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