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The right-wing backlash to Abu Ghraib wasn’t long in coming. Talk radio in America, which has millions upon millions of listeners, with few exceptions is either conservative or ultra-conservative. Some idea of what kind of mental world in which these talk-show hosts and their listeners live can be had from their belief that the dirtiest word in the English language is ‘liberal’. They appear to be convinced that God created the world so that America could rule it. No other nation can excel America when it comes to flag-waving and no other people proclaim themselves to be ‘the greatest country in the world’ as Americans do. National pride is one thing but when it turns into arrogance, it meets resistance.

In their aftermath, the World Trade Centre attacks have brought out the worst aspects of American character. One must at the same time salute the heroism of New York’s firefighters and policemen, hundreds of whom lost their lives in an attempt to save others. Most of these people would be alive today were the call to duty not more important to them than the desire to save themselves.

But to return to the backlash that is now out there in full fury, the most common rationalisation of Abu Ghraib is that it was no more than bored soldiers indulging in some youthful and silly pranks. Abu Ghraib has been compared with the tomfoolery that youngsters practise against one another, not out of malice but fun. What happened in that jail has also been compared to ‘hazing,’ a term for roughing up recruits or new entrants to an academy, institution or school. Some pranksters did get carried away, but no one should really get offended or misunderstand the good-natured intentions of the pranksters, says the argument.

The two liberal newspapers of this country, New York Times and Washington Post, both of which supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, have been denounced for printing Abu Ghraib pictures day after day. There have also been calls that pictures and videos of Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers should be released, the argument being that if the Iraqis could put up with those brutalities for nearly three decades, why should they be creating such worldwide fuss about a few incidents that did not, after all, result in any deaths!

Rush Limbaugh, the leading ultra-rightwing radio host quoted with approval the other day a conservative journalist who had written that by going on and on about Abu Ghraib, the US media had shown four failings: selective agonising, dictation from terror, willing gullibility and ‘galloping inferentialism’. He also argued that much worse things happened in American prisons every day and nobody said a word, so what was all this breast-beating about anyway!

Another radio host, Michael Savage, who is said to carry a gun on him all the time, asked US Sen. James Inhofe about Abu Ghraib and was told, “My father put me though tougher interrogations when I was 16.” He also said that Lynndie England should be declared a poster girl for the war on terrorism as she was an embodiment of the idea that ‘kicking Muslim ass can be fun’. Savage has also advocated ‘dropping fiery death’ on the Iraqis. He said, “I don’t give a damn if they hide behind their women’s skirts. Wipe the women out with them.” He called the Iraqis ‘bugs who are destroying us’. The bombing of Iraqis, he said, was ‘better than an orgasm’.

What the American networks, sound-bit experts, senior officials and politicians do not seem to understand is the refusal of those at the receiving end of this endless ‘war on terror’ to accept dishonour and humiliation. I once asked a Pashtun friend of mine what the most insulting thing you could say to a Pashtun was. “Never call him ‘be-ghairat’,” he replied. This word defies translation, but the nearest would be ‘someone who fails to react when dishonoured’.

Mark Danner, an American professor of journalism and a New Yorker writer of long standing, asked a young man he calls Salih in Iraq why the people of Fallujah were attacking the Americans. In Salih’s reply lies the key to understanding what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Salih said, “For Fallujans it is a shame to have foreigners break down their doors. It is a shame for them to have foreigners stop and search their women. It is a shame for the foreigners to put a bag over their head, to make a man lie on the ground with your shoe in his neck. This is a great shame, you understand. This is a great shame for the whole tribe. It is the duty of that man, and of that tribe, to get revenge on this soldier — to kill that man. Their duty is to attack them, to wash the shame. The shame is a stain, a dirty thing; they have to wash it. No sleep — we cannot sleep until we have revenge. They have to kill soldiers. The Americans provoke the people. They don’t respect the people.”

What Salih said, no one in the Bush administration appears willing or able to understand. And therein lies the tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan and, ultimately, Pakistan.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Jonaid Iqbal, an old friend, responding to a column I write for TFT’s sister publication, Daily Times, has recalled how the announcement by Gen Yahya Khan that he had “unleashed the tigers” (his own description of the military crackdown of March 25, 1971) on the people of East Pakistan was greeted with applause by senior officers of the information ministry in Islamabad, where Jonaid then worked. The only man in that room who did not join the celebrants was Jonaid, who came from East Pakistan. When upbraided for this lack of “patriotism”, he said quietly, “Pakistan as I know it has come to an end.” Jonaid was suspended from service for being what he was: a Bengali. And though the “New Pakistan” was keen to leave him, he never left Pakistan.

I had suggested that instead of lecturing the world on human rights because of Abu Ghraib, we should first apologise to the people of Bangladesh. At the time, the prevailing view in Lahore was that the Bengalis were not being punished enough. Some idea of the general mood in the city can be gleaned from the following two incidents.

In the reporters’ room of The Pakistan Times, where I then worked, I had placed on the large table around which we all worked a picture of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman holding his head in both hands. That one single image expressed the despair that had descended on East Pakistan. The only other person in the reporters’ room who felt the pain of East Pakistan was my friend and senior Maqbul Sharif, though he was quite close to Yahya personally.

The Pakistan Times, despite its forcible takeover by the Ayub regime, still remained the last refuge of card-carrying comrades, socialists, left-wingers and liberals. So what happened next should be sobering for those who are in any doubt as to who stood where when Golden Bengal was raped by its own defenders. One day, Ghulam Muhammad, who used to carry out our errands, came to me and said that while everyone liked me and Judge Sahib (as Maqbul Sharif was called for his expert coverage of the higher courts), there was simmering resentment over the fact that we had put up the “traitor Mujib’s” picture on our desk. So before anything unpleasant happened, would we please remove it.

A few days later, I accompanied Maqbul Sharif to dinner at the Lahore cantonment home of someone he knew. When we arrived, the large living room was full and in one corner a discussion was in progress on the “great army action” in East Pakistan. When I intervened to say that we were massacring our own people and destroying our own country, all hell broke loose. One man said, “If you are siding with the traitors, then you’re traitors yourselves.” As the exchanges grew more animated, the host walked up to us and said, “You two have to leave my house. We don’t want you here.” We left. Had we hesitated or argued, we would have been physically thrown out or perhaps even handed over to some Field Intelligence Unit as collaborating separatists in the pay of India.

I narrate these two incidents to show the atmosphere in Lahore. We should pull this skeleton out of the cupboard where it has lain hidden for over thirty years. The best book written by a Pakistani on the East Pakistan tragedy is The separation of East Pakistan by the late Hasan Zaheer. I would like to quote some passages from the chapter ‘West Pakistani responses’ to reinforce my point. He writes, “The insensitivity of the influential classes of West Pakistan to the physical repression and political manipulation in the East Wing after the army operation, exposed their pretensions as the guardians of the integrity of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. There was no public protest at the outrageous policies, and no demand for national reconciliation.”

Hasan Zaheer writes that the West Pakistan press in 1971 included three major privately-owned independent dailies – Nawai Waqt, Jang and Dawn – all of which enjoyed a fair degree of freedom to take an independent stand and influence government policies. “Following the army action, they all lent their full support to it. They continued to toe the official line until the fall of Dhaka, in violation of their professional obligation to inform the people of the objective conditions in East Pakistan; in fact, at times, they appeared more aggressive than the regime itself and seemed to be goading it to intensify defiance of world opinion.” They ran banner headlines, creating war hysteria and wrote editorials praising the government for giving up the political process and urging it on in the same direction, never questioning the aims and limits of army action. Dawn, which has always crowed about its independence, wrote an editorial on April 4, 1971, calling President Yahya the soldier statesman the nation looked up to “with the same confidence … (to) meet this challenge from without just as he firmly faced the threat of disintegration from within when Awami League’s obduracy and adamant unreasonableness left no other course open.” Nawai Waqt’s coverage remained volatile all through, while demanding the dismemberment of all Pakistan’s internal and external enemies, little realising that in the end, it would be Pakistan itself which would be dismembered.

It is a sad story and it is time all of us accept responsibility for Pakistan’s break-up. And all of us should apologise to the people of Bangladesh, which would have remained East Pakistan had it not been for the refusal of the ruling classes to share power with its people. Have we ever thought that the secession of East Pakistan is the only instance in history where the majority seceded from the minority?

Imran Khan, it occurred to me last Sunday, would only need to get back into whites, put on the green cricket cap he always liked to wear and lead the Pakistan team into its next match, restoring it to the honour and glory it has lost since his day.

He came to Washington to attend a dinner organised by his supporters and well-wishers to raise money for the cancer hospital that he founded in Lahore in memory of his mother who died of this dreaded disease. Some of us gathered at his friend Akbar Chaudhri’s home for breakfast which could have been flown in from the old city of Lahore the same morning. It was sinfully good but Imran Khan is a spare eater, which must explain what keeps him trim as a tiger. We didn’t have long with him because he was taking a flight for New York right after, but he was there long enough to answer questions and regale us with some of his stories.

I hadn’t realised until then how seriously Imran takes his Mianwali constituency and how hard he works for those who voted him in despite opposition from certain feudal circles, not to mention that ubiquitous maker and unmaker of parties and governments whose name I better leave out since I have little wish to be picked up for ‘a little chat’ in a car with fake number plates next time I go to Pakistan. Imran said he regretted having supported the General in his first two years. “I thought here was a man who really wanted to bring fundamental change to the system and restore accountability and rule of law,” he said. He should have been disillusioned much earlier with what the General had initially promised and what he was actually doing, except that Imran is a man with a positive attitude who takes his time getting disillusioned. He likes to persist which is what made him win matches.

Imran said when he saw that the General was consorting with the same fellows who had done all those unethical and dishonest things, he decided this was the parting of ways. He said he could never accept that people should profess one thing and do another. He spoke of the work he had done back in Mianwali and how generously the people who had so little to give, had responded. They had gifted him 400 kanals of land to build first a college and then a university. He spoke of the Mianwali schools that had no teachers and the students who sat on the floor, a hundred to a room at places because they had this tremendous thirst for education. The state, he said, had abandoned its basic responsibilities to the people. All it wanted to do was lord it over the people and be a law unto itself.

I was with Imran and the team in Australia — largely because of my late friend, the great Farooq Mazhar, and Shahid Rafi, one of the most efficient and resourceful cricket officials that Pakistan has ever had — and I was there when Imran lifted that crystal cup high over his head, bringing the Melbourne crowd to its feet and the hundreds of millions others who were watching it on world television. In any other country, Imran would have been put in charge of cleaning up the mess that Pakistan cricket has become. Not here. I asked him what was wrong with Pakistan cricket. “Everything,” he replied. He said there were enormous amounts of money in cricket today. Sadly, the cricket establishment was being run as one runs a private estate. The chief executive, who had no experience of managing anything, worked for an international network which paid him a huge amount of money. “If you are looking for clash of interest, there you have it,” he added.

The coach who was paid a quarter of a million dollars a year had never possessed the qualities necessary for accomplishing such a task successfully. There was no domestic cricket structure. Pakistan had super abundant cricket talent but it was just not being tapped or it was being wasted away as happened in the case of a potential world-class player like Imran Nazir. “We are looking for scapegoats and it is regrettable the way Shoaib has been held responsible for the dismal performance against India.” He said Wasim Akram could have played for Pakistan for another year but had been pushed out.

“What about Gen. Tauqir Zia?” I asked, the same question I had asked Gen. Musharraf in Washington once and received a comprehensive lecture on the General’s genius. Since I do not wish to spoil Gen. T. Zia’s breakfast or his morning game of golf, I better keep Imran’s answer to myself.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The other day a friend, who at her own request will remain unnamed, phoned to say that she had news. Since calls promising news as a rule produce bad news, one is always afraid to ask what. “I have stopped smoking,” she said, much like a German general telling Hitler, “Mein Fuehrer, Paris has fallen.” “It is the sixth day,” she said. “Well, buddy,” I told her, “You are over the hump. It is the first three days that are touch and go.” Several years ago I had told her how to quit the weed, but she was not ready at the time. That was eight years ago, but she remembered.

She suggested that if I still remembered what I told her, I should write it down, perhaps to help someone out there kick the habit. So here it is. If you smoke, the best present you can give your is to stop smoking. So here are some tips from a reformed member of the nicotine equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.

There is no single, hundred percent method of doing it, but there are a number of steps that, if taken, may put you on that smokeless road. In the end, however, it is the smoker himself who has to do it. Guidelines can and do help, but like nirvana, everyone has to find his own path to it. The first thing to remember is that it is not rocket science. It can be done. You can be Johnny – or Jane – three-pack one day and smokeless Jo or Jenny the next. The road is not paved; it is peppered with big and small pits and unless you watch your step and remember where you are going, you will trip.

The first thing that a smoker must do is to make up his mind that he wants to stop. I don’t think there is a single smoker in the world who does not want to quit. Millions have, millions of others have tried but failed. However, if you are on the quit-the-weed road, do not think of those who have tripped, but those who have made it. It can be done, but before all else, you have to decide that you really want to quit. You should never stop smoking on a dare, or in a moment of disgust, or after reading another harrowing account of what smoking can do to people.

Smokers have horror of imagining the day when they no longer have a cigarette between their fingers. They fear that if they were no longer smoking, they would simply not be able to cope or function. This is absolutely untrue. It is possible that the first few days may be bad, but surprisingly, most people do not experience such days. They are later surprised how little they missed not smoking.

The crucial thing to remember is that if you persist, the post-smoking trauma, if any, will pass. Not smoking will not kill you: smoking can and does. If cigarettes could kill the greatest cowboy of them all, ‘Duke’ John Wayne and the debonair Yul Brynner, what chance does the ordinary Jo have? You should remember that there is life after smoking – and a far cleaner one, free of the troubles that smokers are heir to. Just think of it. No morning cough ever again; fewer, if any, colds; freedom from allergic reactions; and the rediscovery of food. Smokers do not know what food really tastes like because their taste buds have been desensitised by Lady Nicotine, the most lethal lady in town.

Saying goodbye to cigarettes is in some ways like ending an affair. It is wrenching, it is painful; but unlike the pain of love, this pain does not linger very long. It is short-lived, say a week or ten days, no more. You must not stop smoking when you are unwell or in an emotionally unstable or vulnerable state, or anxious about something, or under stress or in a state of excitement. Like a good murder, the decision to stop smoking has to be premeditated and executed coolly. You should prepare yourself for the day when you will quit and take your time. You should never do so in a hurry. Don’t make dramatic gestures like throwing away your last packet of cigarettes or giving your gold Dunhill lighter away. Do it quietly and do not advertise it (if you fail, at least you will be spared light-hearted ridicule). If you do not succeed the first time, it does not matter. Try again, and again, and if necessary, again. There is no shame in it. Be sure that if you continue trying, you will do it one day. Of that never be in any doubt.

Smoking is a thing of the mind more than it is physical. All smokers are convinced that if they stop, they won’t be able to concentrate or even go to the bathroom. This is pure poppycock. You will be able to think more clearly and your system will be right as rain once again. You will also smell nice. Smokers have no idea how bad is the smell that they carry around. Their breath smells, as do their hair and even their clothes. I always tell the story of my friend Jerry who said after his divorce that one reason for the break was that when he kissed his wife, he felt he was kissing an ashtray. She was Jane-two-pack a day.

Remember the world famous Nike slogan: ‘Just do it’. That is the one to follow. Stop cold turkey, that is, once and for all. After you have stopped, drink a lot of water, munch carrots – do not chew gum because it is a vile habit and one never knows what to do with gum that is no longer chewable – eat fruit, take walks, drink tea or go to the movies. For a few weeks avoid friends who smoke. Eat well but don’t overdo it because you will put on weight (ladies, be warned). It will take about six months before cigarettes are out of your system. And believe me, once you have kicked the habit, you will feel good about yourself and the world, not to mention that carrot you are munching.

There was a congressional hearing, so called, on Kashmir last week. While there will be no shortage of those in Islamabad and certain external outposts of the Islamic Republic making the thee-hour event here the basis of the inclusion of their names in the next national decoration hit parade at President’s House, one can only marvel at the naiveté of those who would confer those much-desired medals on these supplicants.

By the time this appears, pink cypher telegrams (that the American cryptographers read before the recipients) will have gone to Islamabad from the Washington diplomatic stockyard that Pakistani taxpayers maintain while often wondering why. The telegrams, which would take the poor cypher clerk a bit of time to transcribe in clear text will proclaim what a breakthrough the long-awaited hearing has been. Ambassador Iftikhar Ali used to say that it is a tribute to our cypher clerks that they do not sell to the enemy what they are privy to despite the starvation wages on which they are employed. In his view, it could only be explained by that old-fashioned virtue called patriotism.

Such telegrams and such language have remained the hallmark of Pakistani diplomatic traffic to the lords and masters in Islamabad. Sense of humour at the highest level of government parted company with Pakistan when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was overthrown, so there is no one left in Islamabad to scrawl in the margin of some such telegram, “So is the Sunday’s lunch by the Prime Minister to take place on the banks of the Dal Lake in Srinagar or at Nishat Bagh?”

The Kashmir hearing took place at the minor sub-committee on human rights and wellness (wellness?), one of the offshoots of the committee on government reform of the House of Representatives. The man who presides over this committee is Dan Burton who besides making periodic statements about Kashmir has been advocating the cause of a Free Khalistan for years. In Congress, if a legislator is seen to be over the top on a given foreign issue, little notice is taken of what he says or how many resolutions or ‘sense of congress’ press releases he puts his signatures to. On any given day there are any number of hearings in Congress on all kinds of issues, national, local and foreign. Unless a hearing takes place at a major committee of the house or senate, it has little if any effect. The US press ignores such goings on routinely. Many hearings are set into motion through the well-oiled and generously funded US lobbying system. Only one out of, say, 10 hearings really ends up producing results.

The Burton hearing was scheduled once before but reportedly the Indians got it sabotaged though Dan Burton said it was he who had put it off. One expected that the second time around the hearing on Kashmir would be well advertised. It wasn’t. In fact, it was so hush-hush that until a day before few of the Pakistani journalists knew about it. An embassy official began to phone them late in the afternoon a day before informing them of the event. When I asked him why he hadn’t called earlier, he replied that he himself had been told of it just a short while ago. One insider told me that it was all kept “very, very quiet” because “we didn’t want the Indians to throw a monkey wrench into the works again.”

The timing of the hearing made little political sense. In view of the current peace process (which hopefully will outlive Vajpayee), it did not appear useful to up the ante as any such exercise is always bound to do. Why generate tension when what is needed is to stay away from old controversies and debates where both sides have their own versions of facts and history. Nothing that was said at the hearing was new. Nothing that we heard broke fresh ground. It had all been said before and it had all been heard before. Everybody said what he or she was expected, programmed or paid to say.

Dr Attiya Inayatullah flew in all the way from Pakistan to make a tearjerker of a presentation in her celebrated role as the “Daughter of Kashmir.” She invoked Dante’s inferno and told many stories, all painstakingly sourced. But did she inadvertently say Kashmir is “not a territorial dispute” between India and Pakistan? Did we not always say ‘Kashmir Banay Ga Pakistan’ and wrote it into the constitution of Azad Kashmir. I will concede though that when required, the constitution of little Azad Kashmir can be rewritten. We have several precedents for that in the mother country.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

It is as well that we forget the past, even the immediate past, because were we to remember everything that has happened, life would become impossible. Yet there are times when remembering events past can help put the present into perspective.

Those who tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib wore US army uniforms. What they did could only have been done because of the demonisation to which the Bush administration has subjected those it brands its enemies. The use of terms such as “the axis of evil” and “rogue nations” has divided the world for average Americans into those who are evil and “hate” America because it is a democracy, and those who are on its side in the war against the forces of evil. In such a world it is not surprising that young soldiers consider Iraqis a subhuman species deserving of no better treatment than what they received at that notorious jail.

What happened at Abu Ghraib has sent shockwaves through the United States and around the world. Suddenly, the glory and nobility of the war that Bush and his people tried to sell to the American people are no longer saleable. What took place in Iraq was not glorious but shameful. And it cannot be explained away as the actions of a few individuals. It took the Bush administration days to express its regrets. Then he told the visiting Jordanian king that he was “sorry”. Sorry! Is that an appropriate expression of regret? Bush’s initial reaction to the photographs was even more shocking. He said, among other inane things, “I didn’t like it one bit.” Like it one bit! Is that a normal reaction to those horrifying and degrading pictures?

But this is not the first time American troops have been involved in torture and mistreatment of foreign prisoners. I was in Washington between the autumn of 1969 and the beginning of 1971, during the Vietnam years, and filed for the Pakistan Times. I don’t keep old papers, and many that I did keep were lost during my many moves from country to country and continent to continent. Among those that survived are dispatches I sent to my newspaper from Washington.

If someone were to look up the old files of the PT, he will find that on July 13, 1970, it published a dispatch I had filed under the headline “Tiger cage democracy”. In this I wrote: “The unscheduled discovery of a tiger cage prison for political detenus by a team of congressional investigators in South Vietnam has done almost as much to highlight the brutality of this senseless American war as the Song My massacre (Remember Song My, anyone?). While other members of the handpicked ‘fact-finding’ committee have used a string of glowing adjectives to describe the conduct of war and the success of the Vietnamisation programme, Congressman Augustus Hawkins has had the courage to speak the truth. Quoting U Thant, he said, ‘In times of war, the first casualty is truth. I found that what was cited as facts in Washington, seldom coincided with the realities in Saigon’.”

Hawkins and his colleagues found a prison for political detainees on the offshore island of Con Son where the inmates were kept in tiger cages under conditions of extreme inhumanity. The cages were five feet wide and ten feet long, each housing five persons. The men slept on the concrete floor and about a foot above the floor was an iron rod to which their legs were shackled. At the top of the cages, he found boxes of lime which was sprinkled into the cages to deal with noise or disturbance of any kind. Prisoners who protested were mercilessly beaten by the warders. The congressman found several students, a Buddhist monk and an old woman there who had gone blind because of frequent beatings. None of the prisoners had any criminal record. There had been no trial. They had been jailed because of taking part in peace marches or opposing the corrupt and venal Thieu government. For food, there were small portions of rice and dried fish. The water supply was so inadequate that inmates were often obliged to drink their own urine. The prison was earlier used for extreme interrogation by the Japanese and the French. The US-AID office at Saigon justified the Con Son hellhole, describing it as “a correctional institution worthy of higher ratings than some prisons in the United States”.

Then there was the infamous Operation Phoenix, part of a “pacification” programme devised by the Pentagon. Members of Nixon’s top aide Henry Kissinger’s staff openly bragged about “kill ratios”, claiming that Phoenix had destroyed the National Liberation Front (NLF). On average, 2,300 Vietnamese “suspects” were captured by the US army and CIA every month. Phoenix came to light in February 1969 when two army officers filed a petition in a Baltimore court asking to be reclassified as conscientious objectors. They had recently finished a training programme for those earmarked for Phoenix. During training, the two objectors were told that they would be expected to maintain a “kill quota” of 50 “bodies” per month and that they would be authorised to use “any technique” or employ “any means” to ferret out the Viet Cong and Viet Cong sympathisers through their agents in Vietnam.

In a dispatch I filed from Washington, which the PT carried on February 7, 1970, I wrote: “In no war fought on European soil have atrocities of the kind being committed in Vietnam today been witnessed. After all, they were all white men’s wars, fought by one set of white men against another. The Asians are a different sort of subhuman species. Killing an Asian is to many of the American soldiers no more and no less than killing a humanoid. After all, so the average soldier argues, the Vietnamese are small, puny little men, belonging to a different and inferior race, speaking a funny kind of language and having neither the white man’s refinement nor his Graeco-Roman traditions: the same flat Mongoloid features, the same uncertain, suspicious walk, the same treacherous appearance, the same miserable outfits.”

If we leap 34 years ahead, from Vietnam 1970 to Iraq 2004, we will have to ask ourselves if the mindset that created Operation Phoenix was not also at work at Abu Ghraib.

One thing that must be recognised and saluted before all else is that the Abu Ghraib torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was exposed by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and by an American network on the celebrated CBS news programme 60 Minutes II. It has been newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post which have given big billing to the story and which have thrown their letters columns open, the Times more than the others, for readers to express their outrage.

Had it been left to the Bush administration, the world may never have heard about Abu Ghraib. So this is what a free press is all about. This shattering episode took me back to the days of Gen Yahya Khan and the military crackdown against the people of East Pakistan in March 1971 that led to the birth of Bangladesh nine months later. I was, at the time, a reporter on The Pakistan Times in Lahore and though we all knew what was going on in East Pakistan, we were not allowed to write about it. The mood among the ‘zinda dillan-e-Lahore’ was not one of compassion or concern for their countrymen a thousand miles to the east, but one of regret that the Bengalis were not being punished hard enough for their ‘Hindu ways and customs’.

The late ZA Suleri, who prided himself on being a lieutenant of the Quaid and a keeper of Pakistan’s ‘ideology,’ was writing incendiary editorials denouncing the ‘separatists and enemies of Pakistan’. To his lasting honour, the only man who stood up for the East Pakistanis in Lahore was the great Abdulla Malik who told a meeting of students at the Engineering University, “Hum Bangladesh ke mazloom awam ke saath hain” (We are one with the people of Bangladesh who are being subjected to atrocities). For this ‘anti-state’ declaration, he was charged under martial law and sentenced.

The only Pakistani journalist who was able to write about the atrocities in East Pakistan was the late Tony Mescrehnas, but not for the Pakistani newspaper he worked for in Karachi but the Sunday Times in London. He was denounced as a traitor. He told me in London years later, “I was the only Pakistani patriot in 1971.” It is 33 years since that chapter of shame closed with the breakup of the country, but to this day, no Pakistani writer or journalist has had the decency to transcribe a full and honest account of the rape of Golden Bengal.

The apology that we owe to Abdulla Malik’s ‘mazloom awam’ has not been made. What Gen. Musharraf once said about letting bygones be bygones is not enough. While The Pakistan Times was controlled by the government-appointed National Press Trust, there was nothing to stop the non-Trust papers from bringing the truth about East Pakistan to their readers. Why did they fail to do so? I bring this up because before we begin to lecture the world on human rights, we should examine our own sorry record and apologise for it.

Governments are always slow to own up when bad things happen. The Bush administration had been aware of the Abu Ghraib incidents since at least February when the army completed its inquiry. Even Congress was not informed and it is up in arms because of that. However, had it not been for the American press, the story might not have seen the light of day. The outrage felt by many here I found best reflected in what Philip Kennicott of Washington Post wrote. He said among the ‘corrosive lies’ a nation at war tells itself is that the ‘glory’ belongs to the country but the failures are those of a few individuals. The administration, he pointed out, has called Abu Ghraib an aberration. But the regret in official Washington, he added, is not so much at what happened but that America’s image has been besmirched.

“The problem,” he wrote, “it seems, isn’t so much the abuse of the prisoners … the problem is our reputation. Our soldiers’ reputation. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us. But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals, but armies are made up of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals … No matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done … These photos show us what we may become as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. These pictures are pictures of colonial behaviour, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished.”

It is not too late for a Pakistani to write like this about what we did in East Pakistan in 1971.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Tne industry that the World Trade Centre attacks have spawned in the West, especially the United States, is books on Islam. There have been several serious scholarly works and there have been those written for the average reader.

As was to be expected, hostility to Islam, often closer to the surface than one would have imagined or suspected, has led to the appearance of books whose sole purpose is to argue that there is something intrinsically the matter with Islam, which makes it not only hostile to the West but antithetical to democracy. There have been books whose aim has been to downgrade Islam, misrepresent what it stands for, and attribute the horrifying acts of some Muslim groups to the religion they follow. Some of the books have scoffed at Islam and expressed contempt for both the religion and its followers across the world. A few of these ignorant works, one of them authored by a person who writes under a pseudonym – calling himself Ibn Warraq – have gained popularity.

One satirical book has been authored by a young woman, a Canadian Muslim of East African-Asian origin, who has had the temerity to single-handedly undertake the “reform” of Islam. An additional reason that her book may have gained support in certain quarters is the author’s proud declaration that she is a practising lesbian, and, further, that if God had had anything against people of her sexual persuasion, He would not have created them in the first place.

The Cairo-based writer Max Rodenbeck who writes for the Economist on Middle East issues, recently contributed a critical appraisal of nine recent books on Islam for the respected journal, The New York Review of Books. Some of what he wrote deserves a wider audience, especially in Muslim countries such as ours, so that what is at issue is clearly understood and the wrongs and rights of the current debate can be intelligently and unemotionally appreciated.

Rodenbeck points out that those who ask why Islam, unlike its close cousins Christianity and Judaism, has not undergone a reformation, forget that in the Christian case, for one, it was a painfully long procedure. They tend to neglect the gory episodes and the intricate debates about doctrine and think instead of the end result that Westerners live with today – a disenchantment with pure religious dogma in favour of the ethical principles that underlie it. He points out that in its long history, Islam has undergone “bursts of reformation” and, like other religions, it has splintered into myriad sects and sub-sects, each claiming to be the property of the “reformed” variant of the faith. He notes that within Sunni Islam, reformers have always chosen one of two paths, the literalist path and the one that seeks the essence of the sacred Quranic text appropriate to the community’s temporal and spiritual needs. Instances of the latter school he quotes are the Mu’tazelite movement in 8th century Iraq and Sufism, with its emphasis on the spiritual rather than the ritual. Both have encountered opposition from the powerful orthodox schools.

Rodenbeck points out that reversion to the historical model of early Islam leads to a recasting of the faith as an “aggressive, expansionary force that must struggle for survival in a sea of enemies, whether these be infidels or Muslim ‘hypocrites’”. This profound observation explains in simple words what the Osama bin Laden tribe of zealots is motivated by, or what the Saudis are – and Taliban were – about. The periodic purges of these movements, he points out, have had the cumulative effect of “reducing the Sunni canon to a narrow range of sources and interpretations”, closing, as it were, the “door of ijtihad”. Those who oppose ijtihad entertain a “utopian vision of Islam as a closed system that only awaits firm application by a just ruler”. This, he adds, leads its adherents into a “philosophic cul-de-sac”. I may add that during Zia-ul-Haq’s rule, there were many simple Muslims who said that Zia might be that “just ruler”. They were to be shatteringly disillusioned by what he turned out to be and what he always must have been, a short-sighted and cruel man.

Rodenbeck observes – and quite rightly too – that the Islamic faith is once again in a state of unusual ferment and the same essential split can be found between humanists and literalists or between those, according to a Dutch historian, who would subordinate Islam to “progress” and those who would subordinate progress to “Islam”. He writes, “Like many smaller religious communities that have turned inward, traditional Islam feels itself mortally challenged by a dominant global culture that is ebulliently hedonistic and irreverent.” He notes that “Muslim politics has grown to be dominated by a language of resistance whose physical manifestations range from disturbingly romanticised ‘martyrdom’ operations to the defiant wearing of the headscarf.” Shari’a that the orthodox would like applied to Islamic states, Rodenbeck points out, “was never a comprehensive code. It simply implied a ‘way’, a path, a striving to apply God’s will, as interpreted by scholars following at least five different major schools of Islamic jurisprudence.”

Rodenbeck quotes Prof Carl W Ernst, author of a recent book on Islam, as saying jihad simply means a quest for virtue which is how all Muslims (except a minority) understand and practise it. However, to preach that it is the duty of every Muslim to fight the infidels (and who are they? because the people of the book, the Jews and Christians, are not infidels) is a travesty of Islam’s teachings. Rodenbeck maintains that a “radical remake of the faith is the underlying intention of bin Laden and attacking America is merely a tactic, intended to provoke a backlash strong enough to alert Muslims to the supposed truth of their predicament, and so rally them to purge the faith of all that is alien to its essence”. He stresses that intolerance has historically been less true of Islam than of, say, Christianity. The Salafist version of Islam, if applied in toto, would mean the elimination of what its followers call “impurities” such as Sufism or Shi’aism and “the imposition of a supranational, tribal identification with Islam”. Wherever groups advocating such a prescription have had their way, their following has fallen off quickly because of the ugliness of their methods and the “radical utopianism” of their aims.

Rodenbeck is of the view that the dissident strain in Islam is growing. “It may be a micro-phenomenon, but there have been notable cases in recent years of Salafist radicals crossing the full spectrum of Muslim doctrines towards liberalism.” He quotes Egyptian thinker Gamal al-Banna, brother, ironically, of Hassan al-Banna who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, and the author of a three-volume study of fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence: “We are not here in the service of Fiqh, but to put Fiqh in the service of life.”

All those who are into horror movies — and who isn’t — know that the mummy will return, and so will Dracula’s bride, the monster from the deep, the living dead, the lady with the severed head and the creature from jeepers creepers, to name just a few of the perennials. However, this being Washington, we have our own favourites, and not necessarily from the Pentagon because the horrors who frequent its corridors never go anywhere, so there is no question of their making a comeback.

The exciting news is that the 2002 summer’s runaway sensation, the snakehead fish, which can swim in the water and walk on the ground, is back. Those in Maryland who had hoped that Miss Snakehead would make her next appearance in the neighbouring redneck state of Virginia, are bound to be disappointed because she has reappeared in the same state where she had been supposedly liquidated.

The first to inform the nation that the snakehead was back was the capital’s No. 1 newspaper, the Washington Post. Complete with a two-column picture of a very surprised and very dead fish with its mouth open, the Post spoiled everyone’s breakfast Thursday with the lurid headline ‘A creepy catch of the day: fisherman snags snakehead.’ The intro sent a shiver down my spine. Had the four horsemen of the Apocalypse announced on CNN that they were going to return, a creepier lead could not have been written. Here is what David A. Fahrenthold, correspondent, informed his readers, “The snakehead fish, a voracious Asian invader that’s been known to breathe out of water and scoot short distances over land, has reappeared in Maryland.”

Anyone who reads that should be forgiven for concluding that Godzilla had decided to appear in person or that King Kong was alive and well and stalking the Maryland wilderness. A fish that can breathe like you and me and “scoot” on land (with what? Feet?) must also be the first cousin of Moby Dick, but it turns out that the dreaded snakehead is only 19 inches in length, which means it is unlikely to pose a danger to the survival of the Republic or induce President Bush to set up a Department of Snakehead Security. The reporter, obviously elated at his great scoop or should one say catch, next told his readers that “the toothy green fish (has been) in the area since 2002 when the state of Maryland had to poison a pond in Crofton to prevent snakeheads there from wiggling away (wiggling away?).”

I recall that because so scary were the stories at the time that it seemed as if Osama bin Laden himself had been sighted in Crofton. They poisoned the pond where one or two snakeheads had been found and though they did not kill many more snakeheads, they killed everything else that lived there. Mass slaughter of all that swims it was, yet no one said a word. The authorities, wrote our intrepid reporter, “tried to play down the possibility that the predatory fish had spread, saying they used electric shocks and large nets to gather fish from the surrounding waters and had found no other snakeheads.” If I had my way, I would have had these “authorities” fed to piranhas which have the sharpest teeth in the business and like a lady on a diet are permanently hungry.

If President Bush who, we learnt the other day, does not read newspapers (which is perhaps why he is always half-smiling) were to be told — as we have been told — that the snakehead is “native to China and Korea,” I have little doubt he will order an invasion of both countries by land, sea and air, as well as revise the term Axis of Evil to Quartet of Evil. Experts said that if a snakehead is released in a pond, it is “instantly at the top of the food chain” (sounds like one of our Southern Punjab feudals) and can grow as long as 47 inches and weigh 15 pounds. It can polish off the entire pond, including insects, and “this year’s expected bumper crop of cicadas.” That, by the way, is another bizarre development here, as these cicadas hibernate for 17 years and come out of the ground to create a huge racket before returning to sleep for the next 17 years. Talk of couch potatoes!

So what awaits the poor snakehead with which all my sympathies lie? Not exactly a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, I am afraid. They have already started draining the pond in the Maryland suburb of Wheaton where she was caught. And what about the native fish? We are told that the natives will be netted and then returned to the lake when it is refilled. If you were a fish, would you believe that? The last word must remain though with Terry Wintermoyer, who caught the snakehead, “It had the head of a snake and the teeth of a shark and I hadn’t seen anything like it in my whole life.” What he forgot to tell the reporter was that it also spoke French.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

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