Sri Lankan government in Colombo shows the perspicacity to win the war and not just the battles. For, this is a crucial moment in Sri Lankan Tamil history. The people are battered, bruised and thoroughly demoralised.

Atleast two generations of Tamil youth who only knew violence as a state of existence are now cowering in fear of retribution. The “cognitive dissonance” - as the American social psychologist Leon Festinger had coined it - for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka is so stark, that unless they are helped not to rationalise the emergence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE); their progress into the three-decade long civil war; and their ultimate decimation, the folklores would increasingly get into the realm of mythmaking, thus surviving in the consciousness of the people to the detriment of the Sri Lankan state.

While the military victory of the Sri Lankan forces bore the stamp of strategic and tactical aptitude of the Colombo leadership, it now has to be translated into a much larger realm. There is a reductionist American term for this realm; “winning hearts and minds” of a disaffected people. The British had a better term, ‘integration.’

The Tamils of the north of Sri Lanka need to be integrated into the national mainstream, which albeit dominated by the Sinhala majority now has an opportunity to expand to include the minorities.

At the pain of being called repetitive, it still has to be said: unless the Sri Lankan polity with its jingoistic Sinhala fringe and reactionary Buddhist clergy decides that the integrity of a country is not about just gaining challenged territory but about regaining the loyalty of a painfully subnationalist population, this war will be lost again. The onus for this difficult task devolves on the same singleminded Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan president, who so skillfully ran the violent war. It is upon him and rest of the political class of Sri Lanka to arrive at a national consensus that the Sri Lankan Tamils are as much Sri Lankan as those who wore the uniform of the country to take on the LTTE.

The early signs are promising although seem to give the sense of being cosmetic. The central message that was propagated about the Eelam War IV was that it was not being waged against the Sri Lankan Tamils, but against the intransigent LTTE. After battle pictures of former LTTE leader, Karuna – someone who would have been killed by the all-consuming Prabhakaran had he not fled in time to his eastern enclave - being the first visitor to the devastation of the north shows a certain sensitivity that could go a long way in putting a salve.

Rajapaksa, and the political class of Sri Lanka would have to keep in mind that the LTTE has done the biggest disservice to the Sri Lankan Tamil communities by killing the moderate leadership of the likes of towering, Appapillai Amrithalingam. Hence, they would have to nurture to health a new Tamil leadership that could guide a rudderless community to peace, stability and prosperity.

The LTTE’s record of the ‘protracted war’ is nefarious. They became a killing machine that danced to the tune of one single band master, Prabhakarn. Occasionally showing tactical brilliance, Prabhakarn often missed the strategic picture. He was so consumed by his own propaganda about the “Eelam” that he lost sight of the political nature of his ultimate goal. He thus failed to seize opportunities that came his way, even when the writing on the wall was stark: that redrawing of national boundaries was a relic of the post-WW II world, not to be repeated unless natural.

He thus failed to pick up the international cues for laying down arms and walking the ‘democratic’ path to power; in the process losing his constituency that argued for him.

Prabhakaran did not even relent when he lost the eastern province to Karuna. It is a telling statement on his generalship that he could not read the new status of the Sri Lankan armed forces. Released from fighting a two front civil war, they could not now concentrate their limited resources solely on the north thus creating the possibility of a major military victory over Prabhakaran.

Nor did Prabhakaran anticipate that post-Tsunami his manoeuvrability with small boats will be lessened as the devasatation caused to the fishing communities of the region would be incredible. Plus, the international partnership forged over the post-Tusnami relief operation would hold to the extent of challenging the ingress of his supply ships.

But at the end, it has to be said that Prabhakarn died a warrior’s death. Not for him the quick exit of a Hitlerian suicide. Nor was there an operatic performance of a dramatic attempt at escape. He died fighting the battle that he fought, often dishonourably, for decades without a qualm. Even if the Sri Lankan government manages to not martyrise him, they would not be able to stop him from surviving in the pantheon of free people.

In My View

USA would not change

For the past fortnight or so, a debate is raging in the USA. It has been dubbed ceremoniously by the American media as the debate about “who we (the Americans) are.” This is a long pending process of exculpation for the “crimes committed against humanity” by the George W Bush administration in the name of ‘war on terror.’

On 16 April the new Barack Obama administration decided to make public the American Justice department memoranda that created the whole, supposedly, legal architecture for the practices indulged in places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Apparently, President Obama took the decision to release those memos after a heartrending meeting at the White House.

It can be argued that more than constitutionalism or heightened moral resolves, Obama’s decision was guided by the memory of the leak of the Pentagon Papers in the late 1960s that opened up the whole can of worms of the US’s military actions in Vietnam. In other words, if Obama would not have made public those memos, they could have come back to bite him if leaked at a later date.

Anyway, the release of the memos have highlighted in the blighted consciousness of the American public how much inhuman and immoral their rulers can be. And all this was in the garb of legality

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But curiously Obama has also assured the American elite in the same breath that there would not be any investigation because he would not like to be diverted from his ‘agenda.’ American media has interpreted that as a belief that the examination of the actions of the previous government would rent the bodipolitik of the USA with such divisiveness that it would be back to the days of post-Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the point is that the US did not learn a lesson even after the Vietnam War. It repeated the same mistakes over and over again, while the world had to bear the brunt of its actions. So it can be safely argued that the US would not change and does not want to change.

Read about some of the actions that were ‘legally’ abetted by the Bush administration’s Justice department team. Washington Post quoted from one of the memos, “"A detainee may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point, or twenty to thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question."

“Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary restrictions kept prisoners compliant and reminded them they had no control over their basic needs. Clothes and food could be used as rewards for cooperation,” prescribed another memo. The list goes on.

These are the techniques that the US, indeed the West had been crowing against for decades. They have stood on judgment on other countries, as the self-appointed moral guardians of the world, and have sought to isolate one country or the other on account of human rights violations. And this is their real face, now exposed.

After apartheid was ended in South Africa and a black-led government came to power, the pro-West South African elite alongwith the progressive elements of the Western elite had prescribed as a process of healing from the painful years of white supremacy, a Truth Commission. The formula was later tried in Cambodia and East Timor.

Now is the time when the world should demand a Truth Commission from the Americans to let heal the wounds of US bestiality. Obama has abdicated his responsibility to the global opinion. The international community – if it is not another name of that group of people who owe their allegiance to the US elite in the garb of global citizenship – should rise up as one and demand that ‘let truth prevail.’

Or otherwise, some concerned citizen of the world should stand up and go to the courts of north Europe and file a case against Bush and Co with the same alacrity that is shown in hauling up second or third world dictators.

Of course, there too Obama has created a caveat. He has reassured the CIA officials who could be thus indicted that they would be provided full legal assistance, in the eventuality of such a fate. Not only that, Obama has told them that were they to lose money in the process, the US government would indemnify. No word there, by the way, of any way to compensate the victims or their families, of the treatment of those CIA officers.

Imagine George W Bush with a number pasted on his chest facing a photographer’s camera. Or even a disshevelled George W Bush, fresh out of bed, being examined in his orifices for any hidden cyanide pill, being photographed at that instant like Saddam Hussein had to undergo. That would not happen either. For, Obama has ensured that the people who play the game of global dominance should be immune from the impact of their actions. And he has ensured that the US would not change.

In My View

Summit of inconsequence

In normal circumstances, an entry of the developing countries into the portals of the super-rich club like the G-8 would have raised many eyebrows. The clapperboys – in the media and academics – of the well-heeled would have then lamented the falling threshold of the exclusive club that allowed entry to the sweaty and toiling.

But the recent London summit of the G-20 nations, who account for 90 per cent of the world output have instead roused the levels of optimism of the courtiers to new highs by which they want it to be a permanent feature. They want the G-20 to replace G-8 as a more effective group of countries, which could undertake to lay down the economic destiny of globe from now onwards. This is a sign of the extraordinary times the world is witnessing. And this was possibly the only fundamental change the London summit has wrought.

For, the rest – the $ 1.1 trillion stimulus package; the recapitalisation plans for the IMF; new regulatory frameworks from the financial sectors of the economy; and promises to maintain the trade flowing – are all attempts to hold up a decrepit system, beyond its point of exhaustion.

There is no acknowledgement at the apex levels of the world capitalist system that neo-liberalism of the Friedmanite kind has failed miserably. It has, in fact opened fissures in the current capitalist system that cast systemic doubts about its continuance.

The changes that have been brought into the systems till now in America or Europe in the wake of the current crisis are of the nature that John Bellamy Foster, the Marxist economist calls, “special case theory of depression economics.” Rediscovery of Keynesian economics by the neo-liberal lot do not leave any scope for any discussion of what John Maynard Keynes’s had diagnosed as “outstanding faults” of capitalism.

Regulation of unbridled speculation is being provided as a panacea without tackling the issue of falling returns on investment driving capital to such wanton excesses for earning higher returns. No attempt is being made at addressing the impact of severely depressed wages on economic activity as a whole or the complete destruction of household savings in the past few decades resulting in precarious rise in debt.

There is also the element of culpability that is staying the hands of the current global leadership from fixing responsibility for this sorry pass. If they began taking action against those immediately responsible for the present crisis public ire could soon turn to them demanding their heads in turn. For it has been in their watch that all the violations of normative behavior took place. The public might finally ask the crucial question: were they sleeping on the job?

The various stimuli packages, the recapitalisation of IMF or “end to banking secrecy” are all attempts at increasing the supply of money in the paths of Milton Friedman supposed theoretical innovation about money driving capital expansion. This is opposed to the Marxist critique of capitalism based upon the logic of capital increasing the exploitation of labour by reducing their real wages to maximise profit, ending up depressing consumption and bringing down its own doom.

But this summit also signaled the incipient end to the dollar hegemony. Chinese made the proposal first that the world needed a new reserve currency. The Russians showed that they did not have any big objections about the proposal. Brazilians agreed too. Even Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said China's proposal to create a new global reserve currency to replace the US dollar was "reasonable." The silence from India was deafening.

The other question that should have been asked was about the mountains of debt that the USA has accumulated. By some calculations it now amounts to $ 15 trillion. This is the world’s savings that has been appropriated by the USA for its current consumption. Were it to repay even a quarter of the debt in the next five years, it would act as the biggest stimulus package that anyone could conjure.

In final analysis, it would be a pyrrhic acknowledgement by Indians that they economist prime minister, Manmohan Singh atleast understood that the kind of change that is needed, required a global reordering of political power of nations. He told the bastion of neoliberal economics, Financial Times, “In one day you are asking the leaders of the world to resolve all these issues. Beyond a point they are issues relating to the redistribution of powers among nations. I don’t think these are issues that can be resolved in a short period of time. If you look at Bretton Woods, it took two years for the Americans and British to work out arrangements. There was the Keynes plan, the White plan and now the power system is much more complex, there are much more issues. If you are talking about global reform it requires a lot more work. It is a task that should be entrusted to a competent group of people under the auspices of the IMF or another arrangement we are willing to look at.”

In My View

Double Jeopardy in Pakistan

Misfortune never comes alone. It comes in pairs. The names of the calamity that has struck Pakistan are Asif Ali Zardari and Mian Nawaz Sharif. When the country’s North West is up in flames; when its cities are being bombed and mutilated by assassins bullets everyday, the two decided to have their slugfest in public.

But then for Nawaz Sharif it was a question of political survival. For, the Pakistan Supreme Court had ruled him, and his brother, out of electoral politics for the rest of their life times. That meant they would not be able to ascend to any electoral office anymore. So Sharif had to take to the streets. In the process, he deftly transformed a very personal battle into one about democracy and the rule of law.

Zardari had possibly thought that if he could postpone taking a decision on the issue of reinstatement of Supreme Court chief justice, Ifthikar Chaudhuri long enough, the issue itself would go away. But he had obviously erred about the longevity of the issue. He should have remembered that it was the same issue that had launched a series of events which culminated into them being brought back to power. So he had an unpaid bill. In politics those kinds of bills can seldom be wished away.

So we all know how the events of the past fortnight unfolded in Pakistan. The social turmoil this proxy political battle could have caused would have exacted a price from a country that was being stripped to the bones paying its old IOUs. Not only is it repaying the US for its past benevolence, it is even paying the Taliban/al Qaeda combine for helping Islamabad to wage non-conventional tactics in asymmetric war.

While the Taliban/al Qaeda might have been waiting for the politicians to discredit themselves more, in the manner that made them or their understudies better options for the people of Pakistan in search of State, the US and its allies could ill afford such situation to develop.

The US is increasingly realising that this ‘War on Terror’ in South Asia – a potential key focal point for the Barack Obama administration – can only be won when the people of the Pakistan are geared towards resisting those dark forces of medievalist revivalism. The US establishment is feeling that their overdependence on the Pakistan army is commensurate with the results produced by the forces. The John Kerry-Richard Lugar bill that is slated to triple the hand-out to Pakistan given by the Joseph Biden-Lugar act last year is geared towards delivery of governance.

Unless that key element – which includes both security and development - is brought to the table in Pakistan, the people of the country would not consider their leadership worthy of banking on. And till that time it happens, the Pakistan government would have to find stop-gap measures of seeking to co-opt elements of the forces they are ranged against. In the longer run, these attempts to find ‘good Taliban’ would come back to bite the hands that fed them. For, the ideas that germinate these forces need to be defeated in totality before one can declare their complete extermination.

In that light, one has to look at the events of the past fortnight in Pakistan carefully to see signs of a rejuvenation of Pakistan’s socio-politics. The rent-a-crowd political gatherings of the sub continent ensure that the number of people in a political programme are seldom a measure of their popularity. So if one decides that the teeming hordes in various vehicles that almost laid siege to Islamabad last week are an indicator of the resurgence of democratic politics in Pakistan, one could be miserably mistaken.

On the other hand, if Nawaz Sharif’s return to politics was so unpalatable an idea to the general population, even his unaccounted billions could not have got so many people on the streets. It works on this principle. The goons who rig polls in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh change sides on the basis of the swings in popular mood. That way they ensure that the myths about their power continue to grow riding on the back of popular waves that occur irrespective of their muscle power.

Over and above that, Pakistan’s army would not gone out on a limb to make Zardari relent to the demands of Sharif brothers had they themselves sensed that latter was not resonating with the people.

In fact, the crucial element in the sage of the past few days in Pakistan has been attitude of the army. The way they stayed in barracks, preferring to pull strings to make the puppets dance showed a level sophistication that was sorely lacking in the case of that institution of Pakistan. Clearly, the army has realised that this time if they donned the mufti again, it would be gravely impolitic on their part thus challenging the sustenance of the only functioning institution of the country. At the end, not only the episode ended on a note that was not a reversal of the status quo in Pakistan, but it also did not denote a lasting damage to it.

In My View

Political defeat for Pakistan’s elite

Fourteen months after BenazirBhutto fell to the bullets of Islamist fundamentalists; and a year after the people of Pakistan rejected the Islamist agenda with a thumping victory for the forces ranged against it, Shariat law was imposed in a part of Pakistan. A bigger political defeat for Pakistan’s elite could not have been writ larger than this.

The geographic proximity of Swat valley to the latter’s seat of power, Islamabad – just 130 kms northwest – make Pakistan government’s decision to promulgate Shariat law there even more ironic. It almost seems that Pakistan’s Taliban is knocking on the doors of the elite of that country, asking them to stand up and be counted.

The fact that Monday’s (16 February) decision was taken in a meeting of all the powerful stakeholders of the country; President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani, army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvaiz Kayani, ISI chief Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, NWFP Governor Owais Ahmed Ghani and its Chief Minister Ameer Haidar Khan, shows the breadth of the Islamist political victory.

Some of Pakistan’s newspapers in their anger have called it a military defeat of Pakistan’s army. But cool headed analysis would show that the army did not taste the defeat in any battlefield. Any army would be wary of turning its guns, with its full explosive potential on its own population. Plus, if the government were to be believed the Pakistan Taliban, whose agenda have been fulfilled, enjoyed a level of popular support. In that scenario, the army could have done little but to hunker down for a protracted battle against its own people.

Pakistan’s army did not have the time to do that. They were needed to help the US and allied forces in tackling the far more dangerous enemy, the Afghan Taliban and their supporters, the al Qaeda. They were also needed to keep the country functioning with a modicum of normality. This was an army overstretched and tiring. It needed a breather in one front.

But the political elite of Pakistan deserve all the opprobrium. These were the people who enjoyed the highest levels of popular support just a year back because they vowed to eradicate the menace of Islamist forces. They fumed, fretted, fulminated, and bickered and wasted precious time. They failed to launch the political processes that could turn the people away from considering the Pakistan Taliban as a viable political option out of the morass they are in.

This is the population that had chosen the Awami National Party (ANP) to govern the North West Frontier Province because it had promised to end the war. A war that the Islamabad government now concedes to have brought untold misery to the people of the province. The political parties of Pakistan needed to take on the Taliban not just militarily, but ideologically. A task that they were so incapable of doing that they in turn had to embrace the garb of ‘peacemaker’ by succumbing to the regressive agenda of the Islamist forces. In short, they failed to provide not just governance but a political direction to the country.

In the process they frittered away the biggest mandate in favour of moderation that Pakistan has ever given to its rulers. The fact that this 16 February decision was taken around the time US President, Barack Obama’s special envoy on Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, was visiting the region indicated that Washington was in the loop. The US needs Pakistan to focus its energies into ridding Afghanistan of the Islamist forces, thus did not mind if Islamabad chose to buy time by striking a temporary truce with its own dangerous delinquents.

The victory rally Pakistan Taliban cadres held in Swat on 17 February bore the signs of the times. These are the people who have beheaded people for failing to follow the tenets of so called Islam and driven out hundreds of girls from schools because it is apparently ‘un-Islamic’ for women to have an education. In the rally on Tuesday they flaunted their weapons openly in their distinctive headgear. The cleric who had led the demand for imposition of Shariat at the public level, Sufi Mohammad, now claims that he would lead talks with his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah who is the local Taliban leader for restoring peace to the region.

Pakistan government’s own linkage of actually issuing the order for promulgation of Shariat with restoration of peace gives a sense that in the reward-punishment paradigm it considers, imposition of the retrograde laws is considered a reward. Islamabad has justified this by a logic that if most people wanted it, who are they to stop it.

This hides the fact that most people chose imposition of the oppressive laws to have peace in a war-torn region. They were not given the option of leading their lives in a normal, dignified way. This was a failure of policies and practices of those who were at the helm in the country.

Holbrooke has rightly said this is biggest common challenge to Pakistan, India and the US. India is right to be worried. It would not certainly want the Taliban breathing down the neck of Indian Muslims. What their emergence in Pakistan does to the security situation of the sub continent is an issue nightmares are made of. Let’s hope that the people of Pakistan who are not much different than those who live across their eastern borders get a chance to seize the moment of history.