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If anything is going to be worse than the first Bush administration, it is going to be the second. Make no mistake about it. Dick Cheney, if he wasn’t who he is, I would have thought was the name of an out of work private eye or a salesman of used videos, has already provided the world with a peep into the mind of the Bush shootout team.

He told an interviewer that Israel might take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Israelis did precisely that in 1982 when they destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor causing much glee in Washington. It was a pre-emptive strike, the kind that was to reach its climax in the invasion of Iraq twenty years later. When the Iraqi reactor was destroyed, there were the usual insincere statements of condemnation from such toothless outfits as the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a name that flies in the face of good grammar and commonsense. More than that the brothers did not do. Privately, they were all happy that Saddam Hussein had been cut to size.

Will the Israelis do it again? They have the green light from Dick, but one hopes they will be smarter.

Then there is Ms Condoleezza Rice, whose academic work was centred on Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet Union and who, intellectually, continues to live in that murky world. She has been confirmed by the Senate. Only 13 senators put their vote where their mouth was. Some of those who had expressed much unease over her record and her personal contribution to pushing America into a disastrous war voted for her when the time came. The New York Times called it political theatre. Sen Jo Lieberman, one of the leading liberals in this country who was Al Gore’s running mate and probably cost him the election, voted for Ms Rice. I am not sure how news of her coronation as the Queen of Foggy Bottom is greeted in Islamabad. It is a matter of record though that as President Bush’s national security adviser, every time she met a Pakistani representative, she felt much frustrated, since she would either be told things she knew were not true or she would just be heard with the kind of look on the face of her visitor that appears on a cat’s face after the canary that was about to be her dinner has flown away.

Alberto Gonzales, the other key official chosen by the President to replace Attorney General John Ashcroft, is the pits. During his appearance before a Senate committee, he parried direct questions about his having approved the use of torture on foreigners detained as terrorist suspects. He had authored a memorandum as White House counsel that advocated a departure from the Geneva Conventions. The senators who questioned him were intent upon receiving clear replies and when they did not get them, they sent him written questions which have since been answered to the horror of anyone who believes in the supremacy of international humanitarian law.

The New York Times wrote on Wednesday that the Attorney General does not merely head up the Justice Department: he is responsible for ensuring that America is a nation in which justice prevails. “Mr Gonzales’s record makes him unqualified to take on this role or to represent the American justice system to the rest of the world. The Senate should reject his nomination.

The biggest strike against Mr Gonzales is the now-repudiated memo that gave a disturbingly narrow definition of torture, limiting it to physical abuse that produced pain of the kind associated with organ failure or death. Mr Gonzales’s attempts to distance himself from the memo have been unconvincing, especially since it turns out he was the one who requested that it be written. Earlier the same year, Mr Gonzales himself sent President Bush a letter telling him that the war on terror made the Geneva Conventions’ strict limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners ‘obsolete’.”

The Washington Post, which will have to do penance for having been a drumbeater as Bush was preparing to invade Iraq, redeemed itself somewhat when it wrote that senators who vote for Gonzales should ask themselves if they would not be endorsing the systematic use of cruel, inhumane and degrading practices by the United States. In his written answers, Gonzales, the editorial said, had asserted America’s right to indefinitely hold foreigners in secret locations without any legal process, to deny them access to the International Red Cross, to transport them to countries where torture is practised, confirming in other words that “the Bush administration is violating human rights as a matter of policy.” Well, the Gonzales nomination has come through the Senate Judiciary Committee and it will go to the full Senate for a vote and given the Republican majority there, not to mention Democrats with right-wing convictions, he will become America’s chief law officer. But the President will get his hat trick when he appoints another ultra conservative to the Supreme Court whenever the ailing chief justice decides to step down, which could well be this year.

God’s ways are mysterious, but there is a question mark in my mind over the efficacy of prayer, considering that 48 percent of Americans and almost the entire population of the rest of the world was praying for Bush to lose the election and, lo and behold, the man won. So, tighten your seat belts and get ready for turbulence that will last for the next four years.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Prospects for the restoration of rule by civilians recede even farther when one reminds oneself that even after the surrender at Dhaka on 16 December 1971, Gen. Yahya Khan and his coterie of “fat and flabby generals,” to quote the late HK Burki, had absolutely no intention of stepping down.

At the Pakistan Times where I was then working as a reporter, I recall that the text of the constitution that AR Cornelius had prepared was received, subbed and typeset as the lead story after Gen. Yahya Khan’s formal announcement. But he never made that announcement because a group of brave and patriotic army officers made it clear to him that if he did not resign, there would be a revolt. Consequently, the new constitution was neither announced, nor was its text printed anywhere. If anyone has a copy of it, he should know that he holds a collector’s item. I may add that although East Pakistan had been overrun by the Indian army and the Eastern Command had surrendered, the stillborn constitution granted “full autonomy” to a province that was no longer a part of Pakistan.

After Gen. Pervez Musharraf left Washington on a cloud of nine, if not nine hundred and ninety-nine, someone asked me what the chances of political power being handed over to an autonomous civilian government in Pakistan were. I recommended that he read the Hamoodur Rehman Commission report. “And why should I do that?” he asked. “Because if after the dismemberment of the country, which was entirely the result of the suicidal policies followed by Gen. Yahya Khan, he was not prepared to step down, how could the thought of doing such a thing even occur to a military leader who has had the red carpet laid out for him in every Western capital, including the home of republicanism, France.” I also reminded my friend that on its official website, the State Department had quietly declared the form of government in Pakistan to be “Parliamentary Democracy.”

I don’t carry a gun and even if I did I would not know how to use it, but were I to get myself one and were I to take a few lessons on how to fire it, I would certainly pull the trigger next time somebody told me that the only free and fair election in Pakistan was held by Yahya Khan. Free and fair it was not, since huge amounts of money were doled out in bribes to small and right-wing parties which were seen as natural partners of the military ruler. Nobody was more surprised by the results than Yahya Khan who all but took Gen. Sher Ali Khan’s advice that the results of the election should be “annulled” since they were not in accordance with the “staff scenario.”

The Hamoodur Rehman Commission report is an admirable document and should be required reading in every school, college, university, academy and staff college. It is a stunning indictment of military takeovers, Yahya’s coup and his subsequent actions being the illustrative case in point. Since there is so much confusion and disinformation about events as recent as the 1971 breakup and why it happened, it seems necessary to reproduce the main findings of the Commission insofar as Yahya’s takeover in March 1969 and his subsequent actions are concerned. Here is what Justice Hamoodur Rehman and those who served on his Commission recorded.

Yahya’s assumption of office was “not only illegal but also calculated. It was pre-planned as by the 25th of March 1969, all necessary legal documents had been prepared in advance for the takeover.” President Ayub was being “misled” while these preparations were in progress. Even Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was roped in to ensure the failure of the Roundtable Conference that Ayub had called. Yahya took eight months before laying down a timetable for holding elections. During the election campaign “Yahya Khan endeavoured by use of money and other means to influence the results of the elections so that not one or two parties but a conglomeration of small parties should be returned, none being of a size large enough to be in a position to dictate terms.”

The Commission said, “The failure on the part of Gen. Yahya Khan and his advisers to critically examine the Six Points … seems to suggest that neither the General nor any of his advisers was ever bothered about what the result of the election would be.” Yahya also failed to specify the extent of the autonomy proposed to be given to the provinces or to lay down a voting procedure in the Legal Framework Order (LFO). “The insistence of the regime that the period of 120 days prescribed in the LFO for the framing of the constitution was “sacrosanct” and could not be changed, was “obviously to ensure that the National Assembly should stand dissolved on failing to enact a constitution, thus leaving the General free to continue his administration of the country.” Yahya’s “procrastination” in calling the meeting of the National Assembly and then postponing it without fixing a fresh date was aimed at creating a deadlock in which he could continue to rule.

The Commission said the manner in which Yahya negotiated with politicians in Dacca in March 1971 suggested that he had “pretended to agree with each party putting forward the disagreement of the other as a difficulty, thus playing one party against the other and throwing the blame for the deadlock on them.” The March negotiations were never “really carried to a final end, for he himself left Dacca clandestinely on the 25th of March 1971 without even the knowledge of the civilian aides or the leaders of the People’s Party.” Yahya failed to open negotiations despite unanimous foreign advice with a war hanging over Pakistan’s head, although Mujib was available for such negotiations, something, the report said, “further confirms that he was not interested in any political settlement.”

The most damning indictment of the General comes with the observation, “Getting a constitution prepared, which he intended even up to Dec 16 1971 to impose on the country, providing for his continuance as President and Commander-in-Chief together with the right to impose Martial Law virtually at his own choice, was the final act manifesting his intention of appointing himself not only the supreme authority under the constitution but also over the constitution.” Accusing Yahya of “criminal negligence of official duties,” the Commission added, “Nero certainly fiddled while Rome burnt.”

That was thirty-three years ago. Not only has nothing changed but what was an aberration once has now turned into a habit. I remember that in 1971, the priceless Sardar Mohammad Sadiq, when asked if there would be “ intiqaal-e-iqtidar ” – transfer of power – replied after taking a long drag at his cigarette as he surveyed the scene on the Mall, “ Intiqaal yes, iqtidar , no.”

The debate that has been raging in the Muslim community in the Canadian province of Ontario for the last several months is important because what is at issue could spill across to other countries, from the most conservative to those that are still in the process of finding a workable balance between religion and modernity.

The lines are drawn, the divisions are clear and one can only watch with mounting interest the outcome. The issue involves family and personal law. A conservative section of Canadian Muslims, many of them Pakistanis, would like to have personal and family disputes, and questions arising out of such disputes, settled in accordance with what they call Shari’a law instead of laws applicable to other Canadians. Those opposing this attempt argue that since there is no one agreed definition of Shari’a, it will lead to bitter sectarian controversies, and divide the Muslim community at a time when it needs to join hands, move forward and dispel the label of reaction and extremism that has been plastered across its face. Muslim women are fearful that the new arrangement will work against them and be used by men — fathers, husbands, brothers — to deny them their rights as equal citizens.

The Ontario Attorney General Marion Boyd has thrown a spanner in the works by recommending that the practice not only be adopted and continued but that “Muslim principles” — which she has failed to define despite being asked to do so — be allowed as a substitute for the Ontario Family Law Act. When asked what provisions of the Act were in conflict with what she called “Muslim principles”, she failed to provide an answer. Arbitration by the Shari’a-based tribunals will be binding.

One progressive Muslim community leader who has taken up the cudgels on behalf of those opposing the conservative move is Rizwana Jafri, vice principal of a high school in the city of Toronto and president of the Muslim Canadian Congress. In an open letter to Premier Dalton McGuinity of Ontario, she points out that the bid to make use of religious laws to settle family disputes through binding arbitration as a substitute to the Ontario family law court system has deeply divided the Muslim community and caused serious concern among women’s groups and children’s advocates. She says the Muslim Canadian Congress is opposed to all religious courts and tribunals that trespass the public domain. She argues that whether they are Rabbinical or Christian courts, Shari’a-based arbitration tribunals or any other religious-based quasi-judicial body cannot, and should not, be allowed to substitute the existing court and judicial system which is based on laws created by parliament whose members are accountable to those who elected them.

Ms Jafri, who is married and the mother of two children, writes that under the cover of “Muslim principles” what is being attempted is “Shari’a by stealth.” She argues that Attorney General Boyd by maintaining that opting for arbitration under Shari’a will be voluntary, is reducing justice to a “mere consumer commodity”, something that is antithetical to both Islamic and Canadian values. “Justice is not a mere consumer product and citizens are more than retail consumers”, she adds. She also argues that if the proposed change is implemented, it will amount to privatising Ontario’s Family Law and placing it in the hands of private practitioners who have already started marketing their services as alternate justice providers whereas they are no more than “for-profit religious judges”.

Ms Jafri quotes Prof Omid Safi, who teaches Islamic Studies at Colgate University, New York, who wrote, “The use of religious law as a substitute for laws created by parliament, and the establishment of a multi-tier legal system — one for average Canadians and one for Muslim Canadians, and others for Catholic or Jewish Canadians — is not only unjust, but also detrimental to the well being of all Canadian citizens.” He said that he was “alarmed at the prospects of repressive Muslim governments around the world pointing to Canada, and the implementation of ‘Shari’a’ within Canada, as a justification for their oppressive legal systems. This is not a comment on Islamic jurisprudence as a whole, but rather on the repressive interpretations of Shari’a found in those countries. It is unrealistic to think that the ayatollahs of Iran, the proponents of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and other countries will not use this to promote the viability of their oppressive visions.”

The last word should be Ms Jafri’s who wrote, “Our position is not against religion. On the contrary, we stand for the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion. However, freedom of religion does not mean that we dilute laws and strengthen the power of rabbis, imams and priests over their communities, especially the most vulnerable.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Once you determine a single, simple explanation for an event; be it a natural or a political disaster, it frees you from dealing with any of the troubling questions that such disasters bring in their wake. The breakup of Pakistan in 1971 is a prime example of this approach. Instead of using it as an opportunity for self-examination, it was declared to have been an Indo-Soviet conspiracy, not to mention the blind ambition driving Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and hence not worthy of any further attention or analysis. And that is why we are in the ideological mess we are in today. Had intellectual house cleaning been undertaken at the time, we might have been spared many of the troubles that have dogged us since.

The great Asian tsunami catastrophe has been played in the world of Islam as punishment for the misdeeds and sins of the Muslims who are said to have strayed from the path of God, who has taught them a lesson they will not forget for a long time. Accordingly, they should repent and beg forgiveness for having abandoned the path of virtue and rightful conduct. This, say those who speak to simple, believing Muslims who accept what they are told as the truth, is the only explanation that is required to come to terms with the tsunami, as with all other disasters, no matter what their form, shape or kind. It is a sad commentary on those who make such pronouncements, and those who believe them.

First of all, if the tsunami was indeed a punishment from God, then are we telling the world that the God the Muslims believe in is a vengeful God, who derives some kind of special satisfaction from settling scores and inflicting the most terrible of punishments on those who have strayed from the right path? And why is the punishment indiscriminate, as not only the sinners but innocent children also perished in these great calamities? And what about the large number of Christians, Buddhists and animists who are swept away by the same wave that had decimated the sinning Muslims? What path had they strayed from?

Tarek Fatah, a Canadian-Pakistani in Toronto who is considered worthy of a Saudi-style public beheading by several of North America’s exterminating mullahs, on account of his progressive opinions and his emphasis on rationality rather than dogma, put it rather neatly when he wrote, “The disappointment (flowing from poor contributions by rich Arab states for the tsunami victims) is compounded by the message being repeated ad nauseam in their mosques and media that the earthquake was a punishment from God for the sins of the people of South and Southeast Asia. The view that wanton behavior provoked the quake was the subject of Friday sermons in Saudi Arabia and of other religious commentaries in the Kingdom. “Asia’s earthquake, which hit the beaches of prostitution, tourism, immorality and nudity,” one commentator said on an Islamist website, “is a sign that God is warning mankind from persisting in injustice and immorality before he destroys the ground beneath them.”

Fatah quoted Walid Tabtabai, a member of the Kuwaiti Parliament, who said that the earthquake was not simply a natural calamity, but a message from God. “We believe that what occurs in terms of disasters and afflictions are a test for believers and punishment for the unjust,” he wrote in his column in the Al Watan newspaper. Fatah said anyone who would consider Tamil Nadu, Aceh, Sri Lanka, Somalia, the Islands of Nicobar and Andaman to be “beaches of prostitution, tourism, immorality and nudity” could only have a sick mind. He found the Kuwaitis and Saudi Islamists lecturing the world about morality nothing short of an “outrage.” What the victims needed was help and generosity, not lectures. He also wondered if it wasn’t that in the eyes of most Kuwaitis and Saudis, the dead belonged to the despised underclass which does hard labour in oil-rich Gulf States. “Dark skinned Indians, Sri Lankans, Indonesians and truck drivers, cooks and maids are to them children of a lesser God,” he observed bitterly.

My inquiries show that in most mosques across the United States, the same message has been going out to the Muslim community. While appeals have been made for generous donations to relief funds, the congregations are also being told that the tsunami was “ azab-e-Ilahi ”, or the wrath of God for the sins of those who were destroyed. Such calamities, they are being told, warn us to renounce our ungodly ways, seek forgiveness, establish piety in our lives or else another tsunami will be sent down to wipe us off the earth’s face.

Walid Phares, a US-based academic, wrote, “Had the tsunami hit the West Coast of the United States or the Japanese islands, the official theological story would have been that Allah punished the infidels for their aggression in Iraq. Had the waves reached Iran’s waterfront, the Salafi would have decreed that Shi’a apostates angered the divine. For each natural tragedy, the central madrassas produce an acceptable story. So, when the tsunami washed out tens of thousands of lives in two continents and five countries, the jihadists were ready: Step one: Determine who was killed and where. How many Muslims, how many Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Sinhalese and others? Only one matter is relevant when mass death and suffering occur – the role of the infidels, especially the United States and its allies.”

Arnaud de Borchgrave, who keeps a sharp eye on ignorance in the name of religion, wrote that the logic reverberating through sermons across the Islamic world was “convoluted.”

Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajiid explained that God’s tsunami punishment of Christians stemmed from “the Christian holidays (that) are accompanied by forbidden things, by immorality, abomination, adultery, alcohol, drunken dancing and revelry. A belly dancer costs 2,500 pounds a minute and a singer costs 50,000 pounds an hour, and they hop from one hotel to another from night to dawn. Then they spend the entire night defying Allah … At the height of immorality, Allah took revenge on these criminals … Allah struck them with an earthquake. He finished off the Richter scale. All nine levels gone.”

Sheik Yousuf al-Qaradawi said on Qatari TV: “People must ask themselves why this earthquake occurred in this area and not in others? Why did it occur at this time and not another? Why? Whoever examines these areas discovers that they are tourism areas. Tourism areas are areas where the forbidden acts are widespread, as well as alcohol consumption, drug use, and acts of abomination. Whoever knows about tourism in our age knows this. These areas were notorious because of this type of modern tourism, which has become known as ‘sex tourism’ … in which prostitution and sexual perversion are traded. They even traffic in children. They bring poor children to be used in sexual perversions. In these areas there are about forty children who are used, and their pictures have been posted on the Internet. Do these youngsters deserve punishment from Allah?” If the reference is to strip of the Thai coast, what about the rest of the devastated areas where no “sex tourism” exists?

I think I’ll close this with the words of Mahathir Muhammad, “Muslims who declare themselves as brothers-in-Islam often make it their duty to fight and kill other Muslims. They would in the name of Islam condemn these Muslims as infidels in order to justify their enmity towards them. If we go by their criteria for being Muslim, then there are probably no Muslims in the world.”

In the summer of 1976 in England, the hottest in a hundred years, they said, hardly a day passed without another report of Skinheads and National Front goons beating up Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis. Mian Mumtaz Daultana, Pakistan’s ambassador in London, decided one day that enough was enough and it would send a good message to everyone if the ambassadors of the three countries would meet and decide what steps to take to protect their people.

Indian ambassador BK Nehru, Jawaharlal’s cousin and an old friend of Ambassador Daultana, put the situation in a nutshell when he said, “Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis consider the West Indians “kala log”, while East African Asians consider all three to be “kala log”. As for the Englishman, he considers all five of the blighters “kala log.”

I was reminded of this when I read that Talib Abdur-Rashid, an African-American Muslim imam form Harlem, is fond of telling the story of a young black Muslim who was asked what it was like living in post-9/11 America. “It’s like being black,” he replied, “but twice.” African-American Muslims claim that they are discriminated against by South Asian and Arab Muslims which should be no news to any of us as we do consider all people of African origin, Muslim or no Muslim, “kala log”. An African-American foreign service officer who served for some years in Lahore told a friend before leaving, “I never felt more black in my life than in Pakistan.” I hope, therefore, next time we hurl the racist epithet at the “gora log”, we will, for a moment, take a look at our own bigotry as well.

Members of the congregation of the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood in New York’s Harlem — the mosque was founded by Malcolm X’s followers after he left the Nation of Islam — say that Islam arrived in America 400 years ago and African-American Muslims have fought in all of America’s wars and are “not at odds with the West”, which, it is clear, is what differentiates them from the fire-breathing Pakistani Muslims wearing bushy beards and skullcaps.

According to Carol Eisenberg, writing in the NewsDay daily, for African-Americans, “long relegated to second-class status, it’s been a source of bitterness to find themselves marginalised yet again after September 11, 2001, this time for reasons unrelated to blackness. Many say they are stunned to find they are treated as something less than authentic, not just by the dominant American society, but often by new Muslim arrivals from South Asia and Arab countries as well.”

They resent the fact that they are relegated to the margins, with Muslim organisations from the immigrant community often viewing them as not proficient in the Islamic canon and, thus, lacking in authenticity. An African-American has summed it up neatly, “We have gone from the back of the bus to the back of the camel.”

Imam Abdur-Rashid told the NewsDay reporter after showing her his Arab robes — all folded and packed in a cupboard — that he had stopped wearing them five years ago. “This is part of an effort on my part to model something different culturally. Something that’s not Arab. Because I’m not Arab. And I don’t believe I have to look like one, dress like one, or sound like one to be an authentic Muslim.”

African-American Islamic scholar Aminah Beverly McCloud told a conference last year, “In their pursuit of the American dream and whiteness, the new arrivals (Arab and South Asian Muslims) have largely ignored African-American Muslims, and have assumed that they can impose their own understanding of Islam on African-Americans.”

In the meantime, demonisation of Muslims continues. A popular, long-running TV serial ‘24’ on the Fox network — where else — began its new season on Monday. Here is the story line: A normal well-to-do Muslim family, it turns out, is actually a sleeper terrorist cell. The husband and wife have already caused a train derailment and by way of public service (from my point of view at least) kidnapped the US Defense Secretary. They have seen to the involvement of their teenage son in their faith-inspired shenanigans. When the son’s non-Muslim American girlfriend comes to know what they think could endanger them, they ask him to kill her. When he hesitates, the job is done for him by one of the parents.

Ms Sabiha Khan of the Council on Arab-American Relations (CAIR) is concerned that the depiction of Muslims as terrorists living among Americans “will contribute to an atmosphere that it’s OK to harm and discriminate against Muslims. This could actually hurt real-life people.”

She says the ‘24’ terrorist family “is not a family I’ve ever known. None of the 9/11 hijackers had that kind of family … It’s not really based on any reality of what we are going through.”

Nice try Ms Khan but who is going to believe you!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

If there is one word that needs to be abolished from Pakistani conversation for the good of everybody’s psychological health, not to mention in the larger national interest, it is conspiracy. Everything is a conspiracy. While it cannot be denied that some conspiracies there indeed have been, it is time it was recognised that our “external enemies” may have a couple of other things to do in the world besides plotting against us on a full-time basis.

In some ways, conspiracies are helpful as they free those who believe in them from the need to think. Since conspiracies are supposedly hatched and executed by outsiders, it is they therefore, and not anyone else, who bear the responsibility and the blame for the consequences. In 1971, when Pakistan broke up and the larger part became Bangladesh, that moment in history could have been seized as an opportunity to analyse the cataclysmic event and to try to understand why it had happened. No such exercise took place then, nor has it taken place since. The dismemberment of Pakistan was explained away and rationalised as an Indo-Soviet conspiracy that had nothing to do with those of us who lived in the Western part. The only internal actor blamed by the right-wing and religious establishment was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto whose ambition was held responsible for the country’s breakup. He was made a scapegoat for partisan reasons that had little to do with reality.

Since in Pakistan everybody fancies himself to be an authority on international affairs, as well as a commentator and potential newspaper columnist, national paranoia is unlikely to subside anytime soon. There are more people writing columns today in Pakistan than in most other countries. The New York Times , by all accounts the world’s best edited and best written newspaper, has no more than four columns on a given day. The popular dailies in Pakistan, especially those published in Urdu, have brigades of columnists holding forth on all subjects on earth all seven days of the week. International affairs and foreign policy are special favourites. Such judgments delivered from the pulpit of the press have been responsible for a great deal of the intellectual confusion that exists in the Pakistani mind. Since many people believe what they read, it is only natural that they now believe in some very strange things indeed. Facts are both inconvenient and unwanted. When they do catch up with us at some point, as they must, we feel little hesitation in attributing them to yet another conspiracy.

One would have expected that newspapers produced and printed outside Pakistan by people who live in the West and thus have the opportunity to have access to a far broader range of information and knowledge than the average person has at home, will be different. That, however, is not so. Let me illustrate this. There is a large and growing population of Pakistanis in America and Canada and there are several newspapers and weeklies that are printed, mostly in Urdu, for their information and enlightenment. Let us pick up one published from New York and widely circulated through the Asian grocery store network. While 85 percent of the news it prints is about Pakistan, the one that lies in front of me contains nine columns replete with the most fantastic assertions and theories, all guaranteed to keep the readers in a dodo-land of make-believe. Permit me to present a sample.

One columnist, otherwise a doctor who should be looking after the health of his patients rather than handing out intellectual punishment to the community, writes, “I once wrote (why are some of our columnists always reminding readers what they have already inflicted on them?) that the uniform is not Musharraf’s but the West’s need, and Zaradari is not Musharraf’s but the West’s prisoner. Also, what happened to Nawaz Sharif happened because of certain objectives that could not have been achieved with a popular government in office. The historical background of this situation was that those special objectives had led to disagreements among generals, namely that the Kashmir problem be resolved in return for a rollback of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, but not India’s. Because of disunity in Pakistan’s ruling circles, India has begun asserting again that Kashmir is its integral part, its ‘ atoot an’ . Pakistan has been threatened through a visit by a group of American generals that coincided with the US defence minister’s (sic) tour of India and Afghanistan. This means that Gen. Musharraf is being urged to retain his uniform for the time being. His recent tour (of US) amounted to his begging for his life. As such, Zardari’s release and Gen. Musharraf’s phone call to Nawaz Sharif are moves to get sacrificial lambs ready for slaughter. It also shows Musharraf’s attempt to pull himself out of a mess of his own creation.” Free lunch at Lahore’s best restaurant for anyone who can find his way out of this maze.

Another columnist writing from New York – not about New York but about Kashmir – declares authoritatively that since the generals who have ruled Pakistan have been able to neither fashion a national policy, nor allowed anyone else to make it, why should India talk to Pakistan and to whom? Warming up to his theme, he goes on to say, “There is no responsible government in Pakistan. Had there been a strong democratic government in Pakistan, not only would India have negotiated with Pakistan on Kashmir but begged Pakistan to negotiate with it a given time and place. It would have offered talks to Pakistan and urged a settlement of all outstanding issues. Indian leaders know that the Pakistan army does not wish to settle the Kashmir problem, nor does it wish to establish any kind of relationship with India, since it owes its very existence to enmity with its neighbour. The Indian leadership fully understands this divisive Pakistani policy. The proposals given by Gen. Musharraf are, in fact, a sign of Pakistani weakness because Pakistan has launched an armed insurrection against India in Kashmir and the Kashmiris have mutinied against India at the urging of Pakistan. Why Pakistani and Kashmiri politicians do not open their mouths today is because they know that they have reached a dead-end. India, despite killing one million people, has won the (Kashmir) war internationally.” So goes it, on and on and on. One can only pull out one’s hair (or those that remain) after a dose of such wisdom.

Another columnist blames Muslims, especially Pakistanis, for having failed to educate the Americans about “the two colours of Islam.” Those Muslims who have projected jihad and Islam as identical, he writes, were actually on a mission to lop off the roots of Islam and may have had a special relationship with Jews. He also believes that anyone who ever met the American right-wing eccentric Lydon Larouche ended up dead, including Z.A. Bhutto, Zia and Chaudhri Zahur Elahi. “Asif Zardari will now need to take special care of his security because these elements wish to turn Benazir Bhutto into an ‘Iron Lady’ in the mold of Indira Gandhi. Be careful Zardari,” he writes.

This is the intellectual fare being dished out to our people living in America. Is it any wonder then that we are where we are.

Books on terrorism, the Islamic variety that is, are now a thriving industry in the United States, principally, and in Europe marginally. This is a hot-ticket subject and when a subject is hot ticket, it finds all the authors it needs — and then a few more — and compliant publishers, both major and minor. As with everything, there are good books on the subject and there are bad books, some of them products of heated imaginations, others no more than potboilers.

In whichever cave Osama bin Laden holds court and exercises his kidneys, one wonders if it has occurred to him that if all the past, present and future enemies of Islam were to be assembled and asked to come up with a stratagem that would do the greatest harm to Muslims, they couldn’t have thought of a better one than the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11. Thanks to that and what has happened since, while all Muslims are not viewed as terrorists — or at least not yet — all terrorists are invariably turning out to be Muslim. Does an act of terror grant its perpetrator a club class ticket to heaven, as many have been led to believe? Not likely because if there is one thing sacred under the sun, it is reverence for life.

Had there been no 9/11, there would have been no Department of Homeland Security which, if not stopped, will turn America, this most open, informal and friendly of countries, into a kind of a fortress that you may enter at the risk of your dignity. Body searches, finger-printing, interrogations at airports and border crossings are now routine. Washington, which is one of the loveliest of cities when it comes to public buildings and monuments, is now a vast obstacle course with checkpoints and barriers.

Most people shrug their shoulders and fall in line, doing what they are asked to do. Some find the experience humiliating enough to want to write to newspapers. Here is a lady by the name of Kathryn Gest writing to the Washington Post on January 5 that on a visit to Library of Congress on Capitol Hill with some out-of-town friends, it took the party 25 minutes to get through security at the Jefferson Building, an additional facility built some years ago to house some of the Library’s treasures. “Only one entrance was open, with one metal detector and X-ray machine. People were taken one at a time, and some were wanded (that’s a new verb derived from the wand that security officers run over all public and private parts of your body). Several of those in line for the final day of a library exhibit gave up. Most of the crowd waited patiently, which is more than a terrorist bent on destruction would have done.” My sympathies Ms Gest, but welcome to the club.

On the same day, the leader page cartoon by Toles in the Post showed a family of four, two being children, with the father saying, “We parked three miles away in the secure lot, traversed the Jersey-barrier maze, got through the Bollard obstacle course, past the metal detector on the third try, and escaped the guard dogs to see the new terrorist-proof Jefferson Memorial. Now, where is Jefferson.” That about says it. If there was any hope that America would relax, it vanished the day Bush won a second term despite the prayers of 48 percent of Americans and the entire population of the rest of the world. God’s displeasure with mankind can indeed take strange forms.

Orwell said if you want to imagine the future, think of a jackboot in your face. Bush has put America on war with a nebulous phenomenon, a war that in the words of Dick Cheney will be fought “in the shadows … a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business”. An article in the Marine Corps Gazette captures chillingly what lies in store for America and the world. What is to come is “likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined, the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be non-linear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ may disappear.”

Not only Orwell lives, but so also does Kafka.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

On one of his visits to Islamabad, Abdul Sattar, at the time Pakistan’s envoy to New Delhi, told me about a talk he had been asked to give at one of the establishments in Islamabad where the audience either had a more-than-even component of brass or was perhaps entirely brass. He had been asked to speak on India-Pakistan relations and a better man they could not have found to do so, since Sattar had spent more time on the South Asia desk and in New Delhi than any other officer of the foreign service.

At the time, the insurgency in the Indian part of Kashmir was still in its early stages and what was to become the Indian rallying cry of “terrorism from across the border” was years from being sounded. Sattar told his audience: “Gentlemen, before we initiate an action, we should be aware of its political implications, its fallout, its consequences. Not to do so would be unwise and we can be sure that in time such lack of forethought would place the country and the nation in very serious difficulties. No action is free of consequences and those who initiate a given action should be more than confident that the country would be able to bear its cost and deal with its consequences.” These may not be the exact words Sattar used but I think my recollection of their content is accurate.

Sattar was essentially speaking of the decision taken not, I repeat, not, at the Foreign Office, but in the inner sanctums of the Invisible Soldiers Inc (ISI), to give the ongoing political movement in Kashmir a militant twist. The raw materials for doing so were by then available in abundance, the “jihad” against the Soviet Union having ended with the withdrawal – not the defeat as fanciful propaganda has it – of the Red Army from Afghanistan. What was to be done with these men, the great intellects in charge of decision-making at the Agency and its mother hen, had asked themselves? Instead of encouraging the CIA-designated “Mujahideen” to return, if not actually facilitating their repatriation to their home countries, they were kept back, and in time, launched. It was a reckless decision and not only Pakistan but perhaps the entire world lives with its consequences today.

A political movement is more potent and has a greater chance of success than one based on force. The movement for self-determination in Kashmir was and remains a genuine political movement. The principled support extended to it by successive Pakistani governments, but more than that, by the average Pakistani, is one of the commendable aspects of our history. The wide sympathy that the people of Kashmir and their struggle enjoyed around the world until the induction of militancy and violence was a tribute to their cause and to their tenacity. The gold of that struggle was frittered away because of short-sighted men and a short-sighted policy that was blind to history and unaware of the intrinsic strength that lay at the heart of the Kashmiri urge to be free.

Today, nearly fifteen years after that fateful decision, where do we stand and on what does Pakistan’s case on Kashmir rest, we should ask ourselves? The decision to militarise the movement was not taken either by the people of Pakistan or the people of Kashmir. It was taken behind closed doors by those deluded by a false sense of power, men who fancied themselves to be supreme strategists but were not. Some of them suffered from religious hallucinations and saw the upsurge in Kashmir that had begun with a massive protest march to the UN office in Srinagar, as some kind of a religious and revivalist crusade. The non-Kashmiri elements inducted into the insurrection were fugitives from their lands of birth and in revolt against their own governments and societies. Many of them had been deluded into believing at the time of the Afghan war that they were fighting the good fight for the glory of God and the defence of Islam. And now that the Great Infidel had fled the sacred Islamic land of Afghanistan in defeat and disarray, other manifestations of his Evil had to be confronted elsewhere. These foreigners had no understanding of either the Kashmir cause or its history or of the people on whose behalf they had picked up a gun. Therefore, they only bear secondary blame.

Look at the landscape today. The great Kashmiri movement for self-determination is now seen by the world as a terrorist phenomenon. Pakistan has had to eat humble pie and make a solemn promise not only to India but to the international community that there will no longer be any movement of fighters and equipment from Pakistan into Indian-held Kashmir. In other words, we have confessed to wrongdoing because we were given no other option. We abandoned the Taliban whom the same people who had created militancy in Kashmir had fathered when we sold them down the river when threatened by Bush’s “with us or against us” ultimatum. Should one not ask if all this was to end in such humiliation why were thousands in the first flower of their youth sacrificed? The only growth industry in the Kashmir Valley since 1989 has been graveyards. If you do not believe it, just walk around the city of Srinagar.

Gen. Musharraf’s “enlightened moderation” has to be translated into actions that speak louder than words which alone will impress no one. Unless certain radical adjustments are made at home, Pakistan will remain a lopsided society groping in the dark and stumbling every time it takes a step forward. The General is fond of saying that if you want the army to keep out of politics, you have to bring it in first. On the same logic, if he wants Pakistan to become stable, he has to restore to the ISI its original charter. It must be prevented by law from operating in the domestic political arena. It must also be prevented by law from taking decisions and initiating actions that lie in the area of foreign affairs and international relations. It must have nothing to do with Kashmir or Chechnya or Sinkiang or India. Let Pakistan’s foreign policy be run by the apparatus created for that express purpose: the ministry of foreign affairs under elected leaders.

To this day, the so-called Kashmir information and publicity establishments that The Boys operate inside and outside Pakistan in pursuit of wasteful and muddle-headed policies and projects must be dismantled. I do not wish to go into details but in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s words: Jaan jaiain gay jaan-nay wale …

But let me close what has been a “heavy” piece with a true story that is extremely funny. Everyone knows that the AK government is overseen by the General residing in the salubrious heights of Murree. Some time ago, Muzaffarabad made an appointment that had not been cleared with the brass up above. A letter soon arrived demanding to know the whys and wherefores of the step taken. “The appointment,” Muzaffarabad replied, “was made with the approval of Competent Authority (which is bureaucratese for the government itself).” The reply from Murree was short and prompt. It said, “Competent Authority is hereby instructed not to make such appointments in future.”

The general reaction of the Muslim community, its Pakistani segment especially, since the horrific events of 9/11 and thereafter, has been one of withdrawal from rather than engagement with the society in which its members have chosen to live.

They have sought refuge in orthodoxy, reaching out to an austere, unsmiling version of Islam that they see as their best equipment for dealing with a world that has been turned topsy-turvy thanks to OBL and his diseased worldview. More Muslim women have taken the hijab which they mistakenly believe is their armour against the sinful West. Men have grown beards and/or taken to placing those depressing round skullcaps on their heads.

A woman in Florida — or was it Texas — insisted that the photograph on her driving licence show only her eyes. A girl in a private Catholic school was told to leave after she refused to take off her newly-donned hijab that the school argued correctly could not be allowed as it was not part of the uniform. The various Islamic societies and associations that keep breeding all condemned the school, raising cries of discrimination, narrow-mindedness and anti-Islam sentiment. What is going on?

America is a vast country and a good deal can go on here without attracting much notice, but Europe is different. The situation in England and France is especially worthy of attention. A recent article by Ghyassuddin Siddiqui, founder of the so-called Muslim Parliament in England, published in an Indian journal devoted to Islamic subjects puts it all together rather well.

He writes, “If tomorrow all Muslim women don the jilbab and men grow beards, will the condition of Muslims improve? More likely they will still be despised and marginalised. Muslims must recognise that it is their closed mind-set that has put them on the slippery slope to insignificance. Sadly the pro-hijab conference recently held in London, supported by Ken Livingstone, missed the point.”

He writes about a young Muslim girl about to get married, being reminded that women who look after their husbands “properly” — which translates to getting beaten once or twice a week without complaint — will be able to enter heaven through any of its seven gates. “Muslim women are so used to listening to such garbage that they simply laugh, ignore it and move on”, Siddiqui adds. Another girl was kept from going to school as according to her mother, that was the Sunnah of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Another one was withdrawn from school when she turned fourteen. Four years later the poor thing was asking people if they knew of a “Muslim college” she could go to.

Siddiqui recalls that during debate on the hijab recently arranged by the Oxford Students’ Islamic Society, his attempt to make the point that the Quran stresses modesty of apparel for both men and women received little sympathy. “More scary was the fact that these young people of above-average intelligence seemed more interested in securing a position in the afterlife than in improving their own and others’ lot in this one”, he observes. He is saddened to hear a number of Muslim girls say they would sooner leave school than abandon either hijab or jilbab, the barrel-like garment that is the Iranian (counter) revolution’s gift to us, a gift the women of Iran are now dying to get out of.

Over ten years ago, I saw Iranian women throw off their hijabs and jilbabs the moment the aircraft’s wheels lifted from the tarmac of the Tehran international airport. It was a Swissair flight: they wouldn’t have dared risk that act of “blasphemy” had it been Hawa-paimai-e-Milli Iran. According to Siddiqui, the parents of a Muslim girl at another English school, while denouncing democracy and human rights as “un-Islamic” wanted the school to have her dress as they — not the school — wanted. Double standards are alive and well among the faithful.

Siddiqui argues that by “emphasising hijab as an obligation, not a choice, a faction is making the outward manifestation of dress, rather than modesty in one’s heart, the measure of Muslimness. By making hijab or jilbab a criterion of Islamic identity our clerics are taking on the role of God by laying claim to infallibility. Muslims have to do a lot of soul searching. They shall have to begin by challenging the forces of obscurantism. They must recognise that these forces have brought them nothing but defeat, humiliation and misery. Muslims need an internally-generated intellectual revolution. Small pockets of intellectuals already exist everywhere. What they need is a voice and a forum for their growth and recognition. This bridge-building may ensure that there is enough pressure on the rulers in the Muslim countries to grant basic freedoms to their own people.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

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