PERFUME CHOWK

Qadri case: Battle for the soul of Pakistan

2011-10-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

By Aftab Zaidi:
The reverberations of Justice Munir verdict in Maulvi Tameez uddin case are being felt even today. Every military coup was sanctioned and given a legal cover based on this faulty decision. The long lasting ill effects of this judgment were not realized at the time of its announcement. Similarly the outcome of the Mumtaz Qadri case will have profound impact on the future of this nation. The fact that an ex – Chief Justice of Lahore High Court has come forward to argue in favor of a self confessed killer is likely to put further strain on the judges. It appears that anything wrapped in a cloak of religiosity will even blind our arbitrators of justice. After the proclamation of the sentence; the anti terrorist court judge was hurriedly transferred to Lahore after his office was ransacked by a section of lawyers. There have already been violent protests all around the country condemning the verdict and calling for its commutation by the President. Clearly the protestors through their threats and aggressive gestures are trying to mould outcome of the case in their favor. Lately the courts have also been accused of releasing terrorist suspects. However the judges have defended the acquittals on the basis of lack of evidence provided by the prosecution. The Supreme Court in July ordered the release of Malik Ishaq; a dreaded sectarian killer. . He is the founder of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), which is aligned with al Qaeda along with Jandullah and Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. He was implicated in 44 cases of culpable homicide and was acquitted in 34 of those cases. He was also allegedly accused of plotting terrorist plots from the confines of his jail room and indicted in planning and executing the terror attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team. It has already been reported that Malik Ishaq had in October 1997 admitted to an Urdu daily to being involved in the killing of over a 100 people. The sectarian temperature has also shot up in the aftermath of his release. There have already been two attacks on Shia Hazaras. On September 19, near the town of Mastung gunmen forced 40 Hazaras to disembark from a bus through which they were traveling to visit Holy sites in Iran; shot them at close range and fled the scene of the crime. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi later claimed responsibility for this attack. Ironically, Malik Ishaq has very close links with this sectarian organization. The releases of terrorist suspects by courts have been a recurring theme. This has happened despite the fact that mostly ordinary Pakistani citizens have bore the brunt of terror related causalities. A US State Department report in 2010 criticized Pakistan for failing to outlaw militant Islamic groups. It further complained that Pakistan’s acquittal rate of prosecuting suspected terrorists was approximately 75% culminating in release of three out of four defendants. The courts have also been instrumental in the release of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed; the controversial Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s Ameer who was also banned by a UN Security Council resolution. It is pertinent to mention that Mr. Saeed also led the funeral prayers for Osama Bin Laden after his death through a US Navy Seals operation. The Qadri case presents a very clear evidence of inherent flaws in religiously inspired laws. It also provides the courts with an opportunity to absolve them of the perception that the judges hold a soft corner for the Islamic militants. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear and cogent. However the stay of the sentencing by the Islamabad High Court has again sent the wrong signals. The fight is for the soul of Pakistan. Release of Qadri will have very serious ramifications for the coming generations. This will provide an explicit justification to commit such acts of brute violence in the name of religion. There is still time. The virus of religiously sanctioned killing is still in its embryonic stage. It should be nipped in the bud before it turns into an inferno and engulfing the entire society.

Aalu Andey vs Gandey Andey: A Tale of Two Videos

2011-10-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

Raza Habib Raja
In the past few days, I have had the privilege of seeing two extraordinary videos, one of which spanned barely 3 minutes, and the other was a real brain tester, which lasted for over 30 minutes. The formats were very different, as one was a song, and the other was a television talk show. The schism and the contrast ran much much deeper than the formats, and yet in a strange paradoxical way, there were similarities and an ironical linkage between the two videos.
The thing which connected the two videos was that in the first video, in just breath-taking three minutes, three aspiring musicians gave very credible reasons for what exactly was wrong with the second video. Both the videos were linked in another way: First featured a totally raw rock and roll band, and the second one had Pakistan’s premier vocalist, who once belonged to the most famous rock and roll band Pakistan has ever produced. Two set of musicians, belonging to the same genre, vastly different in experience, but furthest apart in their take on the socio-political scenario of Pakistan.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have posted the links so that you can independently judge yourselves also. The second video has not been posted in its entirety as I have only posted the most “important” portion
Aalu Anday
Ali Azmat with Luqmaan on Khari Baat
Regarding the first video, well I have never in my life seen a video in Pakistan, which within a span of merely three minutes, bares all the hypocritical instinctive foundations of our parallel universe. In those pulse fastening, bewildering, amazing three minutes three youngsters (one of them I happen to know personally also) beat the crap out of the whole right wing narrative. In lyrics, which were simple yet incisive, in a tone which was humorous yet dead serious, and in a video that had innuendos and yet was also so head on, the new group named as “Baighairat Brigade” (Dishonourable Brigade) showed everyone a mirror and showed what in essence honour meant. It showed us that honour is not delusional and misplaced self importance, which in essence is an outcome of our humongous failures in life to achieve anything in economic, cultural and development spheres, but it lies in acknowledging our shortcomings. The group did not try to indulge in some kind of pseudointellectual analysis through some heavy nonsensical words but in a simple intelligible language just sang through the plain facts. Yes, in order to bring out the absurdities they made sure to contrast between what was actually happening and what should actually happen. The following lyrics take the cake:
“Aithe Qadri Baran Nawab hai ithe Hero Ajmal Qasab hai, Mullah nasseya wich Hijab hai, ithe Abdul Salam nu Puchda Koi Nayee “
( Here the Mumtaz Qadri is treated like a Royal, Ajmal Qasab is a hero, the Mullah- the lal Masjid priest who preached about Jihad and yet was coward enough to run veiled as a woman when his own life was under threat- and yet Dr Abdul Salam, Pakistan’s only nobel laureate is being totally ignored just because of his Ahmedi faith)
All these sentences merely state the obvious and yet often denied facts, with the onus being as to how much misplaced heroes we have. In this regard, the contrast between terrorists, murderers and the completely disowned Doctor Abdul Salam was amazing. In merely ten seconds, the group said something which is so obvious and yet never acknowledged. Then the singer went on to poke fun at the rampant conspiracy theory culture particularly the Black Water obsession.
The video was made even more potent by some placards, one of which read: This video is funded by Zionists.
The second video is of a talk show where ace Pakistani singer- solo now- but once the part of the legendary Rock n Roll band Janoon, gave his unique “insight” as to what was wrong with Pakistan. I have over the time become quite accustomed to nonsense, which these talk shows utter but even by their standards, this was “exceptional”. God, Ali Azmat made even Zahid Hamid look like a credible commentator.
Mr. Ali Azmat’s thesis was that West had conspired against us to impose their cultural imperialism and in order to do that had rearranged their music frequency in such a way that it would create mass hypnotism. Mr. Azmat, claimed that everything, including Wall Sreet protest movements, were some sort of a grand conspiracy to take over the world with the ultimate objective to bolster consumerism to help struggling capitalism. And then, under active encouragement from Mubashir Luqman, the fiery host of the program, Ali Azmat went on to declare that everything happening in Pakistan was being directed by the imperial powers with the eventual aim of helping consumerism.
What was mocked at the first video was on full display in the second video. Yet both the videos were humorous though the latter only in its irony. First was a satire, and the second could only be termed as some sort of a black comedy, whch depicted as to how delusional we have become.
But despite everything, the first video has given a faint hope that may be some of us are realizing and therefore articulating of whatever is wrong with the content and intellectual thrust of the second video. And some how or the other, I want to hope because I have still not given up. As the torch of Political Rock N Roll passes to younger blood, some of whom have the nerves to finally say that should have been said long ago, there is every reason to believe that though in fringes, sanity still exists. Well Done Baighairat Brigade..You have given us hope..And yes Daniyal, you have made me proud!!!!

A Double Whammy for the Cyber Army General

2011-10-27T06:13:00.000-07:00

Slowly but surely the cyber army general, more popularly known as Zaid Hamid or “Sir” Zaid by his army of silk mustached self styled patriots or the bevy of monikers that circle around his red beret is clawing his way back to the limelight after his Yusuf Kazab association related lull. Yes, we’ll never let anyone forget of that shady association. Of late he’s been making all sorts of nasty waves by appearing on two high profile talkshows where he, in his inimitable audacious style, declares SAFMA as being funded by RAW and understandably enough invites a lawsuit for slander coming his way.
The blithe declaration came forth on that loud mouthed, attention hoor (feel free to use a w before hoor), khala kutni of an anchor Meher Bukhari’s hot show on Duniya TV. That particular show was dedicated to Nawaz Sharif expressing his amicable intentions towards the Indians and recognizing the possibility of a peaceful and prosperous future for Pakistan in the remote possibility of mending fences with India. Understandably, this scandalized the maulvi, fauji and red bereted guests on Meher Bukhari’s show to no end. Of course, Ms Bukhari has to maintain her loudmouthed image on TeeVee that warrants in them big fat pay cheques. All she has to do is pander to the lowest common denominator in the exceedingly conservative right winged populace by invoking the two nation theory mantra, the rattafied ideology of Pakistan in an inordinately high volume and practiced glares. The shrieks led on to Zaid Hamid do his slanderous act and playing the ham fisted defender of Iqbal’s Pakistan.
Here’s the unnecessary value added clip from youtube:
watch?v=LkWvsq53PQ0
The SAFMA slander got Zaid Hamid another gig at Shahid Masood’s latest reincarnation on ExpressNews, ever so modestly titled Shahidnama. As an aside, have you noticed how steadily self referential the title of each new version of his shows are becoming; Views on News (decent enough), Merey Mutabiq (inflated ego alert) and now Shahidnama (what’s next Shahid ki Shahid Dunya?)
Moving on, Dr Shahid invited Zaid Hamid to defend his position as Mr Slander Extraordinaire as well as Marvi Sirmed to provide the other perspective (read common sense) to the firebrand foil. Now it made for 45 odd minutes of rousing entertainment on TV but not without some reservation. For the moment let’s not talk of Zaid Hamid….he’s a stark raving loon. Dr Shahid on the other hand, as opposed to Meher Bukhari’s hysterical antics comes across as a mild mannered, genial enough individual. We are only speaking of appearances here. At the start of the said show, he bemoans the lack of tolerance amongst the highly educated in our culture and the need for basing and argument over facts and reasoning. Very noble of him to acknowledge so but later on he keeps on egging the guests, steering and reducing the argument to a Raw agent vs ISI agent debacle. This isn’t anything new considering Dr Shahid’s track record for understated manipulative dishonesty.
Kudos to Marvi Sermad for whipping Zaid Hamid’s ass. Needless to say this was a gratifying TV moment. Yet I am not so sure if her choice of attire was any tactful in front of a bigot who’s looking for whatever minuscule excuse to label the opponent as the RAW/CIA/Zionist/Capitalist/Hindu/Buddhist/Communist etc etc agents he so clearly endears himself to. More importantly Marvi Sermad’s choice, while living up to her Baghi credentials, wouldn’t bode well with a significant section of the masses who lap up every word of history according to Nawa-i-waqt and Pak Studies curriculum.
You can see the whole splendorous episode starting from this clip thanks to our “choron sey hoshyar” friends on youtube.
watch?v=ENlWhhySHuU&feature=related

TV channels’ Urdu or mumbo-jumbo?

2011-08-01T05:22:00.000-07:00

By Rauf Parekh

A GIRL student of mine, a South Korean by nationality, had become much interested in Urdu. She was doing a certificate course at Karachi University’s Urdu department and was doing quite well but sometimes stumbled on certain syntactical variations that Urdu has. Another problem was that every so often she could not follow slightly different Urdu accents, particularly if someone spoke fast.

For improving listening comprehension, I advised her to watch Urdu programmes aired by our channels, especially the ones that gave cooking lessons, since she loved Pakistani food and often cooked it. But she smilingly said, “Do you know what language they use? It goes like ‘water lein, us ko boil karen, us mein salt add karen’, what kind of Urdu is that and what can I learn from it?” I was stunned as it was a succinct commentary on our national spirit — or, rather, lack of it — and our linguistic attitudes. It made me wonder what to suggest for listening comprehension as Urdu FM radios were even worse. But as a ‘damage control strategy’, I replied in the lighter vein that the language used by our Urdu channels was a hybrid of Urdu and English, name it ‘Urdish’ or ‘Engdu’.
But jokes aside, some of our TV hosts use a variety of cross-breed language that is packed with English phrases and only a tiny minority of Pakistanis understands it fully. Some TV reporters while interviewing people in the street often ask questions in a language that the latter cannot understand because of its English vocabulary and they either stare at the camera, clueless and embarrassed, or reply only when the question is rephrased in a comprehendible Urdu. It was observed in particular during the floods last year when TV anchors left their talk-shows behind and began on-the-scene reporting. It was great, no doubt. But the problems rose when microphone-totting, jeans-wearing anchors with dark eyeglasses wanted to elicit answers from some simple-looking villagers in a lingo understood only by a section of townspeople watching TV in their living rooms. Does Pakistan consist only of big cities like Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad? Did the majority of target audience understand this mumbo-jumbo? Many flood victims from remote areas could barely speak Urdu, let alone answering the question asked in ‘Engdu’ or ‘Urdish’. With due apologies, some of our woman anchors especially try to impress viewers with a language most of which consists of English words or even sentences. Such programmes are understood by a small section of society as the common viewer resorts to channel-surfing.
This kind of callous and insulting behaviour towards common people is not limited to TV crew only. Our society now has become so dichotomised on the basis of class differences that there is a vast chasm between the cultural and linguistic behaviour of different sections of society. Many professionals use a language or a mixture of languages that suits them. It is fine as long as it does not bother anybody and, especially, does not create a gap in communication. But some professions, such as medical services, demand that the language used must convey the message as clearly and as unambiguously as possible because any gap in the communication may prove fatal. But the language used by most doctors and paramedics can at best be called ‘Urdu pidgin’, for it is loaded with medical jargon in English that less educated patients and their attendants do not comprehend. As a result, some patients are at the end of their wits as they do not exactly understand what disease they suffer from and what treatment they are to follow. Believe me, one of my friends was asked by his businessman friend to go along with him to the hospital where his father was admitted and ascertain after talking to doctor what exactly had happened to his father and what kind of medical procedure was to be carried out on him.
Medical professionals should realise the other kind of agony their patients go through because of the language they use unmindfully. Similarly, Urdu TV channels must think over what segment of the society they are trying to communicate with, only a tiny percentage of the population or the masses? The marketing and advertising agencies must take stock of the percentage of the viewers that understands the messages aired through the channels that use an arcane version of Urdu.
Even PTV is aping the new channels and beautiful Urdu words it has been using for some 40 years such as ‘waqfa’ and ‘naazreen’ have been replaced by ‘break’ and ‘viewers’. At the Urdu conference organised by the Arts Council last year, someone had rightly pointed out that some anchors could not even pronounce some English words properly e.g. they consistently use the word ‘weavers’ instead of ‘viewers’.
It will take perhaps many more pieces like this one to write about Urdu programmes named in English, tickers written in Roman Urdu and the orthographic and grammatical errors made by these Urdu channels. The horrible Urdu pronunciation is a different story. So forget it, at least for now, and keep your fingers crossed that at least some sense prevails at these so-called Urdu channels that are slaughtering Urdu, day in day out.
drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Are we innocent?

2011-07-28T05:02:00.000-07:00

I.A Rehman

The world’s conscience. It has also posed some extremely tough questions for European societies, the world’s Muslims in general, and the people of Pakistan in particular.

Europe will do itself and the world at large great injustice and harm if it dismisses the matter as the isolated work of a deranged mind. It must look deep into the factors that led to Anders Behring Breivik’s reliance on perverted intelligence.
The unpardonable doings of Al Qaeda, the other so-called jihadists and Muslim megalomaniacs have certainly contributed to the spread of Islamophobia in Europe and other parts of the western world, but it would be wrong to limit the list of culprits to them. It may be necessary to probe the extent to which the tone and tenor of the war on terror may have contributed to the growth of both militancy in parts of the Muslim world and reckless Muslim-bashing in the West. The idea is not to shift blame from one party to another, it is only a plea for keeping the indigenous sources of terrorism in Europe also in mind.
The world cannot possibly forget the rise of European fascism that built its power by fanning racism and persecuting certain religious and ethnic communities (Jews and Blacks). Nazism is a disease many parts of Europe are still afflicted with. The Norwegian people themselves have had anxieties about neo-Nazi and other extreme-right gangs for more than a decade.
These facts make it necessary for European societies to take note of elements who may be exploiting the public sentiment against terrorists and immigrants to impose on them new and more horrible forms of right-wing tyranny.
The leaders of Islamic thought and Muslim public opinion on their part cannot shun reality by simply telling the Europeans to put their house in order. Nor can they get away by declaring that terrorists constitute a small minority among Islamic scholars and lay Muslims both, however true this statement may be.
They must not ignore the high percentage of Muslims among the terrorists, nor the flurry of edicts issued by recognised Muslim authorities that not only condone and justify acts of terrorism, including the killing of innocent people in suicide bombings, but also exhort the believers to take part in such acts and win a place in paradise.
Regardless of the degree of the Muslim people’s involvement in terrorism that their ulema and political leaders may be prepared to concede, they have a duty to contribute to a solution to the problems created by groups and individuals claiming to be soldiers of Islam. The most important fact to be realised by the Muslim peoples is that they and their next generations will be the biggest losers if the mischief spread by their fanatic fringe is not quickly suppressed.
The people of Pakistan have to do more soul-searching than others because Breivik has blamed this country as the cause of his heinous crime. They should be shocked because besides being a responsible promoter of peace in the world, Norway has consistently been good to Pakistan. For many years, Norway has been helping Pakistan significantly in all areas of economic development, electoral reform, education, culture, heritage, women’s empowerment and human rights. It has been fair and generous to Pakistani immigrants who have been able to achieve distinction in Norwegian society and have been remitting sizeable funds to Pakistan year after year.
All this makes it necessary for Pakistan to make sure that the people of Norway are not influenced by the vitriolic outpourings of Breivik and the like. The critical question is: are we innocent? Can we say that we the Pakistanis have done nothing to offer neo-Nazis or other right-wing extremists an excuse to go out and massacre people?
One of the greatest ironies in the Pakistani people’s collective behaviour is that while the state is engaged in a grim battle with militants in religious garb and we keep telling the world of the number of lives we have lost, Pakistan has never challenged the so-called jihadis at the intellectual or even theological level. On the contrary, state institutions, political parties and the media have been promoting, some of them partly and casually and others wholly and by design, accommodation with terrorists, if not outright collusion with them. Is this not grist to the mills of hate the neo-Nazis are running across the globe?
Breivik has made a distinction between Pakistani immigrants who have integrated themselves with their host communities and those who haven’t. There is a need to look at the conduct of the latter. There have been occasions when Pakistanis have shocked the Norwegian authorities and citizens by killing a woman for ‘honour’, by abducting and forcibly marrying their daughters against their will, and by cheating Norwegian and Pakistani girls. The Norwegians, or any other host society for that matter, will have cause to consider such crimes as an abuse of hospitality and brand the whole Pakistani community as a pack of criminals and swindlers.
There is also need to take a look at the doings of Pakistani visitors to Norway who claim to be on religious missions. We have seen the havoc done in England by the so-called religious preachers. They have divided Muslim immigrant communities, fought battles to capture mosques, exploited the credulous ones and set up extortion rackets. Are Pakistani missions in Europe charged with the task of monitoring such unsavoury activities or with taking steps to ensure that Pakistanis in European countries respect the hosts’ laws and culture instead of propagating their dreams of world conquest?
Recently, the Norwegian public was considerably incensed when one of their nationals, Ehsan Arjumandi, was picked up, allegedly by security agencies in Balochistan, and all efforts by the Norwegian government to have him recovered failed to elicit from Pakistani authorities a response the matter warranted. The publicity this case received in Norway could not have presented Pakistan and its people as friendly, or even responsible, actors. These matters not only bring a bad name to Pakistan, they frighten away investors and traders and materially affect its economic interests.
Of course, the agent of death on the small Norwegian island was not a Pakistani; nor were his weapons of Pakistani origin. But it is very difficult to say that Pakistanis have made no contribution towards making the world increasingly unsafe for the human family. Will history pronounce us innocent? Let all Pakistanis ponder and find a way to avoid being treated as international pariahs. There are quite a few lessons we may learn from the spirit of discipline and forbearance the Norwegian people have demonstrated in their hour of unmitigated tragedy.

Pakistan’s identity crisis

2011-07-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

by Shafqat Aziz

Flawed and imaginary Arabized identity has become the biggest curse for Pakistani nation. The sickening ideologies emanated from this flawed identity are now posing grave threats to world peace and the very existence of the country itself
“These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so depended on them. That's institutionalized.” --Morgan Freeman as Red in Shawshank Redemption
Pakistan is the primary and worst victim of institutionalized falsehood. How ironic is the fact that the ‘fabrication gurus’ had to concoct so-called ‘Ideology of Pakistan” long after the inception of Pakistan. The chauvinistic and undemocratic mindset, right from the beginning, had a realization the powers will have to be conceded to people if a genuine democracy takes root in newly emerged state.
To keep a tight grip on power and to keep the masses enslaved, a mind control strategy was sought through systematic and institutionalized indoctrination by the crooks at helm of the affairs, especially feudal cum politicians and civil bureaucracy. At that particular time, the military and mullah were ‘dragged into game’ as junior partners, where the later was to act us ‘paid propagandist’ to divert people from real to ‘non-issues’.
The unscrupulous feudal cum politicians had to rely on the ‘muscle power’ of military while confronting the challenge of growing dissenting voices. Thus, it provided an opportunity to military establishment to take the plunge and modify its role from a ‘junior partner’ to a ‘big boss’.
The civil and military establishments both resorted in appeasing the mullah to consolidate their illegitimate regimes. Consequently, the mullah exploited the situation to advance his own agenda. This agenda was (is) based on pan-Islamism and it was the very reason that the mullah had opposed the separation of the Sub-continent earlier. Furthermore, he deemed it a perfect opportunity to avenge his earlier defeats.
However, it was not only typical mullah who played religious cards to advance his agenda. It was a great irony of the history that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of the nation and a man with all the secular credentials and liberal in life style resorted in religious rhetoric to popularize his movement for a separate Muslim state. The history repeated itself when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, another man in modern outlook betrayed his progressive supporter and thus, opened ‘hell gates’ of extreme religiosity, inflicted on the people by then military dictator Gen. Zia.
While refusing to learn a lesson from the separation of Bangladesh which was also a big blow to the notion that religion can be a binding force of diverse ethnic and cultural groups, the Pakistani establishment thus intensified its institutionalized efforts of carving out a flawed and concocted identity of the country as well as its people.
The establishment was desperate to paint a false identity fearing that the flourishing democracy on the other side of the border may ultimately devour their hegemonic rule. The power hungry establishment was also aware of the fact that the religious euphoria could not really cater to the needs of the all ethnic and cultural groups living in its territory.
Therefore, it was decided to instill this false identity by means of all sorts of coercion and manipulation, including enactment of discriminatory and draconian laws against the minorities and women, changing curricula with infusion of hate speeches, violence and extremely bigoted and intolerant worldview and patronizing violent extremist religious groups.
Besides, the state initiated ruthless Arabization (as newly found identity) of society on the cost of the Baloch, Sindhi, Pashtoon, Punjabi, Saraiki and other indigenous identities. The new imposed Arabized identity had some distinct features i.e. 1-detachment from South Asia and attachment with Middle East, 2-self-hatred (showing distain towards South Asian ancestry and obsessed efforts of tracing genealogy in Arabia, Central Asia or Iran) and love for foreign invaders of the past and sympathies with global jihadists of the present.
Today, this flawed and imaginary Arabized identity has become the biggest curse for Pakistani nation. The sickening ideologies emanated from this flawed identity are now posing grave threats to world peace and the very existence of the country itself. But the people of Pakistan are still not ready to determine who their real enemy is. They are totally oblivious of the history of Sub-continent prior to Arabian invasion on this soil led by Mohammad bin Qasim.
This flawed identity is one of the biggest contributors in widespread confusion in the society about the real enemy. The people of Pakistan, in general, have developed sympathies for Jihadist terrorists as they have a feeling of shared identity with them. Thus, the nation is fighting this battle half heartedly. This identity crisis has produced a population which is falling fast into hypocrisy and double standards.
The people of Pakistan want to emulate Arabs in every sphere of life but at other hand, their social ethos, family system and values all are deeply rooted in their South Asian identity and they have a strange love-hate relationship with this identity. The collective guilt of living “immoral” or un-Islamic (on South Asian ethos) lives is pushing them towards more religiosity and thus more isolation and self-hatred.
As a result of this identity crisis, deliberate disconnect with the past, twisted and biased history and being part of illusionary ‘Umma’, majority of the Pakistanis are living in a state of deep confusion and denial. Thus, they resort in supremacist religious ideologies and glorification of the invaders, just to soothe their bruised but inflated egos. This persistent state of denial, bigotry and confusion is resulting as irrational, extreme and violent behaviors.

The inability to comprehend the concepts of a nation state, modernity, equality and pluralism has made the perplexed Pakistani nation incompatible with modern world. Hence, the only areas where they are far ahead of other nations are massive corruption, extremism, violence and terrorism. The feature scenario also seems bleak as any critical thinking is immediately threatened with life. There is a serious and dire need to revive local (South Asian) identities and to return to a pluralist society which has a history of thousands of years in the Sub-continent.

Shafqat Aziz a socio-political analyst based in Islamabad. He is founding member of the online community “Liberal Pakistan”.

Is this Islam?

2011-06-30T03:09:00.000-07:00

Tonight as we all know is the Lailatul Asra – night of the holy ascent and many mosques are decorated and the loud speakers are on the full volume. No doubt its good to listen to naat but not when one is forced to listen to them. I wonder whats wrong with these naat khwans and mullas that they do not fear ALLAH while they are reciting the Quran and praising the Prophet (Peace and blessings of ALLAH be upon him), they never think that they might not be pleasing their Lord by disturbing the peace of those who are old and sick and want to have a good night sleep or small children who can not sleep soundly as their ears are echoing with the sounds coming from these loud speakers – many times small innocent children get terrified when they get waken up by these mullas the moment they go to sleep.

Be it 12 rabi-ul-awal, shab emehraj and shab e barat these mulvis do not care about the rights of their neighbors, they do not care about the sick and those who want to have some rest. I wonder what type of Islam are they preaching. Who will be impressed by this? They are making people change their houses just because of these mosques. Is this the Islam that our holy Prophet Peace be upon him taught us about? Did not he asked us to care for the neighbours and respect their rights? Did he taught us about the sick and elders? Is this the kindness to the children?

It is none but these mullas and so called religious people who have tarnished the image of Islam and mosques in the entire world. Its the high time that we muslims should join to make the authorities to act strictly against such mosques where the loud speakers are used especially in the residential areas. I request the authorities to restrict the use of loud speakers unless it very necessary.

Think Again: Failed States

2011-06-22T08:31:00.000-07:00

On 9/11, the West woke up to the threat posed by failed states. But did we actually understand it?

BY JAMES TRAUB

"Failed States Are a Threat to U.S. National Security."

Only some of them. It has been a truism of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 terrorist attacks that the United States is, in the words of President George W. Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy, "threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones." Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that over the next 20 years, the gravest threats to America will come from failing states "that cannot meet the basic needs -- much less the aspirations -- of their people." Both as candidate and as president, Barack Obama has repeated this claim and has sought to reorient policy toward the prevention of state failure.
But the truth is that some state failure poses a real danger to the United States and the West, and some does not. Consider the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where some 5 million or more people have died in the wars that have convulsed the country since the mid-1990s -- the single most horrific consequence of state failure in modern times. What has been the consequence to Americans? The cost of coltan, a material mined in Congo and used in cell phones, has been extremely volatile. It's hard to think of anything else.
Even the role of failed states in global terrorism may have been overstated. To start, terrorism is only a problem in failed states with significant Muslim populations -- admittedly, 13 of the top 20 in this year's Failed States Index. But the correlation between failure and global menace is weaker than we think. Islamist militants in unequivocally failed Muslim states such as Somalia, or profoundly weak ones such as Chad, have thus far mostly posed a threat to their own societies. They are surely less of a danger to the West than Pakistan or Yemen, both at least somewhat functional countries where state ideology and state institutions abet terrorists.
In his new book, Weak Links, scholar Stewart Patrick concludes that "a middle-ranking group of weak -- but not yet failing -- states (e.g., Pakistan, Kenya) may offer more long-term advantages to terrorists than either anarchic zones or strong states." (See "The Brutal Truth.") Terrorists need infrastructure, too. The 9/11 attacks, after all, were directed from Afghanistan, but were financed and coordinated in Europe and more stable parts of the Muslim world, and were carried out mostly by citizens of Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda is a largely middle-class organization.
A similar pattern plays out in the world of transnational crime. Take the three-cornered drug market that links cocaine growers in Latin America, traffickers in West Africa, and users in Europe. The narcotraffickers have found the failed states of West Africa, with their unpatrolled ports and corrupt and undermanned security forces, to be perfect transshipment points for their product. Drugs are dumped out of propeller planes or unloaded from ships just off the coast of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, or Sierra Leone, and then broken into smaller parcels to be shipped north. But the criminal gangs operate not out of these Hobbesian spaces but from Ghana and Senegal -- countries with reliable banking systems, excellent air connections, pleasant hotels, and innumerable opportunities for money laundering. The relationship is analogous to that between Afghanistan, whose wild spaces offer al Qaeda a theater of operations, and Pakistan, whose freewheeling urban centers provide jihadists with a home base.

"Failed States Are Ungoverned Spaces."

Not necessarily. Somalia, the land of the perpetual war of all against all, is our beau ideal, so to speak, of the failed state, and for the fourth year running it is No. 1 on the Failed States Index. Nobody can match Somalia for anarchy, but elsewhere in the world, government, rather than its absence, is chiefly to blame for state failure. Consider Sudan, where the state, deploying its national army as well as paramilitaries, fomented the violence that has dominated Sudanese life for decades and placed it near the very top of the index. Somali violence is a symptom of state failure; Sudanese violence is a consequence of state policy.
Gérard Prunier, a prominent Africa scholar, has written that since coming to power in 1989, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has adopted a policy toward restive ethnic groups that is "verging on genocide." The same was true in Burundi in the 1990s, where Hutu governments massacred Tutsis, after which the Tutsis turned around and did the same to Hutus. In these and other failed states, mass atrocity has almost become an accepted form of politics.
A categorical divide, albeit a sometimes blurry one, separates two classes of failed states. A country like Somalia is incapable of forming and executing state policy; it is a hapless state. States like Sudan, by contrast, are precarious by design. Or take Pakistan, which has followed clear and consistent policies, laid down by the military, since its inception in 1947. Unlike Somalia, or, for that matter, its neighbor Afghanistan, Pakistan is an intentional state. But just as Sudanese policy has provoked decades of violence by pitting the state against the periphery, so the cultivation of jihadi groups by the Pakistani military and intelligence services -- as a counterweight to India and a source of "strategic depth" in Afghanistan -- has turned Pakistan into a cockpit of terrorist violence. Pakistan does, of course, have ungoverned spaces, in the Pashtun-dominated badlands along the border with Afghanistan. But the country's military leaders have made a strategic choice to allow the Pashtuns to govern themselves there, the better to be able to use them against their alleged adversaries. Intentional states, in short, often pose far greater threats to the world than hapless ones do.

"Failed States Are the West's Fault."

If only. The colonial powers, especially the more heedless ones, undoubtedly dumped their former possessions on the threshold of independence with little if any preparation for statehood. Think of Congo, which Belgium's King Leopold II ruled as the chief executive of a private company dedicated to the extraction of raw materials under conditions of virtual enslavement, and whose entire population at independence in 1960 included not a single person with a graduate degree in any subject. Others, like never-colonized Afghanistan, were shredded in the savage crossfire of the Cold War.
But how can you hold the West responsible for states like Iraq (at least before 2003), Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, all of which enjoyed relative prosperity and stability in the first decades after emerging from rule by a Western power? Or what about Haiti, which threw off the yoke of French colonialism in the time of Napoleon, but never acquired more than the trappings of statehood in the two centuries since?
Less than half of the dozen most-failed countries can reasonably blame their Western parents for their plight. Why, after all, is Pakistan No. 12 on the list and India No. 76, despite sharing the same history of British colonization? Why is Ivory Coast 10 and Senegal 85, when both were under French rule? Same colonial upbringing, very different outcomes.

"Some States Were Born to Fail."

Unfortunately true. Although some failed states have no one but themselves -- or rather, their corrupt or brutal political elites -- to blame, others never had a chance to start with. Here we face a problem of nomenclature. The very expression "failed" falsely implies a prior state of success. In fact, many countries in the upper tiers of the Failed States Index never emerged into full statehood. Fourteen of the 20 highest-scoring states are African, and many of them, including Nigeria, Guinea, and, of course, Congo, consisted at birth of tribes or ethnic groups with little sense of common identity and absolutely no experience of modern government. (Perhaps in this more limited sense one can blame colonialism, because it was the European powers that drew the dubious borders.) They are, in novelist V.S. Naipaul's expression, "half-made societies," trapped between a no-longer-usable past and a not-yet-accessible future. They "failed" when modernity awakened new hopes and appetites (and rivalries) that overwhelmed the state's feeble institutions or that leaders sought to master and exploit.
What is the world to do about such misbegotten states? One answer is that you seek to minimize the harm that comes from them, or to them -- by stemming the flow of drugs into and out of Guinea, say, or by using peacekeeping troops to prevent the spillover of violence from Darfur and Chad into the Central African Republic. You bolster the regional and subregional organizations in their neighborhoods (the African Union, or ECOWAS). And you acknowledge that even in places that pose no meaningful threat to the West, a moral obligation to relieve suffering requires that those who can help do so.

"The United States Needs a Failed-States Policy."

Maybe not. One of the standing critiques of the Obama administration's foreign policy is that, though the president has spoken frequently of the danger posed by state failure, he has never formulated a coherent policy to prevent or cure it. The administration has been sensitive on this score; during her recent tenure as head of policy planning at the State Department, Anne-Marie Slaughter suggested that the U.S. civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan could be viewed as a "petri dish" for such a policy and that the post-earthquake state-building effort in Haiti, with its high level of collaboration with international partners, could serve as an alternative model. But today, even advocates of the administration's large-scale effort in Afghanistan acknowledge that the attempt to spread good governance there has largely failed, while even a year after the Haiti quake the state-building effort there has barely even begun.
Perhaps the problem lies with our habit of thinking of failed states monolithically. What can it mean to have a policy that covers both Haiti and Afghanistan? What template could dictate a useful set of choices for U.S. officials in both Yemen, where state failure poses a direct threat to U.S. interests, and the Central African Republic, which has no strategic significance? And what policy would supply any useful options at all for Somalia, a wasteland that appears to be impervious to all forms of outside meddling, benevolent or malign? In this case, policy coherence may be overrated.
The Obama administration is certainly seeking such coherence. The State Department's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, a novel effort to marshal the tools of "soft power," repeated the criticism about the absence of an overarching policy, but also placed a welcome emphasis on the need to develop civilian capacity to actually do whatever it is policymakers decide needs to be done. At present, meaningful U.S. policy options are undermined by the absence, at least outside the armed forces, of operational or "expeditionary" capacity: police trainers, sanitation experts, public-health officials, forensic accountants, and lawyers (yes, lawyers) who can be deployed to fragile states or post-conflict settings. You need people to do things. Unfortunately, congressional Republicans seem determined to gut any and all increases in nonmilitary capacity. Conservatives seem more comfortable with old-fashioned threats from powerful countries like China, Iran, and Russia. Perhaps they're not troubled by the absence of a failed-states strategy because they don't worry about failed states.

"Military Intervention Never Works."

Wrong. The fixity of the failed-states rankings from year to year reminds us that the multiple diseases that plague these places are very resistant to being cured, whether by domestic actors or outsiders. Certainly the examples of Afghanistan and Haiti, the petri dishes of 2010, are not encouraging. But there are a few rays of light -- all of which, oddly enough, have involved military intervention. Liberia and Sierra Leone have been pulled back from the brink of utter chaos in recent years, and both are now at peace. The same may be true of Ivory Coast in future years; it's still too early to tell after this year's brief and bloody post-election civil war. Iraq, a country whose descent seemed to have no bottom five years ago, has improved its standing on the index as sectarian violence has diminished over the last year, from No. 7 to No. 9.
The inference to be drawn is not that the solution to failed states is to send in the Marines, but rather that, at moments of supreme crisis, outsiders can bend the trajectory of failed states by using force to topple monstrous leaders or prevent them from gaining power. But intervention is itself a sign of failure, a failure to anticipate the moment of crisis. Any new policy toward failed states needs to focus on prevention rather than reaction, not only to avoid the need for military force, but also because in many places intervention simply will not be possible. You want to know now that, say, Thailand is at risk of political crisis, because while neighboring countries and Western powers have diplomatic tools they can use to avert calamity, there may be little they can do once violence breaks out. The supreme example of the dire consequences of ignoring early warnings is, of course, Rwanda, where U.N. officials and the Security Council ignored repeated warnings of an impending genocide and reacted only when it was too late to stop the killing.

"Failed States Can't Be Helped."

Some of them can. What can outsiders do when this moment of leverage has passed? What can they do to promote reconciliation among tribes in Kenya, to bolster civilian rule in Pakistan, to help create an economic base to replace dwindling supplies of oil in Yemen? These are, of course, profoundly different questions, but they do have one common answer: It depends on the willingness of the state to be helped. Outsiders can do little in Zimbabwe so long as Robert Mugabe remains in power, for Mugabe is prepared to wreck his country in order to preserve his rule over it. The best thing outsiders can do is pressure or bribe him and his immediate circle into leaving. On the other hand, outsiders may be able to accomplish a great deal in Liberia, where President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has invited U.N. officials to operate from inside the country's ministries in order to provide expertise and prevent abuse. The same contrast may apply between Sudan, an autocracy afloat on oil wealth, and Southern Sudan, a new country born naked and helpless, but with a legitimate political leadership (though there is a real danger that Sudan's abrupt seizure of the border territory of Abyei could plunge both countries into a spiral of violence).
It is tempting to view the problem of failed states in technocratic terms. In Fixing Failed States, Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart argue that failed states need to be connected to global markets and have their innovative energies unshackled. They do -- but ruthless dictators view economic and political freedom as a threat to their rule. The generals who run Burma will make sure that no one save themselves and their friends benefits from global markets. There's no escaping politics, and political will. The hapless states, like Liberia, want help, and sometimes they can be helped. The intentional states, like Burma or Sudan, will exploit outside help for their own purposes. Unfortunately, it's the intentional states, by and large, that pose the greatest threat to the United States and the West. So here's a proposal: Maybe we can formulate a new kind of failing-states policy, one to help the deserving states, those that can be helped, and minimize the harm from the others.

Our collective psychosis

2011-05-30T04:27:00.000-07:00

By Raza Rumi

Pakistan’s right wing has flourished on the crutches of a national security doctrine: A world view, which prioritises paranoia and ‘security’ of ideological and geographical frontiers. Never mind if the majority of Pakistanis have no access to water and sanitation or the public education and health systems have virtually collapsed. The events of May 2011 cast a long shadow over the merits of investing in security institutions and fuelling patriotism with conspiracies.
First, the poster-Shaikh of anti-Americanism has been ‘eliminated’ when the mighty guardians were asleep. The new round of WikiLeaks cables reveals anecdotal evidence of civil-military acquiescence to the grand designs of ‘evil’ America, including the nasty drones that kill civilians. And now, the latest attack on a well-guarded naval base and destruction of high-value military equipment has jolted us all.
During May, the militant networks ostensibly inspired by the nihilistic al Qaeda ideology have stepped up acts of terrorism across the country. Yet, the response of the Pakistani right remains locked in the folds of ‘foreign conspiracy’ and fails to review what really ails the polity. The enemy within is still far from being recognised. Even the politicians who are calling for military accountability have little to say about the jihadis waging war against Pakistanis.
It does not matter much when we find out through WikiLeaks that the brotherly countries — Saudia Arabia and United Arab Emirates — and their rich citizens finance terrorist networks. Worse, when the UAE proceeds to hire Blackwater for security, few ‘patriots’ complain. Until yesterday, Blackwater was responsible for all the terror attacks in Pakistan according to the media mujahideen. Even the former chief justice of the Lahore High Court directed the Punjab Police to investigate the role of Blackwater in perpetrating suicide attacks on the widely revered Data Darbar.
I guess Blackwater is kosher now, since a brotherly Arab country has hired its service. Our collective habit of finding bogeys and imagining enemies has turned into a deep psychosis. Many Pakistanis believe that Osama was not there in the Abbottabad compound. Urdu press and TV channels augment this world view and politicians play up the insecurity mantra. The parliamentary resolution of May 12 is another exercise in this collective search for sovereignty, glory and honour. Alas, these days glory is achieved through human development, through trade and investment and not empty rhetoric citing the glorious past of the Muslims.
It is therefore understandable that the oracles on TV sets are blaming the US-India-Israel axis for the attacks on the Mehran Naval Base by chanting the ‘who benefits’ mantra. Now, the Pakistani mind is convinced that the May events are a prelude to a forthcoming attack on our nuclear assets. We are gifted with too many assets: Dozens of militant groups, two Taliban streams and, of course, the nuclear weapons, which will have to be guarded. Never mind the people of this country. They are dispensable as long as honour is preserved. It is time to address the mythologies we have constructed and deal with ourselves before we ‘defeat’ the enemies.

The writer is consulting editor, The Friday Times.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 26^th, 2011.

Things More Important than Sovereignty and Honor

2011-05-30T04:14:00.000-07:00

Zia Ahmad
7 days ago, a motley crew of a handful militants raided and occupied a highly sensitive and supposedly heavily fortified Naval air base in Karachi. The ensuing battle lasted for sixteen plus hours at the cost of ten military personnel, fourteen injuries and two surveillance planes. Bear in mind, these are the official numbers. We can’t really blame the people if they find the official toll of damages suspect and assume a higher count of casualties.
It is also said that a contingent of a hundred commandos was deployed to reclaim the naval base. Let’s run the numbers again:
15 – 20 militants
100 “elite” commandos
16 hours of combat
Don’t fault yourself if the numbers don’t add up. Unlike the Abbottabad fiasco, one can bet on incompetence on part of the khakis rather than complicity. The kind of incompetence, as it happens more often than one cares to keep up with, on so many levels that most of us (being the tax payers) have a right to demand if the bloated defense budget is being put to any use.
Now that the Pak Army and ISI have acknowledged a major intelligence failure on the Osama episode, one would have expected them khaki jawans to be on their toes. Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaida didn’t waste any time in promising a fierce backlash in the wake of Osama’s death. That ought to have set all sorts of rainbow colored alarms going around in GHQs of all sizes and shapes. Security and intelligence would have been expected to be an utmost priority. Soon after, a suicide explosion claimed 80 lives at a military training academy near Charsadda. Do we expect the ISPR to issue out another brazen proclamation that nobody was prepared for this.
Last night’s attack and the consequent marathon attempt to reclaim the naval base have done much to dent our confidence in those who are sworn to protect us. What we all ask is if the armed forces can’t protect their assets and indeed themselves, what about us bloody civilians?
It may be too much to ask for the unhealthy fixation with men in khaki amongst the children and adolescents of all ages to wear thin. Our collective amnesia or perhaps the innate tendency to avoid our own grave follies and look the other way (think of episodes as far back as ’71 or as recent as a similar TTP attack on GHQ in ’09) may risk this instance to be sidestepped by some political circus attraction. Even worse, some of the less than bright and more than emotional right wingers would start whining about the drone attacks (wikileaks be damned) and gripe on about the imagined sovereignty and fanciful honor.
Speaking of which, didn’t our dear general make a very “ba-ghairat” claim of not letting anything frivolous such as prosperity compromise our honor. Dear sir, please remember you lead the army of a third world country struggling with drinking water and energy, not the Klingon empire. He also made this claim about breaking the TTP’s back. That was a bit premature sir.
The reverence extended towards the Pak fauj doesn’t show any sign of letting up. TV channels and certain talking heads go on about reminding how the Pak army is the one of the biggest in the world (its all about the size) and offer one kind of justification or the other. Please sirs and bajees, don’t you think with all the tall and mighty claims, the Pak army should also be expected to fight threats other than Indian in origin. And most of you already think India’s behind TTP so that argument doesn’t bode well.

As for our civil benefectors; Mr Rehman Malik and PM Gilani offer their predictable patterns of condemnation and resolves of fighting on the good fight…or something. Hats off to them for keep issuing those tired old monotonous comments one bad event after the other. And you’ll agree there have been fairly a lot of them over the last couple of years. One thing I always wanted to ask the PM was, if God forbid someone was to bomb his front yard of his residence away, what would be his response….another tired old condemnation. Then again he is authority on what is absurd and what is not.
We ask our esteemed Chief of Staff to reclaim our confidence in our own army. With a grim realization we should brace ourselves for more ugly attacks on something more important than our sovereignty and that is hope.

Meet the new apologists on Pakistan TV channels

2011-05-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

By Zia Ahmad
We are already familiar with the rants and tirades of Taliban apologists on TV screens and Op-ed pieces. Enter the Pak Army apologizers. Since the May 2 Abbottabad incident, this lot has come to fore defending, justifying and making excuses for the khakis.
Hasb-e-Haal has been a well received TV show which has enjoyed more than two years of popularity with the masses, owing more to Sohail Ahmed’s alter ego Azizi than the trite and self righteous antics of the respective host. Sure the show’s funny and offers a searing indictment of the social ills and the frustrating corruption and ineptitude of our public institutions and politicians, though it retains a mindset that is borderline reductive and xenophobic.
Of late, since the May 2 Abbottabad incident to be specific, the host Junaid Saleem has been unusually touchy with the fingers pointing at the efficiency of our armed forces. Consider the opening clip from last night’s show where he broached the accusations hurled at khakis after the PNS Mehran attack:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REulLJ90m8I

Observe how the host coyly starts offering his opinion on the Mehran attack. A certain convention of the show is to have Azizi refer Junaid Saleem as a Danishwer (scholar) whereas Mr Saleem is expected to play the straight foil to Azizi’s jester. Being the writer of the show himself, the self serving antic may seem rather bloated but since “public” enjoys it so why should I be a spoil sport.
So Azizi cajoles the host to offer his take on the debacle. Mr Saleem prances around for a good two minutes (doing his weakest best to appear neutral) before really saying what he wants to say or what his phantom handlers want him to say demonstrating all the requisite shrieks and bouts of hysteria.

Pakistan’s State of Nature

2011-05-23T06:45:00.000-07:00

By AA Khalid
The Hobbesian Narrative
Hobbes is perhaps the most important political philosopher Pakistanis concerned about their country should be reading. Of course it will require a ‘’Desification’’ (or ‘’Pakistanization) of the man’s central work, ‘’The Leviathan’’. The Islamic tradition too has works of political philosophy, we think of Al Farabi, who applied the utopian understanding of Plato’s Republic (the rule of the Philosopher King) to the prophetic experience of the Prophet of Islam as a pre-eminent example.
Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Bajja were more realistic if not pessimistic about politics than Farabi’s enthusiastic application of political Platonism. In fact Tufayl and Bajja seek to return to another strand of the Platonic tradition which is more pessimistic and realistic. For Plato knowledge was power and that is why the Philosopher the individual who possessed that greatest of intellect should rule and be king. However, in another tradition of Platonic theorizing, it is realised the great Philosopher is corrupted by the machinations of politics and inevitably his ideals are sacrificed at the altar of political power. Ibn Bajja’s The Governance of the Solitary is such a work, which is concerned about securing the happiness and integrity of the philosopher in the midst of corruption and strife. Or what about that great philosophical novel, ‘’Hayy ibn Yaqazan’’, where the hero of the philosopher Hayy realises that the greatest and most profound truths of philosophy and faith can never find practical application in the real world because as is the case in modern politics the politican will always manipulate simplistic and populist emotion against the beautifully constructed systems of the philosopher. Both Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Bajja conclude that the philosopher must isolate himself from the world and inevitably the great truths of the sages, philosophers, mystics and rationalists will never find true expression in the real world. To pursue the ‘’Platonic Ideal’’ is a vain pursuit.
There are other great philosophers to consider such as Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina. Likewise, we should consider the Islamic tradition as part of the Greek tradition of political philosophy.
But Hobbes’s work speaks with a profound resonance that one can find etched into Pakistan’s political history. Hobbes ‘’philosophical anthropology’’ shaped his pessimistic consideration of human nature and gave the moral substance of his liberalism. Whereas liberalism is always associated with an optimistic faith in human progress and reason, Hobbes’s liberalism is born out of the trials and tribulations of human suffering and existential pessimism.
This passage that Hobbes wrote in the Leviathan postulating about the existence of mankind in a ‘’State of Nature’’ has profound meaning for Pakistanis struggling to make sense of the anaemic civic and democratic organs of the Pakistani State:
‘’Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’’
And:
‘’ Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.’’
But we can take issue with Hobbes’s assertion that life is ‘’solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’’. Life in Pakistan is anything but solitary, in a country where clan, tribe and ethnicity as well as feudal and class status (not to mention the existence of the Pakistani caste system) life is a constant trial of membership and trust that one must invest with their respective social group to make any sort of living. Life therefore is poor, nasty, brutish and short but it is not solitary. In Pakistan life is communal and it is from this communality that we derive the brutality, the destruction and the conflict. It is a constant conflict between different groups of the social structure rather than individuals.
As such with the absence of the modern nation state and the rule of law these groups operate virtually in a state of war as seen in the ethnic sectarianism tearing apart Karachi. Pakistan internally is in a neo-Hobbesian state of war. Neo-Hobbesian because the communal dimension of Pakistani public life is something not touched upon by Hobbes, but it is a perfectly logical extension to make.
Absence of Ideology
The failure in Pakistan is a failure of ideology – because there never has been a free exchange of ideas in Pakistan, there never has been any ideological contestation. The major sources of party conflicts in politics are found in family feuds, feudal rivalries and ethnic division. The major conflict in Pakistani politics is between the Zardari/Bhutto clan and the Sharif brothers. There is no universal ideological narrative – everything is constructed on the basis of family name, feudal affiliation and ethnic status. In Pakistan civil war is played out in the democratic process – it is perhaps the formality of the electoral process which prevents outright intra-warfare between different social groups. The party system in Pakistan reflects the essentially tribal nature of Pakistani political culture.
As such labels such as ‘’secular’’, ‘’liberal’’, ‘’progressive’’, ‘’democratic’’ and other categories of modern political philosophy make no sense when applied to Pakistani politics. It is fruitless to talk about ‘’liberals’’ v ‘’conservatives’’ because that was never the conflict in Pakistan.
As such the reductive and simplistic schemes put forward by some commentators on the role of religion in Pakistani public life is unfounded. The great strife and crisis of the Pakistani State has never been to do with religion directly but rather the failure to establish a civic identity and a workable nation-state. It is the machinations of clan, tribe, ethnicity, feudalism and class that determine the major urban conflicts in Pakistan. Religion has been fused with the Machiavellianism of the Pakistani Army to stay in control – religion has always been used cynically in Pakistani society. But if we even imagined a Pakistan without Islam the same problems would still exist today. That is because religious extremism in Pakistan is something not organic to traditional Pakistani society – it has taken a generation of social engineering by the Pakistani Army to produce the sort of religious extremism we see today and still the religious parties in this country do not have any success in the political process. Observers such as Tariq Ali have noted that it is amazing that a theocratic Islamist revolution has not taken over Pakistan given the socio-economic crippling of the Pakistani state, the theological depravity and social engineering of the Army.
Religious radicalism in Pakistan is anarchic it simple exists not only to overthrow the State but undermine the whole structural logic of the Pakistani Hobbesian scheme. The religious radicals can never be successful in taking over Pakistan because of the culture of feudal, ethnic politics and patronage that not only acts as a buffer against religious extremism but also against liberal reforms.
From Geneva to Islamabad
Pakistan is neither a theocracy, a democracy nor any other discernable modern political organism. It is a neo-Hobbesian creature that trundles along with the social glue provided by ethnicity, provincialism, feudal patronage, Army intervention, tribal affiliation and all the associated pre-modern forms of deliberation, negotiation and conflict that defines everyday Pakistani life.
The real crux of the matter in Pakistan is not the unsustainable and in many ways imported religious radicalism from the hard shores of the House of Saud – because this form of extremism is anarchic and in many ways resembles the untenable experiments of European puritans such as Calvin.
Today we see the city of Geneva as the quintessential embodiment of European secularism and social democracy. But Geneva was once the theocratic stronghold of the Protestant Reformation under Calvin. Calvin’s new and charismatic brand of Protestant faith challenged the clerical authority of the Catholic Church but only so that he could implement his vision of clerical rule.
In Calvin’s theocracy we find the same sort of puritanical measures carried out by the modern day Taliban and Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia. A ban on the arts, culture, freedom of expression and an emphasis on strict religious observance which was forced and an insistence on keeping to laws of blasphemy. Calvinism too was based on an absolute and literal understanding of the sovereignty of God and in many ways this deviated from classical Christian understanding as does the understand of the Wahabbi theologians today which echoes the anarchistic theology of the early Kharijites.
The Kharijite understanding was shunned by the classical tradition of Islamic philosophy and law but it nevertheless has had influence on the modern theocratic Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb and Maududi. Where else did the popular slogan of, ‘’ ‘La hukm illa lillah’’come from, which was the essential creed of the Kharijites. This completely went against the teaching on human agency, human fallibility and the imperfection of human nature taught not only by the Sufi mystics, later Islamic philosophers but also by legal theorists like Abu Hanifa who always accepted that his judgements were only fallible opinions and that people could always challenge his legal rulings.
This brief comparative illustration indicates that modern Islam is undergoing a crisis of authority and many of the actions and beliefs seen today in the Muslim World go against the conclusions and scholastic method of the classical Islamic tradition.
From Utopian Ashes To Religious Secularism
Today we are seeing a total breakdown of classical Islam and we should accept that the classical Islamic tradition is all but dead. What has replaced it is a scary and shallow populist charisma espoused by the likes of Maududi and Qutb who never received rigorous classical Islamic training. In many ways the memberships of the theocratic Islamist followers surprisingly come from secular backgrounds. The vast majority of Islamist movements today are not made up of clerics but rather from Muslims with a secular background who are doctors, lawyers and middle class professionals.
But out of the failures of Protestant utopianism and I believe out of the ashes of Pakistan’s unusually violent brand of anarchic theocratic Islamism will arise a religious secularity. American theologians like Roger Williams and European religious intellectuals like John Locke realised out of experience and applying Hobbes philosophical anthropology that Church and State had to be separated to save religion from power hungry tyrants. In the end what can and what is emerging throughout the Muslim World is a distinctly religious understanding of secularism.
A religious logic of secularism arises out of the ashes of religious utopianism. The European experience and more so the American experiences document how religious traditions articulated the powerful moral intuitions associated with liberty, democracy and secularism. It was the success of the theologians and religious intellectuals of America particularly that popularised an accessible understanding of democracy, secularism and liberty.
It is a fact of life as Bertrand Russell said, ‘’ The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.’’
The social contract theory of the Enlightenment theorists and philosophers is not the reason why most Americans have a deep moral attachment to democracy and liberty. It is because the religious traditions of American have powerfully articulated the moral values required for democratic practice, citizenship skills and given ideas of liberty and secularism a deep moral significance for many Americans. For many like de Tocqueville in his work ‘’Democracy in America’’, it is the biblical theory of Covenant rather than social contract theory which affirms democracy in the hearts and minds of many Americans.
Fundamentalism – A Product of Modernity
As Ashish Nandy has remarked modern day religious fundamentalist movements mark a total break from the scholastic and theological traditionalism of classical religious learning. Hindutva, Zionism , theocratic Islamism are all expression of identity politics couched in religious imagery by individuals who essentially come from secular backgrounds.
Theodor Herzl (the father of Zionism) and Maududi (father of Pakistani theocratic Islamism) were both journalists who came from secular backgrounds but gravitated towards being amateur theologians who mixed powerful religious imagery with clearly secular political goals. Fundamentalism as Khaled Abou El Fadl remarks is a an ‘’orphan of modernity’’.
We are passing through a period of breakdown in the history of Islam in the Pakistani region of the sub-continent. In India and other parts of the Muslim World the story is completely different. In other parts of the world such as Tunisia we have liberal theology flourishing with the likes of Rachid Al Ghannouchi who promote a form of Islamic liberalism. Egypt is more complex – because there are competing theologies such as the Salafis, Islamic liberals, Islamic constitutionalists, legalists, conservatives, pragmatists, reformers and followers of televangelists such as Amr Khaled. The conclusion is that every Muslim society is experiencing some sort of transformation but there are no grand sweeping narratives that can be imposed on each one. Pakistan is in many ways an anomaly in the Muslim World – there is only a crude form of religious anarchism, because the religious liberals and moderates have been persecuted through the instruments and proxies of the Army.
The Army’s State of Nature
The real problem in Pakistan is the role of the Army in public life. This is the elephant in the room that not many Pakistanis talk about. In the English press there are plenty of articles found on criticising the religious establishment but you will not find many criticising the Army directly.
The clerics and madrassas have marginal influence on the daily political discourse in Pakistan. The areas of concentrated political power do not reside with the clerics but within the fierce competition between different social groups. The decline and decay of Karachi is testament to this fact where ethnic sectarianism has destroyed the civic fabric of that city.
We have been looking at the wrong things. The powers of the clerics today, the rise of religious radicalism are all symptoms not causes. The causes lie in the peculiar logic of Pakistani political culture that frustrates and blocks any liberal reform, the causes lie in the failure of the political parties in Pakistan which are nepotistic and despotic, the cause lies in the failure of Pakistani democracy and with the fantastical success of the Pakistani Army that has managed to stay in power through any means necessary. The brutish and neo-Hobbesian nature of the Pakistani political and social fabric is the cause. The reason for today’s ills is because Pakistan has been in a ‘’State of Nature’’, where the sovereignty of the State has been replaced by the Machiavellian logic of Pakistani Army. The Army has played its role in staying in power magnificently by clearly understanding the social logic of the Pakistan and by manipulating the Islamist movements. But of late that tightrope of deceit that the Army tread along has unravelled but for all intents and purposes it seems the Army will consolidate its position again.
The sort of religious thinking present in Pakistan is a symptom of what has gone wrong rather than a cause. It is symptom of the post-colonial failures in Pakistan. When we speak to the older generation they remark with great astonishment the social transformations that have taken place when it comes to faith in Pakistan. The Army’s social engineering has fundamentally altered and distorted religious discourse in this country. Add to this new information from the Wikileaks cables which suggest that clerics in the Punjab have received millions of dollars of funding from the Saudis and UAE and you realise that much of the social transformations that have taken place with regards to faith have been all imported rather than the result of indigenous organic evolution.
The new Wikileaks Pakistan Papers documents the neo-Hobbesian nature of this nation in its full and unrelenting glory. Kayani calls for more drone attacks, Zardari treats the PPP as a play-thing and whoever pleases can come and buy up the allegiance of the Army for the right price of course. How else can we explain the millions of dollars pouring in from the Saudis and UAE into clerical institutions – this can only happen under the auspices of the Army.
Questioning needs to be directed at the centres of concentrated power in Pakistan – it is only recently that the clerics have become such a centre after decades of being sponsored by the Army. Pakistan is a hard country where the real dynamic forces are those of manipulation, ruthless power grabbing and cold calculated political consolidation. The Army and its Generals are ruthlessly utilitarian when it comes to how many Pakistani lives are lost – for them Pakistani lives are mere pennies in the grand calculus of profit.
Beyond the chaos there is a frightening control exerted by the Army, with General Kayani sitting as the unquestionable Pharaoh of Pakistan, who merely chuckles at the bickering of the civilian politicians and humours the democratic system. For all those calling for the Army to enter into a political settlement with civilian there is absolutely no incentive for the Army to do such a thing.

The wheat mountains of the Indian Punjab

2011-05-18T06:19:00.000-07:00

M. S. Swaminathan

The Hindu In this file photo workers cover bags of wheat at a godown in Fatehgarh Saheb district of Punjab. Farmers in Punjab contribute nearly 40 per cent of the wheat and 26 per cent of the rice needed to sustain the public distribution system.

The arrival of large quantities of wheat in the grain markets of the Punjab-Haryana region is a heart-warming sight, while poor storage is a matter of national shame.

It was in April-May 1968, that the country witnessed the wonderful spectacle of large arrivals of wheat grain in the mandis of Punjab like Moga and Khanna. Wheat production in the country rose to nearly 17 million tonnes that year, from the previous best harvest of 12 million tonnes. Indira Gandhi released a special stamp titled “Wheat Revolution” in July 1968, to mark this new phase in our agricultural evolution. The nation rejoiced at our coming out of a “ship to mouth” existence. Later in 1968, Dr. William Gaud of the U.S. referred to the quantum jumps in production brought about by semi-dwarf varieties of wheat and rice as a “green revolution.” This term has since come to symbolise a steep rise in productivity and, thereby, of production of major crops.

Wheat production this year may reach a level of 85 million tonnes, in contrast to the seven million tonnes our farmers harvested at the time of independence in 1947. I visited several grain mandis in Moga, Khanna, Khananon and other places in the Punjab during April 23-27, 2011 and experienced, concurrently, a feeling of ecstasy and agony. It was heart-warming to see the great work done by our farm men and women under difficult circumstances when, often, they had to irrigate the fields at night due to a lack of availability of power during the day. The cause of agony was the way the grains produced by farmers with loving care were being handled. The various State marketing agencies and the Food Corporation of India (FCI) are trying their best to procure and store the mountains of grains arriving every day. The gunny bags containing the wheat procured during April-May 2010, are still occupying a considerable part of the storage space available at several mandis. The condition of the grains of earlier years presents a sad sight. The impact of moisture on the quality of paddy is even worse. Malathion sprays and fumigation with Aluminium Sulphide tablets are used to prevent grain spoilage. Safe storage involves attention to both quantity and quality. Grain safety is as important as grain saving. Due to rain and relatively milder temperature, grain arrivals were initially slow, but have now picked up. For all concerned with the procurement, dispatch and storage of wheat grains in the Punjab-Haryana-Western U.P. region, which is the heartland of the green revolution, the task on hand is stupendous.

Farmers in Punjab contribute nearly 40 per cent of the wheat and 26 per cent of the rice needed to sustain the public distribution system. The legal entitlement to food envisaged under the proposed National Food Security Act cannot be implemented without the help of the farm families of Punjab, Haryana and other grain surplus areas. Farmers are currently facing serious problems during production and post-harvest phases of farming due to inadequate investment in farm machinery and storage infrastructure. The investment made and steps taken to ensure environmentally sustainable production and safe storage and efficient distribution of grains will determine the future of both agriculture in Punjab and national food security.

On the production side, the ecological foundations essential for sustainable food production are in distress. There is an over-exploitation of the aquifer and nearly 70 per cent of irrigated area shows a negative water balance. The quality of the water is also deteriorating due to the indiscriminate use of pesticides and mineral fertilizer. Over 50,000 ha of crop land in the south-west region of Punjab are affected by water logging and salinisation. Deficiencies of Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Zinc are affecting 66, 48 and 22 per cent of soils in Punjab respectively. No wonder factor productivity, i.e., return from a unit of input, is going down. Unless urgent steps are taken to convert the green revolution into an ever-green revolution leading to the enhancement of productivity in perpetuity without associated ecological harm, both agriculture in Punjab and our public distribution system will be in danger. Worried about the future fate of farming as a profession, the younger generation is unwilling to follow in the footsteps of their parents and remain on the farm. This is the greatest worry. If steps are not taken to attract and retain youth in farming, the older generation will have no option but to sell land to real estate agents, who are all the time tempting them with attractive offers. Global prices of wheat, rice and maize are almost 50 per cent higher than the minimum support price paid to our farmers. Our population is now over 1.2 billion and we can implement a sustainable and affordable food security system only with home-grown food.

A disturbing finding of Census-2011 is the deteriorating sex ratio in the Punjab-Haryana region. The female-male ratio among children has come to its lowest point since independence. Already, women are shouldering a significant portion of farm work. If the current trends of youth migrating from villages coupled with a drop in the sex ratio continue, agricultural progress will be further endangered. The prevailing preference for a male child is in part due to the fear of farm land going out of a family's control, when the girl child gets married. I hope the loss of interest in taking to farming as a profession among male youth will remove the bias in favour of male children. I foresee an increasing feminisation of agriculture in the green revolution areas. While the drop in the sex ratio should be halted, steps are also needed to intensify the design, manufacture and distribution of women friendly farm machinery.

Tasks ahead: The first task is to defend the gains already made in improving the productivity and production of wheat, rice, maize and other crops. For the purpose of providing the needed technologies, it will be advisable to set up soon a Multi-disciplinary Research and Training Centre for Sustainable Agriculture at the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. This centre can be organised under the National Action Plan for the Management of Climate Change developed under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister, which includes a Mission for Sustainable Agriculture. Such a centre should initiate a Land and Water Care Movement in the Punjab in association with the farming community. The other urgent task is the promotion of appropriate changes in land use. Over 2.7 million ha are now under rice leading to the unsustainable exploitation of the ground water. Our immediate aim should be to find alternative land use for about a million ha under rice. This will be possible only if farmers can get income similar to that they are now earning from rice. Possible alternative crops will be maize and arhar (Pigeon pea). Quality Protein Maize will fetch a premium price from the poultry industry which is fast growing in the Punjab. Arhar being a legume will also enrich soil fertility as well as soil physical properties. Other high value but low water requiring crops like pulses and oilseeds can also be promoted. At the same time, there could be diversified basmati rice production in over a million ha. In addition to Pusa Basmati 1121 which occupies the largest area now, Pusa Basmati-I (1460) and Pusa Basmati 6 (1401) can be promoted. These have resistance to bacterial leaf blight. Varietal diversity will reduce genetic vulnerability to pests and diseases.

For handling the over 26 million tonnes of wheat which will be purchased during this season, a four-pronged strategy may be useful. First, distribution through railway wagons could be expanded and expedited. One wagon can handle 2,500 tonnes. Currently 30,000 to 40,000 tonnes of wheat are being dispatched each day through wagons. With advanced planning, this quantity can be raised to over 1 lakh tonnes per day. They can be dispatched to different States for meeting the needs of PDS, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), School Noon Meal Programme, Annapoorna, etc. Second, the present Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and godown storage systems can be improved with a little more investment and planning. In Punjab there are 146 mandis and 1,746 Purchase Points. They could be grouped and their infrastructure improved. Third, storage in modern silos, like the one put up at Moga by Adani Agri-logistics, and another one coming up in Amritsar, should be promoted. This will help to adopt an end- to-end system from the point of view of procurement, cleaning, quality assurance, safe storage and distribution. The cost of building silos to store a million tonnes of food grains may be about Rs.600 crore, if the required land is made available by state governments. An investment of about Rs.10,000 crore would help to establish a grid of modern grain storages with a capacity for storing, in good condition, over 15 million tonnes in the Punjab-Haryana-Western U.P. region. Lastly, export options can be explored after taking steps to make food available to the hungry, as suggested by the Supreme Court. Also, we should ensure that adequate food grains will be available for implementing the proposed Food Security Act. Export should be done only if the global food prices are attractive and if the profit made is distributed as bonus to our farmers, as suggested by the National Commission on Farmers.

It is time that we organise a National grid of grain storages, starting with storage at the farm level in well designed bins and extending to rural godowns and regional ultra-modern silos. Post harvest losses can then be minimised or even eliminated and food safety ensured. Unless the prevailing mismatch between production and post-harvest technologies is ended, neither the producer nor the consumer will derive full benefit from bumper harvests.

(M.S. Swaminathan is Chairman, MSSRF, and Member of Parliament of the Rajya Sabha.)

Myth-busting the Bangladesh war of 1971

2011-05-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

An author discusses her new book about the historical narratives of the 1971 civil war that broke up East Pakistan.

Sarmila Bose

Guerilla fighters of the Mukti Bahini prepare to bayonet men who allegedly collaborated with the Pakistani army during East Pakistan's fight to become the independent state of Bangladesh [GALLO/GETTY]

Last month, Al Jazeera published an article entitled Book, film greeted with fury among Bengalis. Here, Sarmila Bose, author of Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, responds to the criticism levelled at her work.
In all the excitement about the "Arab spring" it is instructive to remember the 1971 war in South Asia. Then too there was a military regime in Pakistan, easily identified as the "baddies" - and a popular uprising in its rebellious Eastern province, where Bengali nationalists were reported to be peacefully seeking freedom, democracy and human rights.
When the regime used military force to crush the rebellion in East Pakistan, India intervened like a knight to the rescue, resulting in the defeat of the bad guys, victory for the good guys and the independence of Bangladesh... Or so the story went for forty years. I grew up with it in Calcutta. It was widely repeated in the international press.
Several years ago I decided to chronicle a number of incidents of the 1971 war in-depth. I observed that many Bangladeshis were aggrieved that the world seemed to have forgotten the terrible trauma of the birth of their nation. Given the scale of the suffering, that lack of memory certainly appeared to be unfair, but there did not seem to be many detailed studies of the war - without which the world could not be expected to remember, or understand, what had happened in 1971.
My aim was to record as much as possible of what seemed to be a much-commented-on but poorly documented conflict - and to humanise it, so that the war could be depicted in terms of the people who were caught up in it, and not just faceless statistics. I hoped that the detailed documentation of what happened at the human level on the ground would help to shed some light on the conflict as a whole.
The principal tool of my study was memories. I read all available memoirs and reminiscences, in both English and Bengali. But I also embarked on extensive fieldwork, finding and talking to people who were present at many particular incidents, whether as participants, victims or eye-witnesses. Crucially, I wanted to hear the stories from multiple sources, including people on different sides of the war, so as to get as balanced and well-rounded a reconstruction as possible.
As soon as I started to do systematic research on the 1971 war, I found that there was a problem with the story which I had grown up believing: from the evidence that emanated from the memories of all sides at the ground level, significant parts of the "dominant narrative" seem not to have been true. Many "facts" had been exaggerated, fabricated, distorted or concealed. Many people in responsible positions had repeated unsupported assertions without a thought; some people seemed to know that the nationalist mythologies were false and yet had done nothing to inform the public. I had thought I would be chronicling the details of the story of 1971 with which I had been brought up, but I found instead that there was a different story to be told.
Product of research
My book Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, the product of several years of fieldwork based research, has just been published (Hurst and Co. and Columbia University Press). It focuses on the bitter fratricidal war within the province of East Pakistan over a period of a little more than a year, rather than the open "hot" war between India and Pakistan towards the end. It brings together, for the first time, the memories of dozens of people from each side of the conflict who were present in East Pakistan during the war. It lets the available evidence tell the stories. It has been described as a work that "will set anew the terms of debate" about this war.
Even before anyone has had the chance to read it, Dead Reckoning has been attracting comment, some of it of a nature that according to an observer would make the very reception of my book a subject of "taboo studies". "Myth-busting" works that undermine nationalist mythology, especially those that have gone unchallenged for several decades, are clearly not to be undertaken by the faint-hearted. The book has received gratifying praise from scholars and journalists who read the advance copies, but the word "courageous" cropped up with ominous frequency in many of the reviews. Some scholars praised my work in private; others told me to prepare for the flak that was bound to follow. One "myth-busting" scholar was glad my book was out at last, as I would now sweep up at the unpopularity stakes and she would get some respite after enduring several years of abuse.
Scholars and investigative journalists have an important role in "busting" politically partisan narratives. And yet, far too often we all fall for the seductive appeal of a simplistic "good versus evil" story, or fail to challenge victors' histories.
So far the story of valiant rebels fighting oppressive dictators in the so-called "Arab spring" has had one significant blemish - the vicious sexual attack and attempted murder of CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan by dozens of men celebrating the downfall of Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square in Cairo. It initially vanished from the headlines and has still not led to the kind of questioning of the representation of such conflicts that it should have generated. "Tahrir Square" became shorthand for freedom and democracy-loving people rising up against oppressive dictators.
People in other countries started to say they wanted their own "Tahrir Square". Logan has given a brave and graphic account of what happened to her at the hands of those supposedly celebrating the fall of a dictator and the coming of freedom, democracy and human rights. Her life was saved by burqa-clad Egyptian women and she was rescued by soldiers. Her account endows "Tahrir Square" with an entirely different meaning.
It should caution us against assuming that all those opposing an oppressive regime are champions of non-violence, democracy or human rights. It should alert us to the complexities of political power struggles and civil war, and stop getting carried away by what we imagine is happening, or would like to happen, rather than what the evidence supports.
Such was the impact of the 1971 war on South Asians that the year has transformed into a shorthand for its particular symbolism: 1971, or ekattor, the number 71 in Bengali, has come to stand for a simple equation of a popular nationalist uprising presumed to embody liberal democratic values battling brutal repression by a military dictatorship. But was it really as simple as that? Over time, the victorious Bangladeshi nationalist side's narrative of Pakistani villainy and Bengali victimhood became entrenched through unquestioned repetition.
The losing side of Pakistani nationalists had its own myth-making, comprising vast Indian plots. Pakistan had been carved out of the British Empire in India as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims. It was a problematic idea from the start - a large proportion of Muslims chose to remain in secular and pluralistic India, for instance, and its two parts, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, were separated by a thousand miles of a hostile India. In 1971 the idea of Islam as the basis of nationhood came apart in South Asia along with the country of Pakistan, after a mere 23 years of existence. What went wrong? And what do the memories of those who were there reveal about the reality of that war?
The publication of Dead Reckoning has spoiled the day for those who had been peddling their respective nationalist mythologies undisturbed for so long. Careers have been built - in politics, media, academia and development - on a particular telling of the 1971 war. All the warring parties of 1971 remain relentlessly partisan in recounting the conflict. As the dominant narrative, which has gained currency around the world, is that of the victorious Bangladeshi nationalists and their Indian allies, they stand to lose the most in any unbiased appraisal. Unsurprisingly therefore, the protests from this section are the shrillest.
Mixed reaction
The reaction to the publication of Dead Reckoning by those who feel threatened by it has followed a predictable path. First, there has been an attempt to damn the book before it was even available. Apart from random rants on the internet - which provides opportunity for anyone to rail against anything - reports have been written by people who haven't read the book, citing other people who also haven't read the book. The reason for this may be summed up as the well-founded fear of "knowledge is power".
When people read the book they will be far better informed as to what really happened in 1971. Hence the desperate attempt by those who have been spinning their particular yarns for so long to try to smear the book before anyone gets the chance to read it. A few people also seem to be trying to laud the book before reading it, an equally meaningless exercise. These commentaries are easy to dismiss: clearly, those who haven't read the book have nothing of value to say about it.
Second, detractors of the book claim that it exonerates the military from atrocities committed in East Pakistan in 1971. In reality the book details over several chapters many cases of atrocities committed by the regime's forces, so anyone who says it excuses the military's brutalities is clearly lying. The question is - why are they lying about something that will easily be found out as soon as people start reading the book? The answer to this question is more complex than it might seem. Of course the detractors hope that by making such claims they will stop people from reading the book.
Part of the answer lies also in that the book corrects some of the absurd exaggerations about the army's actions with which Bangladeshi nationalists had happily embellished their stories of "villainous" Pakistanis for all these years. But an important reason for falsely claiming that the book exonerates the military is to distract attention from the fact that it also chronicles the brutalities by their own side, committed in the name of Bengali nationalism. The nature and scale of atrocities committed by the "nationalist" side had been edited out of the dominant narrative. Its discovery spoils the "villains versus innocents" spin of Bangladeshi nationalist mythology.
A key question about the "controversy" over Dead Reckoning is why this book is stirring such passions when other works do not. One reason for this is that there are precious few studies of the 1971 war based on dispassionate research. This is the first book-length study that reconstructs the violence of the war at the ground-level, utilising multiple memories from all sides of the conflict.
Two eminent US historians, Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, published the only research-based study of the war at the diplomatic and policy level twenty years ago. Their excellent book, War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh (University of California Press, 1990), challenged the dominant narrative, but their work does not seem to be known among the general public as much as within academia.
However, a crucial reason for the special impact of Dead Reckoning has to do with who the author is. I am a Bengali, from a nationalist family in India. As Indians and Bengalis our sympathies had been firmly with the liberation struggle in Bangladesh in 1971. The dominant narrative of the 1971 war is the story as told by "my side", as it were. My reporting of what I actually found through my research, rather than unquestioningly repeating the partisan narrative or continuing the conspiracy of silence over uncomfortable truths, is thus taken as a "betrayal" by those who have profited for so long from mythologising the history of 1971.
It is important to note that not all South Asians subscribe to the myth-making. One eminent Indian journalist thought that my "courage, disregard for orthodoxy and meticulous research" in writing Dead Reckoning made me "the enfant terrible of Indian historians". A senior Bangladeshi scholar has found it "fitting that someone with Sarmila's links with Bengali nationalism should demonstrate that political values cannot be furthered by distorting history."
South Asians are prone to conjuring up all manner of conspiracy theories when faced with unpleasant realities, but those looking for one for Dead Reckoning are at a loss, as the only explanation for what it contains is that it reconstructs what really happened on the basis of available evidence.
The process of dismantling entrenched nationalist mythologies can be painful for those who have much vested in them, but the passions stirred by the publication of Dead Reckoning has sparked the debate that the 1971 war badly needed - and set on the right course the discussion of this bitter and brutal fratricidal war that split the only homeland created for Muslims in the modern world.
Sarmila Bose is Senior Research Fellow in the Politics of South Asia at the University of Oxford. She was a journalist in India for many years. She earned her degrees at Bryn Mawr College (History) and Harvard University (MPA and PhD in Political Economy and Government.)
Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is published by C. Hurst and Co. and Columbia University Press.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Pakistan's Yuppies in Danger

2011-05-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

by Lorraine Adams

Pakistan’s small middle class is vulnerable and exposed to the growing violence between al Qaeda and the government. Novelist Lorraine Adams on why this vital group cannot be forgotten by the U.S.
Ever since Osama bin Laden’s demise, I’ve been worried about PUPPies—Pakistani Upwardly Mobile Urban Professionals. They’re a vulnerable and endangered species, despite their Twitter accounts, iPhones, and Facebook pages. College-educated Pakistan (roughly 4 percent of the country’s 170 million people) may be much smaller than Egypt’s, and may have different gripes with their government, but its members share many values with their Arab counterparts. As the news broke over Twitter last week, PUPPies had plenty to say about the death of the man hiding in an ugly house in a town most of them remembered as a decidedly uncool childhood vacation spot. (Think of the Adirondacks or Catskills, if you’re a New Yorker.) They know that terrorists keen on retaliatory strikes for bin Laden’s killing will be looking for them.
Rizwan Tabassum / Getty Images Some writers—among them my friend the novelist Mohsin Hamid and the Guardian’s Declan Walsh and Jason Burke—are familiar with this sliver of Pakistan’s middle class. But most, including Salman Rushdie, who called for declaring Pakistan a terrorist state, sometimes seem to believe in a monolithic Pakistan sympathetic to terrorism, intolerantly Islamic and anti-West. They say the military, which represents the largest component of the middle class, is guilty of harboring bin Laden. If they have their way, the Pakistanis who are most like Westerners—English-speaking folk who carry Blackberries, watch Fashion Week on YouTube, twittered against the murder of anti-blasphemy law crusader Salman Taseer, and obsess about grades for college or medical school—will be thrown to the terrorist pack.
Since 2006, I’ve been traveling to Pakistan to research my last novel and the novel I’m currently writing. I’ve spent time in the border town of Torkham, the Swat Valley, the garrison town Ralwapindi, but mostly in cities—Peshawar, Islamabad, and Lahore. When I first started visiting these were tranquil places. But in 2008, Lahore exploded with its first suicide bombing. Pakistanis from all walks of life became vulnerable, but terrorists have targeted places where tolerant Muslims gather, such as urban shopping centers, Sufi shrines, and cricket fields.

“This day marks mixed feelings of triumph and fear—triumph over the death of a common enemy but fear that darker times marked by fundamentalist backlash and the withdrawal of American support may have begun.”

Rushdie and others, perhaps rightly, blame the Pakistani military for hiding bin Laden, but side by side with this possibility is the statistical reality that middle-class families have born the brunt of the extremist attacks. Officers and soldiers at military training grounds, employees at the federal investigative agency that probes terrorist attacks (comparable to our FBI), and individual police officers have been victims of fatal bombings. The military is not monolithic. One of my Lahore friends is the daughter of a high-ranking officer in the Frontier Corps who is Pathan. If stereotypes were a guide, both her ethnicity and her father’s career mark her family as bin Laden sympathizers. But her uncle, a police chief, was killed by a suicide bomber in Peshawar because of his anti-extremist work. Plus, her sister-in-law’s family is longtime military, the family patriarch an Army general who hails from Abbottabad. Yet whenever both these young women are on Facebook, their updates decry these attacks.
Monday, less than 24 hours after the bin Laden operation, a couple of my Pakistan friends in their 20s—an orthodontist and a medical school student—were far more sober than their American counterparts. These women are devout Muslims (they adhere to virginity before marriage and never drink), but like their counterparts in Tahrir Square, are enlightened observers. One wrote: “We got Osama! But remember that this justice has come at the cost of a decade of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While America, by virtue of its 'wealth and power' may be relatively immune, for Pakistan, this day marks mixed feelings of triumph and fear—triumph over the death of a common enemy but fear that darker times marked by fundamentalist backlash and the withdrawal of American support may have begun.”
Said another, “It shows that our military is either incompetent or complicit. Either way, the world is unhappy with Pakistan. We're sitting in the corner wearing a dunce cap yet again. The Taliban is unhappy with Pakistan. If anything, we'll be seeing more blasts in the coming months. If they had kept him alive, that would have helped fight them. It's too soon to say for sure what's going to happen next. At the most, this is a moral victory for 9/11 families. But my 2c—it doesn't help fight the terrorists which are multiplying by the day.”
Just how much support Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the military gave to bin Laden or any extremists is the subject of government investigation, and has been debated ad nauseam among analysts. Most American commentators quote the highly respected Ahmed Rashid, who recently wrote in The New Republic that they give terrorists enough help to keep “the pot boiling but not overflowing.” Others such as Anatol Lieven, in his new book about Pakistan, argue that military support for extremists in Kashmir and Afghanistan exists but inside Pakistan is thin.
Either way, life for Pakistan’s educated—because the government is such a corruption-saturated institution—is not much better than it is for its poor. Except for one, yes one, hospital in Karachi, medical care is far below international standards. Country-wide, the lack of utilities, even in urban areas, leads to absurdist predicaments. One of my friends, the mother of a 4-month-old, was trying to give him a hot bath in January. An absence of natural gas for the water heater led her to innovate. She got an electric kettle and plugged it in, transferring a teapot of hot water into the tub. But then, the electricity was cut off—Pakistan doesn’t have enough, and major cities regularly have 16 hours a day without it—and the tub was far from full. “Oh crap,” she said in frustration. I remember looking over at the bedroom bookshelf visible from her bathroom; there was an Orhan Pamuk, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others. For all her thoughtfulness and spirit, she was living with problems plenty of slum dwellers in the United States rarely face. Later that day, talking about the situation, she told me, “It’s not for me to question. If I question I create problems. Why do that? It’s better to accept it.”
In these days after bin Laden’s killing, I hope her stoicism continues to keep her sane. Whether it keeps her safe is up to leaders, worldwide and in Pakistan, for whom she is largely invisible.
Lorraine Adams, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and reporter, is the author of Harbor and The Room and the Chair. She lives in New York City.

Whither Labour Rights

2011-05-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

The Friday Times
By Yasser Latif Hamdani
The 18th Amendment to the constitution was welcomed by all who want to see Pakistan a truly federal, progressive and democratic state where the federating units and the centre are balanced in terms of power and rights. Pakistan vests residuary powers in constituent units but the net thrown by the federation – federal and concurrent legislative lists – was so wide that residuary powers amounted to very little. The abolition of the concurrent list devolves real powers to the provinces.
Be that as it may, the parliament has erred by devolving the very important subject of labour to the provinces without saving any powers for itself. This has come as a significant blow to the workers. In all democracies – including staunchly capitalistic countries such as the United States of America – national labour unions and associations form a crucial political counterweight to the industrial and landed classes. There is a big question mark on the legal position of All Pakistan Trade Unions. Pakistan needs a constitutional left movement, and by devolving the labour sector to the provinces, the narrow-sighted politicians have ensured that the democratic left – already in the ICU – is euthanised immediately. In doing so, the Pakistan People’s Party has dug its own grave at the national level.
Nowhere has this been more acutely felt than in the province of Punjab, where the provincial government, heavily dominated by big business interests, has enacted a patently anti-labour act called the Punjab Industrial Relations Act 2010 (PIRA). Section 3(1) of the PIRA abolishes the right of workers to form unions in an establishment that employs less than 50 workers. Consider, for example, how many workers a single brick kiln employs. Not only is this law ultra vires section 17(1) of the constitution, but is in violation of Pakistan’s international obligations of labour rights. Even the jurisdiction of labour courts is questionable, as they are appointed by the provincial government without any interference of the provincial high court. Under Pakistan’s separation of powers doctrine, a judicial body has to be appointed through a mechanism that gives the higher judiciary a say. Sooner or later, all decisions by the labour courts will be subject to legal challenge on this ground alone.
Even where there are unions, outside representation on a union’s executive body has been reduced from 25% to 20%. Unions have long relied on ideological and academic support from this section and this has been crucial in union politics. By reducing their number, the provincial government has smoothened the jagged edges for employers. Even more serious is the by-passing of the Collective Bargaining Agent – a central feature of the Industrial Relations legislation in the past – allowing the employer to negotiate directly with an individual worker. In other words, the industrial employers of Punjab have been given a ready made device to divide and rule the workers and defeat any and all moves by the workers to organise for their rights.
The cumulative effect of these changes is that labour rights have been read out effectively from law. Not since the Industrial Revolution has the legal position been so bleak in our part of the world as under this law. The law – as it existed under the various Industrial Relations Ordinances promulgated by military dictators – included an elaborate mechanism which allowed the government, workers and employers to resolve disputes. This too has been omitted. Additionally, there is no mechanism for routine inspections, making enforcement of minimum wage in the province next to impossible.
Pakistan’s constitution talks great game about elimination of exploitation (Article 3), making provisions for securing just and humane conditions for work (Article 37 e), ensuring equitable adjustment of rights between employers and employees (Article 38 a), facilities for work and adequate livelihood with reasonable rest and leisure (Article 38 b), social security and social insurance etc (Article 38 c), and food, clothing, housing, education and medical relief (Article 38 d). But everything the PIRA has achieved is the exact opposite.
Sher Shah Suri – who achieved a level of development unparalleled in his time – had famously said that peasants and workers are the backbone of any empire and should be kept happy at all costs. We have failed miserably to live up to that glorious example from our past. Workers in Pakistan in general and Punjab in particular are the most oppressed lot in all of South Asia. Labour unions are a natural pressure valve for societies. Those who allow this valve to operate properly avoid bloodshed, revolutions and social unrest. Great Britain is perhaps one of the best examples in this respect, where the labour class was coopted and made a stakeholder in national progress, politics and governance.

Where’s Hillary?

2011-05-10T04:02:00.000-07:00

Hasidic paper breaks the rules by editing Clinton out of White House photo

By Joe Pompeo
Hillary Clinton's expression, right hand clasped over her mouth in astonishment, is largely responsible for making the above photo iconic--and, to at least one newspaper, sexually suggestive.
In the photo, President Obama and his national security team are huddled around a conference table in the White House Situation Room, watching CIA director Leon Panetta narrate last Sunday's raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. The mood is clearly tense.
When Women's Wear Daily consulted a coterie of photo editors and designers about why the image is "destined to be one for the history books," Clinton was foremost in their responses.
"The Hillary Clinton expression is the one that holds the photograph fully," Time's photo director told the magazine. "You can see 10 years of tension and heartache and anger in Hillary's face," Conde Nast's Scott Dadich agreed.
Turns out she was probably just coughing during that crucial moment captured by White House photographer Pete Souza. But nevertheless, the image still proved a bit too racy for at least one of the many newspapers that printed it.
That would be the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic broadsheet Der Tzitung, published in Brooklyn. The paper photoshopped Clinton, as well at the only other woman who could be seen in the room--Audrey Tomason, the national director of counterterrorism--out of the frame.

"Apparently the presence of a woman, any woman, being all womanly and sexy all over the United States' counterterrorism efforts was too much for the editors of Der Tzitung to handle," noted the prominent women's blog Jezebel.
Indeed, "The Hasidic newspaper will not intentionally include any images of women in the paper because it could be considered sexually suggestive," Rabbi Jason Miller explains in The Jewish Week. Though he notes that the publication's "fauxtograpphing" may in fact be a graver act against their religious tenets: "To my mind, this act of censorship is actually a violation of the Jewish legal principle of g'neivat da'at (deceit)."
Beyond that, Der Tzitung's editors apparently missed or blatantly ignored the guidelines stipulated on the official White House Flickr page, where the photo was released for use by news organizations: "The photograph may not be manipulated in any way."
The White House has not issued a response on the altered image.
UPDATE: The editors of Der Tzitung have apologized to the White House for altering the photo and responded to the Wasington Post with a comment clarifiying their position:
"In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status... Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive."

Can the World Feed 10 Billion People?

2011-05-07T03:05:00.000-07:00

With an exploding global population -- and Africa's numbers set to triple -- the world's experts are falling over themselves arguing how to feed the masses. Why do they have it so wrong?

BY RAJ PATEL

The world's demographers this week increased their estimates of the world's population through the coming century. We are now on track to hit 10 billion people by 2100. Today, humanity produces enough food to feed everyone but, because of the way we distribute it, there are still a billion hungry. One doesn't need to be a frothing Malthusian to worry about how we'll all get to eat tomorrow. Current predictions place most of the world's people in Asia, the highest levels of consumption in Europe and North America, and the highest population growth rates in Africa -- where the population could triple over the next 90 years.
There are, however, plans afoot to feed the world. One of the countries to which the world's development experts have turned as a test bed is Malawi. Landlocked and a little smaller than Pennsylvania, Malawi is consistently among the world's poorest places. The latest figures have 90 percent of its 15 million people living on the equivalent of less than two dollars a day. By century's end, the population is expected to be nearly 132 million. Today, some 40 percent of Malawians live below the country's poverty line, and part of the reason for widespread chronic poverty is that more than 70 percent of Malawians live in rural areas. There, they depend on agriculture -- and nearly every farmer grows maize. "Chimanga ndi moyo" -- "maize is life," the local saying goes -- but growing maize pays so poorly that few people can afford to eat anything else.
If you arrive in Malawi in March, just after the rainy season, growing food seems like a fool's game. It's hard to find a patch of red soil that isn't a tall riot of green. From the roadside you can see maize about to ripen, with squash and beans planted at the base of the thick stalks. Even the tobacco fields are doing well this year. But there's a rumble in this jungle. Malawi's swaying fields are a battleground in which three different visions for the future of global agriculture are ranged against one other.
The first and most venerable development idea for Malawi sees these farmers as survivors of a doomed way of life who need to be helped into the hereafter. Oxford economist Paul Collier is the poster child for this "modernist" view, one that he presented in a scathing November 2008 Foreign Affairs article in which he cudgeled the "romantics" who yearned for peasant agriculture. Observing both that wages in cities are higher than in the countryside, and that every large developed country is able to feed itself without peasant farmers, Collier argued the virtues of big agriculture. He also called on the European Union to support genetically modified crops and for the United States to kill domestic subsidies for biofuel. He was one-third right: biofuel subsidies are absurd, not least because they drive up food prices, siphoning grains from the bowls of the poorest into the gas-tanks of the richest -- with limited environmental gains, at best.
Collier's contempt for peasants seems, however, to rest on something other than the facts. Although international agribusiness has generated great profits ever since the East India Company, it hasn't brought riches to farmers and farmworkers, who are invariably society's poorest people. Indeed, big agriculture earns its moniker -- it tends to work most lucratively with large-scale plantations and operations to which small farmers are little more than an impediment.
It turns out that if you're keen to make the world's poorest people better off, it's smarter to invest in their farms and workplaces than to send them packing to the cities. In its 2008 World Development Report, the World Bank found that, indeed, investment in peasants was among the most efficient and effective ways of raising people out of poverty and hunger. It was an awkward admission, as the Bank had long been trumpeting Collier's brand of agricultural development. Farmers organizations from Malawi to India to Brazil had been pointing out that access to land, water, sustainable technology, education, markets, state investment in processing, and -- above all, access to level playing field on domestic and international markets -- would help them. But it took three decades of lousy policy for the development establishment to realize this, and they're not quite there yet.
Because of its colonial legacy, Malawi had long been following conventional economic wisdom: exporting things in which the country had a comparative advantage (in Malawi's case, tobacco) and using the funds to buy goods on the international market in which it didn't have an advantage. But when tobacco prices fall, as they have of late, there's less foreign exchange with which to venture into international markets. And being landlocked, Malawi also faces higher prices for grain than its four neighbors -- Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania -- simply because it costs more to transport into the country. According to one estimate, the marginal cost of importing a ton of food-aid maize is $400, versus $200 a ton to import it commercially, and only $50 to source it domestically using fertilizers. Particularly at a time when food and fertilizer prices are predicted to rise, Malawi is wise to consider how vulnerable to the caprices of international markets it wants to be.
This partly explains why, in the late 1990s, almost a decade before it became fashionable, Malawi bucked the advice of its international donors and decided to spend the majority its agriculture budget on fertilizer, the first and perhaps most necessary ingredient in prepping the soil for producing viable crops. The government gave farmers a "starter pack," with enough beans, improved seeds, and fertilizer to cover about a fifth of an acre. International donors weren't pleased. A USAID official decried the program as consigning farmers to a "poverty treadmill" in which farmers would be stuck growing just enough maize to survive, but never enough to get rich. Although the program had modest success, it took off when Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika expanded the program over the 2005-2006 growing season, quadrupling the amount of fertilizer available. Although driven by domestic political promises, his international timing was perfect -- he was embarking on a policy whose time had come. And this is why what happens in Malawi's fields today matter so much beyond its borders.
To understand why, we need a quick history of agricultural policy in developing countries. Many developing countries were, especially before World War II, pantries to be raided by their colonizers. Post-independence, rural areas were often net contributors to government revenues, but there were some assurances of stability, with government schemes to buy crops at guaranteed prices. Internationally -- especially in Asia -- the post-war era saw governments pressured to feed a restive population that was increasingly wondering whether their lot wouldn't be improved through socialism and a change in land ownership. In order to fight the Cold War in foreign fields, the U.S. government and key foundations invested heavily in agricultural technologies such as improved seed and fertilizer. These technologies were designed to keep land in the hands of its feudal owners, food plentiful, and communists at bay. In 1968, William Gaud, the USAID administrator, dubbed it a Green Revolution, because it was designed to prevent a red one.
For a range of mainly geopolitical reasons, the Green Revolution was implemented with less fervor and success in Africa than in Asia. The International Fertilizer Development Center observed in 2006 that $4 billion worth of soil nutrients were being mined from the African soil by farmers who, struggling to make ends meet, weren't replenishing the nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous in the ground beneath their feet.
The prescription for declining soil quality lay, however, not in addressing the policy causes of farmer's environmental panic -- a systematic neglect since the 1980s to which the World Bank itself admitted in an internal evaluation -- but to fix the soil with technology. So in 2006, the Rockefeller Foundation (the original sponsors of the Green Revolution in Asia) joined the Gates Foundation to launch The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. This is the second brave new development policy that hopes to feed Africa.
AGRA claims to have learned the lessons of history, rejecting Collier's view and focusing on policies that "unlike the Green Revolution in Latin America, which mostly benefited large-scale farmers because they had access to irrigation and were therefore in a position to use the improved varieties ... [are] specifically geared to overcome the challenges facing smallholder farmers."
So did it work in Malawi? It depends on the goal. If the aim was to increase output, then yes. Although economist and Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs recently over-egged the data by suggesting that production had doubled because of the fertilizer subsidy (it only increased by 300,000 - 400,000 tons or up to 15 percent, the rest being mainly due to the return of the rains), the amount of maize in Malawi has undoubtedly gone up.
As the 50 million people food insecure in the United States know all too well, though, having enough food in the country doesn't necessarily mean that all people get to eat, and Malawi still has more than its fair share of glassy-eyed and underweight children. Chronically hungry kids have low height for their age and the number of children malnourished in this way -- "stunted" is the term in the statistics -- has remained stubbornly high since the subsidies began.
Measuring increased yields of maize from fertilizer and starter kits doesn't necessarily translate into a society that is well-fed and economically viable in terms of agriculture. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario who also works in Malawi as a project coordinator for the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project, isn't surprised. "Any nutritionist would scoff at the notion that increased yield automatically leads to increased nutrition," she says.
Bezner Kerr told me that having more crops in the fields and bigger yields can actually be a bad thing, taking "women out of the home and away from domestic work. Particularly if they are doing early childcare feeding, this can lead to poorer nutritional outcomes." What happens within the household is crucial in translating increased output into better nutrition.
Indeed, gender matters when it comes to food and farming. Sixty percent of the world's malnourished people are women or girls. Yet the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization recently pointed out that by increasing access to the same resources as men, women could boost their farm's output by up to 30 percent, leading to a 4 percent increase in total agricultural output in developing countries. In Malawi, 90 percent of women work part time, and women are paid some 30 percent less than men for similar jobs. Women are also burdened with care work, especially in a country ravaged by HIV/AIDS. Even if they own land and have access to the same resources as men, women find themselves torn between the demands of child and elder care, cooking, carrying water, finding firewood, planting, weeding, and harvesting.
These problems are better addressed through social change -- abetted by programs like the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project -- than chemistry. Yet these are precisely the kinds of programs that are crowded out by fertilizer subsidies. The fertilizer program has been a jealous child, sucking resources away from other programs. The opportunity cost of fertilizer for farmers is money that might have been spent on something else -- a serious concern when global fertilizer prices are going through the roof. Research by the World Bank in Latin America and Southeast Asia has suggested that it's smarter for government to subsidize public goods like agricultural research and extension services and irrigation, rather than directing money at private inputs like fertilizer.
Again, this matters beyond Malawi's borders, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The world's population growth is scheduled to be driven by "high fertility countries" -- most of which are in Africa. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, recently argued that the world might be better fed not by pumping the soil with chemicals, but by using cutting-edge "agroecological" techniques to build soil fertility, and using policy to achieve environmental and social sustainability. In a review of 286 sustainable agriculture projects in 57 developing countries covering 91 million acres, a team led by British environmental scientist Jules Pretty found production increases of 79 percent -- again, far higher than the fertilizer subsidy in Malawi, and with a far broader range of ecological and social benefits than increased food production.
These programs succeed, in part, because they don't see hunger as the consequence of a surfeit of peasants or a deficit in soil, but as the result of complex environmental, social, and political causes. You don't just need chemists to solve hunger -- you need sociologists, soil biologists, agronomists, ethnographers, and even economists. Paying for their skills is the opportunity cost of spending precious dollars on imported fertilizer. Of course, agroecology is an entirely different paradigm than one in which technology is dropped into laps from foreign laboratories accompanied by a sheet of instructions. The programs require much more participatory education work, and much more investment in public goods, than the Malawian government and donors currently seem inclined to provide.
Agroecology is the third development vision battling for the future. In Malawi, it works. By growing cowpeas and groundnuts with maize -- expanding the range of crops -- Bezner Kerr's program has beat the fertilizer program's yield by 10 percent and increased nutrition outcomes too. Yet even agroecology has its limits. Fifteen percent of Malawians remain ultra poor, living on less than a dollar a day and unable to buy enough to eat. They tend to be people who are landless, or who have poor quality land and have to sell their labor at harvest time, just when they need it the most. They remain untouched by the Malawian miracle.
The future doesn't look terribly promising for agroecology. Concerned about the financial sustainability of its fertilizer subsidy program, the Malawian government is about to embark on a Green Belt project, in which thousands of acres will be irrigated to induce foreign investors to begin large-scale farming of sugar cane and other export crops. The foreign exchange brought in by this program, it is hoped, will bankroll the fertilizer spending. The result will help balance the country's current account, but as a consequence, thousands of smallholders are scheduled to be displaced to clear lands that will attract the kind of large-scale agriculture of which Collier would approve.
Particularly in the light of the new population projections for the 21st century, it seems foolish to stick to 20th century agricultural policy. Recall that the agroecological interventions in Malawi turned on women's empowerment. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has famously argued that there are few policies better placed to improve individual, family, and community lives (and lower fertility rates) than education -- particularly the education of women and girls. The prophesies presented to us by demographers vary widely -- change the assumptions, and you end up with a world of between 8 billion and 15 billion people. No matter what the future holds, though, it's clear that a world in which everyone gets to eat depends on women's empowerment -- and rather than treating that fact as something irrelevant to feeding the world, agroecology puts it right in the middle.
A great deal of past agriculture policy has been designed either economically to bomb villages in order to save them, or to administer a technological quick fix in order to postpone politics. Collier wants to get rid of peasants. New fads want to keep them, but keep them knee-deep in chemicals. Yet if we are serious about feeding the hungry, in Malawi or anywhere else, we need to recognize that the majority of the hungry are women, and that we need more public, not private, spending on those least able to command rural resources. Because when it comes to growing food, those who tend the land are anything but fools.

Fond of honor in beggars ........ ??????????

2011-05-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

General Ashfaq Kayani runs this country. Let’s not waffle about on this issue. The democratic regime is anemic at best and hapless at worst. What he says carries weight. People listen to him.
When General K says that the nation will not sacrifice its honour for prosperity, he’s expecting people to take it at face value. An unquestioning media will accept it as essential, and will let it lie.
Now, there’s no doubt that honour, or ‘ghairat’ is real. Living your life with dignity and honour is the right of the people of Pakistan. Having their decisions actually count is the right of the people of Pakistan. On that front, I have no issue with his comment.
Similarly, General K is not the first (and he’s unlikely to be the last) Pakistani political personality to make this statement. Rhetoric laden with national honour stretches all the way back to the Two Nation Theory and has been employed by all our rulers. As was pointed out to me on Twitter, the greatest example of honour-over-prosperity rhetoric is ZAB’s infamous “Even if we have to eat grass” speech. It’s an essential, and cheap, political trope that excites people.
What is particularly egregious about this line of argument is that it somehow glorifies poverty, turning it into a virtue. Trying to convince the people of the country that toiling in subhuman conditions is a sacrifice they’re making to ensure that the nation remains honourable. It stakes the nation’s dignity at the cost of the individual Pakistani’s.
The fact that such rhetoric emanates from the military is particularly jarring for me. No single institution has sold out the nation’s “honour” for its own prosperity at the rate that the military has. And none has forced individual Pakistanis to live as undignified, fearful lives as it has.
The army has willingly taken on a mercenary role since the Soviet ‘Jihad’. It has willfully indoctrinated young boys to turn themselves into weapons; in the process snatching away sons from families that would have depended upon them to live a life of dignity in their old age.
The military has appropriated a larger and larger chunk of the national budget to buy itself fancy gadgets at the cost of expanding education and healthcare. Snatching from us the right to education and a healthy life.
And while they may talk of dismantling the feudal nizaam, they themselves have emerged as the largest landowner in Pakistan. Some dignity they’re affording us.
They’ve trampled on our vote time and again. They’ve murdered a Prime Minister through a kangaroo court. They have shown time and again that they care naught for the dignity of our vote.
They’ve treated Pakistanis as second class citizens simply due to their narrow definition of what ‘Pakistani’ is. Which for the uninitiated is basically “Love the army and listen to everything we say without fail.” A genocide in Bengal (yeah, let’s not sugarcoat it), and ongoing repression in Balochistan that barely makes it to our news channels.
In the meanwhile, we have our gleaming Defence Housing Authorities, and our vast Fauji Foundation industrial complex. It would appear that while we ensure the nation’s honour, someone is indeed getting prosperous.
So, General Kayani, allow me to be a little skeptical. Just a tiny bit skeptical when you ask me to forego prosperity for honour.

Obama Got Osama

2011-05-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and four commercial airplanes, was killed in Pakistan in a firefight with U.S. troops, and that’s how finally Osama’s fever is finished among American’s with the dramatic announcement of his death by US President Obama.www.jalaybi.com brings for you the most waited announcement for the Americans and the rest of the world fighting against Alqeada, here is the complete text of those words by Obama that Americans have been longing to listen and every president of US longing to utter since 9/11, finally President Obama got the chance to announce that “I have Got Osama after a decade”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good evening. Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history.The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory. Hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky, the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground, black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon, the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.
And yet, we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world, the empty seat at the dinner table, children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father, parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.
On September 11th, 2001 in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country.
On that day, no matter where we came from, what god we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.
We were also united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice. We quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda, an organization headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocence in our country and around the globe.
And so we went to war against al Qaeda, to protect our citizens, our friends and our allies.
Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort. We’ve disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense.
In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government which had given bin Laden and al Qaeda safe haven and support.
And around the globe, we’ve worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot.
Yet, Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the Afghan border into Pakistan. Meanwhile, al Qaeda continued to operate from along that border and operate through its affiliates across the world. And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network.
Then last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.
It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground.
I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan.
And finally last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties.
After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
For over two decades, bin Laden has been al Qaeda’s leader and symbol and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies. The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.
Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad. As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam.
I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam, because bin Laden was not a Muslim leader. He was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own.
So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.
Over the years, I have repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people.
Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts. They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations. And going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continue to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates.
The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.
After nearly 10 years of service, struggle and sacrifice, we know well the costs of war. These efforts weigh on me every time I, as commander-in-chief, have to sign a letter to a family that has lost a loved one, or look into the eyes of a service member who’s been gravely wounded.
So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet, as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are.
And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.
Tonight we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who have worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work or know their names, but tonight they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.
We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country. And they’re a part of the generation that has borne the heaviest share of the burden since that September day.
Finally, let me say to the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 that we have never forgotten your loss, nor wavered in our commitment to see that we do whatever it takes to prevent another attack on our shores.
And tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed. Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people. The cause of securing our country is not complete, but tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens, our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.
Let us remember that we can do these things, not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The New Geopolitics of Food

2011-04-27T05:19:00.001-07:00

From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars.

BY LESTER R. BROWN | MAY/JUNE 2011

In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing maybe $2.10. If, however, you live in New Delhi, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in the world price of wheat actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to hand-grind into flour for chapatis costs twice as much. And the same is true with rice. If the world price of rice doubles, so does the price of rice in your neighborhood market in Jakarta. And so does the cost of the bowl of boiled rice on an Indonesian family's dinner table.
Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we've seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet's poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute -- and it has -- to revolutions and upheaval.
Already in 2011, the U.N. Food Price Index has eclipsed its previous all-time global high; as of March it had climbed for eight consecutive months. With this year's harvest predicted to fall short, with governments in the Middle East and Africa teetering as a result of the price spikes, and with anxious markets sustaining one shock after another, food has quickly become the hidden driver of world politics. And crises like these are going to become increasingly common. The new geopolitics of food looks a whole lot more volatile -- and a whole lot more contentious -- than it used to. Scarcity is the new norm.
Until recently, sudden price surges just didn't matter as much, as they were quickly followed by a return to the relatively low food prices that helped shape the political stability of the late 20th century across much of the globe. But now both the causes and consequences are ominously different.

How Food Explains the World
By Joshua E. Keating

Street Eats
An FP Slide Show

In many ways, this is a resumption of the 2007-2008 food crisis, which subsided not because the world somehow came together to solve its grain crunch once and for all, but because the Great Recession tempered growth in demand even as favorable weather helped farmers produce the largest grain harvest on record. Historically, price spikes tended to be almost exclusively driven by unusual weather -- a monsoon failure in India, a drought in the former Soviet Union, a heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. Such events were always disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry. Each night, there are 219,000 additional people to feed at the global dinner table.
More alarming still, the world is losing its ability to soften the effect of shortages. In response to previous price surges, the United States, the world's largest grain producer, was effectively able to steer the world away from potential catastrophe. From the mid-20th century until 1995, the United States had either grain surpluses or idle cropland that could be planted to rescue countries in trouble. When the Indian monsoon failed in 1965, for example, President Lyndon Johnson's administration shipped one-fifth of the U.S. wheat crop to India, successfully staving off famine. We can't do that anymore; the safety cushion is gone.
That's why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it yet more bread riots cum political revolutions. What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it? Get ready, farmers and foreign ministers alike, for a new era in which world food scarcity increasingly shapes global politics.

THE DOUBLING OF WORLD grain prices since early 2007 has been driven primarily by two factors: accelerating growth in demand and the increasing difficulty of rapidly expanding production. The result is a world that looks strikingly different from the bountiful global grain economy of the last century. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity? Even at this early stage, we can see at least the broad outlines of the emerging food economy.
On the demand side, farmers now face clear sources of increasing pressure. The first is population growth. Each year the world's farmers must feed 80 million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries. The world's population has nearly doubled since 1970 and is headed toward 9 billion by midcentury. Some 3 billion people, meanwhile, are also trying to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, and eggs. As more families in China and elsewhere enter the middle class, they expect to eat better. But as global consumption of grain-intensive livestock products climbs, so does the demand for the extra corn and soybeans needed to feed all that livestock. (Grain consumption per person in the United States, for example, is four times that in India, where little grain is converted into animal protein. For now.)
At the same time, the United States, which once was able to act as a global buffer of sorts against poor harvests elsewhere, is now converting massive quantities of grain into fuel for cars, even as world grain consumption, which is already up to roughly 2.2 billion metric tons per year, is growing at an accelerating rate. A decade ago, the growth in consumption was 20 million tons per year. More recently it has risen by 40 million tons every year. But the rate at which the United States is converting grain into ethanol has grown even faster. In 2010, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain, of which 126 million tons went to ethanol fuel distilleries (up from 16 million tons in 2000). This massive capacity to convert grain into fuel means that the price of grain is now tied to the price of oil. So if oil goes to $150 per barrel or more, the price of grain will follow it upward as it becomes ever more profitable to convert grain into oil substitutes. And it's not just a U.S. phenomenon: Brazil, which distills ethanol from sugar cane, ranks second in production after the United States, while the European Union's goal of getting 10 percent of its transport energy from renewables, mostly biofuels, by 2020 is also diverting land from food crops.
This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites. Take climate change: The rule of thumb among crop ecologists is that for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the growing season optimum, farmers can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields. This relationship was borne out all too dramatically during the 2010 heat wave in Russia, which reduced the country's grain harvest by nearly 40 percent.
While temperatures are rising, water tables are falling as farmers overpump for irrigation. This artificially inflates food production in the short run, creating a food bubble that bursts when aquifers are depleted and pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge. In arid Saudi Arabia, irrigation had surprisingly enabled the country to be self-sufficient in wheat for more than 20 years; now, wheat production is collapsing because the non-replenishable aquifer the country uses for irrigation is largely depleted. The Saudis soon will be importing all their grain.
Saudi Arabia is only one of some 18 countries with water-based food bubbles. All together, more than half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling. The politically troubled Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where grain production has peaked and begun to decline because of water shortages, even as populations continue to grow. Grain production is already going down in Syria and Iraq and may soon decline in Yemen. But the largest food bubbles are in India and China. In India, where farmers have drilled some 20 million irrigation wells, water tables are falling and the wells are starting to go dry. The World Bank reports that 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping is concentrated in the North China Plain, which produces half of China's wheat and a third of its corn. An estimated 130 million Chinese are currently fed by overpumping. How will these countries make up for the inevitable shortfalls when the aquifers are depleted?
Even as we are running our wells dry, we are also mismanaging our soils, creating new deserts. Soil erosion as a result of overplowing and land mismanagement is undermining the productivity of one-third of the world's cropland. How severe is it? Look at satellite images showing two huge new dust bowls: one stretching across northern and western China and western Mongolia; the other across central Africa. Wang Tao, a leading Chinese desert scholar, reports that each year some 1,400 square miles of land in northern China turn to desert. In Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests have shrunk by half or more over the last few decades. North Korea and Haiti are also suffering from heavy soil losses; both countries face famine if they lose international food aid. Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.
Beyond the changes in the environment that make it ever harder to meet human demand, there's an important intangible factor to consider: Over the last half-century or so, we have come to take agricultural progress for granted. Decade after decade, advancing technology underpinned steady gains in raising land productivity. Indeed, world grain yield per acre has tripled since 1950. But now that era is coming to an end in some of the more agriculturally advanced countries, where farmers are already using all available technologies to raise yields. In effect, the farmers have caught up with the scientists. After climbing for a century, rice yield per acre in Japan has not risen at all for 16 years. In China, yields may level off soon. Just those two countries alone account for one-third of the world's rice harvest. Meanwhile, wheat yields have plateaued in Britain, France, and Germany -- Western Europe's three largest wheat producers.

IN THIS ERA OF TIGHTENING world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage, and countries are scrambling to secure their own parochial interests at the expense of the common good.
The first signs of trouble came in 2007, when farmers began having difficulty keeping up with the growth in global demand for grain. Grain and soybean prices started to climb, tripling by mid-2008. In response, many exporting countries tried to control the rise of domestic food prices by restricting exports. Among them were Russia and Argentina, two leading wheat exporters. Vietnam, the No. 2 rice exporter, banned exports entirely for several months in early 2008. So did several other smaller exporters of grain.
With exporting countries restricting exports in 2007 and 2008, importing countries panicked. No longer able to rely on the market to supply the grain they needed, several countries took the novel step of trying to negotiate long-term grain-supply agreements with exporting countries. The Philippines, for instance, negotiated a three-year agreement with Vietnam for 1.5 million tons of rice per year. A delegation of Yemenis traveled to Australia with a similar goal in mind, but had no luck. In a seller's market, exporters were reluctant to make long-term commitments.
Fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some of the more affluent countries, led by Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China, took the unusual step in 2008 of buying or leasing land in other countries on which to grow grain for themselves. Most of these land acquisitions are in Africa, where some governments lease cropland for less than $1 per acre per year. Among the principal destinations were Ethiopia and Sudan, countries where millions of people are being sustained with food from the U.N. World Food Program. That the governments of these two countries are willing to sell land to foreign interests when their own people are hungry is a sad commentary on their leadership.
By the end of 2009, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2010 World Bank analysis of these "land grabs" reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved -- an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in the United States. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect all downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate crops in Ethiopia or Sudan, for instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries with which Egypt must negotiate.
The potential for conflict -- and not just over water -- is high. Many of the land deals have been made in secret, and in most cases, the land involved was already in use by villagers when it was sold or leased. Often those already farming the land were neither consulted about nor even informed of the new arrangements. And because there typically are no formal land titles in many developing-country villages, the farmers who lost their land have had little backing to bring their cases to court. Reporter John Vidal, writing in Britain's Observer, quotes Nyikaw Ochalla from Ethiopia's Gambella region: "The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands."
Local hostility toward such land grabs is the rule, not the exception. In 2007, as food prices were starting to rise, China signed an agreement with the Philippines to lease 2.5 million acres of land slated for food crops that would be shipped home. Once word leaked, the public outcry -- much of it from Filipino farmers -- forced Manila to suspend the agreement. A similar uproar rocked Madagascar, where a South Korean firm, Daewoo Logistics, had pursued rights to more than 3 million acres of land. Word of the deal helped stoke a political furor that toppled the government and forced cancellation of the agreement. Indeed, few things are more likely to fuel insurgencies than taking land from people. Agricultural equipment is easily sabotaged. If ripe fields of grain are torched, they burn quickly.
Not only are these deals risky, but foreign investors producing food in a country full of hungry people face another political question of how to get the grain out. Will villagers permit trucks laden with grain headed for port cities to proceed when they themselves may be on the verge of starvation? The potential for political instability in countries where villagers have lost their land and their livelihoods is high. Conflicts could easily develop between investor and host countries.
These acquisitions represent a potential investment in agriculture in developing countries of an estimated $50 billion. But it could take many years to realize any substantial production gains. The public infrastructure for modern market-oriented agriculture does not yet exist in most of Africa. In some countries it will take years just to build the roads and ports needed to bring in agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and to export farm products. Beyond that, modern agriculture requires its own infrastructure: machine sheds, grain-drying equipment, silos, fertilizer storage sheds, fuel storage facilities, equipment repair and maintenance services, well-drilling equipment, irrigation pumps, and energy to power the pumps. Overall, development of the land acquired to date appears to be moving very slowly.
So how much will all this expand world food output? We don't know, but the World Bank analysis indicates that only 37 percent of the projects will be devoted to food crops. Most of the land bought up so far will be used to produce biofuels and other industrial crops.
Even if some of these projects do eventually boost land productivity, who will benefit? If virtually all the inputs -- the farm equipment, the fertilizer, the pesticides, the seeds -- are brought in from abroad and if all the output is shipped out of the country, it will contribute little to the host country's economy. At best, locals may find work as farm laborers, but in highly mechanized operations, the jobs will be few. At worst, impoverished countries like Mozambique and Sudan will be left with less land and water with which to feed their already hungry populations. Thus far the land grabs have contributed more to stirring unrest than to expanding food production.
And this rich country-poor country divide could grow even more pronounced -- and soon. This January, a new stage in the scramble among importing countries to secure food began to unfold when South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, announced that it was creating a new public-private entity that will be responsible for acquiring part of this grain. With an initial office in Chicago, the plan is to bypass the large international trading firms by buying grain directly from U.S. farmers. As the Koreans acquire their own grain elevators, they may well sign multiyear delivery contracts with farmers, agreeing to buy specified quantities of wheat, corn, or soybeans at a fixed price.
Other importers will not stand idly by as South Korea tries to tie up a portion of the U.S. grain harvest even before it gets to market. The enterprising Koreans may soon be joined by China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other leading importers. Although South Korea's initial focus is the United States, far and away the world's largest grain exporter, it may later consider brokering deals with Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other major exporters. This is happening just as China may be on the verge of entering the U.S. market as a potentially massive importer of grain. With China's 1.4 billion increasingly affluent consumers starting to compete with U.S. consumers for the U.S. grain harvest, cheap food, seen by many as an American birthright, may be coming to an end.
No one knows where this intensifying competition for food supplies will go, but the world seems to be moving away from the international cooperation that evolved over several decades following World War II to an every-country-for-itself philosophy. Food nationalism may help secure food supplies for individual affluent countries, but it does little to enhance world food security. Indeed, the low-income countries that host land grabs or import grain will likely see their food situation deteriorate.

AFTER THE CARNAGE of two world wars and the economic missteps that led to the Great Depression, countries joined together in 1945 to create the United Nations, finally realizing that in the modern world we cannot live in isolation, tempting though that might be. The International Monetary Fund was created to help manage the monetary system and promote economic stability and progress. Within the U.N. system, specialized agencies from the World Health Organization to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) play major roles in the world today. All this has fostered international cooperation.
But while the FAO collects and analyzes global agricultural data and provides technical assistance, there is no organized effort to ensure the adequacy of world food supplies. Indeed, most international negotiations on agricultural trade until recently focused on access to markets, with the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina persistently pressing Europe and Japan to open their highly protected agricultural markets. But in the first decade of this century, access to supplies has emerged as the overriding issue as the world transitions from an era of food surpluses to a new politics of food scarcity. At the same time, the U.S. food aid program that once worked to fend off famine wherever it threatened has largely been replaced by the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), where the United States is the leading donor. The WFP now has food-assistance operations in some 70 countries and an annual budget of $4 billion. There is little international coordination otherwise. French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- the reigning president of the G-20 -- is proposing to deal with rising food prices by curbing speculation in commodity markets. Useful though this may be, it treats the symptoms of growing food insecurity, not the causes, such as population growth and climate change. The world now needs to focus not only on agricultural policy, but on a structure that integrates it with energy, population, and water policies, each of which directly affects food security.
But that is not happening. Instead, as land and water become scarcer, as the Earth's temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging. Land grabbing, water grabbing, and buying grain directly from farmers in exporting countries are now integral parts of a global power struggle for food security.
With grain stocks low and climate volatility increasing, the risks are also increasing. We are now so close to the edge that a breakdown in the food system could come at any time. Consider, for example, what would have happened if the 2010 heat wave that was centered in Moscow had instead been centered in Chicago. In round numbers, the 40 percent drop in Russia's hoped-for harvest of roughly 100 million tons cost the world 40 million tons of grain, but a 40 percent drop in the far larger U.S. grain harvest of 400 million tons would have cost 160 million tons. The world's carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) would have dropped to just 52 days of consumption. This level would have been not only the lowest on record, but also well below the 62-day carryover that set the stage for the 2007-2008 tripling of world grain prices.
Then what? There would have been chaos in world grain markets. Grain prices would have climbed off the charts. Some grain-exporting countries, trying to hold down domestic food prices, would have restricted or even banned exports, as they did in 2007 and 2008. The TV news would have been dominated not by the hundreds of fires in the Russian countryside, but by footage of food riots in low-income grain-importing countries and reports of governments falling as hunger spread out of control. Oil-exporting countries that import grain would have been trying to barter oil for grain, and low-income grain importers would have lost out. With governments toppling and confidence in the world grain market shattered, the global economy could have started to unravel.
We may not always be so lucky. At issue now is whether the world can go beyond focusing on the symptoms of the deteriorating food situation and instead attack the underlying causes. If we cannot produce higher crop yields with less water and conserve fertile soils, many agricultural areas will cease to be viable. And this goes far beyond farmers. If we cannot move at wartime speed to stabilize the climate, we may not be able to avoid runaway food prices. If we cannot accelerate the shift to smaller families and stabilize the world population sooner rather than later, the ranks of the hungry will almost certainly continue to expand. The time to act is now -- before the food crisis of 2011 becomes the new normal.

More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World

2011-04-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

But what if the experts are wrong?

BY ABHIJIT BANERJEE, ESTHER DUFLO | MAY/JUNE 2011

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did.
But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What we've found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn't necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.
But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.
Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor -- they are in what economists call a "poverty trap." Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them.
But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs's answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential aid critics in his books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden. Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly's with her recent book, Dead Aid. Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies. The best bet for poor countries, they argue, is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts from foreigners or their own governments. In this sense, the aid pessimists are actually quite optimistic about the way the world works. According to Easterly, there is no such thing as a poverty trap.
This debate cannot be solved in the abstract. To find out whether there are in fact poverty traps, and, if so, where they are and how to help the poor get out of them, we need to better understand the concrete problems they face. Some aid programs help more than others, but which ones? Finding out required us to step out of the office and look more carefully at the world. In 2003, we founded what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. A key part of our mission is to research by using randomized control trials -- similar to experiments used in medicine to test the effectiveness of a drug -- to understand what works and what doesn't in the real-world fight against poverty. In practical terms, that meant we'd have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives.
Take, for example, Pak Solhin, who lives in a small village in West Java, Indonesia. He once explained to us exactly how a poverty trap worked. His parents used to have a bit of land, but they also had 13 children and had to build so many houses for each of them and their families that there was no land left for cultivation. Pak Solhin had been working as a casual agricultural worker, which paid up to 10,000 rupiah per day (about $2) for work in the fields. A recent hike in fertilizer and fuel prices, however, had forced farmers to economize. The local farmers decided not to cut wages, Pak Solhin told us, but to stop hiring workers instead. As a result, in the two months before we met him in 2008, he had not found a single day of agricultural labor. He was too weak for the most physical work, too inexperienced for more skilled labor, and, at 40, too old to be an apprentice. No one would hire him.
Pak Solhin, his wife, and their three children took drastic steps to survive. His wife left for Jakarta, some 80 miles away, where she found a job as a maid. But she did not earn enough to feed the children. The oldest son, a good student, dropped out of school at 12 and started as an apprentice on a construction site. The two younger children were sent to live with their grandparents. Pak Solhin himself survived on the roughly 9 pounds of subsidized rice he got every week from the government and on fish he caught at a nearby lake. His brother fed him once in a while. In the week before we last spoke with him, he had eaten two meals a day for four days, and just one for the other three.
Pak Solhin appeared to be out of options, and he clearly attributed his problem to a lack of food. As he saw it, farmers weren't interested in hiring him because they feared they couldn't pay him enough to avoid starvation; and if he was starving, he would be useless in the field. What he described was the classic nutrition-based poverty trap, as it is known in the academic world. The idea is simple: The human body needs a certain number of calories just to survive. So when someone is very poor, all the food he or she can afford is barely enough to allow for going through the motions of living and earning the meager income used to buy that food. But as people get richer, they can buy more food and that extra food goes into building strength, allowing people to produce much more than they need to eat merely to stay alive. This creates a link between income today and income tomorrow: The very poor earn less than they need to be able to do significant work, but those who have enough to eat can work even more. There's the poverty trap: The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer and eat even better, and get stronger and even richer, and the gap keeps increasing.
But though Pak Solhin's explanation of how someone might get trapped in starvation was perfectly logical, there was something vaguely troubling about his narrative. We met him not in war-infested Sudan or in a flooded area of Bangladesh, but in a village in prosperous Java, where, even after the increase in food prices in 2007 and 2008, there was clearly plenty of food available and a basic meal did not cost much. He was still eating enough to survive; why wouldn't someone be willing to offer him the extra bit of nutrition that would make him productive in return for a full day's work? More generally, although a hunger-based poverty trap is certainly a logical possibility, is it really relevant for most poor people today? What's the best way, if any, for the world to help?
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY has certainly bought into the idea that poverty traps exist -- and that they are the reason that millions are starving. The first U.N. Millennium Development Goal, for instance, is to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger." In many countries, the definition of poverty itself has been connected to food; the thresholds for determining that someone was poor were originally calculated as the budget necessary to buy a certain number of calories, plus some other indispensable purchases, such as housing. A "poor" person has essentially been classified as someone without enough to eat.
So it is no surprise that government efforts to help the poor are largely based on the idea that the poor desperately need food and that quantity is what matters. Food subsidies are ubiquitous in the Middle East: Egypt spent $3.8 billion on food subsidies in the 2008 fiscal year, some 2 percent of its GDP. Indonesia distributes subsidized rice. Many states in India have a similar program. In the state of Orissa, for example, the poor are entitled to 55 pounds of rice a month at about 1 rupee per pound, less than 20 percent of the market price. Currently, the Indian Parliament is debating a Right to Food Act, which would allow people to sue the government if they are starving. Delivering such food aid is a logistical nightmare. In India it is estimated that more than half of the wheat and one-third of the rice gets "lost" along the way. To support direct food aid in this circumstance, one would have to be quite convinced that what the poor need more than anything is more grain.
But what if the poor are not, in general, eating too little food? What if, instead, they are eating the wrong kinds of food, depriving them of nutrients needed to be successful, healthy adults? What if the poor aren't starving, but choosing to spend their money on other priorities? Development experts and policymakers would have to completely reimagine the way they think about hunger. And governments and aid agencies would need to stop pouring money into failed programs and focus instead on finding new ways to truly improve the lives of the world's poorest.
Consider India, one of the great puzzles in this age of food crises. The standard media story about the country, at least when it comes to food, is about the rapid rise of obesity and diabetes as the urban upper-middle class gets richer. Yet the real story of nutrition in India over the last quarter-century, as Princeton professor Angus Deaton and Jean Drèze, a professor at Allahabad University and a special advisor to the Indian government, have shown, is not that Indians are becoming fatter: It is that they are in fact eating less and less. Despite the country's rapid economic growth, per capita calorie consumption in India has declined; moreover, the consumption of all other nutrients except fat also appears to have gone down among all groups, even the poorest. Today, more than three-quarters of the population live in households whose per capita calorie consumption is less than 2,100 calories in urban areas and 2,400 in rural areas -- numbers that are often cited as "minimum requirements" in India for those engaged in manual labor. Richer people still eat more than poorer people. But at all levels of income, the share of the budget devoted to food has declined and people consume fewer calories.
What is going on? The change is not driven by declining incomes; by all accounts, Indians are making more money than ever before. Nor is it because of rising food prices -- between the early 1980s and 2005, food prices declined relative to the prices of other things, both in rural and urban India. Although food prices have increased again since 2005, Indians began eating less precisely when the price of food was going down.
So the poor, even those whom the FAO would classify as hungry on the basis of what they eat, do not seem to want to eat much more even when they can. Indeed, they seem to be eating less. What could explain this? Well, to start, let's assume that the poor know what they are doing. After all, they are the ones who eat and work. If they could be tremendously more productive and earn much more by eating more, then they probably would. So could it be that eating more doesn't actually make us particularly more productive, and as a result, there is no nutrition-based poverty trap?
One reason the poverty trap might not exist is that most people have enough to eat. We live in a world today that is theoretically capable of feeding every person on the planet. In 1996, the FAO estimated that world food production was enough to provide at least 2,700 calories per person per day. Starvation still exists, but only as a result of the way food gets shared among us. There is no absolute scarcity. Using price data from the Philippines, we calculated the cost of the cheapest diet sufficient to give 2,400 calories. It would cost only about 21 cents a day, very affordable even for the very poor (the worldwide poverty line is set at roughly a dollar per day). The catch is, it would involve eating only bananas and eggs, something no one would like to do day in, day out. But so long as people are prepared to eat bananas and eggs when they need to, we should find very few people stuck in poverty because they do not get enough to eat. Indian surveys bear this out: The percentage of people who say they do not have enough food has dropped dramatically over time, from 17 percent in 1983 to 2 percent in 2004. So, perhaps people eat less because they are less hungry.
And perhaps they are really less hungry, despite eating fewer calories. It could be that because of improvements in water and sanitation, they are leaking fewer calories in bouts of diarrhea and other ailments. Or maybe they are less hungry because of the decline of heavy physical work. With the availability of drinking water in villages, women do not need to carry heavy loads for long distances; improvements in transportation have reduced the need to travel on foot; in even the poorest villages, flour is now milled using a motorized mill, instead of women grinding it by hand. Using the average calorie requirements calculated by the Indian Council of Medical Research, Deaton and Drèze note that the decline in calorie consumption over the last quarter-century could be entirely explained by a modest decrease in the number of people engaged in heavy physical work.
Beyond India, one hidden assumption in our description of the poverty trap is that the poor eat as much as they can. If there is any chance that by eating a bit more the poor could start doing meaningful work and get out of the poverty trap zone, then they should eat as much as possible. Yet most people living on less than a dollar a day do not seem to act as if they are starving. If they were, surely they would put every available penny into buying more calories. But they do not. In an 18-country data set we assembled on the lives of the poor, food represents 36 to 79 percent of consumption among the rural extremely poor, and 53 to 74 percent among their urban counterparts.
It is not because they spend all the rest on other necessities. In Udaipur, India, for example, we find that the typical poor household could spend up to 30 percent more on food, if it completely cut expenditures on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals. The poor seem to have many choices, and they don't choose to spend as much as they can on food. Equally remarkable is that even the money that people do spend on food is not spent to maximize the intake of calories or micronutrients. Studies have shown that when very poor people get a chance to spend a little bit more on food, they don't put everything into getting more calories. Instead, they buy better-tasting, more expensive calories.
In one study conducted in two regions of China, researchers offered randomly selected poor households a large subsidy on the price of the basic staple (wheat noodles in one region, rice in the other). We usually expect that when the price of something goes down, people buy more of it. The opposite happened. Households that received subsidies for rice or wheat consumed less of those two foods and ate more shrimp and meat, even though their staples now cost less. Overall, the caloric intake of those who received the subsidy did not increase (and may even have decreased), despite the fact that their purchasing power had increased. Nor did the nutritional content improve in any other sense. The likely reason is that because the rice and wheat noodles were cheap but not particularly tasty, feeling richer might actually have made them consume less of those staples. This reasoning suggests that at least among these very poor urban households, getting more calories was not a priority: Getting better-tasting ones was.
All told, many poor people might eat fewer calories than we -- or the FAO -- think is appropriate. But this does not seem to be because they have no other choice; rather, they are not hungry enough to seize every opportunity to eat more. So perhaps there aren't a billion "hungry" people in the world after all.
NONE OF THIS IS TO SAY that the logic of the hunger-based poverty trap is flawed. The idea that better nutrition would propel someone on the path to prosperity was almost surely very important at some point in history, and it may still be today. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel calculated that in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, food production did not provide enough calories to sustain a full working population. This could explain why there were large numbers of beggars -- they were literally incapable of any work. The pressure of just getting enough food to survive seems to have driven some people to take rather extreme steps. There was an epidemic of witch killing in Europe during the Little Ice Age (from the mid-1500s to 1800), when crop failures were common and fish was less abundant. Even today, Tanzania experiences a rash of such killings whenever there is a drought -- a convenient way to get rid of an unproductive mouth to feed at times when resources are very tight. Families, it seems, suddenly discover that an older woman living with them (usually a grandmother) is a witch, after which she gets chased away or killed by others in the village.
But the world we live in today is for the most part too rich for the occasional lack of food to be a big part of the story of the persistence of poverty on a large scale. This is of course different during natural or man-made disasters, or in famines that kill and weaken millions. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has shown, most recent famines have been caused not because food wasn't available but because of bad governance -- institutional failures that led to poor distribution of the available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere. As Sen put it, "No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press."
Should we let it rest there, then? Can we assume that the poor, though they may be eating little, do eat as much as they need to?
That also does not seem plausible. While Indians may prefer to buy things other than food as they get richer, they and their children are certainly not well nourished by any objective standard. Anemia is rampant; body-mass indices are some of the lowest in the world; almost half of children under 5 are much too short for their age, and one-fifth are so skinny that they are considered to be "wasted."
And this is not without consequences. There is a lot of evidence that children suffering from malnutrition generally grow into less successful adults. In Kenya, children who were given deworming pills in school for two years went to school longer and earned, as young adults, 20 percent more than children in comparable schools who received deworming for just one year. Worms contribute to anemia and general malnutrition, essentially because they compete with the child for nutrients. And the negative impact of undernutrition starts before birth. In Tanzania, to cite just one example, children born to mothers who received sufficient amounts of iodine during pregnancy completed between one-third and one-half of a year more schooling than their siblings who were in utero when their mothers weren't being treated. It is a substantial increase, given that most of these children will complete only four or five years of schooling in total. In fact, the study concludes that if every mother took iodine capsules, there would be a 7.5 percent increase in the total educational attainment of children in Central and Southern Africa. This, in turn, could measurably affect lifetime productivity.
Better nutrition matters for adults, too. In another study, in Indonesia, researchers tested the effects of boosting people's intake of iron, a key nutrient that prevents anemia. They found that iron supplements made men able to work harder and significantly boosted income. A year's supply of iron-fortified fish sauce cost the equivalent of $6, and for a self-employed male, the yearly gain in earnings was nearly $40 -- an excellent investment.
If the gains are so obvious, why don't the poor eat better? Eating well doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive. Most mothers could surely afford iodized salt, which is now standard in many parts of the world, or one dose of iodine every two years (at 51 cents per dose). Poor households could easily get a lot more calories and other nutrients by spending less on expensive grains (like rice and wheat), sugar, and processed foods, and more on leafy vegetables and coarse grains. But in Kenya, when the NGO that was running the deworming program asked parents in some schools to pay a few cents for deworming their children, almost all refused, thus depriving their children of hundreds of dollars of extra earnings over their lifetime.
Why? And why did anemic Indonesian workers not buy iron-fortified fish sauce on their own? One answer is that they don't believe it will matter -- their employers may not realize that they are more productive now. (In fact, in Indonesia, earnings improved only for the self-employed workers.) But this does not explain why all pregnant women in India aren't using only iodine-fortified salt, which is now available in every village. Another possibility is that people may not realize the value of feeding themselves and their children better -- not everyone has the right information, even in the United States. Moreover, people tend to be suspicious of outsiders who tell them that they should change their diet. When rice prices went up sharply in 1966 and 1967, the chief minister of West Bengal suggested that eating less rice and more vegetables would be both good for people's health and easier on their budgets. This set off a flurry of outrage, and the chief minister was greeted by protesters bearing garlands of vegetables wherever he went.
It is simply not very easy to learn about the value of many of these nutrients based on personal experience. Iodine might make your children smarter, but the difference is not huge, and in most cases you will not find out either way for many years. Iron, even if it makes people stronger, does not suddenly turn you into a superhero. The $40 extra a year the self-employed man earned may not even have been apparent to him, given the many ups and downs of his weekly income.
So it shouldn't surprise us that the poor choose their foods not mainly for their cheap prices and nutritional value, but for how good they taste. George Orwell, in his masterful description of the life of poor British workers in The Road to Wigan Pier, observes:

The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. We shouldn't forget, too, that other things may be more important in their lives than food. Poor people in the developing world spend large amounts on weddings, dowries, and christenings. Part of the reason is probably that they don't want to lose face, when the social custom is to spend a lot on those occasions. In South Africa, poor families often spend so lavishly on funerals that they skimp on food for months afterward.
And don't underestimate the power of factors like boredom. Life can be quite dull in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall. And not a lot of work, either. In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agriculture and about 30 days in construction that year. Otherwise, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. All three men lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find enough money to give their children a good education. But they each had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone.
This is something that Orwell captured as well, when he described how poor families survived the Depression:

Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by reducing their standards.
But they don't necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way around -- the more natural way, if you come to think of it. Hence the fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased.

These "indulgences" are not the impulsive purchases of people who are not thinking hard about what they are doing. Oucha Mbarbk did not buy his TV on credit -- he saved up over many months to scrape enough money together, just as the mother in India starts saving for her young daughter's wedding by buying a small piece of jewelry here and a stainless-steel bucket there.
We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don't invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it.
We asked Oucha Mbarbk what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better-tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"

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Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo direct the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and are authors of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, from which this excerpt is adapted.

Post Uprising Depression

2011-04-26T03:50:00.000-07:00

Two good books about an important but confusing country which has been driven, partly by American intervention, into strange ways
from The Economist

Pakistan: A Hard Country. By Anatol Lieven. PublicAffairs; 558 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad. By Bruce Riedel. Brookings Institution Press; 180 pages; $24.95 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IT IS a shame that these books should be published at a time when the world is riveted by events in the Middle East. Pakistan’s population is more than half the size of the entire Arab world; for most of the past three decades it has been involved in a war with a superpower, first against it, and now on the same side as it; it suffers from an Islamic insurgency that has killed 30,000 people over the past four years; it is regarded by students of geopolitics as the most likely location of nuclear conflict; and the reasons why it does not work as a country are many and fascinating.
The trouble with Pakistan’s story is that the country is one rather depressing stage on from the Middle East. Its people have risen up bravely against autocrats (three times over, if you count only the generals, or four if, like some Pakistanis, you count Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as well) and had several unsuccessful attempts at democracy. So it ricochets between military and civilian governments, with a state that does not work very well but has not collapsed, and an insurgency that is not turning into a civil war but won’t go away. Unlike the Middle East, it is not full of hope.
Yet for drama, colour and complexity, the place is hard to beat; and Anatol Lieven captures the richness of the place wonderfully. His book has the virtues of both journalism and scholarship—not surprising, since Mr Lieven used to be a reporter for the Times and is now at King’s College, London. He has travelled extensively and talked widely, to generals, shopkeepers, farmers, lawyers and bureaucrats.
He quotes the people he meets with both sympathy and scepticism, pointing to “Pakistani society’s ability to generate within an astonishingly short space of time several mutually incompatible versions of a given event or fact, often linked to conspiracy theories which pass through the baroque to the rococo”—a characteristic which anybody who has worked there will recognise. He has a great affection for the country, which he describes as “a place that cries out for the combined talents of a novelist, an anthropologist and a painter.” Aside from occasional bits of horrible writing, he does it justice.
The notion that Pakistan is approaching the condition of a failed state is popular these days. Mr Lieven rejects it. The state may be weak, but in his view society is strong, which both holds the place together and frustrates attempts to modernise it. For instance, Mr Lieven finds the official bit of the legal system—the police, lawyers and judges—horribly wanting. “When I visited the city courts in Quetta, Baluchistan, a majority of the people with whom I spoke outside had cases which had been pending for more than five years, and had spent more than 200,000 rupees [$4,500] on legal fees and bribes—a colossal sum for a poor man in Pakistan.”
Many therefore turn to tribal courts, or to the Pakistani Taliban in areas where they are strong. Few outsiders would recognise some of the tribal courts’ decisions as justice—girls are traditionally given as compensation for particularly serious crimes—yet service is speedy and generally reckoned to be superior to that provided by the state. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons why the Taliban’s rise was, at least initially, widely welcomed.
Democracy, similarly, sits uncomfortably with traditional society. Politics is dominated by big landowners and tribal chiefs, who regard their job not as developing the country’s economy and civil institutions for the good of all Pakistanis, but as distributing patronage to their clan or tribe; and that’s how government is run. Values diverge radically from those normally associated with representative democracy. In 2008, three teenage Baluch girls were shot and buried alive for refusing to marry the husbands chosen for them by their tribes. A tribal chief, a senator belonging to the Pakistan People’s Party of President Asif Ali Zardari, commented: “these are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them. Only those who commit immoral acts should be afraid.” The man was subsequently made a federal minister.
Mr Lieven thinks growing resentment at the hierarchical nature of Pakistani society has helped the Taliban. Educated Pakistanis would ask of some Islamist on the rise: “Who on earth can respect a former bus conductor as a leader?” The answer, says Mr Lieven in rather cross italics, is “another bus conductor…It is precisely the lowly origins of the Taliban…which endear them to the masses.”
Still, Mr Lieven reckons that because of the strength of traditional social bonds, which tie individual to family, and family to tribe or clan, “Pakistani society is probably strong enough to prevent any attempt to change it radically through Islamist revolution, which is all to the good.” Bruce Riedel is less sanguine. He regards “a jihadist victory” in Pakistan as “neither imminent nor inevitable…[but] a real possibility that needs to be assessed”. It might come about, he reckons, as a result of a military coup by an officer sharing the world- view of General Zia ul Haq, or as a result of an insurgent victory; neither of which Mr Lieven’s analysis suggests is likely.
Though Mr Lieven knows Pakistan from the inside, Mr Riedel, who has advised no fewer than four American presidents, knows power from the inside—something he is keen to share with the reader. Every chapter starts with some version of “We were aboard Air Force One en route to California when I began briefing President Barack Obama…”
For readers who can successfully suppress their irritation, his book provides a useful account of the dysfunctional relationship between Pakistan and America. The governments are supposedly close allies, yet betray each other with monotonous regularity. After the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, America abandoned Pakistan for India. Pakistan both helps America in its war against the Afghan Taliban and—playing both sides—allows Taliban fighters to conduct attacks in Afghanistan from Pakistani territory. Pakistan’s people regard America with deep suspicion, and Pakistan’s Taliban is taking up the baton of global (and particularly anti-American) terror from a weakened al-Qaeda.
Although the books disagree somewhat about Pakistan’s prospects, they are not far apart on at least one important aspect of its past. America’s interventions, argues Mr Riedel, have made it “harder for Pakistanis to develop a healthy democracy that can effectively fight terror”, by encouraging military interference in civilian affairs. “It has above all been the US-led campaign in Afghanistan,” says Mr Lieven, “which has been responsible for increasing Islamist insurgency and terrorism in Pakistan since 2001.” These two books, in different ways, sharply illustrate an uncomfortable truth about American foreign policy: that the war in Afghanistan has helped foster in Pakistan exactly the sorts of tendencies that America went into Afghanistan to wipe out.

Source:http://www.economist.com/node/18526715/print

Files reveal what al-Qaida did after 9/11

2011-04-26T03:45:00.000-07:00

WikiLeaks releases secret documents on Gitmo detainees

By PETER FINN WASHINGTON POST

April 24, 2011, 10:41PM

On Sept. 11, 2001, the core of al-Qaida was concentrated in a single city: Karachi, Pakistan.

At a hospital, the accused mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole was recovering from a tonsillectomy. Nearby, the alleged organizer of the 2002 bombing in Bali, Indonesia, was buying lab equipment for a biological weapons program. And in a safe house, the man who would later describe himself as the intellectual author of the Sept. 11 attacks was with other key al-Qaida members watching the scenes from New York and Washington unfold on television.

Within a day, much of the al-Qaida leadership was on the way back to Afghanistan, planning for a long war.

A cache of classified military documents obtained by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks presents new details of their whereabouts on Sept. 11, 2001, and their movements afterward. The documents also offer some tantalizing glimpses into the whereabouts and operations of Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The documents, provided to European and U.S. news outlets, including The Washington Post, are intelligence assessments of nearly every one of the 779 individuals who have been held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002. In them, analysts have created detailed portraits of detainees based on raw intelligence, including material gleaned from interrogations.

Detainees are assessed "high," "medium" or "low" in terms of their intelligence value, the threat they pose while in detention and the continued threat they might pose to the United States if released.

The documents tend to take a bleak view of the detainees, even those who have been ordered released by the federal courts because of a lack of evidence to justify their continued detention. And the assessments are often based, in part, on reporting by informants at the military detention center, sources that some judges have found wanting.

In a statement, the Pentagon, which described the decision to publish some of the material as "unfortunate," stressed the snapshot and incomplete nature of the assessments, known as Detainee Assessment Briefs, or DABs.

"The Guantanamo Review Task Force, established in January 2009, considered the DABs during its review of detainee information. In some cases, the Task Force came to the same conclusions as the DABs. In other instances the Review Task Force came to different conclusions, based on updated or other available information," said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell and Ambassador Daniel Fried, the Obama administration's special envoy on detainee issues. "Any given DAB illegally obtained and released by Wikileaks may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee."

Histories of detainees

Regardless of how detainees are currently assessed, many of the documents shed light on their histories, particularly those of the high-value detainees. When pieced together, they capture some of the drama of al-Qaida's scattering in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. They also point to tensions between certain members of the terrorist group.

Among other previously unknown meetings, the documents describe a major gathering of some of al-Qaida's most senior operatives in early December 2001 in Zormat, a mountainous region of Afghanistan between Kabul and Khost. There, the operatives began to plan new attacks, a process that would consume them, according to the assessments, until they were finally captured.

Four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden visited a guesthouse in Afghanistan's Kandahar province. He told the Arab fighters gathered there "to defend Afghanistan against the infidel invaders."

It was beginning of a peripatetic three months for bin Laden and Zawahiri. Traveling by car among several locations in Afghanistan, bin Laden handed out assignments to his followers, met with some of the Taliban leadership and delegated control of al-Qaida to the group's Shura Council, presumably because he feared being captured or killed as U.S. forces closed in.

At some point, bin Laden and Zawahiri used a secret guesthouse in or relatively near Kabul. The al-Qaida leader welcomed a stream of visitors and issued a series of orders, including instructions to continue operations against Western targets. He dispersed his fighters from training camps and instructed women and children, including some of his wives, to flee to Pakistan.

Meetings in Afghanistan

In October, bin Laden met in Kabul with two Malaysians, Yazid Zubair and Bashir Lap — both of whom are now at Guantanamo Bay - and lectured them on history and religion. On the day that the U.S.-led coalition began bombing Afghanistan, bin Laden met in Kandahar with Taliban official Mullah Mansour.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri also met that month with Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who continues to lead a deadly insurgency against the United States and its allies in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden, accompanied by Zawahiri and a handful of close associates in his security detail, escaped to his cave complex in Tora Bora in November. Around Nov. 25, he was seen giving a speech to the leaders and fighters at the complex.

According to the documents, bin Laden and his deputy escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001. At the time, the al-Qaida leader was apparently so strapped for cash that he borrowed $7,000 from one of his protectors - a sum he paid back within a year.

In December, al-Qaida's top lieutenants gathered in Zormat. They included Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged planner of the USS Cole attack; and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a key facilitator for bin Laden.

The place was teeming with fighters who were awaiting for al-Qaida to return their passports so they could flee to Pakistan.

U.S., Israeli targets

Nashiri reported that while at Zormat he was approached by two Saudi nationals who wanted to strike U.S. and Israeli targets in Morocco. Nashiri said he had been considering an operation in the Strait of Gibraltar and thought that the British military base there, which he had seen in a documentary, would be a good target.

Nashiri's willingness to approve a plot on his own was later the source of some tension within the organization, particularly with Mohammed.

In May or June 2002, Mohammed learned of the disrupted plan to attack the military base in Gibraltar and was upset that he had not been informed of it.

Nashiri separately complained that he was being pushed by bin Laden to continue planning aggressive operations against U.S. interests in the Arabian gulf region without much regard for his security.

Indeed, Nashiri was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in late 2002.

After the Zormat conclave, Mohammed and other senior al-Qaida figures began to return to Karachi.

The documents state that Mohammed "put together a training program for assassinations and kidnappings as well as pistol and computer training." It was not intended for specific operations but to occupy the bored fighters stuck in safe houses.

At the time, money was flowing into the country for Mohammed, according to the documents, allowing him to acquire safe houses and fund operations.

In November 2002, his nephew Baluchi took a delivery of nearly $70,000 from a courier.

Gradually, Mohammed and the other operatives were picked off by Pakistanis working with the CIA and the FBI. When Ramzi Binalshibh, a key liaison between the Sept. 11 hijackers and al-Qaida, was arrested at a safe house in Karachi on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, there was a four-hour standoff while the Yemeni and two others held knives to their own throats and threatened to kill themselves rather than be taken.

There are few geographic references in the documents for bin Laden after his flight into Pakistan.

He apparently sent out letters from his hiding place through a trusted courier, who then handed them to Libbi, who had provided the secret guesthouse in Kabul immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After the capture of Mohammed in March 2003, Zawahiri fled from the house where he had been staying.

The documents state that Zawahiri left on his own and sought out an Afghan, who delivered him to Libbi.

In May 2005, while waiting for bin Laden's courier at a drop point, Libbi was arrested by Pakistani forces.

Zawahiri, in response, moved again. His residence, documents state, "was changed to a good place owned by a simple old man."

He remains at large.

Terror’s Training Ground

2011-04-26T03:42:00.000-07:00

By Ayesha Siddiqa

A few years ago, I met some young boys from my village near Bahawalpur who were preparing to go on jihad. They smirked politely when I asked them to close their eyes and imagine their future. “We can tell you without closing our eyes that we don’t see anything.”
It was not entirely surprising. South Punjab is a region mired in poverty and underdevelopment. There are few job prospects for the youth. While the government has built airports and a few hospitals, these projects are symbolic and barely meet the needs of the area. It’s in areas like this, amid economic stagnation and hopelessness, that religious extremists find fertile ground to plant and spread their ideology.
The first step is recruitment – and the methodology is straightforward. Young children, or even men, are taken to madrassas in nearby towns. They are fed well and kept in living conditions considerably better than what they are used to. This is a simple psychological strategy meant to help them compare their homes with the alternatives offered by militant organisations. The returning children, like the boys I met, then undergo ideological indoctrination in a madrassa. Those who are indoctrinated always bring more friends and family with them. It is a swelling cycle.
Madrassas nurturing armies of young Islamic militants ready to embrace martyrdom have been on the rise for years in the Punjab. In fact, South Punjab has become the hub of jihadism. Yet, somehow, there are still many people in Pakistan who refuse to acknowledge this threat.

Four major militant outfits, the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), are all comfortably ensconced in South Punjab (see article “Brothers in Arms”). Sources claim that there are about 5,000 to 9,000 youth from South Punjab fighting in Afghanistan and Waziristan. A renowned Pakistani researcher, Hassan Abbas cites a figure of 2,000 youth engaged in Waziristan. The area has become critical to planning, recruitment and logistical support for terrorist attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, in his study on the Punjabi Taliban, Abbas has quoted Tariq Pervez, the chief of a new government outfit named the National Counter-Terrorism Authority (NCTA), as saying that the jihad veterans in South Punjab are instrumental in providing the foot soldiers and implementing terror plans conceived and funded mainly by Al-Qaeda operatives. This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering that the force that conquered Khost in 1988-89 comprised numerous South Punjabi commanders who fought for the armies of various Afghan warlords such as Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani. Even now, all the four major organisations are involved in Afghanistan.
The above facts are not unknown to the provincial and federal governments or the army. It was not too long ago that the federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik equated South Punjab with Swat. The statement was negated by the IG Punjab. Perhaps, the senior police officer was not refuting his superior but challenging the story by Sabrina Tavernese of The New York Times (NYT). The story had highlighted jihadism in South Punjab, especially in Dera Ghazi Khan. The NYT story even drew a reaction from media outlets across the country. No one understood that South Punjab is being rightly equated with Swat, not because of violence but due to the presence of elements that aim at taking the society and state in another direction.
An English-language daily newspaper reacted to the NYT story by dispatching a journalist to South Punjab who wrote a series of articles that attempted to analyse the existing problem. One of the stories highlighted comments by the Bahawalpur Regional Police Officer (RPO) Mushtaq Sukhera, in which he denied that there was a threat of Talibanisation in South Punjab. He said that all such reports pertaining to South Punjab were nothing more than a figment of the western press’s imagination. Many others express a similar opinion. There are five explanations for this.
Firstly, opinion makers and policy makers are in a state of denial regarding the gravity of the problem. Additionally, they believe an overemphasis on this region might draw excessive US attention to South Punjab – an area epitomising mainstream Pakistan. Thus, it is difficult even to find anecdotal evidence regarding the activities of jihadis in this sub-region. We only gain some knowledge about the happenings from coincidental accidents like the blast that took place in a madrassa in Mian Chunoon, exposing the stockpile of arms its owner had stored on the premises.

Nothing is off limits: Militants attack the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore in March 2009.

Secondly, officer Sukhera and others like him do not see any threat because the Punjab-based outfits are “home-grown” and are not seen as directly connected to the war in Afghanistan. This is contestable on two counts: South Punjabi jihadists have been connected with the Afghan jihad since the 1980s and the majority is still engaged in fighting in Afghanistan.
Thirdly, since all these outfits were created by the ISI to support General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation process, in essence to fight a proxy war for Saudi Arabia against Iran by targeting the Shia community, and later the Kashmir war, the officials feel comfortable that they will never spin out of control. Those that become uncontrollable, such as Al-Furqan, are then abandoned. This outfit was involved in the second assassination attempt on Musharraf and had initially broken away from the JeM after the leadership developed differences over assets, power and ideology. Thus, the district officials and intelligence agencies turned a blind eye to the killing of the district amir of Al-Furqan in Bahawalpur in May 2009. As far as the JeM is concerned, it continues its engagement with the establishment. In any case, groups that are partly committed to the Kashmir cause and confrontation with India continue to survive. This is certainly the perception about the LeT. But in reality, the Wahhabi outfit has also been engaged in other regions, such as the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Badakhshan since 2004.
Fourthly, there is confusion at the operational level in the government regarding the definition of Talibanisation, which is then reflected in the larger debate on the issue. Many, including the RPO, define the process as an effort by an armed group to use force to change the social conditioning in an area. Ostensibly, the militant outfits in the Punjab continue to coexist with the pirs, prostitutes and the drug mafia, and there is no reason that they will follow in the footsteps of Sufi Mohammad and Maulana Fazlullah, or Baitullah Mehsud. Since the authorities only recognise the pattern followed by the Afghan warlords or those in Pakistan’s tribal areas, they tend not to understand that what is happening in the Punjab may not be Talibanisation but could eventually prove to be as lethal as what they call Talibanisation.

Finally, many believe that Talibanisation cannot take place in a region known for practicing the Sufi version of Islam. There are many, besides the Bahawalpur RPO, who subscribe to the above theory. A year ago in an interview with an American channel, Farahnaz Ispahani, an MNA and wife of Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, stated that extremism couldn’t flourish in South Punjab because it was a land of Sufi shrines. This is partially true. The Sufi influence would work as a bulwark against this Talibanisation of society. However, Sufi Islam cannot fight poverty, underdevelopment and poor governance – all key factors that encourage Talibanisation.
South Punjab boasts names such as the Mazaris, Legharis and Gilanis, most of whom are not just politicians and big landowners but also belong to significant pir families. But they have done little to alleviate the sufferings of their constituents. A visit to Dera Ghazi Khan is depressing. Despite the fact that the division produced a president, Farooq Khan Leghari, the state of underdevelopment there is shocking. Reportedly, people living in the area in the immediate vicinity of the Leghari tribe could not sell their land without permission from the head of the tribe, the former president, who has been the tribal chief for many years. Under the circumstances, the poor and the dispossessed became attractive targets for militant outfits offering money. The country’s current economic downturn could raise the popularity of militant outfits.

In recent history, the gap created due to the non-performance of Sufi shrines and Barelvi Islam, or the exploitative nature of these institutions, has been filled partly by the Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith madrassa conversion teams and groups, such as the Tableeghi Jamaat, and militant outfits. This alternative, unfortunately, is equally exploitative in nature. Sadly, today the shrines and Barelvi Islam have little to offer in terms of “marketing” to counter the package deal offered by the Salafists for the life hereafter, especially to a shaheed: 70 hoors (virgins), a queen hoor (virgin queen), a crown of jewels and forgiveness for 70 additional people. This promise means a lot for the poor youth who cannot hope for any change in a pre-capitalist socio-economic and political environment, where power is hard to re-negotiate. Furthermore, as stated by the former information minister Mohammad Ali Durrani, who had been a jihadi from 1984-90, a poor youth suddenly turning into a jihadi commander is a tremendous story of social mobility and recognition that he would never get in his existing socio-economic system. More importantly, the Deobandis and Ahl-e-Hadith offer a textual basis for their package, which is difficult for the pirs to refute due to the lack of an internal religious discourse in the Islamic world. The modern generation of pirs has not engaged in an internal discourse to counter this ideological onslaught by the Salafis. The main belief of Salafism is that all Muslims should practice Islam as it was during the time of Prophet Muhammad. The religion at that time, according to them, was perfect. Salafism – which pre-dates Wahhabism – is often used interchangeably with Wahhabism, which is actually an extension of Salafism.
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Punjab offers a different pattern of extremism and jihadism. The pattern is closer to what one saw in Swat, where Sufi Mohammad and his TNSM spent quite a few years indoctrinating the society and building up a social movement before they got embroiled in a conflict with the state. South Punjab’s story is, in a sense, like Swat’s in that there is a gradual strengthening of Salafism and a build-up of militancy in the area. The procedure of conversion though, dates back to pre-1947. Still, the 1980s were clearly a watershed, when both rabid ideology and jihad were introduced to the area. Zia-ul-Haq encouraged the opening up of religious seminaries that, unlike the more traditional madrassas that were usually attached with Sufi shrines, subscribed to Salafi ideology. In later years, South Punjab became critical to inducting people for the Kashmir jihad. The ascendancy of the Tableeghi Jamaat and such madrassas that presented a more rabid version of religion gradually prepared the ground for later invasion by the militant groups. Two reports prepared around 1994, firstly by the district collector Bahawalpur and later by the Punjab government, highlighted the exponential rise in the number of madrassas and how these fanned sectarian and ideological hatred in the province. These reports also stated that all of these seminaries were provided funding by the government through the zakat fund.

The number of seminaries had increased during and after the 1980s. According to a 1996 report, there were 883 madrassas in Bahawalpur, 361 in Dera Ghazi Khan, 325 in Multan and 149 in Sargodha district. The madrassas in Bahawalpur outnumbered all other cities, including Lahore. These numbers relate to Deobandi madrassas only and do not include the Ahl-e-Hadith, Barelvi and other sects. Newer estimates from the intelligence bureau for 2008 show approximately 1,383 madrassas in the Bahawalpur division that house 84,000 students. Although the highest number of madrassas is in Rahim Yar Khan district (559) followed by Bahawalpur (481) and Bahawalnagar (310), it is Bahawalpur in which the highest number of students (36,000) is enlisted. The total number of madrassa students in Pakistan has reached about one million.

Visions of paradise: JeM supporters walk by a banner of jihadi art. Photo: Tariq Mahmood, AFP.

Everyone has been so focused on FATA and the NWFP that they failed to notice the huge increase in religious seminaries in these districts of South Punjab. According to a study conducted by historian Tahir Kamran, the total number of madrassas in the Punjab rose from 1,320 in 1988 to 3,153 in 2000, an increase of almost 140%. These madrassas were meant to provide a rapid supply of jihadis to the Afghan war of the 1980s. At the time of 9/11, the Bahawalpur division alone could boast of approximately 15,000-20,000 trained militants, some of whom had resettled in their areas during the period that Musharraf claimed to have clamped down on the jihad industry. Many went into the education sector, opened private schools and even joined the media.
These madrassas play three essential roles. First, they convert people to Salafism and neutralise resistance to a more rabid interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah in society. Consequently, the majority of the Barelvis cannot present a logical resistance to the opposing ideology. In many instances, the Barelvis themselves get converted to the idea of jihad. Secondly, these madrassas are used to train youth, who are then inducted into jihad. Most of the foot soldiers come from the religious seminaries. One of the principles taught to the students pertains to the concept of jihad as being a sacred duty that has to continue until the end of a Muslim’s life or the end of the world. Lastly, madrassas are an essential transit point for the youth, who are recruited from government schools. They are usually put through the conversion process after they have attended a 21-day initial training programme in the Frontier province or Kashmir (see box “A Different Breed”).
State support, which follows two distinct tracks, is also instrumental in the growth of jihadism in this region. On the one hand, there has generally been a link or understanding between political parties and militant groups. Since political parties are unable to eliminate militants or most politicians are sympathetic towards the militants, they tend to curb their activities through political deal-making. The understanding between the SSP and Benazir Bhutto after the 1993 elections, or the alleged deal between the PML-N and the SSP during the 2008 elections, denote the relationship between major political parties and the jihadis. Currently, the SSP in South Punjab is more supportive of the PML-N.
The second track involves operational links between the outfits and the state’s intelligence apparatus. As mentioned earlier, some of the outfits claim to have received training from the country’s intelligence agencies. Even now, local people talk of truckloads of weapons arriving at the doorstep of the JeM headquarters and other sites in the middle of the night. While official sources continue to claim that the outfit was banned and does not exist, or that Masood Azhar is on the run from his hometown of Bahawalpur, the facts prove otherwise. For instance, the outfit continues to acquire real estate in the area, such as a new site near Chowk Azam in Bahawalpur, which many believe is being used as a training site. Although the new police chief has put restraints on the JeM and disallowed it from constructing on the site, the outfit continues to appropriate more land around the area. Junior police officials even claim seeing tunnels being dug inside the premises. The new facility is on the bank of the Lahore-Karachi national highway, which means that in the event of a crisis, the JeM could block the road as has happened in Kohat and elsewhere. Furthermore, the outfit’s main headquarters in the city is guarded by AK-47-armed men who harass any journalist trying to take a photograph of the building. In one instance, even a police official was shooed away and later intimidated by spooks of an intelligence agency for spying on the outfit. Despite the claim that the SSP, the LeJ and the JeM have broken ties with intelligence agencies and are now fighting the army in Waziristan, the fact remains that their presence in the towns of South Punjab continues unhindered.
Is it naivety and inefficiency on the part of officialdom or a deliberate effort to withhold information? The government claims that Maulana Masood Azhar has not visited his hometown in the last three years. But he held a massive book launch of his new publication Fatah-ul-Jawad: Quranic Verses on Jihad, on April 28, 2008, in Bahawalpur. Moreover, JeM’s armed men manned all entrances and exits to the city that day – and there was no police force in sight. The ISI is said to have severed its links with the JeM for assisting the Pashtoon Taliban in inciting violence in the country. Sources from FATA claim, however, that the JeM, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) and LeT are suspected by the Taliban for their links with state agencies.
In addition, intelligence agencies reportedly ward off anyone attempting to probe into the affairs of these outfits. In one case, a local in Bahawalpur city invoked daily visits from a certain agency after he assisted a foreign journalist. Similarly, only six months back, a BBC team was chased out of the area by agency officials. In fact, intelligence officials, who had forgotten about my existence since my last book was published, revisited my village in South Punjab soon after I began writing on militancy in the area and have gone to the extent of planting a story in one of the Urdu newspapers to malign me in my own area. In any case, no serious operation was conducted against these outfits after the Mumbai attacks and the recent spate of violence in the country. Hence, all of them continue to survive.
The Deobandi outfits are not the only ones popular in South Punjab. Ahl-e-Hadith/Wahhabi organisations such as the Tehreek-ul-Mujahidden (TuM) and the LeT also have a following in the region. While TuM, which is relatively a smaller organisation, has support in Dera Ghazi Khan, the LeT is popular in Bahawalpur, Multan and the areas bordering Central Punjab. Headquartered in Muridke, the LeT is popular among the Punjabi and Urdu-speaking Mohajir settlers.

There are obvious sociological reasons for LeT’s relative popularity among these people. The majority of this population represents either the lower-middle-class farmers or middle-class trader-merchants. The middle class is instrumental in providing funding to these outfits. And the support is not confined to South Punjab alone. In fact, middle-class trader-merchants from other parts of the Punjab also feed jihad through their funding. This does not mean that there are no Seraiki speakers in Wahhabi organisations but just that the dominant influence is that of the Punjabis and Mohajirs. The Seraiki-speaking population is mostly associated with the SSP, LeJ and JeM, not to mention the freelancing jihadis that have direct links with the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP).
The LeT’s presence in South Punjab is far more obvious than others courtesy of the wall chalkings and social work by its sister outfit, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Despite the rumours of friction between the LeT and the JuD leadership, the two segments operate in unison in South Punjab. Three of the favourite areas of recruitment in South Punjab for all outfits are Cholistan in Bahawalpur, the Rekh in Dera Ghazi Khan, and the Kacha area in Rajanpur. The first two are desert areas known for their poverty and underdevelopment, while the third is known for dacoits. However, another known feature of Kacha in Rajanpur is that the clerics of the Lal Masjid come from this area and have partly managed to push back the dacoits. Local sources claim that the influence of the clerics has increased since they started receiving cooperation from the police to jointly fight the dacoits.
Organisations such as the LeT have even begun to recruit women in the Punjab. These women undergo 21 days of ideological and military training. The goal is to ensure that these women will be able to fight if their menfolk are out on jihad and an enemy attacks Pakistan.
The militant outfits are rich, both ideologically and materially. They have ample financial resources that flow from four distinct sources: official sources (in some cases); Middle Eastern and Gulf states (not necessarily official channels); donations; and the Punjabi middle class, which is predominantly engaged in funding both madrassas and jihad for social, moral and political ends. With regard to donations, the militant outfits are extremely responsive to the changing environment and have adapted their money-collection tactics. Gone are the days of money-collection boxes. Now, especially in villages, followers are asked to raise money by selling harvested crops. And in terms of the Punjabi middle class, there are traders in Islamabad and other smaller urban centres that contribute regularly to the cause. These trader-merchants and upcoming entrepreneurs see donations to these outfits as a source of atonement for their sins. In Tahir Kamran’s study “Deobandiism in the Punjab,” Deobandiism (and Wahhabiism) is an urban phenomenon. If so, then the existence of these militant outfits in rural Punjab indicates a new social trend. Perhaps, due to greater access to technology (mobiles, television sets, satellite receivers, etc), the landscape (and rustic lifestyles) of Punjab’s rural areas has changed. There is an unplanned urbanisation of the rural areas due to the emergence of small towns with no social development, health and education infrastructure. Socially and politically, there is a gap that is filled by these militant outfits or related ideological institutions.
Fortunately, they have not succeeded in changing the lifestyles of the ordinary people. This is perhaps because there are multiple cultural strands that do not allow the jihadis to impose their norms the way they have in the tribal areas or the Frontier province. This is not to say that there is no threat from them in South Punjab: the liberalism and multi-polarity of society is certainly at risk. The threat is posed by the religious seminaries and the new recruits for jihad, who change social norms slowly and gradually. Sadly nothing, including the powerful political system of the area, which in any case is extremely warped, helps ward off the threat of extremism and jihadism. Ultimately, South Punjab could fall prey to the myopia of its ruling elite.
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So how does the state and society deal with this issue?
Deploying the military is not an option. In the Punjab this will create a division within the powerful army because of regional loyalty. The foremost task is to examine the nature of the state’s relationship with the militants as strategic partners: should this relationship continue to exist to the detriment of the state? Once this mystifying question is resolved, all militant forces can be dealt with through an integrated police-intelligence operation.
This, however, amounts to winning only half the battle. The other half deals with the basic problems faced by the likes of those young jihadis-in-training from Bahawalpur who said, “We don’t see anything” in our futures. Presently, there is hardly any industrialisation in South Punjab and the mainstay of the area, agriculture, is faltering. The region requires economic strengthening: new ideas in agriculture, capital investment and new, relevant industries. This is the time that the government must plan beyond the usual textile and sugar industries that have arguably turned into huge mafias that are draining the local economy rather than feeding it.
Investment in social development is desperately needed. A larger social infrastructure that provides jobs and an educational system that is responsive to the needs of the population can contribute to filling the gaps. The message of militancy is quite potent, especially in terms of the dreams it sells to the youth, such as those disillusioned boys from my village. Jihad elevates youngsters from a state of being dispossessed to an imagined exalted status. They visualise themselves taking their places among great historical figures such as Mohammad bin Qasim and Khalid bin Waleed. It is these dreams for which the state must provide an alternative.

Source: http://www.newslinemagazine.com/2009/09/terror%E2%80%99s-training-ground/