In My View

A futile offer for talks

Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s offer to Pakistan for talks if it stopped exporting terrorism to India, might have been good for effect. But it was not designed to achieve any breakthrough. For, though his twin calls to Pakistan and all the contending parties of Kashmir could have been supremely choreographed to jive with the visit to Islamabad by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, it still was ill-timed in terms of inspiring Pakistan’s leadership to respond to it in concrete terms.

The feudal lords who rule the country from Islamabad are too distracted and enjoy too little legitimacy to be able to engage India in any meaningful way. The country is rife with dissension about which approach to take to tackle the menace of terrorism, presently tearing asunder the fabric of its society. The country is also deeply divided about how to deal with the US, which has mostly been a friend of opportunity – goading Pakistan to do its bidding for serving the US national and global interests; and withdrawing when those necessities had disappeared.

Most of all these larger questions have divided the sole pillar of solidity propping up Pakistan’s establishment – the army. This is an army that had used the religion of Islam to not just garner support of the people of the country but also as a military ideology to motivate its ranks. It has also historically weaved in non-conventional warfare into its operational doctrine based on the ‘holy warrior’ concept. They have used military professionalism less to create a perfect war-fighting machine to take on India, but more to train ungainly ‘mujahids’ to do their job by proxy.

This army is now been asked to account for itself, with its guns turned against its own people. And the Americans believe that they are not doing the job well enough. The US strategic community is of the opinion that the Pakistan army is ill-equipped to operate on a counter-insurgency mode. They thus want the army to be trained by US experts alongwith the equipment they are supplying.

Pakistan’s military leadership is weary of that prospect. While overtly they are saying that they do not want their army turned into a counter-insurgency force as they have to be ever prepared to take on their conventional enemy, India, in real terms it could be linked to far more harsh reality embedded in the social pattern of the country.

This is a country that is heavily dominated by the Punjabis of Pakistan. If this force were to become a potent counter-insurgency force, it could very well strain the unity of the country to a breaking point as it would mean the battles within Pakistan were between the rest versus the Punjabis.

The case in point in this direction is the severe opposition within the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan establishment to let the Americans modernise the Frontier Corps. Because, the Corps, a paramilitary that has seen intense action in the anti-insurgency operations in North West Frontier Province and Balochistan, is drawn mostly from the Pushtun tribes of the same region, the Punjabi leaders of Pakistan are weary to hand over modern weapons in their hands, lest those are turned on them at a later date.

These kinds of deep contradictions occupy the minds of the Pakistan establishment to the extent of obviating any space for taking a long-term view in terms of achieving stability from a volatile current situation. They remain hostage to their past machinations and fresh survival strategies that account for most of their imagination. In that light Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s newest offer for dialogue needs to be viewed.

It is imperative for Pakistan to understand that they need to a create a regional copact against terrorism and insurgency to deal with the twin phenomenon nearer home. For that, Pakistan’s army would need to change its worldview about seeking to achieve strategic goals through illegitimate means of fostering cross-border terrorism.

Pakistan today finds disembarking from this tiger it has ridden for so many decades extremely difficult. They have a belief system based on the successes notched up in the past because of this policy. They cannot forget that they gained a huge foothold in Afghanistan – a strategic “deep country” because it helped create the mujahideen force with American resources. It cannot obliterate from its minds the initial successes of creating instability in India by infusing terrorism into the localised insurgency of Kashmir.

But today Pakistan leadership’s terrorist friends are deeply disillusioned with their former mentors. As a result the leaders have to constantly look over their shoulders each time they take a step in any direction. The people of Pakistan are bearing the brunt of past recklessness of the leaders and paying with their lives. Result: Chaos reigns supreme.

From that viewpoint, Dr Singh call for talks seem misplaced. Who should talk what? To what end? Are the present leaders of Pakistan capable of arresting the country’s slide into anarchy? If they were to talk about Kashmir – as Dr Singh has hinted and Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani have underlined in his response by referring to the “core issue” – who would listen? Would the Kashmiris pay any heed to their formulations? Would the people of Pakistan themselves listen to their leaders who have made the country descend to such destitution?

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

.

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.

In My View

End state for Sri Lanka

The big guns are blazing for the final time. Termination of the 25-year-long conflict is near. Clearly, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is getting ready for its final stand in an area that is shrinking every day around Mullaithvu. Sri Lankan army is notching up significant successes, after decades of being at the receiving end.

The end is coming at a dramatic pace. Even the LTTE could not have expected that environment around them could degrade so fast. That clearly was a strategic misjudgment for which the Sri Lankan Tamil ‘army’ is paying a heavy price. In retrospect, it now seems Velupillai Prabhakaran’s inability to read the political milieu has brought the downfall of the force he built as a ruthless fighting machine.

Primarily, three elements constituted that political situation. First, in the post-9/11 world, the public opinion had sharply turned against forcible changes of governance regimes. In the Indian sub continent, Nepal witnessed a similar change. But qualitatively, the Maoists of Nepal showed more flexibility in dealing with the politics of the times much better than the LTTE. The former came overground and joined the democratic discourse with the same aplomb which they showed fighting the Royal Nepalese Army.

The LTTE had its last chance at a similar transformation in 2005-6 when it made peace with the Sri Lankan government. It could have then turned itself into an overt political force seeking broadbased autonomy and devolution of powers from the Colombo government. Instead, it sought accretion to its military power, negotiating multi million dollar arms deals.

This emphasis on a military solution to the problem had possibly led the LTTE to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. After the dust settles down in the battlefields of Sri Lankan north, Sri Lanka experts would measure how that single act had cost the organisation crucial support of the Indian Tamils, and how it had proved decisive when the end-game was near.

In the penultimate days of the LTTE’s existence as a quasi-legitimate representative of the Sri Lankan Tamils, the Indian Tamils show little sympathy towards their cause. This is especially evident in the way the two main Tamil political parties, DMK and the AIADMK had conducted themselves in the recent past. If the DMK supreme and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M Karunanidhi has publicly disavowed the LTTE, Jayalalitha, the AIADMK leader has maintained a deafening silence after initial stirrings of expression of concern.

Finally, the LTTE was done in by the vertical split in its ranks, led by ‘Colonel’ Karuna in the eastern province. This tactically degraded the security situation for the organisation as the Sri Lankan army was relieved off the pressure of having to fight the civil war on two fronts. Plus, Karuna challenged the LTTE’s claim of being the sole homogenous arbiter of the Sri Lankan Tamil fate. His desertion from the organisation’s ranks also released the Sri Lankan army assets that were all deployed in the north, targeting the remaining leg of the LTTE.

It is a different point that this military victory will not bring the desired end state for the Sri Lankan government in this battle of attrition. While the victory on the battle fields would remove the conventional security threat posed by the LTTE, but it would not mean a sudden change in the allegiances of the Sri Lankan Tamil population. The Colombo government would then have the harder task of establishing trust with the Tamil population of the country that would still begrudge the demolition of their legitimate platform of protest.

So it is imperative for the Sri Lankan government to conduct the rest of the operations with a high degree of care that no excesses are committed against the civilian population. This is especially important in light of the 250,000 Tamils who have been moved to Mullaithvu alongwith the LTTE forces, and who the Sri Lankan government claim to have been held hostage by the latter as ‘human shields.’

The Sri Lankan army has created a ‘safe zone’ within this embattled area on which, they have said; they would not do any shelling. They expect that the civilians with the LTTE would be moved to this area for the sake of security of these people. But they also say that the LTTE has apparently asked its soldiers to fight in civilian clothing, so that their death in combat can be projected to the world as the killing of civilian population.

The US, UK, Norway and Japan has urged the Sri Lankan government to desist from attacking the ‘safe zone.’ They have also exhorted the combatant sides to show utmost caution.

So has India. Minister for External Affairs, Pranab Mukherjee, had reiterated a policy of caution with the Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had come to New delhi a few days ago. The presidential delegation gave a full scale briefing on the war situation to the Indian counterparts. And possibly, advocated patience with the Indians on the face of the LTTE propaganda. The future thus is now.

In My View

Crumbling Promises

The USA would withdraw all its soldiers from Iraq - barring a few support troops – in 16 months time from the inauguration of the new administration.

The new US government would close the Guantanamo Bay prisons in a year from its inception.

These were the two key promises Barack Obama, the 44^th president of the United States made during his long campaign for office. And these pledges are the crucible on which he would be tested by the international audience in his first days in office.

By the look of it he would have to renege on the Iraq promise right at the outset. Washington’s elite is not in any mood to relent on their strategy of global domination so easily. Presumably, they still think that the US has the economic capability to sustain globe girdling military operations by US forces to uphold their ambitions.

France’s highly acclaimed Le Monde Diplomatique (LMD) has written in its current January issue how the US armed forces top echelons are trying to subvert an agreement that George W Bush’s administration had signed with the Iraqi government for a hundred percent US combat troops withdrawal from the country by 2011. Called the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), it had stipulated that that US troops withdraw from the Iraqi cities and towns and regroup in bases to be located according to another agreement with the Baghdad government.

The SOFA forbade the US forces from operating in the country without full Iraqi “approval” and “coordination.” It also bars the American forces from detaining Iraqis without an Iraqi court order. The agreement also bans the US from using Iraqi territory or airspace to “launch attacks against other countries.” Finally, SOFA, which was concluded on 18 November, last year, held that Washington needed to develop a detailed schedule for “complete withdrawal” of all combat forces and create “mechanisms and arrangements” to reduce US force levels in a stipulated time period.

Obama’s pronouncements were not far different from this agreement. Only his plan was for an accelerated withdrawal, drawing back two brigade level forces every month. But the Washington warriors would like to have nothing of it. So they are already bent on sabotaging the plan and the SOFA to the best of their abilities.

On Thursday (22 January) the new White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs referred to Iraq almost 25 minutes into his hour-long first media briefing of the new administration said, “The president would be provided all access to information about Iraq that would help him take decisions.” This rather laconic reply was about a war that had witnessed the loss of more than 3000 American lives; tied down more than half-a-million US troops; and costed a few billion dollars every day.

As the LMD records, the days of the signing of the SOF agreement the Pentagon officials told the media that the “withdrawal should take place only if conditions (on the ground) warrant it.” This is the precise premise that was rejected by the government of Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq in the negotiations of the SOFA. Obama had said that the sole determinant of his decision to withdraw would be the ‘cost’ of the continuing US presence.

Even before the ink was dry on the new agreement, the Bush administration had decided to circumvent the key provisions like the ban on military operations against any foreign country using Iraqi soil by arguing the “right of self defence.” It even had plans to relabel some of the combat troops in Iraq into training and support troops to go around the provision for withdrawal of forces.

Soon after Obama was elected on November 4, some of our mailboxes were flooded with material from the so-called US experts who argued that the new president-elect’s withdrawal plan was not justifiable for various reasons including the impending Iraqi elections in 2010. For example, Roger Hertog in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) wrote, “They (the Democrats like Obama) want to cut force levels too early and transfer responsibility to Iraqis before they are ready, and they offer no plan to deal with the chaos that would result six months down the road. In essential outline, they have chosen to duplicate the early mistakes of an (Bush) administration they hold in contempt.”

Colin H Kahl and William E Odom wrote in the venerable Foreign Affairs journal, “Rather than unilaterally and unconditionally withdrawing from Iraq and hoping that the international community will fill the void and push the Iraqis toward accommodation -- a very unlikely scenario -- the United States must embrace a policy of "conditional engagement." This approach would couple a phased redeployment of combat forces with a commitment to providing residual support for the Iraqi government if and only if it moves toward genuine reconciliation. Conditional engagement …..would incorporate the real lesson from the Sunni Awakening.”

Now that Obama has taken office, he seems to have taken to heart all these protestations. So no longer does one hear any clarion calls for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Instead, the new US president the lesser of the two ‘evils’ – closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison – as the ground on which he can renew the call for freedom and liberty under the American leadership. Thus, expect more falsehoods in the near future.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

In My View

Recovering Palestinian legacy

At one level the Western strategy in post-Yasser Arafat Palestine made a certain diabolical sense.

Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) represented, in their mind, the radical Islamist fringe of the Palestinian movement. So it needed to be isolated. Its apparent unity with the post-Arafat Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) signalled a trend towards increasing radicalisation of the ‘mother of all disputes’ that could challenge the West’s monopoly as the power broker of the problem; hence, even that unity needed to be destroyed by pushing Fatah-led PLO towards greater distance with Hamas. Democratic franchise be damned!

In the last elections held in the Israeli-occupied territory of Palestine, Hamas had won more than 30 per cent of the votes. It had gained unstinted political control of the Gaza strip and had given Fatah a run for its money in the West Bank. The election was held under the auspices of the great ‘democracy’ drive of the George W Bush administration in Washington, only to be repudiated by the latter when the results became inconvenient.

Now they are being bombed. Of course, Palestinian civilian population is also becoming equal victims of this current Israeli aggression. But that could be pointedly ignored as ‘collateral damage.’ After all, hasn’t the South Korean champion of democracy, Ban ki Moon issued a statement condemning violence ‘from all sides’ as the secretary general of the United Nations! He has even given Nicholas Sarkozy a free run to waltz his way into the problem, much in the character of a French farce.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, needs a cleaner slate to work on once he takes office. He would seek a long term solution to the Palestinian problem with a two-state solution where Fatah can rule supreme. And Obama can be hailed as the great ‘peacemaker’ from the West who is desperate to reestablish Western hegemony in India’s West Asia. Israel can manage a bit of opprobrium as the force that ‘shaped the battlefield’ especially since it is also being given the badge of victimhood, what with Hamas’ Katyusha rockets taking the Palestinian struggle a bit to the Israeli doors.

This is also a great diversion for the world’s television channel’s, which were so full of the economic crises that it was causing bilious outrages in various capitals of Europe and the USA. Now atleast the world is looking familiar with blood, gore and death of those who could very easily be labelled ‘fundamentalists.’

Of course, Hamas is fundamentalist. They are raising ‘fundamental issues’ about the continued occupation by Israel of their homeland. If the Israeli forces are no longer ubiquitous in the West Bank and Gaza after the elections, they wait just outside the doors screening everyone and everything that crosses the security wall they have built a few years ago. Hamas wants the control of the Palestinian destiny back in their own hands.

But then Hamas is also a product of a Syrio-Iranian enterprise: the diplomatic red rags of the region. Hamas was born when a large section of the Palestinian youth had lost all hope on the Fatah’s ability to deliver an honourable Palestinian solution. They had the militancy of youth and eagerness of desire to reclaim their identity. At a tender age, they got sucked into high politics; they made mistakes, they still do.

Now their intransigence is being used in a manner that suits Israel and the West either way. On the one level they are being told that there cannot be any lasting solution to the Palestinian problem unless they unite with the Fatah. On another level, history tells us how the same international forces militate against such a unity when it occurs.

Having said that, we have been promised by the Brussels-based International Crisis group (ICG) that, “…a clear signal from the U.S.and European Union (EU) (might emanate) that, this time around, they would judge a Palestinian unity arrangement on its conduct rather than automatically torpedo it.” The whole matrix is based in Washington’s desire to engage with Syria and Iran seriously once Obama takes over the reins of power.

Sarkozy would bring in a ceasefire before 20 January once Isreali Defence Forces fulfill their tactical objectives. Though one cannot say whether the Hamas would be tamed.

But what would remain on record is India’s ludicrous reaction to the whole chain of events that began in late-December. Its exhortation about Israel using “disproportionate” force in Gaza is a slap on the face of those who have witnessed India’s past political record in the region since Jawaharlal Nehru’s time.

What would India, under the UPA government, have lost if it had threatened to discontinue the multi-billion dollar arms trade with Israel? What would India have failed to accomplish in terms of its security if the training programmes by the Israeli security agencies were stopped? What are they achieving anyway? Are they stopping a Mumbai from happening?

And what would India have gained had it done the two things that had immense value as international currencies of exchange? It would have gained a voice and respect of about 180 nations out of the 190 odd in the United Nations. It would have again become to be considered a beacon of Asian righteousness. Each of these attributes, of course, don’t have a dollar value attached to them. But they have immense importance in terms of global power.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

In My View

Catch me if you can!

Pakistan is playing the familiar game. But what else could it do under the circumstances. After 9/11, it had made a 180-degree turn and had disavowed its long standing association with the Taliban regime of Afghanistan. It had then let the US and allies use military bases in Pakistan for launching their ‘regime changing’ expeditions across the country’s western frontiers.

But as later experiences have revealed the Pakistan state avoided an existential crisis of it’s own by a diabolical ploy. Knowing well that important and significant sections of its own people were in close dalliance with the Taliban, Islamabad and Rawalpindi had winked and nodded when Mullah Omar and his close lieutenants had crossed over with their tails between their legs from Afghanistan. The latter had found refuge in the Pushtoon dominated north western parts of Pakistan where they now continue to reside and dream of returning to Kabul. Even key al Qaeda leaders had melded in that crowd and had sought sanctuary there.

Even now when the Pakistan army and air force lead military actions in those parts of the country, they do it with great ‘sensitivity’ about the level of harm they should cause to these ‘guests.’ A perennial complaint of Islamabad’s US allies is about this undue reticence in hitting targets by Pakistan’s marksmen. The new US president-elect, Barack Obama hopes to correct the situation when he is in the saddle post-January 20.

But Pakistan is not similarly beholden to India in the way it is to the West. Islamabad does not have to kow-tow with angry Indian fulminations about taking action against all those who use its territory to wage war against New Delhi. The only real pressure that India can exert is moral. And morality is a highly discounted commodity these days in the bazaars of Lahore or Karachi.

However, amidst this rather bleak prognosis another element has got added recently. That is reflected in the commentaries of Pakistan’s intellectuals in the pages of its newspapers. They say that India does not pose an existential threat to Pakistan any longer. Presumably, any such threat, in their minds has been effectively countered by the nuclear weapons the country now possesses. But the real and present danger to the country now resides with the glassy-eyed jihadis, high on Wahabi Islam.

These groups have increased their state-less autonomy to such a high degree that Pakistan’s ruling elite now see them as threats to its own survival. No longer are they viewed like ‘guns on hire’ who could be directed against India – like in Kashmir – if only to cause death to the Indian nation by a thousand cuts.

There is also a growing appreciation in Pakistan that India is no longer in its league. India’s emergence as a power to reckon with has made these people recognise that whatever happens to India now causes a global impact. They are now thus seeking a modus vivendi to engage with India in a context, which does not seem too supine.

One model that is being talked about, now, in their country is the ‘regional’ approach. Apparently, this is the current favourite in the US among its fast dwindling corridors of power. In that light, the statement of the newly elected victor, Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina Wajed, in Bangladesh’s polls becomes important. That she has spoken about a South Asian regional task force on terrorism does not seem to be the product of her own imagination alone.

For India, that idea should sound promising especially considering that it emerged from Bangladesh, the other problem child of the sub-continent. There is always greater accountability if a mechanism is developed outside of the bilateral matrix, with multiple actors being involved in the exercise.

If that Hasina Wajed proposal reaches fruition, it would remove much of the cover under which Pakistan plays the game mentioned above. For, then evidence or proof of a situation would not lie in the realm of one or two, but would be examined by all the others of the region. And that would underline the acceptability of that ‘evidence.’

India should not nitpick too much when the proposal comes to the SAARC table about whether China should become a party to the ‘joint task force.’ Whatever New Delhi might imagine, the reality is that both Islamabad and Dhaka sees China as a hedge against a perceived Indian hegemony.

On the contrary, New Delhi might actually discover an ally in Beijing on issues of terrorism, especially since the latter seems so weary of challenging the global status quo at least for the next two decades. In fact, if Beijing were to become a party to the mechanism it would raise the level of the discourse from being strictly regional to global. That would guarantee a kind of attention, which would preclude any obfuscation by any other individual country or even, group.

In other words, what Mumbai mayhem had kicked off might prove to be seminal in the history of the troubled South Asian region, far outflanking any diversionary ploy that Pakistan could dream about under the circumstances. At the end, the memories of the people who lost their lives in the city during those last days of November, 2008 would be better served if something systemic changes in the sub-continent in the longer run.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in