Criterion Vol 3 No 2

Criterion
April/June 2008 Volume 3, Number 2
Editorial New Government, Old Problems Governance Reforms in Pakistan A Liberal Islam in South Asia Muslim Radicalism, Western Concerns. The Bomber and the Burqa
S. Mushq Murshed Ishrat Husain A.G. Noorani Tanvir Ahmad Khan Farhana Ali
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The Law of Aerial Bombardment and Civil Casualties: Kosovo and Afghanistan Prof. Hayatullah Khan Security Alliances and Security Concerns: Pakistan and NATO Zulkar Ali Bhuttos Legacy and the Rebuilding of Pakistan Essays Of Tongues and Languages: The Tao of Translation Dimension and Consequences of NATO Expansion to Eurasia: Reviewing Irans Security Environment
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Shahwar Junaid 121
Iqbal Ahmad Khan 138
Toheed Ahmad 163
Arif Kemal 187
Publisher S. Iftikhar Murshed Editor-in-Chief S. Mushq Murshed Consulting Editor Tanvir Ahmad Khan Executive Advisers S. Mashkoor Murshed Riaz Khokhar Aziz Ahmad Khan Fiazullah khilji Editors Muzaffar Abbas (Executive) Navid Zafar (Research)
Marketing Coordinator Aman Abbasi Cover Design by Fariha Rashed Printers Lawyersown Press 28, alfalah Askaria Plaza, Committee Chowk, Rawalpindi. Contact Editor The Criterion House 225, Street 33, F-10/1, Islamabad Tel: +92-51-2210531 Fax: +92-51-2297206
Criterion is a quarterly magazine which aims at producing well researched articles for a discerning readership. The editorial board is neutral in its stance. The opinions expressed are those of the writers. Contributions are edited for reasons of style or clarity. Great care is taken that such editing does not affect the theme of the article or cramp its style. Quotations from the magazine can be made by any publisher as long as they are properly acknowledged. We would also appreciate if we are informed. Subscription: Pakistan, Bangladesh & India Rs. 195 (Local Currency) Overseas US $ 15 The Annual Subscription Price is Rs. 700 or US $ 50 plus postage Price: Rs 195 US $ 15
Editorial NEW GOVERNMENT, OLD PROBLEMS

Despite the imperfections of the 18 February election, the outcome was consequential. Analysts have waxed eloquent about the rout of the so-called kings party and the religious right as well as the ascendancy of moderates. Yet indecision typified the victors of the election who, for several weeks, procrastinated on government formation. While politicians dithered about power sharing, chaos ensued. Extremists unleashed a chain of suicide bombings in the main cities of Pakistan. Negotiations for establishing a national consensus government at the centre culminated in the Murree Declaration between the PPP and the PML (N). The six-point document contained the following critical element: This has been decided in todays summit between the PPP and PML(N) that the deposed judges would be restored on the position as they were on November 2, 2007, within 30 days of the formation of the Federal Government through a parliamentary resolution. Self-adulation and premature optimism ensued obscuring a fundamental flaw in the arrangement which led to the formation of the coalition government. Joint statements and overly optimistic banter camouflaged a core difference between the two parties. PPP co-chairman Zardari, like president Musharraf, is apprehensive about the restoration of the pre-3 November 2007 judiciary. For the former, the possibility of a reversal of the National Reconciliation Ordinance weighs heavily while the latter fears the invalidation of the 5
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October presidential election. Nawaz Sharif, despite the attack on the Supreme Court by PML loyalists during his second prime ministerial term, has extended fullfledged support to the lawyers movement on the restoration of the judges. Any other course would have been unacceptable to civil society and resulted in adverse political consequences. Should the two mainstream parties fall apart, a new PPP-led coalition can be put together at the centre while the Punjab would be governed by the PML (N). This would be reminiscent of the friction between the centre and Punjab in the late 1980s when the two parties were bitter adversaries. After intra-party negotiations and inter-party conspiracies, Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani secured a unanimous and unprecedented vote of confidence from the National Assembly and was finally sworn in as prime minister on 25 March 2008. Gillanis first act as prime minister was to free the judges under house arrest. This resounded positively countrywide and rekindled the hope that the Murree Declaration would be implemented in letter and spirit. The lawyers fraternity accordingly decided to hold their agitation in abeyance in order to enable the government to work out the modalities for the restoration of the judges. In his maiden speech the prime minister also declared: The war on terror has become our war, because it has posed serious threats to our own country. The measures enunciated by Gillani to deal with the problem of extremist violence include a comprehensive economic and social package for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the prospective scrapping of the Frontier Crimes Regulation, and Madrassa reforms. The prime minister extended the olive branch to militants. While addressing the parliament on 29 March 2008 he said, We are ready to talk to all those people who are ready to give up arms and embrace peace. The Tehreek-e-Taliban, in response to this offer, laid down its own preconditions which include the imposition of Shariah and Jirga
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system and severance of all ties with the US. The Taliban leaders reiterated that their jihad against the Americans in Afghanistan would continue and that they would oppose Pakistan if it worked for American interests as its ally. This show of confidence and arrogance on the part of the Taliban is indicative of the dominance they have over the tribal areas and their utter disregard for the writ of the state. A similar situation prevails in Swat. The militants that were routed by the army a few months ago have regrouped and returned under the leadership of Maullanah Fazlullah. The NWFP government has been negotiating with them and the prospect of implementing the Shariah is on the cards. Negotiations under these conditions and dictates should not even be considered by the government. These miscreants and their oppressive and obscurantist interpretation of Islam cannot be given such leeway. Any compromise by the state will further embolden their movement. Cowardly suicide bomb attacks on women, children and girls schools will become a norm in all cities of Pakistan. The Lal Masjid episode, the weak-kneed reaction of the state and the chaos that followed in the federal capital is an example of what can be expected. The problem is complex and multi-layered. The solution lies in a mix of military, political, economic and ideological initiatives. Gen Kayani has affirmed the constitutional obligations of the armed forces and this means the military has to be depoliticised and work in tandem with the elected government. Only then can an effective civilian-military partnership so essential for the fight against terror be established. The ban on army officers from associating with politicians and their recall from civilian posts are welcome first steps. Politically, the old administrative system of assistant commissioners, deputy commissioners and commissioners has to be revived. In FATA, the responsibility of dealing with the tribesmen, who should be associated
CRITERION April/June 2008
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with implementing state policy, must revert to the political agent. The Political Parties Act of 1962 has to be implemented in the tribal areas. The lack of secular political parties has provided religious outfits an unopposed playing field through the management of mosques and madrassas. Madrassas have been referred to as factories of terror as they have been used to train and indoctrinate militants in Pakistan. One of the prime reasons for the success of the seminaries has been their ability and willingness to offer basic amenities, such as board, lodging and education, which the state has failed to provide to families living below the poverty line. The government has to reclaim the public services provided by religious seminaries. Massive projects on a national level pertaining to low income housing, educational and vocational training, health care and employment opportunities have to be implemented. A recent study has shown that amongst the approximate 1.8 million students enrolled in madrassas, economic and social reasons account for 89.58 percent of madrassa enrolment and the remaining 10.42 percent for religious, educational and political considerations. Once these basic necessities are met only then can the ideological battle against extremist violence yield results. Recently Sheykh Waheeduddin Khan, a prominent Indian scholar stated that Dajjal, a concept that some theologians equate with the Islamic antichrist, is not a person, but is a manifestation of violence and terrorism. Shortly afterwards, no less than 20,000 Deobandi clerics collectively declared terrorism as un-Islamic. The Taliban in Pakistan are also mostly Deobandis although the links with the Dar-ul-Uloom of India were severed after partition in 1947 and replaced by Wahabi influence and money. The question that arises here is whether genuine madrassa reform can eventually erode the extremist ideology taught in the seminaries of Pakistan.
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This four-pronged political, military, economic and ideological approach to effectively combat terrorism can only yield results through a collective effort involving the elected government, a reformed military and above all civil society. The new government faces formidable challenges. It has inherited a constitutional crisis, terrorism, power outages, inflation and food shortages. However, the problems are not insurmountable and can be overcome through pragmatic measures reinforced by good governance.
S. Mushq Murshed Editor-in-Chief
GOVERNANCE REFORMS IN PAKISTAN

Ishrat Husain *
Abstract
(Broad-based economic growth and social development are inextricably linked to good governance. Through the years, various commissions and committees have been established in Pakistan to reform the administrative system. These have failed. The reluctance to grant adequate provincial autonomy and over-centralization impeded both good governance and development at the local level. The striking down of the statutory job security guarantees, the erosion of real incomes and political patronage have cumulatively impacted adversely on the quality and efciency of the civil services. The National Commission for Government Reforms, established in April 2006, has been working on an agenda designed to restructure government and revitalize institutions. The provision of education, health care, water sanitation and security have been identied as the core functions of the state. It remains to be seen whether workable proposals are eventually formulated and faithfully implemented for the benet of ordinary citizens. Editor). Governance, Institutions and Development The link between good governance and economic and social development has been well established in the last few decades. Although it is hard to have a precise denition of governance there is a wide consensus that good governance must lead to broad-based inclusive economic growth and social development. It must enable the state, the civil society and the private sector to enhance the wellbeing of a large
* Ishrat Husain is a former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan , former chairman National Commission on Government Reforms and presently Director Institute of Business Administration.
Governance Reforms in Pakistan
segment of the population. If this denition is accepted then economic growth in Pakistan is likely to become unsustainable if a widespread perception persists that the majority of the population has not been gaining from recent growth. This perception, whether right or wrong, erodes political support for continuation of present economic policies and reforms. Why does this perception persist? The main reason is that the overall governance structure through which economic policies are intermediated and translated into economic and social benets for the vast majority has become corroded and dysfunctional. The governance structure of any country consists of judiciary, executive and legislature. If access to the institutions of governance for common citizens is difcult, time consuming and costly, the benets from growth get distributed unevenly as only those who enjoy preferential access to these institutions are the gainers. How far is this true can be gauged by reference to the current state of governance prevailing in the region but particularly applicable in Pakistan? The 1999 and 2005 reports on Human Development in South Asia aptly summarize the situation in the following two extracts: South Asia presents a fascinating combination of many contradictions. It has governments that are high on governing and low on serving; it has parliaments that are elected by the poor but aid the rich; and society that asserts the rights of some but perpetuates exclusion for others. Despite a marked improvement in the lives of a few, there are many in South Asia who have been forgotten by formal institutions of governance. These are the poor, the downtrodden and the most vulnerable of the society, suffering from acute deprivation on account of their income, caste, creed, gender or religion. Their fortunes have not moved with those of the privileged few and this in itself is a deprivation of a depressing nature. (Human Development South Asia Report, 1999) Governance constitutes for {ordinary people} a daily struggle for survival and dignity. Ordinary people are too often humiliated at the hands of public institutions. For them, lack of good governance means police brutality, corruption in accessing basic public services, ghost
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schools, teacher-absenteeism, missing medicines, high cost of and low access to justice, criminalization of politics and lack of social justice. These are just few manifestations of the crisis of governance. (Human Development in South Asia Report, 2005) In the face of this overwhelming evidence of failure of institutions of governance empirical work across countries suggests that economic performance is greatly determined by the quality of institutions. Differences in the quality of institutions help explain the gap in economic performance between rich and poor nations. In addition to the ndings linking institutions with aggregate growth, there is some association between the distribution of income and institutional quality with very unequal distribution of income being associated with a lower quality of institutional development. How have institutional reforms been successfully carried out elsewhere? One of the key factors is that civil servants of high professional calibre and integrity are attracted, retained and motivated and allowed the authority and powers to act in the larger interests of the public at large. This can be accomplished by introducing a meritbased recruitment system, continuous training and skill up-gradation, equality of opportunity in career progression, adequate compensation, proper performance evaluation, nancial accountability and rule-based compliance. Another important factor is responsiveness to public demands. The World Bank (1997) in its report asserts that governments are more effective when they listen to businesses and citizens and work in partnership with them in deciding and implementing policy. Where governments lack mechanisms to listen, they are not responsive to peoples interests. Decentralization can bring in representation of local business and citizens interests. Is there any evidence about a particular form of government that has been relatively successful in implementing these reforms? In Pakistan as elsewhere it has been demonstrated that the nature of the government military, democratically elected, nominated, selected has not mattered
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much. There is no systematic correlation found between the reforms of the underlying institutions and a particular form of government. The challenge of reforming these institutions is formidable as the vested interests wishing to perpetuate the status quo are politically powerful and the coalition and alliances between the political leadership and the beneciaries of the existing system are so strong that they cannot be easily ruptured. The elected governments with an eye on the short term electoral cycles are not in a position to incur the pains from these reforms upfront while the gains accrue later on to a different political party. The authoritarian governments are not effective as they do not enjoy legitimacy for sustaining reforms. Changing institutions is a slow and difcult process requiring, in addition to signicant political will, fundamental but tough measures to reduce the opportunity and incentives for powerful groups to capture economic rents. The imperatives of globalization in the 21st century have given a further impetus to governance reforms. The pathway for countries as to how they can successfully compete with other countries and surge ahead is clearly laid out. The successful countries can bring about an improvement in the wellbeing of their population through markets, trade, investment and exchange. But the state has to play an equally important role in nurturing and creating markets that foster competition and provide information about opportunities to all participants, acting against collusion and monopolistic practices, building capabilities and skills of people to engage in productive activities, setting the rules of the game in a transparent manner and adjudicating and resolving the disputes in a fair and equitable manner. To perform these functions the capacity, competencies and responsiveness of the institutions of state have to be upgraded along with the rules, enforcement mechanisms, organizational structures and incentives. According to Acemoglu and Johnson, (2003) good institutions ensure two desirable outcomes - that there is a relatively equal access to economic opportunity (a level playing eld) and that those who provide labour or capital are appropriately rewarded and their property rights are protected.
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The above analysis and the future needs indicate clearly that institutions play a critical role in economic performance and distributional consequences. The question that arises is how these institutions can be made effective and functional in the context of Pakistan so that the majority of the population are accorded the opportunity to engage in fruitful market activity and improve their wellbeing through their own efforts and through the interventions of the state? Before the agenda for reforms in Pakistan is spelled out, it is essential that the historical evolution of governance is examined in order to understand the context in which this agenda is to be implemented. History of Governance in Pakistan At the time of its independence, Pakistan inherited a well-functioning structure of judiciary, civil service and military but a relatively weak legislative oversight. Over time, the domination of the civil service and the military in affairs of the state disrupted the evolution of the democratic political process and further weakened the legislative organ of the state. The judicial arm, with few exceptions, trudged along vindicating the dominant role of the military and the civil service. The institutions inherited from the British colonial era, suited and were relevant to the requirements of the rulers of those times. After independence, those requirements expanded in scope and content while the level of expectations from the public and their elected representatives was heightened. But these inherited institutions failed to adapt themselves to meet the new challenges of development and social changes and respond to the heightened expectations and aspirations of a free people. The business as usual mode of functioning, the approach and attitudes of the incumbents holding top and middle-level positions in the bureaucracy and manning these institutions did not endear them to either the political leaders or to the general public. Several commissions and committees were constituted in the rst twenty ve years after independence for reform of the administrative structure and civil services. Some changes were introduced during Ayub Khans regime in the 1960s to improve the efciency of the secretariats but the proclivity towards centralized controls and personalized decision making became
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more pronounced in this period. The reluctance to grant provincial autonomy to East Pakistan the most populous province of the country - so remote physically from the hub of decision making i.e., Islamabad led to a serious political backlash and eventual dismemberment of the country into two independent nations. Pakistan continued to suffer from what has been termed as confused federalism in which weak local and provincial bodies are unable to match the ability of the central government to mobilize resources and provide services. Whether it is health or education or highways or agriculture, the federal government has much larger programmes under implementation than the provincial or local governments. Although the money is spent in the provinces or districts, the inability to identify, design, approve and implement these projects caused resentment among the provincial governments. In 1973, a populist government headed by the charismatic Zulkar Ali Bhutto took the rst step to weaken the pervasive hold of the civil services by eliminating the constitutional guarantee of job security. He also demolished the exclusive and privileged role of the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP) within the overall structure of the administrative system. The next twenty ve years witnessed a signicant decline in the quality of new recruits to the civil services as the implicit trade-off between job security and low compensation ceased to operate. Furthermore, the expanding private sector including multinational corporations offered far more attractive career opportunities. The erosion of real wages in the public sector over time also resulted in low morale, de-motivation as well as inefciency and, in the process, corruption became widespread in all echelons of the civil services. The abuse of discretionary powers, the bureaucratic obstruction and the delaying tactics adopted by the government functionaries are all part of the manoeuvring to extract illegal benets for supplementing their emoluments. In real terms the compensation paid to higher civil servants is only one half of the 1994 package. The low wages mean that the civil service no longer attracts the most talented young men and women. Some of the incumbents of the
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civil services, in their instinct of self-preservation, became vulnerable to the machinations of the political regimes in power and many of them got identied with one political party or the other. They also beneted from the culture of patronage practised by the politicians. During the 1990s the replacement of one political party by the other in the corridors of power was followed by changes in the top bureaucracy. This growing tendency of informal political afliation for tenaciously holding on to key jobs was also responsible for the end of an impartial, neutral and competent civil service responsive to the needs of the common man. Loyalty to the ministers, the chief ministers and the prime ministers took priority over the accountability to the general public. The frequent takeovers by the military regimes and the consequential screening of hundreds of civil servants led to subservience of the civil service to the military rulers, erosion of the authority of the traditional institutions of governance and loss of initiative by the higher bureaucracy. The 2001 devolution plan dealt another major blow to the Civil Service of Pakistan as the posts of commissioners, deputy commissioners (DC) and assistant commissioners (AC) were abolished and the reins of district administration were transferred to the elected nazims. To ordinary citizens, the government was most tangibly embodied in these civil servants. It was the DC and AC that they approached on a daily basis. The substitution of the civil servant by an elected head of the administration is quite a new phenomenon and will take some time to sink in. While this transition takes place, the checks and balances implicit in the previous administrative setup have become redundant. The police as a coercive force has, as a consequence, assumed greater clout. The opportunities of collusion between the nazim and the police have multiplied and in many instances alienated the common citizens and diluted the impartiality of the administration at the grass roots levels. The sanctity of private property rights has been threatened in several cases when the nazims have given orders to make unauthorized changes in the land records in the rural areas in collusion with the government functionaries to benet themselves and their cronies. The district administration is yet to grow as an autonomous institution in the face of a hostile environment of centralizing administration, and inequitable resource distribution.
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Reform Agenda for Pakistan The governance reform agenda for the future should therefore be designed to aim at restructuring government and revitalizing institutions to deliver the core functions of the state i.e., provision of basic services education, health, water sanitation and security to common citizens in an effective and efcient manner and to promote inclusive markets through which all citizens have equal opportunities to participate in the economy. The restructuring should lower transaction costs and provide access without frictions by curtailing arbitrary exercise of discretionary powers, reducing over-taxation, minimizing corruption, cronyism and collusion and ensuring public order and security of life and property. To achieve sustained economic growth, a competitive private sector has to be nurtured and relied upon. Therefore a major area of reforms in Pakistan is to create space for the growth of new entrants in the private sector by removing the constraints created by the state in their entry and smooth operations. Despite the pursuit of policies of liberalization, deregulation, de-licensing and disinvestment during the last fteen years, the overbearing burden of government interventions in the business life cycle looms large. The difculties faced by new businesses in acquiring, titling, pricing, transferring and possessing of land, in obtaining no objection certicates from various agencies, in getting water and gas connections, sewerage facilities, reliable electricity supply, access roads, in securing nances for green eld projects or new enterprises using emerging technologies are still horrendous and nerve wrecking. The powers of petty inspectors from various departments/ agencies are so vast that they can either make or break a business. The growing trend towards informalization of the economy particularly by small and medium enterprises is a testimony to the still dominant nature of the government. Over 96 percent of the establishments reported in the economic census of 2005 fall in this category. The attitude of middle and lower functionaries of the government in the provinces and districts towards private business remains ambivalent. Either the functionaries harass the business to extract pecuniary and non-pecuniary benets for themselves or they are simply distrustful, hostile or hesitant towards private entrepreneurs. The multiple agencies involved, too
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many clearances needed and avoidable delays at every level raise the transaction costs for new entrants. Unless the ease of entry and exit is facilitated the competitive forces will remain at bay and the collusive and monopolistic practices of the large businesses will continue to hurt the consumers and common citizens. The second area is the absence of accountability for results. There is both too much and too little accountability of those involved in public affairs in Pakistan. On the one hand, the plethora of laws and institutions such as anti-corruption bureaus, National Accountability Bureau, Auditor Generals reports, Public Accounts Committees of the legislature, parliamentary oversight, judicial activism and the ombudsman system have created an atmosphere of fear, inertia and lack of decision making among the civil servants. On the other hand, instances of rampant corruption, malpractices, nepotism and favouritism and waste and inefciency have become common occurrences in the administrative culture of the country. Too much emphasis on the ritualistic compliance with procedures, rules and form has taken the place of substantive concerns with the results and outcomes for welfare and justice. Introducing transparency through simplication of rules and regulations, codication and updating and wide dissemination through e-governance tools such as a dynamic websites, information kiosks, online access to the government functionaries can help in enforcing internal accountability standards while, at the same time, making it convenient for the citizens to carry out hassle-free transactions. Strong pressure from organized civil society advocacy groups on specic sectors or activities from the media, the political parties, private sector and think tanks can also compel the government departments and ministries to become more accountable for the results. The third area of reforms has to do with the size, structure, scope of the federal, provincial and local governments; the skills, incentives and competencies of the civil servants. The entire value chain of human resource policy from recruitment to compensation needs to the reviewed and redesigned. Similarly the division of functions and responsibilities
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between the different tiers of the government has to be claried and delineated. The elongated hierarchy within the ministry/division has to be trimmed down and the relationship between the ministry and the executive departments, autonomous bodies has to be redened. The governance agenda outlined above should not be considered as a technocratic exercise as it is essentially a political exercise that takes into account the existing power relationships in which the polity is rooted. The balancing of diverse interests of the various stakeholders involves many politically tough choices which cannot be made by the technocrats. The sustainability of reforms requires broad consultation, consensus building and communication to articulate the long term vision. People should see beyond the immediate horizon and buy into the future changes. Concerns, criticism and scepticism should be addressed. The scope, phasing, timing, implementation strategies, mitigation measures for the losers from the reforms should be widely discussed and debated. If things do not proceed the way they were conceptualized, corrective actions should be taken in the light of the feedback received. Citizens charters, citizens surveys and report cards, citizens panels and focus groups should be used as instruments for receiving regular feedback about the impact of reforms on society and its different segments. Care should also be taken to ensure that the governance reforms are not perceived to be driven by external donors. The resistance against these reforms by internal constituencies is invariably quite erce to begin with but any semblance that they are being carried out under external pressure will lead to their premature demise. The argument that externally motivated reforms ignore the domestic context and constraints and are, therefore, unsuitable gets currency and stiffens the resistance. However, there is no harm in looking at the successful experiences of other countries, gain insights or learn lessons from these experiences and apply them in the specic circumstances of Pakistan with suitable modications. Guiding Principles for Reforms The government established the National Commission for Government Reforms (NCGR) in April 2006 and mandated it to prepare
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proposals for governance reforms in Pakistan. The Commission decided that the following broad principles will underpin reforms in each area of responsibility: Civil Services i) Open, transparent meritbased recruitment to all levels and grades of public services with regional representation as laid down in the constitution. ii) Performancebased promotions and career progression for all public sector employees with compulsory training at post induction, mid-career and senior management levels. iii) Equality of opportunities for career advancement to all employees without preferences or reservations for any particular class. iv) Replacement of the concept of Superior Services by equality among all cadres and non-cadres of public servants. v) Grant of a living wage and compensation package including decent retirement benets to all civil servants. vi) Strict observance of security of tenure of ofce for a specied period of time. vii) Separate cadre of regular civil services at the federal, provincial and district levels co-existing with contractual appointments. viii) Creation of an All Pakistan National Executive Service (NES) for senior management positions drawn through a competitive process from the federal, provincial and district level civil servants and outside professionals. ix) Introduction of three specialized cadres under the NES for economic management, social sector management and general management. Structure of Federal, Provincial and District Governments. a) Devolution of powers, responsibilities and resources from the federal to the provincial governments. b) Establishing inter-governmental structures with adequate authority and powers to formulate and monitor policy formulation. c) Clear separation of policy making, regulatory and operational
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d)
e)
f) g)
h)
i)
j)
responsibilities of the ministries/provincial departments. Making each ministry/provincial department fully empowered, adequately resourced to take decisions and accountable for results. Streamline, rationalize and transform the attached departments/ autonomous bodies/subordinate ofces/eld ofces etc., into fully functional arms of the ministries for performing operational and executive functions. Reduce the number of layers in the hierarchy of each ministry/ provincial department. Cabinet secretary to perform the main coordinating role among the federal secretaries on the lines of the chief secretary in the provinces. Revival and strengthening of the secretaries committee at the federal/provincial governments to become the main vehicle for inter-ministerial coordination and dispute resolution among various ministries. District level ofcers interacting with the general public in day-to-day affairs should enjoy adequate powers, authority, status and privileges to be able to resolve the problems and redress the grievances of the citizens. Police, revenue, education, water supply, and health are the departments which are highly relevant for the day-to-day lives of the ordinary citizen of this country. The internal governance structures of these departments, public grievance redress systems against these departments and checks and balances on the discretionary powers of the ofcials have to be introduced.
Business process re-engineering i) All laws, rules, regulations, circulars, guidelines issued by any government ministry/department/agency should be available in its most up-dated version to the general public free of cost in a user-friendly manner on web pages and in electronic and print forms at public places. ii) Service standards with timelines for each type of service rendered at the district, thana and union level should be
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iii)
iv)
v)
vi)
developed, widely disseminated and posted at public places in each department. Rules of business at the federal, provincial and district governments should be revised to make them simple, comprehensible empowering the secretaries/heads of departments/district coordination ofcers to take decisions without multiple references, clearances and back and forth movement of les. Post-audit of the decisions taken should be used to ensure accountability rather than prior clearances. Delegation of nancial, administrative, procurement, human resource management powers should be revisited and adequate powers commensurate with the authority should be delegated at each tier of the hierarchy. Estacode, Financial Rules, Accounting and Audit Rules, Fundamental Rules and all other rules in force should be reviewed systematically and revised to bring them in line with modern management practices. E-government should be gradually introduced in a phased manner. Technological solutions, hardware and software applications are the easy part of the process but the most difcult aspect is the training and a change in the culture, attitude and practices. E-government should be driven by business needs rather than crafted as an elegant technical solution.
Proposed Approach There are several ways to approach the task assigned to the National Commission for Government Reforms (NCGR). One option is to spend several years in preparing a comprehensive blueprint and plan for bringing about the desired changes covering all aspects of the structure, processes and human resource policies of government. This option has the disadvantage that by the time the report is ready, ground realities might have changed. Political support for reforms under this approach is most likely to wane as high costs are incurred upfront in pushing through complex, unpopular and difcult decisions but the benets of the reforms do not become visible in the lifecycle of the political regime in power. The advantage of this option is that all deciencies and
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weaknesses are addressed simultaneously in a comprehensive manner. The second option is to prepare a long-term vision and direction in which reforms should aim and move but combine this with an opportunistic approach whereby easy to implement changes are taken up rst and the more difcult reforms are taken up later. The disadvantage of this option is that the changes introduced may be imperceptible and the time taken for the whole process to complete may be too long. But the advantage is that incremental changes that create a win-win situation for all the stakeholders including politicians have a much better chance of getting accepted and implemented. The Commission has adopted the second option as the modus-operandi for its working. The preference for this option which is less elegant and imperfect lies in a dispassionate reading of the past history of reforms in this country. A large number of erudite commissions and committees have spent virtually thousands of man-years in seeking out views and opinions from a diverse set of opinion makers and public at large, prepared elaborate diagnostic studies and presented very sensible set of recommendations. But except for some tinkering here and there most of the recommendations were not implemented because of lack of political will and courage. The sequencing, phasing and timing of the various reforms and their implementation will be guided by the speed at which consensus is built among the stakeholders and the decisions are made by the top policy makers but it is important to lay down the overall direction in which these reforms will move While the comprehensive reforms will be implemented incrementally a second track will also be followed in which some quick-win reforms will be implemented from time to time as an opportunity presents itself. For this purpose, the Commission will follow a more exible route. For example, it has decided to focus on four major areas where the interaction between the ordinary citizen and administrative machinery of the government is most intense. These four areas are: 1. Police and enforcement of laws.
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2. Land revenue administration 3. Education 4. Health The Commission has formed four sub-committees to review and examine the efforts being made by the government, private sector and civil society in each of these areas and come up with solutions that will make the existing system more efcient and responsive to the needs of the public in the immediate or short run. The Commission has also formed another sub-committee to recommend revision in the Rules of Business for removing impediments in the functioning of the government departments/ministries/ agencies and empowering the heads of the departments to deliver results. The preliminary recommendations of the sub-committees were presented to focus groups of stakeholders drawn from diverse segments of society secretaries committee, political leaders, businessmen, NGOs, academic rened civil servants etc., for soliciting their feedback and views. After incorporating the feedback the sub-committees nalized their recommendations which were discussed by the Commission and then presented for consideration and decisions by the steering committee. The high-powered steering committee is co-chaired by the president and prime minister and consists of the four chief ministers. The committee has decided to provide a legal cover to the Commission so that the recommendations approved by the steering committee are implemented by the federal and provincial governments without further reviews. The Commission will also act as a facilitator and conduit for the reforms formulated by the federal ministries/ provincial governments and table them, after its own analysis for the decisions by the steering committee. To conclude, those who agree that there is a need for these reforms have serious reservations about their implementation. They contend that these reforms cannot be implemented in the real sense unless the bureaucratic actions are insulated from political interference. According to this school of thought, the problem of maladministration and poor
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governance stems from this interference. It must be recognized that in democratic forms of governance, elected leaders will have to respond to their political constituents and the associated vested interests. The accountability for results, rest largely on these politicians and not on the civil servants. If the interference of the politicians is aimed at serving the narrow parochial interests of few individuals or groups rather than the broader collective interests of their constituencies they may end up paying a heavy price at the time of the next elections. Their opponents, the opposition parties and the media scrutiny will keep a watch on their actions and expose them before their constituents. With the passage of time and successive purges at the elections, the impulse to interfere in the affairs of the civil servants for personal and parochial factors will be contained and replaced by the urge to pay greater attention to the collective interests of their constituents. No system is perfect and some elected leaders as well as civil servants will continue to misuse their powers and authority but the extent of such misuse will be reduced with greater accountability.
23
Ishrat Husain BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. 2. World Development Report (1997) World Development Report (2002), Building Institutions for Market (Washington D.C., World Bank. World Economic Outlook (205), Building Institutions Chapter-III (Washington D.C. IMF September). Acemoglu, D and S. Johnson (2000), Unbundling Institutions NBER WP 9934 (Cambridge Mass. NBER) Islam, Roumeen and Claudio Montenegro (2002 What Determones the Qaulity of Institution? WB Policy Research Working Paper 2764 (Washington DC World Bank) Kaufmann D, A. Kray and Zoid-Lobaton (1999) Governance matters, World Bank Policy Research working paper 2195 (Washington DC World Bank) Rodrik D, A. Subramian and F. Trebbiu (2004) Institutions Rule: The primacy of institutions over Geography and Integration in Economic Development Journal of Econ-Gmoth Vol. 9 No. 2. Knack S. and B Keefer (1997) Why dont poor countries catch-up? A cross-national test of institutional explanation, Economic Inquiry 35 (July).
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24
A LIBERAL ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA

A.G. Noorani *
Abstract
(Historically intellectual stagnation in the Islamic world long preceded revivalism and its hideout offshoot, fundamentalism. Western imperialism inspired revivalism. Its opportunism aided fundamentalism. Accordingly, any reform in the Islamic world must grapple honestly with four related tasks: (i) interpretation of some Quranic verses in the light of the times, as against others which are of enduring relevance for all time; (ii) weeding out hadith (compilation of the Prophets sayings) of dubious credibility; (iii) rejection of the authority of the ulema (clerics); (iv) a sound appreciation of Islam in history, especially the role of the rst four caliphs, as distinct from Islam in the Quran. Author). What the Muslim League has done is to set you free from the reactionary elements of Muslims and to create the opinion that those who play their selsh game are traitors. It has certainly freed you from that undesirable element of maulvis and maulanas. I am not speaking of maulvis as a whole class. There are some of them who are as patriotic and sincere as any other; but there is a section of them which is undesirable. Having freed ourselves from the clutches of the British Government, the Congress, the reactionaries and so-called Muslims, may I appeal to the youth to emancipate our women. This is essential. I do not mean that we are to ape the evils of the West. What I mean is that they must share our life, not only social but also political.1 Even when Jinnah spoke thus at the Muslim University Union in the Strachey Hall in Aligarh on 5 February 1938, liberal thinking among the Muslims of the sub-continent was under erce attack. Two of their outstanding thinkers were obliged to compromise outing a strong
* A.G. Noorani is an eminent Indian scholar and expert on constitutional issues.
A.G. Noorani
tradition of free thinking that went back to Shah Waliullah (d.1762) and was nurtured by the founder of the Aligarh Movement, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817 1898) and his yet bolder colleague, Maulvi Cheragh Ali (1844 -95). Iqbal gave up a projected work on ijtihad on the advice of Sayyed Suleiman Nadvi.2 Maulana Azad suppressed the third volume of his commentary the Tarjuman al-Quran.3 How did this come about? Iqbal explained it all too clearly in the late 1930s in a letter to Akbar Shah Mujibabadi: The inuence of the professional maulvis had greatly decreased owing to Sir Syed Ahmad Khans movement. But the Khilafat Committee, for the sake of political fatwas, had restored their inuence among Indian Muslims. This was a very big mistake (the effect of) which has, probably, not yet been realized by anyone. I have had an experience of this recently. I had written an English essay on ijtihad, which was read in a meeting here and, God willing, will be published, but some people called me kar. We shall talk at length about this affair, when you come to Lahore. In these days, particularly in India, one must move with very great circumspection.4 Jinnahs secular politics did put the mullahs back in their proper place. But in 1939, when he propounded the two-Nation theory, they ocked to his support, which he accepted, more so after the 1940 Lahore Resolution on Pakistan. The Congress had begun playing this game much earlier. It supported not only the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Hind but also the Shia Conference. This Jamiat serves in India, still. The pro-Muslim League ulema founded the All-India Jamiat-ul-Ulema-iIslam at Calcutta (now Kolkata) on 26 October 1945, and it ourishes in Pakistan under a changed name, JUI Pakistan. Another poisonous export was the Jamaat-e-Islami. It was founded by Abul Ala Maudoodi in 1941 at Pathankot. He opposed the demand for Pakistan as also the tribal raid in Kashmir. In Pakistan, he took up the Ahmadiya issue in 1949 and ourished thereafter, with Saudi backing and, later, Zias. In Pakistan, the revivalists hold the public and the State to ransom despite electoral debacles. In India, Muslim society struggles to free
26
A Liberal Islam in South Asia
itself from their shackles. Every now and then, poets, scholars and artists are treated to their wrath. To cite an instance, the highly respected Director of the Khuda Baksh Library at Patna, Dr. Abid Raza Bedar, was denounced for his reported remark, at the A.N. Sinha Institute at the launch of Prof. S.M. Mohsins book, Keynote of the Holy Quran, that the word kufr (unbelief) has been misinterpreted and has affected our national integration.5 To what a rich tradition have the Muslims of South Asia turned their backs. Professor Abdullah Saeed, Director of Study of Contemporary Islam at the University of Melbourne, recalls: Modern trends in the interpretation of the Quran may be traced to Shah Waliullah of India (d. 1762). In the course of Shah Waliullahs life, several monarchs occupied the throne in Delhi. The Mughal Empire continued to decline and break up until it was replaced by a Western power in the form of British Raj Shah Waliullah reacted to this changed situation for Muslims in India by initiating his reform movement. He rejected taqlid (blind imitation of early scholars) and advocated ijtihad (independent judgment) and the application of fresh ideas in interpreting the Quran. In emphasizing a move away from the blind following of tradition, Shah Waliullah rejected some accepted views related to the principles of exegesis (usually altafsir). Though Shah Waliullahs reformist ideas about interpretation are not radical from the perspective of the twenty-rst century, they seemed so at the time. They became quite inuential, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to J.M.S. Baljon, from the end of the nineteenth century, Shah Waliullah was loudly acclaimed in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent as the man who discerned the signs of his times. And when at present an Urdu-writing modernist is looking for arguments from Muslim lore, he weighs in with opinions of the Shah.6 Perhaps one of the most radical attempts to reinterpret the Quran in the modern period was by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan of India (d. 1898) who published a six-volume work on the Quran from 1879. He believed that Muslims needed to reassess their tradition, heritage and ways of
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thinking in line with newly emerging knowledge, values and institutions. The gulf between Western and Islamic modes of thought was vast, and Muslims who had been educated in the West or inuenced by Western education were no longer able to comprehend the religious discourse of the ulema of the time. The widening gap threatened the very relevance of Islam as a religion for many Muslims. But such is the clime today that when Raq Zakaria pleaded with the Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, Syed Hashim Ali, and Prof. Atiq Ahmed Siddiqui, Director of the Sir Syed Academy, to publish an English translation of Sir Syeds commentary on the Quran, he found them hesitant as they feared that it might provoke a fundamentalist backlash.7 Less known is Cheragh Ali who spent the better part of his career in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad. In 1833 he published from Bombay The Proposed Political, Constitutional and Legal Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammedan States. In 1885 appeared a work which is of direct relevance to the situation in 2008. It was A critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad. In 1984 the Idarah-i-Adabiyati-Delli (Sic.) published a reprint. The bulk of the book was devoted to establishing, with learning and reasoning, that Islam does not enjoin wars of conquest Neither the wars of Mohammad were offensive, nor did he in anyway use force or compulsion in the matter of belief. All the wars of Mohammad (PBUH) were defensive. Cheragh Ali, however, did not stop there. He submitted the AngloMuhammadan law in British India, which passed for Shariah, to merciless scorn; particularly the Hedaya. In his Conclusions he wrote: The Mohammedan Common Law is by no means divine or superhuman. It mostly consists of uncertain traditions, Arabian usages and customs, some frivolous and fortuitous analogical deductions from the Koran, and a multitudinous army of casuistical sophistry of the canonical legists. It has not been held sacred or unchangeable by enlightened Mohammadans of any Muslim country and in any age since its compilation in the fourth century of the Hejira. All the Mujtahida, Ahl Hadis, and other non-Mokallids had had no regard for the four schools of Mohammadan
28
religious jurisprudence, or the Common Law. (pp. 159 160). Forty-Five years later, in 1930 Iqbal had much the same things to say in his famous lectures The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Sang-e-meel, Lahore). Chapter VI on The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam is particularly relevant. I have no doubt that a deeper study of the enormous legal literature of Islam is sure to rid the modern critic of the supercial opinion that the Law of Islam is stationary and incapable of development. Unfortunately, the conservative Muslim public of this country is not yet quite ready for a critical discussion of Fiqh, which, if undertaken, is likely to displease most people, and raise sectarian controversies, yet I venture to offer a few remarks on the point before us. In the rst place, we should bear in mind that from the earliest times, practically up to the rise of the Abbasides, there was no written law of Islam apart from the Quran. Secondly, it is worthy of note that from about the middle of the rst century up to the beginning of the fourth not less than nineteen schools of law and legal opinion appeared in Islam. This fact alone is sufcient to show how incessantly our early doctors of law worked in order to meet the necessities of a growing civilization.. Turning now to the ground work of legal principles in the Quran, it is perfectly clear that far from leaving no scope for human thought and legislative activity the intensive breadth of these principles virtually acts as an awakener of human thought.. Did the founders of our schools ever claim nality for their reasoning and interpretations? Never. The claim of the present generation of Muslim liberals to re-interpret the foundational legal principles, in the light of their own experience and the altered conditions of modern life, is, in my opinion, perfectly justied. The teaching of the Quran that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems. In view of the intense conservatism of the Muslims of India, Indian judges cannot but stick to what are called standard works. The result is that while the peoples are moving the law remains stationary. Turning to the Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet) he held; we
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must distinguish traditions of a purely legal import from those which are of non-legal character. With regard to the former, there arises a very important question as to how far they embody the pre-Islamic usages of Arabia which were in some cases left intact, and in others modied by the Prophet. It is difcult to make this discovery, for our early writers do not always refer to pre-Islamic usages. Nor is it possible to discover that the usages, left intact by express or tacit approval of the Prophet, were intended to be universal in their application. Shah Wali Ullah has a very illuminating discussion on the point. I reproduce here the substance of his view. The prophetic method of teaching according to Shah Wali Ullah is that, generally speaking, the law revealed by a prophet takes especial notice of the habits, ways, and peculiarities of the people to whom he is specically sent. The prophet who aims at all-embracing principles, however, can neither reveal different principles for different peoples, nor leaves them to work out their own rules of conduct. His method is to train one particular people, and to use them as a nucleus for the building up of a universal Shariat. In doing so, he accentuates the principles underlying the social life of all mankind, and applies them to concrete cases in the light of the specic habits of the people immediately before him. Shariat values (Ahkam) resulting from this application (e.g., rules relating to penalties for crimes) are in a sense specic to that people; and, since their observance is not an end in itself, they cannot be strictly enforced in the case of future generations. Iqbal concluded his analysis by saying It is, however, impossible to deny the fact that the traditionalists, by insisting on the value of the concrete case as against the tendency to abstract thinking in law, have done the greatest service to the Law of Islam. And a further intelligent study of the literature of traditions, if used as indicative of the spirit in which the Prophet himself interpreted his Revelation, may still be of great help in understanding the life-value of the legal principles enunciated in the Quran. Iqbal lamented the closing of the door of ijtihad and this voluntary surrender of intellectual independence. Far less known is another comment by Iqbal in his Presidential Address to the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad on 26 December 1930. His advocacy of autonomous Muslim States along the North-West
30
border aroused interest. It was to be a member of the Indian federation. Only on 21 June 1937 did he advocate partition of India The Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination. I think that the Muslims of north-West India and Bengal ought at present to ignore Muslim minority provinces.8 But to what end? On this, Iqbal was explicit in his Presidential Address: for Islam; an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilize its laws; its education, its culture and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.9 Iqbals Pakistan then was to be a State in which Islam, shorn of the dross accumulated over the centuries, would nd a liberal rational expression with the spirit of modern times. (Note also that, unlike Jinnahs two-nation theory, Iqbals Muslim nation was conned to the north-west and Bengal). But after independence the Muslims of South Asia had no one of such high political stature to guide them. The Munir Report 1954 (Report of the Court of Inquiry to enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953) subjected the religious leaders rhetoric on Islam and on the Islamic State to pitiless scrutiny and exposed their falsehoods. A minority that feels besieged becomes a conservative minority. That apart, the Muslim leadership in India, such as it was, came within the sway of a motley crowd; comprising the Muslim League in the south and the old pro-Congress Jamiat-ul-Ulema in the north. Aligarh Muslim University was torn apart by factions. Since 1973 the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board acquired a monopoly on the reform of Muslim law and exerted itself to avert the day which would put its leaders out of business.10 In Pakistan, President Mohammed Ayub Khan tried manfully to arrest the trend. It is sufcient comment on Indian Muslims that they view with suspicion his Family Laws Ordinance 1960, which reforms the law of marriage and divorce on the basis of Shariah.
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Fazlur Rahman Malik (1919-88) was a major and signicant scholar of Islam. He founded the Islamic Research Institute (now attached to the International Islamic University) in Islamabad in 1960. One fellow researcher described him as probably the most learned of the major Muslim thinkers in the second-half of the twentieth century, in terms of both classical Islam and Western philosophical and theological discourse. His father, Maulana Shahab al-Din, was a scholar at Deoband. Fazlur Rahman received his doctorate from Oxford University and taught at Durham University and McGill University before returning to Pakistan to set up the Islamic Research Institute. The Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan 1966-1972 contain two revealing entries about him. One of 30 April 1967 reads: Dr. Fazlur Rahman of the Islamic Research Institute came to see me. He was engaged in writing a book on ideology of Islam. I read his rst chapter. It is fascinating, but the language he has used is scholarly and difcult. It has been arranged to attach a couple of knowledgeable people with him so as to discuss the theme of each chapter and then put it in simple language. The doctor can then review it to ensure that his theme has been properly brought out. I am sure that this book, when written, will be a real contribution in the service of Islam.11 The President clearly wanted to encourage the study of a liberal scholarly view of Islam. But he was powerless to protect the great scholar. The entry of 5 September 1968 reads: Dr. Fazlur Rahman, Director of the Islamic Research Institute came under countrywide adverse criticism fanned by the ignorant and politically motivated mullahs. The allegations, which were totally false, were made against some remarks made in his book, Islam, which he wrote some years ago and which was later published by the Oxford University Press. This book is a highly scholarly work written for a European audience and an attempt to remove some false impressions about Islam. When the criticism gained momentum he held two press conferences refuting all the allegations. These clarications would have satised any honest critic, but the mullah, who regards any original and objective thinking on Islam as his deadly enemy, was not going to be pacied. This sort of argument is just the grist he wants for his mill. Meanwhile, the administrators at
32
the centre and the province got cold feet. Some of them persuaded the doctor to resign. He must have also got frightened. After all, it is not easy to stand up to criticism based on ignorance and prejudice. So I had to accept his resignation with great reluctance in the belief that he will be free to attack the citadel of ignorance and fanaticism from outside the government sphere. Meanwhile, it is quite clear that any form of research on Islam which inevitably leads to new interpretations has no chance of acceptance in this priest-ridden and ignorant society. These people will not allow Islam to become a vehicle of progress. What will be the future of such an Islam in the age of reason and science is not difcult to predict.12 The tacit prediction came true. Dr. Fazlur Rahman moved to the University of Chicago and won undying fame. His work Islam & Modernity is a classic.13 There are three legacies from the past which Muslims must discard the ossied Sharia which conicts with the Quran; the notion of the Islamic State which the Quran does not support and which never existed in history; Jihad which is a perversion of the concept as propounded in the Quran. Accordingly any reform in the Islamic world must grapple honestly with four related tasks: (i) interpretation of some Quranic verses in the light of the times, as against others which are of enduring relevance for all times; (ii) weeding out hadith (compilation of the Prophets sayings) of dubious credibility; (iii) rejection of the authority of the ulema (clerics); the fatwa is a mere opinion. During the Raj, fatwas were sold to the British; (iv) a sound appreciation of Islam in history, especially the role of the rst four Caliphs, as distinct from Islam in the Quran. It was only a century after the Prophets death that the task of compiling the hadith was undertaken. There is not the slightest doubt about the integrity and authenticity of the Quran. One cannot say that of the hadith. The Prophet died at Medina on 8 June 632. Al-Bukhari, a man of piety and compiler of the most respected of the hadith, was born in the ninth century (194 of the Hejira, he died in 256). He was
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methodical. Having collected 600,000 hadith, he retained only 7,257 omitting 4,000 repetitions. Thus less than two centuries after the Prophets death there were already 596,725 false hadith. Al-Bukhari told off a king who wanted him to read some excerpts in private. Go, he told the emissary, tell your master that I hold knowledge in high esteem, and I refuse to drag it into the antechambers of sultans. Islamic history would have been different if others had his integrity. This brings us to the question, precisely what had Fazlur Rahman done to invite the trouble. There was a long standing debate among Muslim scholars on the distinction between Sunnah and Hadith. To S.M.Yusuf. for example, Sunnah refers to practice as distinct from any documentation of it (hadith). Practice, unbroken and untainted, is a proof by itself.14 Fazlur Rahmans offence is described well by Prof. Daniel Brown in his work Rethinking Tradition in modern Islamic thought. To recall the promise of that era is to realize the intellectual poverty in South Asias Muslims today. He writes: A similar but much more sophisticated attempt to separate the authority of sunna from the strict authenticity of hadith is found in the work of the Pakistani modernist Fazlur Rahman. Rahman articulated his views on hadith, sunna, and other relationship during the 1960s when he served as director of Pakistans Central Institute for Islamic Research, an institution established by the regime of General Ayyub Khan to aid in promoting modernist interpretations of Islam compatible with the needs of the regime. His work on sunna must be understood against the background of religious politics in Pakistan during the 1960s and, in particular, against the background of the controversy between Ghulam Ahmad Perwez and his opponents among the Pakistan ulama. Perwezs radical rejection of sunna and his particular vision of the Islamic state as true heir to Prophetic authority was associated in the minds of his opponents with the efforts of the Ayyub government to bypass the ulama in order to promote modernist Islam. A number of controversial government actions seemed to suggest that Ayyub was sympathetic to Perwezs ideas.
34
Opponents of the government suspected, quite correctly, that Ayyub was intent on bypassing traditional sources of religious authority in his formulation of policy. They concluded, probably incorrectly, that Perwezs ideas were exercising an undue effect on government policy. Thus the debate over the relationship between religion and state and the relative role of the ulama and the government in formulating policy on religious questions became focused on Perwezs ideas, and particularly on the issue of sunna. Attention was also focused on the regimes major voice in religious matters, the Central Institute for Islamic Research and its director. Against this background of heated controversy, Fazlur Rahman entered the fray with the publication of a series of articles on the authority of sunna and the authenticity of hadith.15 By his own account he was responding through these articles16 to two quite separate, although interrelated, controversies. He was responding, rst of all, to the immediate controversy in Pakistan aroused by Perwezs radical rejection of sunna. But he was also responding to the ongoing international scholarly debate about Joseph Schachts sceptical views on the authenticity of hadith which had been published some years earlier in his Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Fazlur Rahman refuted Schacht. In 1981 came a vindication of sorts, belatedly, in a ruling of the Federal Shariat Court in a case concerning rajm (stoning to death for adultery) which is contradicted by a Quranic verse (24:2) prescribing a hundred lashes.17 Justice Salahuddins remarks touched a raw nerve. Apart from the fact that Hadith cannot override the denite and clear injunctions of the Quran, the Ahadith (particular to the case) themselves suffer from inrmities. In the circumstance it is neither safe nor reasonable to found a grave punishment like that of (rajm) on such Ahadith and make it an obligatory rule of law. In 1968 the mullahs decided that the debate had to be ended. Fazlur Rahman had to go. A debate of great promise and consequence was aborted to the loss of Muslim scholarship in the entire region. Elsewhere it picked up speed. Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan scholar, submitted it to rigorous scrutiny in Women and Islam.18 It is neither the Quran nor
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the Messenger of Allah but certain hadith that have served as texts to sanctify oppression of women. Al-Bukharis work (Sahih) has been one of the most highly respected reference for 12 centuries. This Hadith is the sledgehammer argument used by those who want to exclude women from politics, indeed from much else. Al-Bukhari retained as authentic only 7,257 Hadith, if the repetitions, which number 4,000 are eliminated. The great lesson to be drawn from Al-Bukharis experience in coming to grips with the ight of time and failing memory is that one must be true to ones method and honour it, by continuing to mistrust, all those who regulate their affairs with the help of Hadith. If at the time of Al-Bukhari that is, less than two centuries after the death of the Prophet there were already 596,725 false Hadith in circulation (600,000 minus 7,275 plus 4,000), it is easy to imagine how many there are today. The most astonishing thing is that the scepticism that guided the work of the founders of religious scholarship has disappeared today. In two whole chapters Mernissi takes two signicant cases of misogynistic hadith by witnesses of dubious repute whose false testimony played havoc for centuries. One is Abu Bakra, not to be confused with the great rst Caliph, Hazrat Abu Bakr al-Siddiq. He reported the Prophet as saying those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity. He recalled this and other saying at convenient moments. He was convicted of and ogged for false testimony by the legendary Caliph Umar Ibn Al-Khattab. Al-Tabari was against exclusion of women from politics. Another such witness was Abu Hurayra. Mernissi points out: There is no trace in al-Bukhari of Aishas refutation of the Hadith. They told Aisha that Abu Hurayra was asserting that the Messenger of God said: Three things bring bad luck: house, woman and horse. Aisha responded: Abu Hurayra learned his lessons very badly. He came into our house when the Prophet was in the middle of a sentence. He only heard the end of it. What the Prophet said was May Allah refute the
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Jews, they say three things bring bad luck, house, woman and horse. Not only did Al-Bukhari not include this correction, but he treated the Hadith as if there was no question about it. He cited it three times, each time with a different transmission chain. Thus procedure generally strengthens a Hadith and gives the impression of consensus concerning it. Is it any wonder that both the Caliphs Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and Umar ibn Al-Khattab forbade the citation of hadith; the latter, even whipping the offenders. But Sir Syeds legacy was rejected and his intellectual heir, Fazlur Rahman, had to quit his country. The Indian scholar Asghar Ali Engineer remarks: Quran gives equal rights and equal dignity to both men and women but hadith literature is full of ahadith contradicting this Quranic approach. For example in Bukhari we nd a hadith which stands in contradiction to the Quranic verse 33:35. The hadith is narrated thus: The Prophet (PBUH) urged the women to be generous with their gifts, for when he had glimpsed into the ames of hell, he had noted the vast majority of people being tormented there were women. The women were outraged, and one of them instantly stood up and demanded to know why that was so. Because, he replied you women grumble so much, and show ingratitude to your husbands. Even if the poor fellows spent all their lives doing things for you, you have only to be upset at the least of thing and you will say, I have never received any good from you. At that the women began vigorously to pull off their rings, and throw them into Bilals Cloak (Bukhari 1.28. Abdu Dawud 439). See the content and tenor of this hadith. It is full of anti-women attitude and women are supposed to be, in this hadith, ungrateful to their husbands. As against this see the Quranic verse 33.35 which says: Surely the men who submit and women who submit, and the believing men and the believing women, and the obeying men and the obeying women, and the truthful men and truthful women, and the patient men and patient women, and the humble men and humble women, and the charitable men and the charitable women, and fasting men and fasting
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women, and the men who guard their chastity and the women who guard, and the men who remember Allah and women who remember Allah has prepared for them forgiveness and mighty reward. See how in this verse Quran treats men and women equally and talks of equal degree of forgiveness and equal reward. In the above hadith, on the other hand, more women than men are consigned to ames of hell because they are ungrateful to their husbands.19 A team of reformist Islamic scholars at Ankara University, acting under the auspices of the Diyanet or Directorate of Religious Affairs, the government body which oversees the countrys 8,000 mosques and appoints imams, is said to be close to concluding a reinterpretation of parts of the Hadith, the collection of thousands of aphorisms and comments said to derive from the Prophet Muhammad and which form the basis of Islamic jurisprudence or sharia law.20 The Quran is the only source that escapes criticisms of unreliability. Out of a total of 6,236 verses, revealed over 22 years, between 200 500 are estimated to be law-like rules. Mutazilites were the ulema whose school of thought became important in the mid-eighth century (Christian Era) and who ascribed a key role to reason in their research as opposed to those who constantly invoked the hadiths in their creation of new laws. The Mutazilites explained the Quran itself by constantly referring to reason. They made reason the very criterion of religious law. In this way, they were able to develop extremely bold legal constructs. They were hunted down as indels as early as 546 (CE). Their writings were thoroughly destroyed. It is only in the last century or less, since the rediscovery of ancient manuscripts, that we have had direct access to their writings. With the crushing of the Mutazilites, the spirit of imitation carried the day over the spirit of reection. The gates of ijtihad (reasoning), itself a source Islamic law, were closed. What the founder of the Aligarh Movement wrote of the hadith over a century ago will shock the Muslims in the subcontinent today: It is
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the most sacred of all Islamic lore, yet Caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar had forbidden people to narrate a hadith. The latter even whipped offenders and imprisoned Ibn Masud. Abu Darda and Abu Masud Ansari for narrating traditions. In fact Abu Bakr burned all those traditions, which he had collected. Evidently the collection of tradition started in earnest only after the death of Caliph Umar (644) whom Caliph Uthman succeeded.21 Hafeez Malik, a distinguished Pakistani scholar records: The founding of four schools of jurisprudence started the decline of ijtihad. People began to follow them blindly they do so to this day. Many ulema fabricated false hadith. He set out 38 of them, which Sir Syed Ahmad Khan had listed in 1871. Some are still in vogue. It is, then, on the Quran that we must largely depend. Fazlur Rahmans double movement theory is brilliant: If we look at the Quran, it does not in fact give many general principles for the most part it gives solutions to and rulings upon specic and concrete historical issues, but as I have said, it provides, either explicitly or implicitly, the rationales behind these solutions and rulings, from which one can deduce general principles. In building any genuine and stable Islamic set of laws and institutions, there has to be a two-fold movement. First one must move from the concrete case treatments of the Quran taking the necessary and relevant social conditions of that time into account to the general principles upon which the entire teaching converge. Second, from the general level there must be a movement back to specic legislation, taking into account the necessary and relevant social conditions now obtaining.22 He complains that no serious effort is made to read the Quranic verses in the order in which they were revealed. That would show the context. If the Quran must be read in context, the hadith can do with close scrutiny and the ulema must be properly sized up. Maududi has been called erudite by some. Fazlur Rahman held that he was by no means an accurate or profound scholar. In none of the states of South Asia India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
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and Sri Lanka would the Muslims have welcomed such views, judging by the recurring outbursts over tries; more likely than not, tolerated Fazlur Rahman even after the fame he had won in the entire world of Islamic scholarship. But the problems which Muslims of South Asia face are in no hurry to run away. They persist and will continue to persist unless they are faced and resolved honestly and boldly. That is where this scholars greatest service lies. He pointed out: The rst essential step to relieve the vicious circle is for the Muslim, to distinguish clearly between normative Islam and historical Islam. Unless effective and sustained efforts are made in the direction, there is no way visible for the creation of the kind of Islamic mind I have been speaking of just now. No amount of mechanical juxtaposition of old and new subjects and disciplines can produce this kind of mind. If the spark for the modernization of old Islamic learning and for the Islamization of the new is to arise, then the original thrust of Islam of the Quran and Muhammad must be clearly resurrected so that the conformities and deformities of historical Islam may be clearly judged by it.23 Another South Asian who struck a fresh note is Shabbir Akhtar. Born in Pakistan, he settled in Bradford, England after graduating in philosophy at Cambridge and winning a doctorate in comparative religion. His book A Faith for All Seasons: Islam and the Challenge of the Modern World24 is little known. This is one of the most stimulating and original works on Islam that has appeared in a long while. Its main purpose is to prod Muslims to overcome the paralysis of the mind that has aficted them and rendered them unable to respond to the challenges of secular modernity. Modern Muslims are as a group of people, embarrassingly unreective: it were as though Allah had done all the thinking for his devotees After developing a great national philosophical tradition, the adherents of Islam have lapsed into an intellectual lethargy that has already lasted half a millennium Owing to an absence of sceptical and liberal inuences, itself traceable to the lack of an extant philosophical tradition, few Muslims have even recognized the threats of secularity and ideological
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pluralism that our current circumstance brings in its train. His counsel to Muslims is not to turn their backs on Islam, but to discover for themselves that Islam is, indeed, a faith for all seasons. He denes three problems which are discussed throughout the book the religious ban on critical assessment of revealed claims; the true ofce of religion in theology and the justication for the inquiring mind in matters theological. Far from turning their backs on the faith, he emphasises the need for its renewal. The call for Islamic liberalism is in essence a call for the renewal of the faith. A devout Christian scholar, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who taught Islamic history at the Forman Christian College in the 1940s held: Our own view is that liberalism and humanism in the Muslim world, if they are to ourish at all, may perhaps be Islamic liberalism and Islamic humanism; or that: in any case, some basis must be found for matters of this weight.25 Yet another South Asian offers the same wise counsel. But he also lives abroad. He is Muqtedar Khan. Born in India in 1966, where he earned a degree in engineering and an MBA, he received his doctorate in government from Georgetown University and is now on the faculty of the University of Delaware. His forthcoming book on Islamic democratic theory should be thought-provoking, judging by his essay in Islam in Transition : Muslim Perspectives26 Read this: Reason, as Imam Sha himself suggests, is Allahs greatest gift to humanity. Without reason the human agent is nothing but a beast incapable of conceiving or realizing his/her divine purpose. Reason is the singular element that constitutes the human and enables everything else. Even the Quran needs reason to make itself available to us. The limitation of reason in the theory of ijtihad has had an adverse effect on the very theory of knowledge in Islam. The epistemological dilemma of using reason for practical and other purposes such as medicine, while circumscribing it in Islamic studies in order to conserve legal thinking has led Muslims to reach and maintain mutually contradictory positions. For example, nearly all Muslim thinkers, particularly those grounded in the Islamic traditions and genre, maintain the unity of knowledge as a fundamental
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epistemological truth. These same Muslims continue to maintain a stated or implicit boundary between secular and sacred knowledge. Reason reigns in the former while the latter is supposed to be ruled by revelation. Indeed, traditions and metaphorical thinking masquerade as revelation in the realm of sacred knowledge. The most signicant consequence of this double-think has led to the decline of both forms of knowledge in the Muslim world. There is no doubt in my mind that the decline or rather stagnation of Islamic thought in all realms is due to the leash that the fuqha (jurists) have placed on reason. There is a vibrant movement for reversal of Islam which has been noticed by Westerners. Nicholas D. Kristof noted that apart from the thread of fundamentalism equally real is the thread of reform. Islamic history has never been without dissenters and heretics. Particularly strong is the Muslim womens voice for reform.27 Prof. Mehran Kamrava of the California State University, Northridge produced a timely and telling collection of writings by creative Muslim thinkers whose views were neglected by those obsessed with the utterances of the fundamentalists, The New Voices of Islam: Reforming Politics and Modernity. 28 He notes that over the past two decades or so, at a time when the forces of Islamic fundamentalism have emerged as the dominant face of Islam in the West, a vibrant and highly inuential discourse by a number of prominent Muslim thinkers is seeking to reform and reformulate some of the main premises of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Throughout the Muslim world, from Indonesia and Malaysia in Southeast Asia to Algeria and Morocco in North Africa, there has emerged a group of highly articulate and inuential public intellectuals whose ideas are inspired by reformist interpretations of Islam. Their voices might be faint and difcult to hear, downed by the boisterous violence of self-righteous fundamentalists whose claims of exclusivity leave no room for discourse and debate. Their writings form part of a proud tradition of reformist Muslim thought that dates back to at least the late eighteenth century and even before. Todays reformists do not represent a novel or new phenomenon in Islam. What they do represent is a vision of Islam and
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its role in human polity that is radically different from that advocated by orthodoxy. Included in the book are 13 of the most renowned and inuential Muslim reformist thinkers alive today Leila Ahmed (Egypt and the United States), Nasr Abu Zaid (Egypt), Moahmmed Arkoun (Algeria and France), Hasna Hana (Egypt), Fethullah Gulen (Turkey), Mohsen Kadivar (Iran), Fatima Mernissi (Morocco), Tariq Ramadan (Switzerland), Muhammad Shahrour (Syria), Abdolkarim Soroush (Iran), Mohamed Talbi (Tunisia), and Amina Wadud (United States.).Not included because of space limitations are Huseyn Atay (Turkey), Rachid Ghannouchi (Tunisia), Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari (Iran), Anwar Ibrahim (Malaysia) and Abdurrahman Wahid (Indonesia), among others. A notable exception is the South African Scholar Farid Esack, a powerful advocate of the Islamic theology of liberation. Another notable exception is the Tunisian Mohamed Chars work Islam and Liberty : The Historical Misunderstanding.29 The work draws heavily on writings in French by Arab and European scholars, which are not cited in English books. The authors analyses are based on the Quran. He faced the problems boldly at the very outset. Islam is no less capable of evolution than Christianity or Judaism. But whereas, over the past few centuries Europeans have undergone profound technological, economic, cultural and political changes, often amid considerable suffering and with major ebbs and ows, the Muslim peoples have fallen greatly behind in all spheres. This is not a fate to which they are doomed for ever, it is possible for them to close the gap. Historically intellectual stagnation in the Islamic world long preceded revivalism and its hide-out offshoot, fundamentalism. Western imperialism inspired revivalism. Its opportunism aided fundamentalism (witness : Afghanistan and Somalia). Year after year the gulf has been widening between an idealized ancestral system, which is held sacred and disseminated through school, and a new system that is ever more widely regarded as an alien import contrary to Islam. This is a grave discrepancy that tears people apart and brings them to the verge of schizophrenia for they do not wish to sacrice either Islam or modernity. They are as attached to the Islamic
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religion, as they are to the structure of the modern state, which they insist should be genuinely democratic and representative. The political Islamist wants his imagined historical Islam to prevail over modernity. The modernist seldom rises to the intellectual challenge of understanding Islam as well as modernity. There is no credible counter-discourse, especially among Muslims of the subcontinent. Most of them think in stereotypes. For the lay Muslim, the disconnect between the faith he learns at home and the rationalism and knowledge he acquires at school and in college is painful. He wants to be a good Muslim; yet nds the Islam preached from the pulpit strange, almost irrelevant. A Muslim student learns one truth at an English-medium school, another from devout parents at home. Bafed, he either clings to the faith or abandons it. Neither course does homage to reason or justice to the faith and the role of religion in an individuals life. If in Muslim countries, an authoritarian state sties free debate, the same job is undertaken in countries where Muslims are a minority by the bigoted, ignorant mullah in complicity with Muslim politicians. Without free thought and free discourse, Muslim society stagnates intellectually and morally, even if some Muslims prosper economically. The gravest, most fateful mistake by Muslims over the centuries is a palpable, wilful misconstruction of Quranic messages on marriage. This is a scripture, not a statute. Judges say that the worst way to read a Constitution is to read it literally and that every document must be read as a whole. Now read the Quranic verses for yourself in the Fourth Surah (chapter) on Women. The second verse in this Sura enjoins: render unto the orphans their possessions. The third says: If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four: But if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one. That will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice. This verse is clearly illustrative, not mandatory. Honestly read,
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monogamy is what it enjoins; polygamy is permitted in that specic situation and subject strictly to the overriding condition of equal treatment. Later on, another verse (129) in the same Surah says in categorical terms; And you cannot do justice between wives, even though you (wish it). To the true believer the Holy Quran is in the Word of Allah. This is His assessment of the nature of His creature, man. It implies a clear prohibition of polygamy. Abdullah Yusuf Ali records in his commentary on the Quran that the immediate occasion for the verse was the battle of Uhud, which left behind many orphans and widows. This brings us to a fundamental of Quranic interpretation reading the text in its context. Even those who disagree with that, cannot honestly ignore the overriding prohibition (4 : 129). It is, however, on a dishonest reading of the Quran, that Muslim women have suffered for centuries at the hands of men and mullahs. They still do. It is the same story in regard to divorce. The law in force in India is not Islamic law of the Sharia, but Anglo-Mohammedan law, which the courts followed during the Raj. In 1905, an English judge of the Bombay High Court, Justice Batchelor, was honest to admit that there can be no doubt that talaq-ul-bidat (the triple, irregular divorce) is good in law, though bad in theology. These instances reveal the perversion of the faith by men in authority; the denial of ijtihad. It is a parlous situation. The ulema lack the intellectual equipment, the courage and the desire to think afresh. Politicians feed on the peoples ignorance. Intellectuals are either apathetic or seek short cuts. The winds of change sweeping over the Muslim world elsewhere, the intellectual ferment, stop at the shores of the South Asian subcontinent. Verily never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change it themselves. (Quran; 13 : 11).
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References:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah, compiled and edited by Jamiluddin Ahmad, Sheikh Ashraf, vol. 1, p.43. Fazlur Rehman, 1982, p.120. Ali Ahraf and Mushirul Hasan, Islam and Indian Nationalism, Reections on Abul Kalam Azad, Manohar, 1992, p.116. Muhammad S. Ikram, Modern Muslim India and Pakistan, 1970, pp.175-6. Vide The Times of India, 2 June 1992 for the details of the instructive episode. Modern Muslim Koranic Interpretation (1880-1960), L.J. Brill, 1968. The Times of India, 26 November 1988. Hafeez Malik, Iqbal, 1971, p.388. Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (Editor), Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents, vol.II 1924-1927; p.160. Vide the writers Muslims of India. A Documentary Record 1947-90, Oxford University Press, 2003. Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan 1966-1972, Edited and annotated by Craig Baxter, Oxford University Press, Karachi, p.90. Ibid., p.253. Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 1978. S.M.Yusuf, An Essay on the Sunnah, Lahore, 1966. Prof. Daniel Brown, Rethinking Tradition in modern Islamic Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.102. Published in Islamic Studies in 1962. A compilation appeared in Islamic Methodology in History,Karachi, 1965. Hazoor Baksh vs. Federation of Pakistan; All Pakistan Legal Decisions. 1981, FSC. Mernissi, Fatima, Women in Islam, Blackwell Publishers, 1991. Janata, weekly, Mumbai, 17 February 2008. Ian Traynor Guardian, 27 February 2008. Quoted in Hafeez Malik; The Religious Liberalism of Sir Sayyid Khan, The Muslim World, Vol. LIV, No.3, 1964, p.163. Islam and Modernity, p.20. Ibid., p. 141. Akhtar, Shabbir, Islam and the Challenge of the Modern World, 1990, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago. Islam in Modern History, 1957, p.303. Donohue J John, Esposito L John, Islam in Transition: Modern Perspectives, Oxford University Press, 2006. International Herald Tribune, 16 October 2006. Kamrava, Mehran, The New Voices of Islam: Reforming Politics and Modernity, I.B. Tauris, London, 2006. Char, Mohamed, Islam and Liberty: The Historical Misunderstanding, Zed Books, London, 2006.
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MUSLIM RADICALISM, WESTERN CONCERNS

Tanvir Ahmad Khan *
Abstract.
(Religious extremism as a source of violence has a long history and the three great monotheistic religions have grappled with issues of just wars and illegitimate use of force for centuries. Islam has clear injunctions on the concept of a just war and abhors coercion and violence outside their ambit. Yet, since 9/11, western discourse has tended to argue that violence is intrinsic to Islam. A far more protable approach is to contextualise current events in the Muslim world in historical situations of external aggression, occupation and national humiliation. There is also an urgent need to recognise that movement of labour from the South to North is an inevitable consequence of globalisation. Creative solutions have to be found for tensions generated by the growing number of expatriate communities in western societies. Author) There is widespread concern in the West about the problems of Islamic radicalisation in Pakistan and the region in which it occupies a sensitive geopolitical location. It is often argued that global peace and stability depend in no small a measure on the outcome of the so-called war on terror now being waged by a US-led coalition of nations in this particular theatre. Apart from the fairly large contingent of American troops battling the resistance since the invasion of 2001, soldiers of some European NATO member states are in harms way in Afghanistan. The war they are embroiled in has divided European opinion as few issues in contemporary history have done. According to NATO ofcials,
* Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former ambassador and foreign secretary of Pakistan. This essay is based on a presentation made by him to an international conference held in the Netherlands in October 2007.
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the future of their military alliance - easily the most powerful in modern history - hinges on victory in that war-torn land. This rather startling assessment is made against the backdrop of pervasive opposition to this conict seen in European parliaments and in the larger battles of public opinion. By now the struggle in Afghanistan has become indistinguishable from its spill-over into Pakistan. There is, indeed, a three-decade old nexus between Muslim activism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The hope that Pakistan could somehow ward off the inter-connectedness of events in the two neighbouring countries ---- what in the semantics of our times is often called a blowback has turned out to be illusory and nearly one hundred thousand Pakistani troops are stretched along a 2,500 kilometre border to contain what has been described as a twilight struggle against a network of non-state actors waging a holy war. The region also includes Iran where one of the great revolutions of the 20th century overturned an existing internal and regional order. This revolution which established the term political Islam in contemporary discourse has not run its full course; nor has it found a modus vivendi especially with powerful states that have been seeking its reversal for twenty eight years. A state of siege is still a cause for rekindling the res of the Iranian revolution as, indeed, for the Iranian quest for defensive space around the heartland of the revolution. In much of Central Asia, the successor states of the Soviet Union have not been able to accommodate even mild Muslim revivalism and have thus contributed to its radicalisation. Since 1989, Muslim militants have challenged Indian control of Kashmir. In fact, in the entire region a legacy of anticolonialism fuses with a more particular Muslim resentment against what is widely perceived as a resurgence of imperial attitudes, a virtual western re-conquest of the greater Middle East. Before one turns to the question whether Muslim activism in a country like Pakistan has become part of a seamless global Islamic war against the West and if so to what extent and why, it is salutary to recall briey the dynamics of Muslim revival in South Asia. There was a long period of decline before Great Britain delivered the coup de
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grace and destroyed Muslim power from one end of the sub-continent to the other. Initially, the Muslims bore the brunt of British reprisals against the forces that tried to drive them out of India in 1857. As they recovered from the initial shock, their responses to the tragedy of their fall varied signicantly. There was the refuge offered by a quietist Su interpretation of Islam that sidestepped questions of resistance. Some of the Ulema sought to evade strife by declaring that British colonial rule in India did not interfere with the observance of Islam and was not manifestly unjust; India, therefore, was Darul Aman (abode of peace) and did not need armed resistance. A different tradition exemplied by Shah Waliullah, Shah Ismail and Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly emphasised the concept of a just war (Jihad) to save the Muslims of the sub-continent from the emerging Sikh and Marhatta warlords as well as from a creeping annexation of Muslim lands by the East India Company. Sensing a danger from evangelical proselytising Christian missions, the Muslims turned some of the madrassas like the famous Deoband into fortresses for the defence of faith and doctrine. The revolt of 1857 was a watershed. A section of the community concluded their introspection on the decline of Muslim power by seeking a creative encounter with the New Age. Led by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the founder of Aligarh Muslim University, a group of Muslim notables saw amelioration of the plight of Muslims in modern western education rather than in reversion to orthodoxy and armed struggle. A fundamental difference in strategies advocated to secure the future of Islam in South Asia thus initiated an unnished dialectical tussle between tradition and modernity. The controversial address of Pope Benedict XVI delivered at the University of Regensburg on 12 September 2007 differentiated between Islam and Christianity on the grounds that the Judeo-Christian civilisation had created a synthesis of Faith and Reason through an interaction with Greek philosophy. For the reformists in the Indian subcontinent and in many other Muslim countries which were reacting to the colonial dominance with a robust intellectual revival, Islam has had its Hellenic moment long before the Christian world. They now sought reconstruction of Islamic thought by reviving that lost renaissance in the dominant Islamic discourse. The Islamic modernists in India attributed the Muslim decline to the Ulema clinging to an atrophied
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and skeletal tradition that caused stagnation. By abandoning critical thought and innovation, they had left Islam devoid of its erstwhile depth, diversity, and critical apertures.1 They argued that there was no contradiction between Revelation and Reason. They went back to the Quran to substantiate their view that revelation emanated from a divine and transcendent source within history and is understood by the human mind.2 As his editor put it, the Pakistani Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman had attempted to provide a complex theory of revelation that linked philosophical and psychological arguments with a sociology and anthropology of history. The ux of time demanded that Muslims discover once again the ability to grasp the kinesis at work in a dynamic tradition. (The) process of questioning and changing a tradition in the interest of preserving or restoring its normative quality in the case of its normative elements, maintained Fazlur Rahman, can continue indenitely and that there is no xed or privileged point at which the predetermining effective history is immune from such questioning and being consciously conrmed or consciously changed.3 Though scholars like Fazalur Rahman were unpopular with the conservative Ulema, they were developing their radical interpretation of Islam the word radical being used in an entirely different sense from the current usage that conates it with militancy and violence----not so much in an apologetic response to western orientalists but by way of reconnecting with a lost tradition within the Islamic canon. It is important to recall their seminal work because of a tendency, particularly since the catastrophic events of 9/11 to bury Islam under utterly untenable allegations against its very essence. At the practical level, the modernists played an important role in reconstituting Muslim societies and empowering them in a manner that enabled them to accelerate decolonisation and lead to the emergence of independent Muslim nation states, including Pakistan. It is often said that Islam is a religion of laws. This is meant to be a derogatory perception of the last of the three great monotheistic religions; it is designed to underline the preoccupation with Sharia on the part of the extremist movements that threaten to supplant the modernists in many Muslim states and communities. This perception, however, is fallacious. Islams pristine emphasis is on justice (adal) and compassion (ihsan). The distinctive feature of Islam is the yearning
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for an egalitarian, equitable and democratic social order; the denial of such an order has been the cause of much strife within Islam. The poetphilosopher Muhammad Iqbal who envisioned an independent Muslim state in post-colonial South Asia was not a revolutionary in the usual 20th century sense but when it came to the new and strange gods of his times - Capitalism, Fascism and Communism - he was an iconoclast. As a matter of fact when lights were going out one after the other all over Europe, the main independence movements in the colonised world were guided largely by democratic forces. In fact, a major fountainhead of Muslim rage that has spawned the other kind of radicalisation that leads to much conict now is a pervasive sense of injustice. This sense of injustice and the contingent outrage are directed as much towards the Muslim rulers as towards major powers. The modernist movements helped usher the era of freedom from direct alien rule but failed to deliver progress and security for all partly because of intrinsic factors and partly because of continued foreign interventions. Palestine, Kashmir, the CIAs successful operation to bring down Mossadegh and the invasion of Egypt by Israel, France and the United Kingdom became symbols of perpetual injustice and a perennial source of a sense of victimhood amongst the Muslims to which the modernists and reformers of Muslim thought had no easy answer. Over a period of time, localised grievances became a global narrative of rejection and denial by a predatory West. Huntingtons clash of civilisation thesis owes its central motif to the prolic orientalist Bernard Lewis. In much of the Muslim world Bernard Lewis is synonymous with long standing plans to fragment the world of Islam into small ethnically-based and compliant states. Huntington is retrospectively seen as having written not an academic dissertation but a manifesto, a virtual scheme that the neoconservatives were to implement as soon as they seized power in the United States. It was a scheme for an aggressive return of western armies to the broader Middle East. It went far beyond the control of the energy resources and the establishment of military bases to ll the gaps in a global deployment of strategic forces for the new century. In the Muslim perception, every piece tted into a giant jigsaw puzzle. Iraqs 7000-year old cultural
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heritage was ravaged and almost 3.5 millions Iraqis displaced internally and externally to demonstrate that the only history that mattered was that of the West. The world, it was argued, was being returned to the era when it was divided between central, metropolitan people and the peripheral people bound to them by tributary relations. What turned these apprehensions into a spiral of mindless violence by Iraqi resistance and terrifying reprisals by western armies--- Fallujha epitomising the gory drama for history--- was partly the result of the ever shifting grounds for invading Iraq. By the time the rationale for the invasion of Iraq crystallised into a declaration of intent to recongure and reconstitute the broader Middle East, it had revived layers of fears accumulated over centuries. Islam has a long and proud history of its own and nothing could have been more provocative than to apply the 18th century concept of a civilising mission in proclaiming liberty and freedom as the purpose of a massive military intervention. The menu offered to the region was not only democracy but also a transformation of its dominant faith. In his 1988 book Islamic Liberalism, Leonard Binder made the following trenchant observation to make the point that the world of Islam believes that it can progress without paying such a heavy cultural price : From the time of the Napoleonic invasion, from the time of the massacre of the Janissaries, from the time of the Sepoy mutiny, at least the West has been trying to tell Islam what must be the price of progress in the coin of the tradition which is to be surrendered. In 1992, after witnessing murder and mayhem in Bosnia Herzegovina, the western-educated Arab intellectual, Rana Kabbani, wrote: How are we to tackle our problems rationally; handicapped as we are by an overpowering sense of grievance? Both towards a West that has long colonised, manipulated and despised us, and towards our own governments, which are shamefully silent, corrupt and castrated. We have yet to earn our independence as Muslims: the rich nations amongst us are mere vassals, the poor ones, full victims. Given the Quranic injunctions on a just war, the Muslim mind should have no difculty in differentiating between jihad and martyrdom on the one hand and terrorism on the other. If this distinction has got blurred today, then there is something gravely wrong with the Muslim
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imagination and the forces that are trying to bend it to their will. The difference is so clearly embedded in the historical memory of Islam that a true Muslim instinctively knows when there is resort to illegitimate and impermissible violence in the name of Islam. There is the haunting memory of Ibn Muljam assassinating the fourth pious Caliph, Hazrat Ali. Here is the immutable difference between the terrorist and the martyr. Then there is the awesome moment of the grandson of the Prophet of Islam sacricing his life at Karbala. This is the Muslim individual redeeming an entire culture by standing up to the state terrorism of a usurper. Islam refuses to resign itself to perpetual injustice and repression. Drawing upon Ali Shariatis Iqbal, Mamar Tajdid Banaye Taffokar-I Islami (Iqbal, the architect of the reconstruction of Islamic thought) and his seminal Shahadat (Martyrdom), Mannochehr Dorraj makes the following observation about Shariati and, by implication, about Iqbal : For Shariati, one of the greatest and most revolutionary contributions of Islam to human society has been to instil a sense of devotion and sacrice in the pursuit of justice. Through martyrdom a society renes itself. By sacricing the most precious possession (ones life) the individual also afrms his/her faith in the ideals of the collectivity and adds to the credibility and sanctity of this ideal. The western failure to distinguish between lawful resistance to foreign occupation and mindless terrorism that stalks the world of Islam today is the root cause of the rapidly growing mutual incomprehension. Millions of Muslim denounced in unequivocal terms the outrage in East Africa in 1998, the World Trade Centre attack in 1993, the ghastly tragedy of Twin Towers, the terrorist bombing in Madrid, the bombs of Bali and every other atrocity committed in some twisted logic of defending Islam. But what they get in return is the tarnishing of their faith as Islamofascism not only by opinion-makers such as the novelist Martin Amis who wrote an anti-Muslim polemic entitled The Age of Horrorism in Sunday Observer but also by leading western politicians including President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. In a remarkable essay entitled Muslims and Democracy, Abdou Filali-Ansary sought avenues of better mutual understanding and coexistence.4 He conceded that Muslim confrontation with European
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colonial powers in the nineteenth century gave birth to some great and lasting misunderstandings, as a result of which Muslims have rejected key aspects of modernity as alienation and a surrender of the historical self to the Other. But then he also reminded us that the rule of law is a notion that expresses something that Muslims have longed for since the early phases of their history, and have felt to be part of the message of Islam. The Muslims seek higher universalism for the concept of the rule of law in the conduct of international relations and will not accept another century of dominance, subjugation, humiliation and exploitation by the West or its new surrogates. The Muslim world does not deny that a high degree of natural cosmopolitanism is inherent in economic globalisation; it is willing to accept it as an evolutionary process. But it is a delusion to think that by applying overwhelming military force, local cultures hallowed by thousands of years can be bludgeoned into the total homogeneity of a supercial western culture. In fact, it is a recipe for conicts lasting generations. Justifying this project as a post-Enlightenment civilisation dragging a pre-Enlightenment culture into a creative encounter with modernity is sheer hubris. The events of 9/11 were a manifestation of pure primordial evil which can never be condoned. But they signalled a new stage in a new kind of warfare which has only been expanded by the retribution extracted from the Taliban in Afghanistan and during a far more indefensible invasion of Iraq. Professor Michael Mazarr speaks of twilight struggles against non-state networks of evildoers. The new conicts are not wars waged by regular, organised armies, however lethally armed, across vast swathes of European or Asian land mass They do not belong even to the tradition in which less powerful peoples made hit and run raids to prosecute the classical anti-colonial and national liberation movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are not ghting, writes Professor Nazarr, proto-Bismarcks, who want nothing more than to seize power and start operating as realpolitikers.5 It is a ght against a fantasy ideology, a mind set and the central route to war in such psychological dramas is national humiliation and society-wide alienation. For a battle for the society, for its mindsets
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and psychologies, (and) to address sources of grievance and anxiety, to shore up institutions of governance, Mazarr proposes a theory of psychopolitik resting on three pillars of statecraft: restraint, compassion, and scal responsibility. He is aware of the danger that the West would persist in its faith that traditional conventional conict is the dominant mode. Were it to do things differently, his recipe for at least mitigating the threat of new radicalism, is stated thus: attend to identity; attend to the global economy; practise the greatest restraint possible in foreign policy; avoid humiliating others; do not become the focus of alienation. This recipe would obviously not be acceptable to the hardcore Al-Qaeda that is already beyond reverence for life, beyond the insights of the three monotheistic religions, beyond the fruits of settled civilisations and beyond the four walls of international law. But it could still make a profound impact on thousands of radicalised young men and women who are engaged in battles of alienation and mutual incomprehension. As stated in the beginning of this paper, Muslim activism in the Indian sub-continent aimed primarily at reviving a vanquished community. In reconstructing Muslim thought its main proponents tried to cut through cobwebs of ritualism and esoteric practices that induced a passive acceptance of life under foreign domination. Even when they successfully mobilised Muslim separatist sentiment and demanded a Muslim homeland in South Asia, the emphasis was on constitutionalism and democratic assertion in Muslim majority areas. The Indian Muslims steered clear of all anti-British movements that embraced political violence as a tool of the independence struggle. Pakistans emergence as an independent state however created a new dynamic. The founding fathers believed that they would be able to accommodate Islamic aspirations in a largely secular state structure of an elected parliament, independent judiciary and modernising bureaucracy. This was challenged by Islamic parties not so much by rejecting the state organisation as by demanding that it should be the instrument of creating an Islamic state. The principal parties like Jamati Islami, which was established by the internationally renowned scholar Abul Ala Maududi in British India in 1941, and Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i- Islam took up the banner of Islamisation engaging the state peacefully through the
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established institutions. Since the early years of Pakistans history were marked by a vocal if small Marxist movement that opposed military alliances and propagated a leftist revolution, much of the energy of the Islamic parties was expended on combating communist radicalism. The fear of an ideology alien to Islam also created a rapidly expanding apolitical movement - the Tablighi Jamaat - that concentrated on reviving the basic knowledge of Islam amongst the masses through low key frictionless contact with individuals and susceptible groups such as students. In the 1950s and 1960s, some of the Islamic parties in Pakistan received western support. By and large, the Islamic parties have garnered very limited electoral support except in 2002 when they were able to gain signicant representation in the National Assembly and two provinces by exploiting the anti-American wave unleashed by the American invasion of Afghanistan. They have failed to repeat their success in Pakistans general election in 2008. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Pakistani state responded to demands for Islamisation with a gradualist policy of incorporating elements that did not alter its basic organisation. Pakistans Constitution forbids parliament to enact a law that is repugnant to Islam. First a state-funded Institute of Islamic Research and then a Council of Islamic Ideology emerged as forums for study and research on how Islam could interface with the modern world. Pakistan also created a Sharia Court with a parallel existence to the established system of traditional courts inherited from the British Raj. The subsequent drift towards radicalisation was caused by intrinsic factors as well as by momentous changes in Pakistans strategic environment. First and foremost, Pakistan experienced along with several Arab-Islamic countries the failure of the nationalist secular elites that had emerged during decolonisation to provide political stability and sufcient economic growth. In Pakistans case, periods of high economic growth were marred by an accentuation of class and income disparities. Disillusionment with the post-colonial modern state fuelled the urge for a return to the pristine values and true tenets of Islam. The failure of the state to provide universal education led to a rapid expansion of the traditional seminaries, the religious madrassas, which now have an
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enrolment of nearly a million young people and account for a signicant percentage of literacy in a certain age group. The external developments that radicalised Muslim politics in Pakistan and the neighbourhood include several seminal events: the Soviet Unions direct military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 to save a tottering Marxist regime; the Islamic revolution in Iran; the refusal of Israel to withdraw from Arab territories occupied during the 1967 war and later colonised heavily; the suppression of Palestinian intifada, the Iran-Iraq war; the eventual American interventions to liberate Kuwait and later in 2003 to occupy Iraq for an indenite period of time; and the collapse of the Soviet Union that brought freedom to predominantly Muslim Central Asian states. The emancipation of Central Asia--played an important role in radicalising the Kashmiri movement against India with attendant consequences for Pakistans polity; it was taken as afrmation of the view that a local armed struggle could change the status quo otherwise preserved and sanctied by nuclear deterrence stability in the sub-continent. In Afghanistan Islamist politics emerged because of the countrys brief experiment with parliamentary democracy in 1960s. It was also a distinct reaction to the growing Marxist trends amongst the educated classes. Pakistans Islamic parties kept contact with Afghan parties such as Hizbe Islami because they were never enthusiastic about the irredentist claims of Afghan leaders typied by Sardar Mohammad Daoud who was to lose his life in the Marxist-led military putsch in 1978. These links played an important part in forging a formidable front against the Marxist regime and then in organising the great Afghan Jihad against the Soviet Union. The Jihad was largely outsourced to Pakistans intelligence services which, with strong American assistance, radicalised the Afghans Mujahidden and their Pakistani partners. The madrassas that had imparted a conservative Sunni education based upon a centuries old curriculum became a special focus of anti-Soviet militancy. In the mid1990s the madrassa students on both sides of the border constituted the Taliban who intervened strongly in a erce power struggle amongst the Mujahideen leaders. The Taliban had much of Afghanistan under their medievalist control when they were overthrown by the American attack
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in October 2001. The Afghan Jihad brought thousands of Muslims, mostly Arabs, to Afghanistan and the neighbouring districts of Pakistan. Amongst them were Shaikhs who commanded veneration for their knowledge of fundamentalist Islam and who raised the awareness of the Pakistani and Afghan Islamists from the local to the global. People of both the countries had always taken a strong interest in Muslim causes all over the world especially in Palestine. But the Arab component of the Afghan Jihad provided them with a conceptual framework for a perpetual struggle against powers that continued to humiliate the Muslims and usurp their lands directly or through indigenous surrogates. Pakistans reversal of policy on Afghanistan in 2001 and the wholehearted participation of the Pakistani army in the project to build a new democratic Afghanistan aroused great hostility amongst this ideological enclave of the erstwhile Afghan Jihad. Pakistan has ended up importing the ongoing conict in Afghanistan where the Taliban have re-surfaced as the main resistance group into Pakistan. Its tribal belt now has militants called local Taliban and the losses suffered by the Pakistans security forces exceed the aggregate of American and NATO losses since 2001. The Pakistan government has not carried conviction that the country needs to ght the militants for its own security and prosperity. The armed forces are currently engaged in re-establishing the writ of the government in Waziristan where the jihadis have created a rival authority. It is a costly enterprise in military losses and governments popularity ratings. The ever widening perception in the country that the government is ghting Americas war in Afghanistan by itself has become a factor in the radicalisation of Islamists in the country. The post-election political government in Pakistan is mindful of this factor and is currently engaged in exploring avenues for diversifying the strategy for combating extremism so as to include offers of negotiations with amenable groups of militants enraged by an excessive reliance on military counterinsurgency operations. European Concern As a citizen of a country from where considerable emigration to
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Europe, especially the United Kingdom, has taken place one cannot but understand the increasing anxiety about the inroads that Muslim activism is making into Muslim expatriate communities in Europe. Nor can one be indifferent to the reactive implications of this phenomenon for European societies and for inter-state relations in a globalising world. If the European liberal -left feels that Muslim radicalism has intensied the shift in the European political spectrum to extreme right, the Muslim world is equally apprehensive of irrational Islamophobia. Not since the crusades and the Spanish Inquisition has Islam been vilied the way it is being done in this age. What are the easily recognisable aspects of the situation that need to be addressed? First and foremost, it is the fear of demography. Muslims tend to concentrate in urban centres for obvious economic reasons. They have a high birth rate. According to Timothy M.Savage,6 there are 15.2 million Muslims in the original pre-expansion European Union (EU). France with ve million, Germany with four million, the UK with 1.6 million, Italy with a million, and the Netherlands with 886,000 lead the charts. Austria, Belgium, Greece and Sweden have Muslim populations ranging from 300,000 to 450,000. Muslims in the New EU member states are estimated at 290,000 out of which Cyprus alone accounts for 200,000. One estimate visualises a doubling of Muslim population in Europe as a whole by 2015. While it is possible to dramatise the confessional situation in a particular city like Bradford in England, a situation that certainly calls for appropriate interventionist strategies, the overall demographic prole of Europe does not justify paranoid reactions. Surely, the cause is more qualitative than quantitative. Three aspects of the qualitative situation stand out. The Muslims are reluctant to shed their identity; in fact, they are mobilising themselves more earnestly than ever before to preserve it. Even though they are not a monolithic group, European Muslims increasingly identify rst with Islam rather than with either their familys country of origin or the European country in which they reside. Here is an abiding conict of values. Second, they are prone to the seductive lure of a transnational Muslim identity forged in foreign policy grievances, a culture of victimisation and a sense of alienation that is only partially fed by socioCRITERION April/June 2008
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economic factors. {Jonathan Paris) Third, even for those who are not unduly distressed by the new diversity produced by Muslim cultures, in the plural, there is a putative threat to the state and the society. Analysing the scene in the Netherlands, Professor Paul Sniderman argues that multiculturalism encouraged an ambiguity of commitment; the fundamental issue, it turns out is not diversity but loyalty. Fourth, there is anxiety that Muslim communities in Europe, aggrieved as they feel, may not be fully forthcoming to cooperate with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in eliminating terrorist cells. Unfortunately, Europe, like Pakistan, is reluctant to admit that an uncritical acceptance of the metaphor of a global war against terrorism has worked against the initiatives for greater harmony and integration. The two seminal strategies--- multiculturalism adopted as a policy by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Scandinavia etc., and assimilation by France --- might have had a better chance if Iraq had not happened the way it did and Afghanistan was not mishandled after the initial success against the Taliban. It would be unnatural to expect that Muslims anywhere in the world would not be outraged by the destruction of Iraq. They were prominent in the peace marches because of their race and religion; the demonstrations were otherwise overwhelmingly composed of Europeans whose time-hallowed post-Enlightenment values were grossly violated by the invasion and its sordid aftermath. The perception that the US-led West was waging war against Islam was as much a product of the fevered imagination of Muslim communities as of the reckless semantics used increasingly by western leaders once it became clear that the invasion had turned into a asco. The morally untenable over-simplication that any Muslim failing to show submission to the US grand design for the broader Middle East must either be a terrorist or a sympathetic accomplice has contributed greatly to the radicalisation of Muslims all over the world. One of the new clichs is that the project to build multi-cultural societies in the West has collapsed because of political Islam. It is possible to revive both multiculturalism and assimilation provided they are subjected to a critical reappraisal. The British are backing away from multiculturalism partly because they have not as yet factored into their
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assessment the blowback of the policies of the Blair era. France has to rethink its literalist interpretation of assimilation which over-blows issues like the wearing of scarves. Such potentially emotive matters are often a substitute for hard solutions for the harsh realities of the banlieues. The British academic, David Drake, pertinently asked why so much political, intellectual and emotional energy has been spent on the issue of a teenager wanting to wear a head scarf rather than on far more pressing issues of integration such as the high rates of unemployment and deprivation in the Muslim community. The explanation that the apprehensions of the French state are rooted in the memory of the bloody struggle for secularisation after the French Revolution and through the counter-revolutionary movements for restoration of the old school system does not make much impression on Muslims who consider the scarf as an ordinary statement of identity. For many Muslim analysts, Islamophobia is an escape from a cluster of realities. It has an undertone of racism that the West does not want to admit. There is a touch of imperial nostalgia that manifests itself into a hierarchical arrangement of people from former colonies. It is also a state of denial about the fact that many western countries have lost their distinctive status because of globalisation, American hegemony and now a rapid shift of economic power to the emerging Asian nations. An effective strategy to combat the rise of radicalism will have to address issues of foreign and security policies and those of integrating or assimilating Muslims into European societies simultaneously. Seeking to bring about a forcible disconnect between the two has already been shown as counter-productive. At the psychological and emotional plane, it is as difcult to make Muslims indifferent to the disastrous new wars in the Middle East as to expect Jewish communities in the United States and elsewhere not to concern themselves with the fortunes of Israel. Secular western states often show an understandable bias in favour of Christian minorities in other lands particularly when they become victims of an oppressive majority, as was the case of East Timor under Indonesian control. The harm done by European procrastination over a ceasere in Lebanon in August 2006 was incalculable as every additional day provided to Israel to wreak havoc in Lebanon was being carried to millions of homes all over the world in real time. The recent history
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of Arab-Muslim people from Palestine to Afghanistan has regrettably highlighted how little is the impact of the mass of liberal people in the West on the policies of their governments. It has gravely undermined the European moral authority. With its unrivalled experience of other cultures and climes spanning at least three hundred years, Europe is expected to exercise a moderating inuence on American policies. The popular perception in the Muslim world is not only of the insensitivity of American decision-making to honest advice but also of Europe not even tendering such advice. Muslims do not expect Europe to unleash an insurgency against what is often described as the new global American empire. But they do think that Europe can strengthen its own initiatives for Good Neighbourhood policies towards Muslim lands across the Mediterranean and on its eastern rim from Turkey southwards. On issues like Palestine that fuel radicalism, Europe has not tried hard enough to present a different prole. If Prime Minister Tony Blair was lured to the Iraq war by a subliminal desire to recapture the lost glory of the British Empire, then the outcome should open our eyes. Iraq has emerged as the new epicentre of radicalism and given Al-Qaeda a new lease of life. Even on its own, Europe in partnership with Arab-Muslim countries can help create a civilisational infrastructure of education, professional knowledge, economic reforms and technology transfer that would stop the rapid expansion of the space where deprivation and frustration translate into radicalism. Europe can also disseminate liberal and democratic values by demonstrating that in the nal analysis it is not on the side of local despots and dictators. Unfortunately the present evidence points to the contrary; Europe is still seen to prefer puppets that can keep the natives on a tight leash. Internally, Europe must make a distinction between those who have signed up for mindless violence and the rest including those given the derogatory title of fence sitters. If further recruitment is denied the hard core will succumb before long to better law enforcement, intelligence and international cooperation. Europe needs to deconstruct myths being popularised by the extreme right wing and the American
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evangelists trying to hasten the second coming. It is often said that the Muslim minority is encroaching upon the collective identity and public values of European society. We need to sift the truth in such assertions from deep-seated historical prejudices which project themselves as a paranoid fear of the other. Thirteen European states have been listed as not recognising Islam as a religion. Many of them do not even bestow minority rights embodied in their constitutions on Muslims because they are not a recognised ethnic group. No less than 19 percent of Germans were reported in a survey to favour a ban on Muslim worship altogether. Several European states create serious hurdles in the construction of mosques. Discriminated against frequently, the ghettoised mind can only resist assimilation. That resistance is stronger amongst the young is as much an indictment of the European societies as the false charisma of the radicalised Imams. Loyalty comes more easily if one has a stake in the state and society. Reforming Islam The present crisis in the Wests relations with the Muslim world emanates in no small a measure from an inexible hostility towards what is often referred to as political Islam. The term is becoming synonymous with terrorism. Political Islam is considered on a priori basis as antithetical to modernisation, democratic choice and liberal values. Embracing an essentialist view of Islamist movements, the US-led West seems to have taken upon itself the task of reconstituting Islamic civilisation. Since political Islam is pathology, a surgical use of force is considered legitimate. The fact of the matter is that the major Islamist movements in Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia reject neither modernity nor development. Nearly all of them are willing to stake their claim to political power through free and fair election. What is, however, true is that they also share their opposition to conating modernisation with westernisation. History, writes Menderes Cinar, is narrated accordingly: the pious Muslim people reacted to the colonisation of their lands by waging a war of independence, but since then an alienated, Westernising elite grabbed the power of the state and acted as internal colonisers. Cinar recommends that Islamism be accepted as a legitimate political movement, advancing
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a moral criticism of politics which is a sine qua non of democracy.7 This proposal to normalise Islamism as an alternative vision that is willing to gure in a democratic battle of ideas resonates well with much of liberal Muslim opinion which regards the western pressure on Muslim rulers to exclude the Islamist tendency from the equation as playing into the hands of militants and terrorists. Muslim politics cannot be severed by force from assertion of a Muslim identity by segments of the polity; the balance can be found only in the adoption of democratic procedures. The West, at the moment, is seen as clearly arrayed on the side of nondemocratic regimes willing to advance its agenda of re-establishing control of physical resources of the Muslim world. That religion is not a factor per se is seen in the readiness of most of the Islamic movements to support increased ties with non-Muslim or secular states such as China and India. In Muslim history, a transnational awareness of the Ummah has never abolished local identities. At best it was unity in diversity even at the zenith of the Caliphate, a concept left far behind by modernity. A great deal of the sacred has survived in all Christian sects despite the Enlightenment and the Jacobeans. A great deal of the sacred will shape the Muslim imagination wherever the Muslims live as a community. They will imbibe modern sciences and technology and yet retain some sense of mystery in their understanding of the Genesis and the purpose of human life. How it can threaten European values is simply incomprehensible. Nor would it stand in the way of Muslims integrating in non-Muslim states as loyal citizens as they have done for 1400 years.
References:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rahman, Fazalur, Revival and Reform in Islam, One world, Oxford 2006. P.7 ibid p 13 ibid p 21 Abdou Filali-Ansary. Journal of Democracy 1999 Mazarr, Michael J,www.realclearpolitics.com March 6, 2006 Savage, Timothy M.,, Europe and Islam: Crescent Waxing, Cultures Clashing, The Washington Quarterly; Summer 2004, pp 25-50 Cinar, M, 2002, From Shadow boxing to Critical Understanding, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 3.1, 35-57
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THE BOMBER UNDER THE BURQA

Farhana Ali*
Abstract
(Since March 2003, when the war in Iraq began, the participation of women in that country in suicide terrorism has increased by nearly 30 percent. This year alone there have been eight attacks committed by women compared to six in 2007. The exponential increase in female suicide bombings suggests the trend will continue to rise unless security officials, the Iraqi government, and the international community seek new solutions to counter the rising violence by an important non-state actor. Author). Introduction: Why Women Kill Over the past six years, more Muslim women appear ready to conduct suicide terrorism for reasons similar to their male counterparts. On the surface, women seem to be no different than male terrorists and appear to be equally affected by their local context, driven to suicide terrorism in part by their personal, familial, organizational, and societal responsibility to protect their families, communities and nations perceived to be under attack. Many assume that women, like men, are motivated by an extremist interpretation of Islam that promotes, if not legitimizes, suicide terrorism (i.e., martyrdom operations) to defend the faith against perceived infidels. While Islamic doctrine is used to encourage and incite violent jihad, womens communiqus, interviews and online statements indicate that religion is the least common denominator for the would-be female bomber. The literature on women in armed conflict, war, and political
* Farhana Ali is a scholar and the author of several internationally published research papers.
Farhana Ali
violence is growing, but few studies focus on the motivations that drive Muslim women to support the violent jihad. The reality of many women engaged in terrorist activities is that they, unlike men, are invisible to local security forces and the outside community. Through their anonymity, Muslim women have successfully perpetrated attacks with the bomb under the burqa which provides them an additional layer of protection; by wearing the burqa or the abaya (Arabic term), women are able to mask their intentions and master the art of deceit and deception. While recent studies of female suicide terrorists highlight the Islamic dress, partly attributed to Western fascination with veiling and patriarchy, this focus fails to recognize the psychological factor that contribute to women choosing suicide terror. Therefore, by highlighting the dress code of Muslim women, and the Islamic societies from which suicide terrorism increasingly emerges, Western scholars have confused Islam with terrorism. Why and how are Muslim women recruited by male terrorists or volunteer for suicide attacks? For terrorism analysts, the answer often lies in the womans connections, direct or indirect, to the terrorist leader, other group members, organization or the conflict. The answer may be traced to the ideological, historical, socio-political, or economic factors that impact their decision to choose suicide as a tactic of warfare. Some Western scholarship on this subject has emphasized the role of female emancipation within Islamic patriarchal societies, assuming that all would-be female terrorists are second-class citizens. Overcoming the increasingly accepted argument that women commit attacks to attain equality, this article integrates some of the unconventional norms that have unjustly been used to categorize Muslim women into a single framework. This narrow view discounts the important variables that reflect a womans decision to choose suicide terrorism, such as culture, religious practice, and the familial/societal role of Muslim women in any given environment. The reality is that Muslim female bombers vary considerably along the lines of culture, religion, national identity, as well as their own personal perceptions of their roles within the nuclear - and extended - familial systems to which
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they belong. A full account of Muslim female activism - and by extension, the role of men who recruit women - requires further attention, and should consider the impact of values and norms within a particular society that could act to persuade some women to choose violence. How these norms are violated with respect to women is a point worth highlighting. For example, in most conflicts today, including the non-Muslim world, women are also victims of rape, torture, kidnappings and other heinous crimes committed by men as acts of vengeance or simple blood-letting and/or barbarism. Therefore, women who do not join terrorist groups also fall victim to violence. As victims of war, women suffer from rape, kidnappings, and torture. Radical Iraqi men, similar to men in other Muslim countries, exact revenge against the women of their society. In a newly released report by the Women for Women International, created by Iraqi-born female activist, Zainab Salbi, almost two-thirds of the 1,500 Iraqi women questioned for the survey she conducted in Iraq said that violence against them had increased.1 According to Salbis survey data, only 26.9 percent of women questioned were optimistic about the situation in Iraq. Like Salbi, Iraqi-born Dr. Rashad Zidan, who was voted Person of 2006, reects the growing concerns of women, especially widows. She exposes the conditions of Iraqi women to the West, noting the loss of their men, including brothers and son to ongoing wars. In an interview with US reporters, Zidan states, I would say to the American Congress, your war has ruined my country. You need to repair what you have ruined and then leave us alone. Of equal value is the cultural psychology of men. Female acceptance by male leaders is key to gaining access into terrorist organizations and perpetrating suicide attacks - a tactic that has helped alter the assumption that women are pacists, moderate and non-violent. Thus, the role of culture and ideas, as interpreted by male extremists and their followers, can alter the choices women make and convince them that there is glory in suicide attacks. Couched in religious symbols and language, some Muslim women might choose to express their real-world grievances
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through violence. Although it is accepted that we may never know the full range of motivations that female bombers might use to rationalize suicide terrorism, and their reasons may vary from person to person, group to group, and conict to conict, certain common themes and patterns among female bombers can provide a framework for analysis. Drawing on earlier research and interviews of female extremists, this author frames the mujahidaats motives for suicide terrorism under broad categories into what is called the ve Rs: Reform to the conict through a peaceful settlement and for future generations Revenge for the loss of family members, and/or loss of community/ nation; Respect from the larger Muslim community for her sacrice; Reassurance that she is a capable and equal partner in affecting change in war; Recruit other women to follow her example. This list is not meant to exclude other factors that could inspire women to participate in terrorism. Professor Andrew Silke maintains that certain factors exist within a given community that enables groups to employ suicide. His argument assumes that groups using suicide have a cultural precedent for self-sacrice; the conict is longrunningand involves casualties on both sides; and the protagonists are desperate.2 In a separate article, Silke highlights the psychology of vengeance, social identication (i.e., the need to belong to a local or international community of believers), accessible entre into a terrorist group, status and personal rewards, and the feeling of exclusion from mainstream society which leaves individuals vulnerable to religious indoctrination.3 No Two Conicts Are Alike Local conicts are critical motivators, but each one is unique and must be viewed from a specic set of circumstances, such as the historical
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framework from which conict emerges, to assess the factors that drive women in various parts of the world to suicide terror. For instance, aside from being linked by gender, the mujahidaat in Chechnya have little in common with women in Palestine, and women in Saudi Arabia have absolutely nothing to share with their sisters in Uzbekistan. Therefore, different people generate different reactions to local and global conicts. Like men, women understand the importance of propaganda (i.e., the CNN factor) in ghting for a cause they believe in. No different from men, women have chosen suicide attacks to call attention to their conict, raising the level of awareness from the world community to the heightened frustration, alienation, and despair experienced in local conicts. Increasing awareness with instant media coverage, however, has not always guaranteed an end to conict or increased involvement by regional or other actors, such as the United States, to mediate for a peaceful solution to conict. In some cases, news of female bombers helps to create more anger and disillusionment from the general population, while motivating other women to commit the same act. For example, four Palestinian women committed suicide attacks within four months after Wafa Idriss suicide bombing in January 2002.4 While conicts and motivations vary, a womans decision to pursue violent action is impacted by personal experiences and outcomes. Coupled with the absence of change to her own local conict, of which she is a part of, a woman is more apt to volunteer or be recruited for a terrorist operation to end her own suffering, or that of the people she identies with. Suicide is the preferred tactic when Muslim women believe that their social structure, which is the fabric of an Islamic society, is threatened or has been violated by the prevailing authority. Veteran Palestinian jihadist Leila Khaled said, we are under attackthe Palestinians are ready to sacrice themselves for the national struggle for the respect of their just rights, extolling female bombers like Wafa.5 Following Idris bombing, Hanadi Jaradat detonated a bomb in October 2003 in the Arab-owned restaurant, Maxim, in Haifa, Israel, which killed nineteen people. In an
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excerpt aired on 16 August 2005 on Al Jazeera, Hanadi says: By the power of Allah, I have decided to become the sixth female martyrdomseeker, who will turn her body into shrapnel, which will reach the heart of every Zionist colonialist in my country.6 The perceived threat against Islam also serves as a powerful motivator that has justied the use of violence as an effective means of communication. Convinced that the local Muslim community can no longer afford inaction, some Muslim women enlist in operations to ensure the survival of the Muslim community. For the believer of martyrdom, subjugation to the faith (i.e., Islam) is rewarding. The individual, knowing that death is likely, inspires other Muslims to continue the struggle and the martyrs death is kindling wood for jihad and Islam.7 Accepting that other motivations are likely, two factors offer women a heightened sense of awareness of the world in which they live: a breakdown of a womans societal structures (including foremost the loss of her family and community) and increased opportunities for women to volunteer for or join terrorist groups. Through the latter, women - even those not living in war, occupation or armed struggle - can become members of a larger community, or what Islam calls the Ummah (Global Islamic Community). Scholars and psychiatrists refer to this as embracing a collective identity.8 Terrorism experts Dr. Jerold Post and Paul Horgan stress the importance of the social psychological perspective as the most powerful lens through which to examine and explain terrorist behaviour.9 Through the identication process, the mobilization of women into terrorist organizations represents an evolving network.10 With a wide range of possibilities, it is therefore difcult to draw rm conclusions about the motivations of all mujahidaat for a number of reasons. First, there is limited data on womens motivations for suicide terrorism, particularly in emerging conicts such as Iraq. In older conicts, such as the Arab-Israeli crisis, empirical evidence has been collected over time by thoughtful researchers, although one could argue that the bulk of this research is that of Israeli scholars and former
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defence ofcials. There is little to no evidence provided by Palestinian experts, writers, and/or activists, probably due to a lack of access to failed suicide bombers inside Israeli prisons and/or the lack of interest.11 Second, the history of female involvement in terrorist organizations, including secular/nationalist groups, indicates women providing logistical support including protection for male ghters. In the authors recent interviews in Kashmir, female militants noted the wide range of support they offered to the mujahideen, ranging from offering their homes for protection against authorities to cooking their meals.12 Other women join extremist groups or participate in warfare to protect their honour and dignity. In the same region (i.e., Jammu and Kashmir), women have formed armed groups to protect their interests, their homes, and families from Islamic militants, rather than kill in the name of Islam. According to one female ghter, we were subjected to mental and physical harassment by militants who would force us to provide them with food and shelter, and in some cases, sexual favours,13 and this induced women to use guns and grenades for their own survival. Third, women participating in terrorist activities suggest no clear pattern. Existing data on female operatives render it nearly impossible to prole the female bomber. They are both young and old, single and married, educated and illiterate, and few are mothers. Thus, the wide range of women in female suicide terrorism today discounts any one prole of a female bomber. The preponderance of evidence suggests that the mujahidaat could be anyone. The increased invisibility of the female bomber today also makes proling an ineffective exercise. Rather, an important area of research that proles the circumstance may be a more useful mechanism, but will require further exploration before drawing preliminary conclusions.14 Female Bombers in Iraq: Why the Trend Continues In Iraq, the trend of female suicide terrorism is unpredictable and unprecedented. As the war in Iraq continues, more Iraqi women will be ready to make the ultimate sacrice: to use their bodies as human shields. The US Government and other experts are asking: Why now?
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Why has there been a spike in attacks in Iraq committed by women? More important, how will the new role of women as suicide bombers change the nature of this conict? Since March 2003, when the war began, Iraqi womens participation in suicide terrorism has increased by nearly 30 percent. This year alone there have been eight attacks committed by women, compared to six in 2007. The exponential increase in female suicide bombings suggests the trend will continue to rise, unless security ofcials, the Iraqi Government, and the international community seek new solutions to counter the rising violence by an important non-state actor. Over the past year, publicly available data of Iraqi female bombers has shown that women are now the driving force of suicide terrorism. To understand the psychological factors that stimulate such acts, there are three likely motivations relevant in Iraq: a mothers love for her children - a cathartic desire for revenge that has motivated mothers, who had lost children to sectarian violence, to become suicide bombers; a womans love for her country - like men, Iraqi women are also die-hard nationalists and have the right to protect their families against sectarian attacks and foreign occupation; a womans love for her body - suicide terrorism becomes an act of restitution for women who perceive violence as a way to cleanse themselves of sinful acts. An additional explanation is related to mens exploitation of womens vulnerability and exposure to violence by other groups, foreign troops, and/or Iraqi security. These factors can be summarized in the following way: Extremes of maternal love. The cathartic revenge mothers feel for losing their son(s) is exceptional. No one is of more value to an Iraqi woman than her son, for whom she will rip out her heart, according to a former professor of Baghdad University. The loss of a son, a mothers prized possession, is turning young mothers into cannibals, according to the Baghdad University scholar. She says, These women have no reason to live, and are therefore more susceptible to violence.
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Survival instinct. During Saddams era, many women were given light arms training to protect their families from the threat of Iran. Today, these same women are in charge of protecting not only their families (i.e., when a husband dies or is not available) but are also die-hard nationalists. Consider the rst suicide attack by two women in March 2003. Both young women asserted their national duty to save their country from the US-led occupation. In the early days of the conict, other Iraqi women expressed their primal fear of being ruled by an external force and were thus willing to conduct acts of violence in defence of their homeland. To die for Iraq. Information on Arabic websites from Iraqi-based Sunni insurgents and Shia militias suggests that their women are ready to sacrice themselves for the love of their country and faith.15The Abu al-Boukhari Islamic Network indicates that because Islam is under attack from the Crusaders, women have an obligation to defend their faith.16 Therefore, the restriction imposed on women to stay in their homes is lifted in jihad. A rare martyrdom video from 2003 shows Wadad Jamil Jassem saying, I have devoted myself to Jihad for the sake of God and against the American, British, and Israeli indels and to defend the soil of our precious and dear country. Increasingly, the effect of the occupation and insurgent attacks against women (i.e., torture, rape, kidnapping) has invariably resulted in growing despair, disillusionment, and depression among Iraqi women, which could explain their decision for death over life. Exploitation by men. On the Internet, male extremists encourage women to become actively involved in the conict in Iraq. The evidence on Sunni and Shia websites clearly demonstrate that women are increasingly participating in the conict as ghters, suicide bombers, and mothers of the martyrs.17 This reprehensible exploitation of women is a nightmare for Iraqi security ofcials as well as US forces trying to counter female violence.
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Farhana Ali
Aside from conducting suicide operations, Iraqi women are honoured for taking care of male insurgents. For example, in a proinsurgent web page known as the Iraqi League, an Iraqi woman from the city of Falluja is celebrated for remaining in the city during the siege. This woman provided her home to the insurgents, baked them bread, and buried them in her own garden; for her efforts, she has been called the mother of martyrs.18 Insurgents also encourage Muslim women to support their husbands in jihad. The Islamic Army in Iraq, for example, posted an article entitled This is How Women Should Be to carry this message. Other women support insurgents by offering to marry them, albeit temporarily. These women agree to marry Sunni men, accepting no dowry in exchange for a temporary marriage. Sunni girls who choose to marry would-be insurgent ghters are seen as devout to their religion and their country - a sign that the girls only wish is to free Iraq from occupation.19 While temporary marriages were banned during Saddam Husseins regime, it is a widely accepted practice in Shia culture. Known as a mutaa marriage, a couple is permitted to live together as husband and wife so long as they sign a contract and agree to a xed term. This practice is used to recruit Mehdi Army ghters to encourage young men, who cannot otherwise afford a heavy dowry, to join the militia. In one statement, Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr motivated Shia girls to agree to a temporary marriage to provide enjoyment and pleasure in their bodies and money to the ghters who are sacricing their souls for the Imam.20 Finally, womens inclusion in the war is intended to confuse the enemy and make it more difcult for Iraqi and coalition forces to identify the female bomber. It is the invisibility of female bombers in Iraq that poses a grave security concern. The anonymity of the female bomber protects her personal identity and cloaks the terror groups location, membership, and activities. Because she is an invisible non-state actor, a female supporter of terrorism makes it difcult for authorities to prole her. Only recently have security forces been able to suspect and stop women from detonating. On 6 June 2007, a woman dressed in the abaya who refused to respond to Iraqi police was shot at, causing the
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explosives underneath her dress to explode before she reached her target. A report from Aswat al-Iraq (Voices of Iraq)21 in January 2008 indicated that Iraqi police had intelligence information that ten female suicide bombers entered the province of Diyala, while in March, US troops arrested a male recruiter of female suicide bombers north of Baghdad. According to the later report, the male cell leader intended to use his wife and another woman to conduct suicide attacks.22 So long as the war in Iraq continues, women could become increasingly available and ready to commit suicide attacks. Because the trend is recent, there is an urgent need to understand why these women once considered the liberated females of the Middle East - are resorting to such extreme acts of violence. It is important to identify why, in their misplaced zeal for jihad, they inevitably choose suicide terrorism and will instigate others to do the same. This alarming development, so poorly understood, demands serious and immediate research to preempt the acceleration of suicide attacks perpetrated by women in Iraq. The ultimate question is will an end to the occupation decrease the level of violence by women in Iraq? The US withdrawal from the country may not necessarily restore womens rights though America can play a leading role in helping them rebuild their lives by providing security, economic opportunities, educational freedom, and other wideranging reforms. A former Baghdad professor told the author, Iraqi women were equal to men under Saddams regime; today, women are targeted for abuse and violence. We need to give women back what they deserve. Scholars Support Female Martyrs To isolate this study from the ideological underpinnings of suicide terror, as delineated by some members of the Muslim clergy, would be to misplace the importance of scripture in determining when, and how, violence can be used. The current debate in various Islamic circles about the utility of suicide, and conversely, the use of women in warfare, has divided the Muslim ummah (community).
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The Muslim clergy have failed to reach consensus on whether suicide is an acceptable means of warfare, but several scholars in the wake of September 2001 and the subsequent July 2005 attack in London have issued various fatwas (edicts) condemning suicide bombings. The former head of the Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee, Shaykh Atiyyah Saqr, uses references to historical Islamic literature to argue that the Prophet Muhammad said a believer would be forbidden from entering Paradise if he committed suicide.23 More recently, a prominent Syrian cleric, Abdel Monem Mustafa Abu Halima, issued a fatwa prohibiting suicide operations. A resident of London, Abu Halima, also known as Abu Naseer Al Tartusi, said whoever hurts a Miuslim has no Jihad reward, and quotes the Prophet as having said: whoever murders a non-Muslim enjoying protection under the Islamic state would never smell the scent of Paradise.24 Despite these references, religious extremists justify new rules of warfare to defeat their enemies, including the use of suicide operations. Rather than suicide, these actions are considered martyrdom operations (amaliyat istishhadiyya). Using this term helps to legitimize, promote, and activate future male and female bombers. First, martyrs are held in high esteem in Islam, but some Islamic theologians and contemporary jihadis distort several hadith to suggest that: 1) women receive fewer rewards for martyrdom than their male counterparts; and 2) the male martyr is entitled to more rewards, though his entitlement to these rewards is mentioned neither in the Quran or popularly cited traditions of Imams Bukhari and Muslim. Rather, some of the rewards attributed to male martyrs may be intentionally circulated to motivate, inspire, and activate the male bomber. For example, a well-known and widely transmitted hadith of Imam Ahmad al-Tirmidhi explicitly notes that male martyrs will enjoy the pleasure of 72 virgins in paradise. Tirmidhis opinion on the rewards for the male martyr appears to be all-encompassing and arguably enticing for a would-be male ghter: The Martyr has seven special favours from Allah: He [or She] is forgiven his sins with the rst spurt of blood, He sees his place in Paradise; He is clothed with the garment Of faith. He is wed with seventy-two wives from the beautiful
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Maidens of paradise. He is saved from the Punishment of the Grave. He is protected from the Great Terror (Judgment Day). On his head is placed a Crown of Dignity, a Jewel better than The world and all it contains, and he is granted intercession For seventy people of his household to enter Paradise.25 Of the seven favours listed above, the most controversial but at the same time widely accepted among violent jihadis is the promise of 72 maidens of paradise for the male martyr. The promise of 72 virgins is even reminiscent of the medieval Assassins26 doctrine, involving the paradise that awaits the holy terrorists,27 but the concept is not recognized by all Muslim scholars. The translation of the word virgin in the hadith is characterized in a sexual manner, but other scholars insist that the word houri is closer to the most pure, a likely reference to the Prophets pious companions.28 Outside of Tirmidhis narrative, the Quran makes no reference to the black-eyed virgins or admitting 70 of the martyrs relatives to heaven. And yet jihadi literature continues to cite this reference to incite would-be male bombers to conduct terrorist operations. Well-known clerics in the Muslim world, such as Doha-based Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi, and the late Dr. Abdallah Azzam, along with several Saudi sheikhs, continue to support martyrdom as a holy concept, rejecting the Western use of the word suicide. They argue that women can participate in jihad because it is not suicide. According to Qaradawi, the word suicide is incorrect and misleading, and prefers to use the phrase, heroic operations of martyrdom. In an interview in an Egyptian newspaper, Qaradawi justies suicide on the basis that it is the weapon of the weak.29 Qaradawi rst issued a fatwa on the role of women in jihad following the suicide attack by Wafa Idris, the rst Palestinian Muslim woman to perpetrate an attack on 27 January 2002 when she detonated explosives at the entrance to a shopping mall in Afula, a city in northern Israel. First published on the HAMAS Internet site, www.palestineinfo.info in January 2004, Qaradawi said that Muslim women could disregard certain codes of dress and Islamic law to participate in suicide
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operations: when jihad becomes an individual duty, as when the enemy seizes the Muslim territory, a woman becomes entitled to take part in it alongside menand she can do what is impossible for men to do, even if it means taking off her hijab (headscarf) to carry out an operation.30 Before Qaradawi, one of the leading proponents of jihad was Umm Mohammad, the wife of the late Dr. Abdallah Azzam who was Osama bin Ladens spiritual mentor and leader of the Afghan Arabs. In an interview to Al Sharq al-Awsat in April 2006, Umm Mohammed said she became the mother gure who coordinated amongst the wives of the mujahideen (male ghters) in Peshawar. In a memoir from late 1990, Umm Mohammed wrote: I ask my Muslim sisters to encourage their husbands and sons to continue with the jihad. Both husband and wife supported the empowerment of women in jihad. In his book, Defense of Muslim Lands, Abdullah Azzam, said women did not need their husbands permission to participate in jihad. In a separate fatwa published in 1984,31 Azzam declared that jihad was the action required (fard ayn) of every Muslim, regardless of gender.32 He appealed to Muslim women to support the male ghters. In Part Two of Join the Caravan published in 1988, he wrote: What is the matter with the mothers, that one of them does not send forward one of her sons in the path of Allah, that he might be a pride for her in this world and a treasure for her in the hereafter through her intercession?33 As Azzam states, mothers were essential to the jihad in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union. Through their support for male family members, which included their sons, husbands, and brothers, women were seen as playing a key ideological role. Similarly, the wife of the veteran terrorist leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - also named Umm Mohammad - posted a letter in July 2006 on the Mujahideen Shura Council website, calling on Muslims everywhere to defend the honour of her husband and participate in jihad. Interviews of wouldbe suicide bombers have also shown the strong afnity women have towards securing a better future for their children. The maternal instinct for Muslim women is powerful and rooted in Islamic doctrine. According to the Prophet of Islam, Heaven lies at the mothers feet and therefore, a mothers role in the family - and by extension, her community, society
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and nation - is incomparable to the role played by men, who are seen as providers and protectorates of the family. The worlds most gloried ideologue, Osama Bin Laden, also extolled the role of the Muslim woman in jihad in his 1996 fatwa: Our women had set a tremendous example of generosity in the cause of Allah; they motivated and encouraged their sons, brothers and husbands to ght [for Allah]. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Bin Laden told Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir: I became a father of a girl after September 11. I named her Saa after Saa who killed a Jewish spy at the time of the Prophet. [My daughter] Saa will kill enemies of Islam like Saa of the Prophets time.34 Aside from this single statement, bin Laden is not known to support female suicide terrorists, but has gloried the auxiliary roles of early Muslim women, with specic reference to Khadija, the Prophets rst wife and the rst Muslim convert in preIslamic Arabia. Bin Laden honoured Khadija for inciting men at the time of the Prophet to participate in jihad against the Quraysh, Islams ercest and rst enemy. In his Declaration of War against Americans, Bin Laden stated: Our women had set a tremendous example for generosity in the name of Allah. They motivate and encourage their sons, brothers, and husbands to ght for the cause of Allah in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzigovina, Chechnya, and in other countries Our women encourage jihad.35 Al-Qaedas number two, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri also proudly cited examples of female jihadis, probably to encourage other women to ght for the cause. In an interview with Al Majallah, Zawahiri said: A British Muslim woman called Umm-Hafsah carried out another operation during which she killed two Americans.36 Religious enablers of jihad also include key Al-Qaeda ideologues such as Yousef al-Ayyiri, the former head of operations for Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia until he was killed by Saudi security forces in 2004. A prolic writer, Ayyiri also wrote The Role of Women in Jihad Against the Enemies; referring to the early Muslim female ghters, he stated: behind every Mujahid stood a woman, which suggests that women were the primary instigators of jihad.
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Today, the debate among the ulama on the permissibility of suicide continues to divide the Muslim world; some view suicide as a legitimate tactic while others defy it on the basis that it was never employed by the Prophet of Islam, and therefore, suicide is haram (forbidden). Many scholars argue that suicide is one of the major sins in Islam that annuls ones faith,37 and those well versed in religious text often cite the Quranic verse that clearly rebukes those who kill: He who kills anyone not in retaliation for murder or to spread mischief in the land, it would be as if he killed all of mankind, and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.38 A Short-Lived Panorama The liberal door that now permits women to participate in operations will close once male jihadists gain new recruits and score a few successes against the war on terror. The sudden increase in female bombers over the past year may represent nothing more than a temporary wave of Al-Qaedas success rather than an enduring feature of global jihad. Male jihadists could nd it difcult to accept a female operative as the revolutionary vanguard of Islam, and while younger members of AlQaeda and like-minded groups are encouraging Muslim women to join the ranks, there is little indication that they would allow the mujahidaat to overshadow images of the male folk-hero. There is also no evidence that Muslim female operatives will have contact with senior male leaders, calling into question the male jihadists willingness to directly deal with women on an equal footing. The more conservative terrorist regards a Muslim woman as key to maintaining the family structure, while the new, younger generation of terrorists could increasingly encourage women to join their ranks to offset the losses of male operatives. She provides the male jihadist with multiple operational advantages, but while she is indispensable to the war effort, she also is expendable. While a female ghter might not enjoy the same status and rank as her male counterpart, her participation in suicide bombings could, in the near-term, provide impetus for other women to participate in future
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operations. A Muslim female academic states that: by resorting to this tactic [suicide], women would most likely appeal to the female Muslims in the world; that is, to those who are not aware, or have been prevented from becoming aware of the actual teachings of the Quran.39 Suicide arguably attracts those women who have a distorted view of Islam; that is, they have subscribed to the patriarchal interpretations of the Quran, rather than understand the religious verses in their historical context. Coupled with the dire socio-political conditions under which some Muslims live, these women probably believe they have nothing to lose in this life, but have everything to gain from that-world (the Hereafter). Should suicide attacks become a trend among Muslim women, it would be the exception rather than the rule. Some terrorism experts understand that the jihad movement is not homogenous, and there are places where social mores are perhaps conducive to more progressive treatment of womens status. Even in Muslim societies where female ghters are the norm, (i.e., Palestinian territories) it still remains unclear whether traditional societal norms will make adjustments to afford women equal rights once the conict ends. Conclusion: Empowering Women A formidable challenge for countries where women are active participants in war is how states integrate them into mainstream society in the post-conict phase. Disrupting female networks and the conditions that are conducive to violence, necessitates a multi-faceted approach. This must not only serve to identify, target and counter such women but also put in place an effective strategy for detecting male handlers, clerics, and terrorist leaders. A holistic approach is therefore one that aims at improving intelligence capabilities, increasing outreach efforts between local law enforcement with religious leaders and community gures, and involving women in peace and security initiatives. The latter point is often overlooked but studies have shown that womens inclusion in democratic change and institutions affords them greater opportunities to participate and shape civil society. Giving women a chance at peace
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means placing them in positions of authority to manage security issues often reserved for men - in order to advance the process of peace. Doing so can help women develop relationships with women across society and ensure that females prone to violence or vulnerable to terrorist recruitment are included in the peace process. With a policy platform that is inclusive of their interests, women across different classes, traditions, ethnicities, and religious sects can facilitate cohesion in the movement and prove invaluable for feminist lobbying efforts to ensure that womens agendas are heard. For example, in the endeavour to provide radical women political opportunities, institutions backed by state support can contribute towards reintegrating them into society. Through amnesty for female terrorists, the state can create an enabling environment within which they can be brought back into the fold of society. The inclusion of former female terrorists into womens movements and organizations helps strengthen their efforts to lead normal lives and offers them a way to mitigate divisions with other members of the society that might arise as a result of their participation and support for war and conict. Ultimately, the next step for governments to reduce the rise of female terrorists is to improve the lives of women by providing basic necessities such as education for their children, protection for their families during times of war, and equal rights to women wishing to participate in postconict resolution. By encouraging females to participate in the postconict phase, for instance as peacemakers, there is a greater likelihood that society will be able to rebuild, particularly in the Islamic world where the primary responsibility for rearing and nurturing the family system falls on women. In most cases, however, governments do not have a uniform plan to protect and provide for women who wish to return to a normal life. Governments should reconsider their current programs in favour of a community-based approach that aims to improve the socioeconomic opportunities for women in the pre and post conict phase; fund community development projects; centre activism on education and social issues that matter to women; and support various womens
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organizations and social movements to encourage their participation in the political process. By protecting the social and political development of women, states can reduce, to a large extent, the rate at which females are drawn towards terrorist groups.
References:
For the full report, see Stronger Women, Stronger Nations: 2008 Iraq Report, Women for Women International, accessed at http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/ RMOI-7-CF2M 2 Andrew Silke, The Psychology of Suicide Terrorism, in Terrorists, Victims, and Society, Andrew Silke (ed.) (Sussex, England: Wley, 2003), pp.105-107. 3 For background of these factors, see Andrew Silke (ed.), Becoming a Terrorist, in Terrorists, Victims, and Society, (Sussex, England: Wley, 2003), pp.37-51. 4 Wafa Idriss was the rst Palestinian female suicide operative in January 2002. She detonated explosives at a Jerusalem shopping district, killing one Israeli and injuring over 150 people. Some analysts have argued that she was seeking revenge from occupation and retribution from her husband for being barren and divorced. While personal reasons are cited for her attack, it remains unclear and unknown if Wafas unmarried status and other personal factors were taken into consideration before she committed the attack. 5 Westerman, Toby, Cheerleader for female suicide bombers, WorldNetDaily.com, 2002 6 Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera Airs Special on Female Suicide Bomber, 24 August 2005. 7 Lustwick, Ian S., Terrorism in the Arab-Israeli Conict: Targets and Audiences, in Martha Crenshaw, ed., Terrorism in Context. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 1995. p. 536. 8 See John Horgan, 2005, Post, 1986, 1987, 1990 9 Jerold Post, The Psychological roots of Terrorism, in Addressing the Causes of Terrorism: The Club de Madrid Series on Democracy and Terrorism, vol. 1 (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005); Jerold Post, E. Sprinzak, and L. Denny The Terrorists in Their Own Words: Interviews with 35 Incarcerated Mddle Eastern Terrorists, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 15, no. 1 (2003), pp.171-184; and John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005) and (2008, forthcoming). 10 See Mia Bloom, Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bomber, in Bulletin o the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec 2005. Bloom indicates that historically, women have served supporting roles but the advent of suicide bombers has not so much annulled that identity as it has transformed it. Even as martyrs, they ay be portrayed as the chaste wives and mothers of revolution. (p.56) 11 It is difcult to explain the lack of scholarship by Palestinians; of worth noting is that data collected by a female U.S.-based expert, Nichole Argo, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and former work by Nasra Hassan have proved useful to this authors assessment. However, there is no evidence of recent scholarship by an Arab and specically, a Palestinian of this phenomenon. 12 Interviews conducted by the author with two Kashmiri women in February 2008; these 1
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two women were the rst to cross the Line of Control from India into Pakistan. They are both celebrated and honored by male militants for the support they provided to men during the conict. Prakriti Gupta, Muslim Women Take Up Arms Against Islamic Militants in Kashmir, 10 September 2005. This paper does not consider the circumstances that drive women to suicide terrorism but rather, presents several different likely motivators for different women across different conicts. Because proles no longer prove useful in terrorism studies, proling the circumstances or environment from which terrorism breeds (i.e., the roots of terror) can offer a useful framework from which to analyze the causal relationships between terrorists and their societies, as well as look at individual relationships between the female bomber and the male handler, leader, or source of inspiration. A website called The Iraqi Diaspora in Switzerland Forum posted an article and opened a discussion through its chat room on the subject of The Girls of the Insurgency and the Tempting Offer. Accessed through http://www.iraqi.ch/forum/index.php?showtopic=64 8&pic=2512&mode=threaded&start= http://www.abualbokhary.info/vb3/showthread.php?t=12910 Ibid. Also see http://www.iraqiarbita.org/index3.php?do=article&id=8267 and http:// vb.roro44.com/42952.html, accessed in July 2007. In the latter webpage, a woman by the name of Noofa Ghargan, 40 years of age, is considered the rst Iraqi female woman to fall at al-Qaim battles, where she fought with men against U.S. marines in al-Anbar province. http://www.iraqirabia.org/index3.php?do=article&id=8267 http://www.iraqi.ch/forum/index.php?showtopic=648&pid=2512&mode=threaded&star t= Here, the imam is a reference to Imam al-Mahdi, the last of the twelve imams who is believed to return to restore order to the world. Voices of Iraq, January 22, 2008, accessed at http://www.iraqupdates.com/p_articles.php/ article/26433 Patrick Quinn, U.S. captures female bomber recruiter in Iraq, Associated Press, March 2, 2008 Ask the Scholar, IslamOnline.net. 21 May 2003. www.islamonline.net Sala Jihadi Trend Theorist Turns against Al Qaeda and Issues a Religious Opinion of the Imipermissibility of Suicidal Operations, Al Sharq Al Awsat, 2 September 2005. News from Al Mendhar. www.almendhar.com From verse 9:111 from the Quran. For a historical background on the Assassins, see Akbar, M.J., The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the conict between Islam and Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2002), 195 Hoffman, Bruce, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 99. Muhammad Asad, a Muslim scholar, translates the Arabic word to mean one who is most pure and white but refutes the term virgin. Debating the Religious, Political and Moral Legitimacy of Suicide Bombings, MEMRI No. 53, 2 Ma 2001. http://memri.org Ask the Scholar, IslamOnline.net, 22 March 2004. www.islamonline.net The idea that jihad is fard, or an obligation on all members of the Muslim society, demand that women, like men, play an active role in militant organizations. Even when jihad is not fard and is instead, fard kifaya (duty for select male members of society),
13 14
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18 19 20 21 22 23 24
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women were not obliged to ght but did participate in warfare in the early days of Islamic history, as indicated earlier. While the concept of jihad as a religious obligation for all Muslims is not new, its reintroduction into contemporary jihadi literature signals a shift towards mandating jihad for all Muslims worldwide, making it incumbent for Muslims living outside of conict to help those in need (i.e., wage jihad). Borrowing from the ideas of classical theologians, Azzam reinvents jihad by attaching to it symbolic drama to propagate a consistent Al Qaeda message: Muslims comprise a single Nation and must unite to resist anti-Islamic aggression through the use of obligatory defensive jihad. The Union of Good, www.intelligence.org.il/eng/sib/2_05/funds_f.htm Azzam, Abdullah, Join the Caravan, Part Two, (London, U.K.: Azzam Publications, 2001), Cited from Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, Lady Killer, September 11, 2006, at TNR Online. The full text of bin Ladens fatwa can be found on the PBS web page, accessed at http:// www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html Paper Cites Al-Zawahiris Al-Majallah Interview, Sensational Revelations, in Al Arab al Alamiyah, December 17, 2001. Abualrub, Pp. 209-211. Verse 32. Interview with female Muslim professor in the United States who teaches courses on Islam and gender. September 2005.
32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
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THE LAW OF AERIAL BOMBARDMENT AND CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: KOSOVO AND AFGHANISTAN
Prof. Hayatullah Khan Khattack*
Abstract
(Although rules applicable during armed conflict originated in ancient times, a universal system for regulating conduct during war and offering protection to civilians did not exist. With the advance of technology and the resort to aerial bombardment, war became more deadly and civilians could no longer be insulated from the ravages of conflict. It was in the 20th century that rules began evolving for the protection of civilians. These included the Hague Conventions of 1907, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the two Additional Protocols to the 1949 Conventions. A controversial belief also emerged that air warfare and precision weapons had significantly humanised war. The strikes against dual use and so-called emerging targets have resulted in unacceptable civilian casualties. Furthermore, the application of the rules of engagement during air warfare has not been uniform as is evident from the conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Editor). Introduction A belief has emerged that airpower can deliver a strategic victory in modern conflicts. In the West, and in particular the US, this perception has been reinforced by the decisive military victories in the two Gulf Wars, former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan. Winning the peace is often overlooked. Nevertheless, it is likely that the trend to rely on airpower
* Prof. Hayatullah Khan Khattak is a faculty member of the National Defence University,
Islamabad. He also chairs the Directorate of Collaboration and Publication at ISSRA.
The Law of Aerial Bombardment and Civilian Casualties
to achieve strategic victory will continue. This belief, with serious consequences, has been extrapolated to the tactical level in the fight against terrorism and insurgencies. From the international humanitarian law (IHL) perspective, airpower is also credited with achieving decisive military victories with minimum civilian casualties. Some writers have gone so far as to proclaim: Air warfare over the past decades has significantly humanised war - if such a phenomena is possible. Tremendous technological strides in the use of precision weapons, as well as development in air and space intelligence-gathering tools, have made it far easier to distinguish between military and civilian targets and then effectively strike the military ones - in short, modern warfare has reduced casualties among both attackers and attacked1 Much of the discussion about the adequacy of IHL revolves around the core issue and concept of distinction. Specifically, can the claim that the use of airpower in modern conflicts has reduced civilian casualties be substantiated? As the armouries of very few countries can match that of the US in terms of precision weapons, can general conclusions be drawn from the case studies of the use of airpowers implication for IHL? The relevance of these questions is obvious from the criticism such attacks in various regions have attracted especially in undermining counter-terrorism efforts This study will focus on Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, specifically on the use of airpower in two areas of conflict where the boundaries between combatant and non-combatants and military and non-military objects are blurred. Difficulties of targeting and distinction arise when aerial bombardment is contemplated in urban areas as also with objects that have dual-use i.e., both civilian and military.2 This will continue to cause difficulties in spite of the increasing use of smart weapon systems. Societies are becoming progressively complex and institutions are acquiring both military and civilian functions. Often, the weaker belligerent, usually a developing country, tries to draw the
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stronger side into urban warfare.3 Predictably, therefore, issues relating to distinction will continue to cause legal, moral and ethical dilemmas. In the Kosovo and Afghan conflicts, Western governments have maintained that airpower was used within the framework of the Geneva Conventions and international customary rules.4 However, in both instances the use of airpower has been vehemently criticised on the ground that it was indiscriminate and in violation of international norms. The debate continues in the Afghan conflict.
Section I Rise of the Right to Protection of the Civilian

Jus in Bello Homers Achilles brings the wrath of the gods on himself when he desecrates the corpse of Hector. Rules applicable during armed conflict, jus in bello, originated in ancient times.5 Sun Tzu, circa 500 B.C. enunciated important humanitarian principles applicable to warfare and the Viqayet, written by Arab scholars in the 13th century, covers all aspects of a code of wartime behaviour. As Quincy Wright has noted: Taken as a whole, the war practices of primitive people illustrate various types of international rules of war known at the present time: rules distinguishing types of enemies, rules determining the circumstances, formalities and authority, for beginning and ending war; rules describing limitations of persons, time, place and methods of its conduct, and even rules outlawing war altogether. However, a universal system for regulating conduct during war, and offering protection to civilians, did not exist. Belligerents entered into bilateral agreements for a specific conflict, specific period of time and for specific parties. Parties to a conflict set rules on themselves. But rules there were. As overlapping collections of conventions, treaties and customary law, the period from 19th century onwards is where modern IHL proper (or Law of Armed Conflict or Laws of War) sprout. If one single cause
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can be identified as leading to development of universal rules for the conduct of hostilities then it must be the emergence of the nation state and modern warfare in terms of the horrors that it entailed. It was not surprising that the 1925 and 1929 Geneva Conventions were responses to the horrors of World War 1. The ratio of civilian to military death was 1:200 during the First Great War. During the Second World War the ratio changed to 1:1. It was therefore natural that rules for the protection of civilians were introduced in the 1949 Geneva Convention.6 Max Huber, as early 1945, strikingly put it in the following terms: war, as it becomes more and more total, annuls the difference which formerly existed between armies and civilian populations in regard to exposure to injury and danger.7 IHL, therefore, as rules governing the conduct of military operations, the protection of civilians, and treatment of prisoners blossomed in the 20th century. The three major steps in the development of the law were the Hague Conventions of 1907, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the two 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Conventions. The 1907 Hague and 1949 Geneva Conventions re-affirmed and developed customary law and conventions on the methods and means of warfare, the protection of victims of war (including prisoners of war) and the rules concerning the protection of civilians in occupied territory. This stream of law focused mainly on international conflict. The provisions in these treaties affirmed the limits that military commanders have in application of use of force. The 1977 Additional Protocols further developed rules of conduct for the protection of civilians and non-combatants from the effects of hostilities. Additional Protocol II extended the law dealing with non-international armed conflict. As Geoffrey Best notes, these two additional protocols hugely extended the protection offered to civilians and came as a cloud burst after a long drought. It is catching up seventy years of inaction and inadequacy.8 Although the central idea embodied in the Jus in Bello concept, i.e., the idea of civilian protection or immunity from harm, can be traced back several centuries, civilians had been largely insulated from belligerent actions - until the appearance of modern warfare and in particular airpower. Prior to the emergence of modern warfare, IHL
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did not have to address the protection of the non-combatant. Thus Bests comments are true to a point: prior to the emergence of airpower, a nation could be attacked by first destroying its army, civilians generally were not a direct target as they were to become in the First and Second World Wars.9 The 1949 Convention was specifically drafted to protect civilians in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. The earlier 1907 Hague Conventions, although limited, also restricted armed conflict in order to protect civilians and the League of Nations in 1938, condemned the deliberate bombing of civilians as illegal. IHL reacted to developments in warfare as new circumstances arose in a slow but sure way. Thus, as Sandoz notes: in view of the rapid development of modern weaponry, states have felt the need to impose further restrictions, in particular the prohibition against bombing, starving or terrorizing the civilian population as a means of forcing the enemy to capitulate, and the principle of proportionality between the anticipated military gains of an attack and the risk of collateral damage to civilians and their property10 In Europe the intellectual reasons for distinguishing between civilians and combatants, and thus the legal and political theory of Jus in bello, were sown by such writers as Grotius,Vattel and Rousseau from the 17th century onwards culminating in the 20th century into the full blown IHL as known today.11 Civilian protection, as noted above, much predates this intellectual foundation in the 17th century but the culmination in the 20th century of Additional Protocol I (and II) of the 1949 Geneva Conventions12 took the idea of civilian protection to new heights and gave a clear legal statement as to the distinction of a civilian in armed conflicts. The Geneva Conventions have also been bolstered by other developments in IHL after 1977 that have further affirmed civilian protection. New laws on landmines, and chemical and laser weapons, combine with the statute of the new International Criminal Court and the UN Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the Special Court for Sierra Leone to create a growing framework for civilian protection in war and from genocide.
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The 1977 Additional Protocol I13 It was the brutalities of the conflicts in Vietnam, Middle East, Nigeria, etc., and decolonization that gave a further impetus to reaching agreement on the two 1977 Additional Protocols: it was an achievement not to be belittled and something perhaps rather great [was achieved].14 The greatness was in the degree of protection that the civilian was being given for the first time and the almost universal acceptance of the Protocol by nation states. But even more important is the global acceptance of the values embodied in it. This was demonstrated by the persistent public discourse on IHL pertaining to the use of force in the Second Gulf War. The main protagonist in the conflict, the US, was constrained to vehemently counter accusations of violating the Conventions although it had not even a ratified Protocol I.15 As so often in the past, it was the International Red Cross that proposed substantial rules in 1969 to supplement existing IHL.16 Many of these were included in UN General Assembly Resolution 2675 outlining draft rules for the protection of civilians. These Draft Rules became the basis of the final texts of Additional Protocols I and II to the Geneva Conventions 1949 adopted, through consensus at the Diplomatic Conference convened by the Swiss Federal Council. Protocol I, for the first time in the history of IHL, defined the civilian caught in a conflict and expressly distinguished between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objects.17 Article 50 defines a civilian as a person not directly involved in hostilities and a civilian population consists of such persons. The basic rule is that the parties to a conflict should distinguish between civilians and civilian objects on the one hand and combatants and military objects on the other, and should direct their military operations against the latter. However, even where civilians are not directly the objects of an attack their proximity to a valid military objective may result in it not being attacked if the civilian casualties would be excessive in relation to the military advantage to be gained. More importantly, a considerable amount of ambiguity as to who is
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or is not a civilian has been removed by the requirement that in case of doubt whether a person is a civilian that person shall be considered to be a civilian.18 Nevertheless, for example the Afghanistan conflict illustrates, disputes as to distinguishing between civilians and combatants continues to hinder the application of IHL. Articles 51, 52 and 57 are important in that opposing forces are required to limit their attack to military objectives but of more significance from our perspective is Article 54 which requires protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. Article 51(5a) regulates bombardment in populated areas in that it is prohibited to attack a whole area as one target if in that area several military objectives are located. Article 51 (5b) is worth quoting in full because it refers to the important principle of proportionality (codified for the first time): Among others, the following types of attack are to be considered indiscriminate -: An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. This article requires the commander to weigh the consequences of his decision to attack in terms of the military objective as against possible civilian casualties. This, in itself, is a subjective exercise and depends on the prevailing situation on the field. Article 52, though important, has generated controversy. It prohibits attacks on non-military objects and defines military objects as objects which by their very nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offer a definite military advantage The interpretation of Article 52 has been debated extensively. For example, when does an advantage become definite? Some states, such
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as the US, have taken a liberal view of what constitutes a military objective19 while others have adopted a more restricted approach and consider only those objects that have a more direct link with the military to be a military objective.20 Article 57 reaffirms: .. those who plan or decide upon an attack shall: take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding..., incidental loss of civilians life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects; The above is a summary of the salient Articles of Additional Protocol I relevant to our study and we shall now turn to the important principles enshrined therein and examine those.
Section II Developments in Air Power & Legal Concepts

The 1977 Additional Protocols constitute a significant development in the protection of the civilian. Specific steps were required to be taken for protecting the civilian and civilian objects during international conflict. Most of the principles and legal concepts contained in Protocol I have a long established basis in customary international law. The main elements relevant to our case studies are those of distinction (or discrimination), proportionality, military necessity and military objectives. There are difficulties in interpretations of these principles which are further complicated by targeting policies and dual-use facilities. The increasing impact of technological developments in weaponry and aerial warfare is also of consequence. Precision guided ammunitions (PGMs), satellite-launched/guided missiles and aerial bombardment have changed the face of battle as never before. Development in the precision of weapons has given military planners freedom and flexibility in the use of force.21 In theory, it is to comply potentially with the distinction requirements of Protocol I between combatants and non-combatants on one hand and protected
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property and military objects on the other. But in practice this potential has proved controversial as our case studies will illustrate. The precision of modern bombardment has highlighted several grey areas in IHL such as the targeting of belligerent leadership or dual use targets. Technological developments have had the impact of stretching the boundaries of IHL. Developments in air power have had a particular influence in the evolution of IHL. But are there rules and regulations restraining aerial bombardment law? Land Warfare Law is certainly well developed and so is, unarguably, Naval Warfare Law. Attempts have been made to regulate aerial bombardment by treaty law but the development in this respect remains non-existent.22 It is ironic that the advent of airpower has had such an impact on giving impetus to development of laws for the protection of civilians, but the rules and regulations for the conduct of air warfare itself remains nascent. It is to this we turn our attention to first, and, then the legal concepts within Protocol 1 so far as relevant to air warfare. Air Power and IHL As mentioned earlier, before the advent of air power civilians were, in general, immune from the effects of war unless, of course, an army was on the march and requisitioning or the civilians were part of a besieged town. With the development of air power, attacks could be launched well behind enemy lines only not against the enemys armed forces but also against supply depots, logistics and lines of communication. Inevitably, and increasingly, civilians became casualties. The changed nature of warfare in the early twentieth century was to have other consequences. The heavy demands of the large but mobile conscripts armies that were put into the field in the Second World War and their increasing reliance on mechanization meant that civilians had to be employed in factories producing weapons, warships and military aircraft, their armaments and components, and in installations producing the fuel to drive vehicles and the raw material such as steel needed to build ships. The emphasis of targeting was shifting away from enemy combatants to the equipment and supplies on which they depended, but
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at great cost to the enemys civilian population. Though still protected by IHL from direct attack, they were not protected from the incidental damage caused as a by-product of attacks on war production facilities. Bombing was still far from precise.23 The Second World War started with a commitment by all the major belligerents to avoid casualties to civilians from aerial bombardment. But three years into the war, the inviolability of civilians was totally discarded, especially by the US and Britain. Civilians became deliberate targets. The following description of the effects of a US bombing raid could be mistaken for the attack on Hiroshima or Nagasaki: There were reports of babies being torn by the high winds from their mothers arms and sucked into the flames. Many died trapped in the burning wreckage of buildings. Upon entering air-raid shelters, would-be rescuers found nothing but bones suspended in congealed fat. Women and children were charred as to be unrecognisable.24 But that was the fate of the German civilians of Hamburg where harm was intentionally inflicted as a military policy through aerial bombardment. Within 25 years of its first use on the western front, Britain and the US took aerial bombardment (strategic bombing) to new heights. Hamburg was to lose 45,000 civilian in one night whilst Dresden, after 14 hours of aerial bombing, over 100,000. Similarly 5 Japanese cities were fire-bombed before the atomic attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The rationale for aerial bombardment was to destroy the enemy morale. The justification for civilian casualties was that they had become too integrated into the military effort to be isolated from the consequences of war. IHL was slow to react to developments in air warfare. This was probably because, initially, airpower was intended only for transportation and not for bombardment.25 At the battle of Marne during the early years of First World War, air reconnaissance proved decisive for the French and disastrous for the German war plans. But air power, in terms of a method of bombardment, was never even contemplated to play a
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tactical role let alone a strategic one as it is now. Field Marshal Foch had declared in 1912 that flying was a fascinating sport but not of the slightest interest to the armed forces, notwithstanding the fact that a year earlier the Italians had dropped bombs over Libya for the first time from an aircraft. Hindrance to the development of the rules and codifications, in this area have also been influenced and affected by other factors characteristic to aerial warfare: rapid technological development, relative recent emergence of the aircraft and its dual use as a weapon and serving peaceful civilian purposes. It is thus not surprising that no single set of international rules or treaty governs the conduct of aerial bombardment. Most of the rules that are applied to aerial bombardment are those that derive from the general rules of warfare in the Hague and Geneva Conventions as discussed below.26 However, some specific legal regulation relevant to air warfare was introduced in 1899 when the First Hague Peace Conference adopted three Declarations and three Conventions. The first prohibited the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons or similar objects.27 The measures were temporary (lasting from 4 September 1900 until 4 September 1905) justified by the inaccuracy of such methods in discriminating. However, the regulations were too restrictive and hindered further developments for a permanent ban. The Hague Declaration of 1907, once again, renounced the discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons or by other new methods of similar nature. But application of the Declaration had been conditioned by a general participation clause, and since the Declaration had not been ratified by the various belligerents in the First World War, it was binding on no one. Nevertheless, the 1907 Convention did establish restrictions on the means used to injure the enemy and stop property being destroyed unnecessarily. Restrictions were also placed on bombing structures such as hospitals and places of worship during sieges and bombardment.28 Article 26 also stated that belligerents do all in their power to give the civilian population warning of what was coming; but this fell far short of the total inviolability civilians would receive in 1977. The Geneva Conventions was to be expanded on these provisions to include medical shipments and convoys, and hospital zones.29
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Specific attempts at regulating aerial warfare and protection of civilians from aerial bombardment by treaty, understandably, occurred in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. However, these attempts failed. In 1923, a Commission of Jurists drew up a draft of Rules of Air Warfare, which would have forbidden aerial bombardment of civilians or of injuring non-combatants and additionally defined military objectives to which attacks were to be confined.30 Once again, four years after the Second World War, the International Committee of the Red Cross formulated Draft Rules for the limitation of the Dangers incurred by the Civilian Population in Time of War.31 These were similar to the 1923 Rules which prohibited attack on civilian populations and permitted attacks only on military objects. However, what militated against the acceptance of the Rules by governments, was its prohibition on target-area bombardment and its extensive precautionary requirements in attack. Although no treaty resulted from the above attempts at regulating aerial warfare, both, especially the one of 1923, had a profound impact on customary international law governing aerial warfare which, together with state practice and pronouncement, contributed to the emergence of general principles. A consensus appears to have emerged that civilians should not be the object of attacks and that the incidental harm caused to civilians through the bombardment of military objectives should not be out of proportion to the military advantage to be gained and. to the extent possible, precautions should be taken to protect civilians.32 These principles, as we have seen above in Section I, found their way into Protocol I. However, in this context, it is also worth mentioning the 1969 UN General Assembly Basic Principles on Armed Conflict that had relevance for aerial bombardment. There were 8 principles and 5 of them are of particular relevance: 2. In the conduct of military operations during armed conflicts, a distinction must be made at all times between persons actively taking part in the hostilities and civilian populations. 3. In the conduct of military operations, every effort should be made to spare civilians from the ravages of war, and all necessary
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precautions should be taken to avoid injury, loss or damage on civilian population. 4. Civilian populations, as such, should not be the object of military operations. 5. Dwellings and other installations that are used only by civilian populations should not be the object of military operations. 6. Places or areas designated for the sole protection of civilians, such as hospital zones or similar refuges, should not be the object of military operations.33 Air Power & Protocol I The various provisions of the two conventions (1899 and 1907) and the two Rules were to be the building blocs of Protocol I. Protocol I does not specifically address aerial bombardment although Article 49 provides that all its articles concerning the protection of civilians apply to all means of attack. As we have discussed in Section 1, Protocol I clearly prohibits attacks against civilians, civilian objects and protected property. Protocol I obliges belligerents to take measures to limit loss of civilian life and damage to civilian property incidental to attacks on military targets. The Protocol underlines the critical concepts of distinction, military necessity and proportionality: these are the concepts that determine any targeting decisions of planners of air warfare. The absence of treaty law does not mean complete freedom in the use of means and methods during air warfare. Aside from the rules in Protocol I natural law and customary law also impose restrictions. Customary international law restraints on warfare are premised on the idea that violence and destruction that are unnecessary to actual military necessity are wasteful, counterproductive and immoral. The principle of humanity both complements and limits the doctrine of military necessity, proportionality being central to the latter. How are these principles, and consequently Protocol I, applicable to air warfare?
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Distinction Distinction is the most fundamental, and uncontroversial, principle of customary international law. It provides that non-combatants must be distinguished from combatants and military objects from civilian. As discussed earlier, the core principle of distinction is to be found in Article 48 of the Protocol. Under Article 50 of Protocol I, a civilian is any person who is not a member of the armed forces in the sense of Article 43 of Protocol I. Members of the armed forces, as so defined, are legitimate objects of attack, except in so far as the law of war extends protection to them in various circumstances. Article 50(2) states that the totality of the entire civilian constitutes the civilian population. The presence of soldiers within the civilian population does not deprive the latter of its immunity nor does the presence of large number of soldiers within the civilian population give the former immunity.34 Article 51 (4 & 5) states:Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited. However, the fact that attacks upon legitimate military objectives may cause terror among the civilian population does not make such attacks unlawful. Terrorising civilian populations by aerial bombardment had been practiced during the two World Wars, and in the 1960s, in violation of international law; the Rules discussed above would have forbidden terrorising the civilian population. In view of this, the above rule was inserted into Protocol I. This Article also prohibits aerial bombardments to destroy civilian morale. Technically there may be a distinction between terror and morale attacks but in practice they are treated the same. What may be a morale bombing to the attacking force will be a terror bombing to the targeted civilians. As such, aerial bombing intended to force civilians to overthrow their government or leadership would be unlawful bombing. Central to the principle of distinction is the concept of the military objective, or the legitimate target. The definition of objects has two elements: (a) their nature, location, purpose or use must make an effective contribution to military action, and; (b) their total or partial destruction, capture or neutralisation must offer a definite military advantage in the
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circumstances ruling at the time. It is a requirement that both elements of the definition must be met before a target can be properly considered an appropriate military objective. Without this limitation to the actual situation at hand, the principle of distinction would be void, as every object could in abstracto, under possible future developments become a military objective. The drafters of Protocol I tried to avoid too large an interpretation of what constitutes a military objective. The Protocol I definition has been criticised by some American scholars as focusing too narrowly on definite military advantage and paying too little heed to war sustaining capability, including economic targets such as export industries.35 The British view also appears to be that the Protocol definition is too narrow and include as targets such as broadcasting and television stations as military objectives.36 It may be that, for practical purposes, a definition of a civilian object in the Protocol would have been more satisfactory. But because it is not the intrinsic character of an object but the use made of the object that defines it as a military object, military objects had to be defined. Indeed, every object other than those benefiting from special protection (protected property) may become a legitimate object of attack. Perceived successes of aerial bombardment, and in particular use of PGMs, in modern conflicts, has also raised questions as to the rationale behind the limitation to military objectives, pointing out that the aim of modern conflicts is the capitulation of (usually dictatorial) governments. As Clausewitz has claimed, the aim of every armed conflict is to defeat the enemys will. Acquiring a non-military advantage over the enemy can more effectively accomplish that aim. Traditionally, Clausewitz argued that the centre of an enemys gravity was its armed forces. Now some strategists argue that the centre of gravity is no longer the armed forces but may be the political leadership or the political support of the civilian population.37 So, the argument goes, why limit attacks to just military objectives? Proportionality Concentrating unduly on the principle of military objective might
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lead one to ignore civilian casualties or consider them as collateral damage in the course of legitimate activities. The principle of proportionality counters this tendency by requiring a constant weighing of military and humanitarian values. Although the term proportionality is not mentioned in Protocol I, equivalent terms such as excessive damage or excessive injury are used in Articles 15, 57 and 85. Therefore, notwithstanding the customary law aspect of the concept, the principle of proportionality clearly does bind parties to the protocol. As the US is the major protagonist in the case studies to follow and a non-ratifying state of the Protocol, it is important at this juncture to comment on its attitude to the principles enshrined therein. The US has declared its intention to be bound by those principles that reflect customary international law.38 The US Air Force Pamphlet advises that, in applying international legal limits to air attacks, the following precaution must be taken: 1. Do everything feasible to verify that the objectives attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects. 2. Take all precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimising, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, and damage to civilian objects; and 3. Refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.39 It will be noted that paragraph 3 embodies the principle of proportionality while 1 and 2, embody the principles of discrimination and humanity respectively. Therefore, the US expressly recognizes Article 51 as a customary international law and it will not have escaped attention that the Air Force Pamphlet enjoins attack against civilians in terms virtually identical to Article 51.
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However, whether or not a state is a party to the Protocol, its armed forces are required to respect the customary rule of proportionality which attempts to balance military and humanitarian consideration. When applying this rule, those who decide upon an attack must take into account the effects of the attack on the civilian population in their pre-attack calculations. They must determine whether those effects are excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. A balancing act must be carried out depending on various factors: a) the importance of the target and the urgency of the situation; b) intelligence about the proposed target, i.e., what is being, or will be, used for and when; c) what weapons are available, their range, accuracy and radius of effect; d) conditions affecting accuracy of targeting such as terrain, weather, night or day; e) factors affecting incidental loss or damage, such as the proximity of civilians or civilian objects in the vicinity of the target or other protected objects or zone and whether they are inhabited, or the possible release of hazardous substances as a result of the attack; f) the risks to his own troops posed by the various options open to him.40 In practice the balancing test is extremely difficult to conduct as it requires comparing and quantifying dissimilar values i.e., military advantage and incidental injury. How, for example, is one to measure the suffering caused to civilians during attack on a bridge against the military advantage of disrupting enemy logistics/supplies? Furthermore, the value attributed to a target or the incidental injury depends on who is making the assessment and the value is never constant in practice as it should be. Does the concept apply to individual facets of an attack or the attack as a whole? The latter appears to represent(s) the weight of opinion, (although) consensus remains elusive.41 The emphasis on precise aerial bombardment and from a safe
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distance without placing the attacking force in danger has created what Schmitt, who has made a special study of the subject, has termed a false dilemma regarding proportionality. It has been argued that aerial attacks from a safe distant create increased civilian casualties and the attacks are therefore disproportionate. Schmitt asserts that this argument wrongly excludes preservation of ones own forces as an important military advantage to be considered when conducting proportionality calculations.42 Dual Use Objects and Urban Operations Aerial bombardment of dual-use objects and of targets in urban areas creates particular dilemmas. Precision guided munitions have, to some extent, eased the dilemma of the military planner but experience indicates that accuracy cannot be taken for granted. Additionally, only a very limited number of states have the capability to deploy PGMs or the resources to afford them. Whilst the targeting of dual use objects raises complex issues in relation to operations in urban environments, the ultimate question revolves around the principle of distinction and proportionality. The military and civilian populations often use common power sources, transportation networks, and telecommunication systems. Distinguishing between the military and civilian infrastructure is difficult and it may be impossible to disable or destroy only those elements servicing the military. It would appear from the restrictions within Protocol I that attacks on dual use objects may be unlawful but the issue is not clear-cut and is open to interpretation. It is also not clear from the literature whether there is an absolute prohibition on attacks on dual use objects in terms of customary international law. The US, as a constant objector to and violator of the rule, would adopt the stance that it has not been accepted as a norm. Attacks on dual use objects can have extensive effects on the civilian population and raise concerns about proportionality. Disagreement centres on the weight to be given to the immediate and direct injuries to civilians or the longer indirect effects of an attack on a civilian population. The US and
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the UK adhere to the former interpretation when making proportionality calculations43 and tend to liberally interpret military objective when it comes to dual use objects. Aerial bombardment in an urban area poses serious problems for compliance with principles of discrimination and proportionality. Urban environments increase the chances that military attacks will harm civilians and even the impact of small precision munitions can be devastating for the population. The structure and organisation of urban centres where military and civilian institutions can be adjacent to each other or even in the same building creates targeting restrictions and limitations difficult to overcome. To compound these difficulties belligerents may deliberately place military objects or combatants within urban centres. In the above circumstances any aerial bombardment would still have to comply with proportionality principles and refrain from attacks likely to result in excessive civilian casualties in relation to military gain
Section III Operation Allied Force

Introduction Having reviewed the legal principles underlying the protection of civilians and the laws of war pertaining to aerial bombing, we now turn to the use of air power in two case studies: Kosovo and Afghanistan. Tentative conclusions will be drawn from the estimates of casualties and the degree of adherence to Protocol I when air power is used. Whilst it is possible to investigate and evaluate specific instances of civilian casualties within a particular case study, it is difficult to draw concrete conclusions for comparison purposes between the case studies. One of the main reasons is that there are no consistent and transparent sources for the compilation of figures on civilian casualties. In both conflicts the US was the main air power, and the military doctrine and air assets used were to some extent uniform. The two theatres
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of operation were in different continents, under different politico-social conditions. What was politically acceptable in Afghanistan was not so in Kosovo. What critical examination by the media (CNN Effect) of aerial bombardment in Afghanistan there was, conceding the context of September 11, could not match that received by Kosovo. The CNN effect was certainly important in determining the freedom of how aerial bombardment was used. Restraint and pressures within the US-led coalitions and the political scrutiny of force was not consistent in the conflicts The geography and demography of the two regions was starkly contrasting; this in turn had consequences for the way air power was used and the accessibility of targets. Population density in the target area determined the size of causalities as well as the degree of restraint. The type and number of munitions used were important factors: the number of PGMs employed in the Afghan conflict was far greater than in Kosovo. The duration of the conflicts is yet another factor: the Kosovo war lasted for 78 days and the Afghan 103 days. The ground forces used in Afghanistan were much larger than in Kosovo. This, of course, meant that in the Kosovo war, air power achieved the goal of winning a war on its own. The complexity and effectiveness of air defence systems, including fighter cover, also varied: it was highly effective in Kosovo but non-existent in Afghanistan. In both conflicts command of the air by the US-led coalition was achieved at an early stage and air operations took place freely and with impunity. But the greatest obstacle to securing accurate estimates of civilian casualties is the absence of official records and the difficulty of obtaining information. In Afghanistan this is even more problematic because of the countrys impenetrable terrain and the consequent inability of independent assessors to move about freely. The virtual absence of independent sources as well as the difficulties posed by cultural practices such as the quick burial of the dead in accordance with Islamic traditions collectively result in the absence of accurate data on casualties. The Kosovo conflict was fought almost exclusively with air power.
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Unlike the Afghan war, the political leadership, anticipating a brief campaign, retained control over the use of air power.44 This ensured greater restraint, discrimination and proportionality. NATO had openly opted for air power to stop human rights violations and ensure withdrawal of Serb forces. Reliance on air power alone made the achievement of political objectives difcult and, after six weeks of bombing, there were more Serb forces in Kosovo than before the campaign. An important truism is that media presence impacts on the number of casualties. This is amply demonstrated by the Kosovo conict were media exposure ensured fewer casualties while in Afghanistan the numbers were much higher because of the relatively weak media presence. The latters watchdog role thus sensitises public opinion and, consequently, compliance with IHL.45 In democracies, media exposure inevitably also inuences political direction of targeting policy and the operational freedom of the military.46 NATO policy on the use of air power and targeting policy were well known: rst targets to be hit were Serbian surface-to-air missile sites, military installations and troop concentrations. Others included those used by civilians and military such as communication facilities, roads and bridges. Attacks on dual-use facilities, such as power stations, oil and petroleum depots received particular media attention. Considerable efforts were, therefore, made to limit attacks to military targets and avoid civilian causalities and damage to civilian objects. Targeting was tightly controlled by constant review of its legal, political and military terms at the NATO headquarters (SHAPE) and national capitals of the participating NATO members. Dual-use targets were to have a distinct military component to secure approval for attack.47 The US-led Operation Allied Force began on 24 March 1999 when Richard Holbrookes attempt at mediation failed and OSCE monitors withdrew from Kosovo. Fourteen NATO member-countries launched air attacks from 24 European bases and 3 aircraft carriers. The war, that was supposed to last a few days rather than weeks, concluded after 78 days resulting in the deaths of 500 civilian and about 600 Serb military and police.48 NATO conducted over 37,000 sorties and used approximately
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40 percent PGM.49 Two-third of the rst month of aerial bombardment took place during the night and, more importantly, in the rst month of the campaign 50 percent of the strike sorties were cancelled, tons of bombs were dropped in the Adriatic due to bad weather, under the rules of engagement imposed by the politicians.50 Morale Targeting During the Kosovo conict several targets were hit raising worldwide concerns and publicity. Similar incidents occurred in Iraq and later in Afghanistan more frequently but never received the same media attention and hence there was no important restraining inuence. In Kosovo such incidents included the attack on a passenger train transporting internally displaced civilians, the Chinese embassy, bridges, Serbian television and the electric grid systems. Some of these were targeting errors because of faulty intelligence, some were accidents, whilst other were deliberate attacks justied by military necessity. Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that all too often NATO targeting subjected the civilian population to unacceptable risks either in its illegal targeting or failing to take adequate precautions to verify civilians presence when attacking mobile targets.51 The HRW reports question whether civilian casualties were sufciently taken into account or whether NATOs strategy of psychological warfare was intended to harass civilians. NATOs high altitude bombing was specically identied as a reason for the unacceptable risks taken with the civilian population. The Chinese Embassy incident on 7 May 1999 was admitted as a mistake by the US Air force and was attributed to incorrect information.52 A mobile target that was attacked resulting in large civilian casualties was the Djakovica convoy on 14 April 1999. The target was found to be a civilian object although NATO claimed that all the available intelligence indicated that it was military and that the attack was called off when it was realized that the object attacked was civilian.53 In practical terms, air power without sufcient ground intelligence made targeting vulnerable to human error and NATOs dependence only on non-ground intelligence made it difcult to achieve political objectives.
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The Djakovica incident raised several issues. One was NATOs policy of bombing from an altitude of 15,000 feet in order to minimize risks to the pilots especially from hand held surface-to-air missiles and ant-aircraft artillery; another was rules of engagement for air patrols seeking target opportunities without verication.54 Protocol I imposes a duty to undertake all feasible precautions before commencing attack. Hans-Peter Gasser comments: The keyword is feasible: the law does not expect the impossible, but it asks the Commander or the staff Ofcer to do what he can do. The United Kingdoms declaration on signing Protocol I give appropriate indications for the interpretation of this notion. the word feasible means that which is practicable or practicably possible, taking into account all circumstances at the time including those relevant to the sources of the military operations.55 Protocol I would require a pilot to get close to the target to identify it correctly whilst military necessity and advantage, would require pilots to y at a sufcient height to reduce risk. Also relevant is the rule mentioned earlier of presumption when there is doubt i.e., when the identication of a target is in doubt it must be presumed to be a civilian. In situations where states are not party to Protocol I, customary international law requires attacking only military objectives. Although unclear from available literature, the level of care would not be higher in customary international law than in Protocol I, namely do all that is feasible. Clearly, the requirements of IHL and military advantage are in conict and this is an area that requires further research. Milosevics intransigence compelled NATO to change its strategy and attack dual use targets plus those that would instigate the public to exert pressure on the political leadership. Public morale thus became a target towards the middle of the 78 day campaign, while in the Gulf conict it was targeted from the start.56 Yugoslav electric installations and industrial structures began to be hit on the 40th day of the campaign and almost 70 percent of the power was disrupted. The HWR report, states that targets were chosen to harass civilians and that these included
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bridges and radio and television stations. Serbian Television and Radio In the early hours of 23 April 1999, NATO aircraft attacked the Serbian State Television (RTS) in Belgrade killing 17 civilians. At the time at least 120 people were in the building and the attack generated heated international controversy: RTS was entitled to the protection granted to civilian objects, though not absolute protection, was it therefore a legitimate military objective? Was state control and ownership of a progovernment propaganda apparatus sufcient to regard it as a military target especially when 17 civilians died? Alternatively, was the attack proportional? Finally, were the civilians forewarned about the attack? NATO argued that RTS was targeted because it had become the mouthpiece of Milosevic and was responsible for fostering ethnic nationalism and hatred. It however primarily relied on the dual-use of RTS to justify its aerial bombardment: the RTS was linked to the C3 (command, control and communication) network. At a press conference prior to the bombing, NATO declared RTS a military objective, but apparently gave no warning to the civilians to vacate the premises. Although not journalists,57 in the traditional sense of the word, the RTS personnel were protected persons as Protocol I equates them to civilians during armed conict.58 However, as the ICTY Committee opined, if the additional use of the facilities was that of an integral part of the C3 network, then it was a legitimate target.59 This view approximates that of Protocol I that a dual-use object may be a lawful military object when the criteria of Article 52 have been met (see Section I above). The Final Report also concluded that although civilian casualties were high, the attack on RTS was not disproportionate. This conclusion was reached by counterbalancing the civilian deaths with the overall concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from attacking the specic dual-use component of the network. The coordinated targeting of the radio relay buildings were intended to deny communications to Serb troops and afford NATO military advantage.
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Even if the concept of proportionality affords the attacker considerable latitude, he is required to limit damage to civilians and take all feasible precautions as stipulated in Article 51 and 57 of the Protocol. In this respect, serious reservations have been expressed whether NATO did in fact take the necessary measures to protect the civilians from harm. Its warnings were contradictory, unclear and too little.60 The Final Report concluded that although there were conicting testimonies, NATO should have given sufcient advance warning.61 Finally, the ICTY Committee concluded that the use of the media to incite hatred may justify its destruction but propaganda alone was not sufcient to warrant such an attack.62 NATOs claim was that the destruction of RTS for its propaganda role was secondary, if complementary, to that of its C3 function. However, it is unavoidable that during a conict, state controlled media is involved in propaganda and journalists, therefore, should be accorded protection.63 On balance, in the light of articles 51, 52 and 57 of Protocol I, the attack on RTS was a violation of IHL. Although the Protocol was not ratied by some of the attacking states, the principles enshrined in these articles were the same as in customary international law. On balance, however, the degree of compliance with IHL during Operation Allied Force was exemplary especially the extent to which NATO forces went out of their way to avoid casualties. On the other hand, the conditions under which Operation Allied Force took place were exceptional and problematic for comparison purposes.
Section IV Operation Enduring Freedom

If Operation Allied Force was characterized by restraint and is likely to be highly scrutinised, Operation Enduring Freedom was anything but restrained and unlikely to be scrutinised seriously because of the aftermath of 11 September 2001. The Talibans harsh rule and links to Osama Bin Laden alienated international sympathy. Furthermore, Afghanistan was neither located in Europe nor did it have large oil reserves to generate the sympathy of the international media. The mainly US-UK coalition
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with NATO support began bombing of the Taliban regime on 7 October 2001 to bring about regime change. Operation Enduring Freedom was fundamentally different in other ways too. Unlike the two other campaigns, aerial bombardment did not have any worthwhile targets such as complex industrial structures or extensive electrical grid systems, or even dual-use facilities: the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent civil war that had raged since 1992 had left the country denuded of targets. With the absence of civilian objects that could be bombed, civilians became targets with little regard to proportionality or precautionary measures. Most of the US aerial bombardment occurred over 9 of Afghanistans 32 provinces which comprise less than 25 percent of the countrys territory but more than 50 percent of its population. The context of the Afghanistan conict, as that of any other, is important. The context of any conict determines the way adversaries are viewed or treated. For Afghanistan, 11 September 2001 is important for two reasons: the attitude of the US to international norms, its perception of the threats and how it reacted to these; secondly, criticism of US violation of IHL was muted because of post-9/11 global sympathy. The Project on Defence Alternatives (PDA) concluded in its study of the conict: Despite the adulation of Operation Enduring Freedom as a nely-tuned or bulls-eye war, the campaign failed to set a new standard for precision in one important respect: the rate of civilians killed per bomb dropped. In fact, this rate was far higher in the Afghanistan conict - perhaps four times higher - than in the 1999 Balkan war. In absolute terms, too, the civilian death toll in Afghanistan surpassed that incurred by the NATO bombing over Kosovo and Serbia; indeed, it may have been twice as high.64 Estimates on the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan from October 2001 till the end of March 2002, vary greatly.65 The US, as
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per policy, does not maintain casualty records but various organizations have estimated civilian deaths between 1000 and 3,400. PDA estimates that between 1000 to 1300 civilians died as a consequences of bombing, whilst Human Rights Watch puts the gure at around 1000.66A much disputed estimate by an American academic, Prof. Marc Herold, puts the civilian dead between 3000 - 3400 during the period under consideration.67 Compilation of data by the various organizations and individuals of casualties have their weaknesses but all point to heavy civilian losses.68 The difculties with estimating casualties are compounded by the USs refusal to release their gures of civilian casualties, and also the US decision to purchase all the exclusive rights to all the satellite images from Space Imaging Inc.; these images would have made it possible to corroborate damage from aerial bombardment.69 Although 60 percent of munitions used in Afghanistan were PGMs, compared to 38 percent in Kosovo, the casualty estimates are surprising. There were other distinguishing features: greater reliance on bombers as compared to tactical aircraft, aircraft on longer ights en route to sorties, majority of sorties were undertaken by tactical naval aircraft and nally the majority of the PGMs used were satellite guided as compared to Kosovo where laser guided munitions were more extensively deployed.70 Several other factors contributed to the higher rate of casualties: e.g., the lack of xed targets, foes indistinguishable characteristics from the civilian population and reliance by the US for targeting intelligence on forces opposing the Taleban.71 But because of the safety mechanism inserted into Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law, the excessive civilian casualties should still not have occurred. In the name of targeting Al-Qaeda, scores of civilians were killed in different incidents with no apparent respect to proportionality and distinction. As we saw above, in the case of Kosovo, where large numbers of civilians were killed in a few incidents the worldwide publicity and scrutiny was understandable. However, in the case of Afghanistan no such examination has been forthcoming in spite of the larger number of incidents. In October 2001, for example, the following incidents were reported by the British papers: 11th October, village of Karam was bombed leaving over 100 dead;72 13th October, over 15 civilians killed,
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US claims a stray missile was responsible for deaths;73 21st October, bomb kills over 80 in a Herat hospital;74 and 31st October, Red Crescent Clinic hit killing 12 civilians in Kandahar.75 The same month there were other incidents of refugees, ambulances, wedding celebrations being attacked from the air with sizeable civilian casualties but these remain unconrmed. In subsequent months numerous other incidents occurred where civilian casualties ran into scores. Afghanistans limited civilian infrastructure did not remain intact after a few weeks of the aerial bombardment. On 15 October the main telephone exchange was knocked out killing 15 civilians; on 28 October the electric grid system in Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the Taliban, was destroyed depriving the whole province of electricity; on 31 October several attacks were launched against the Kajakai dam; and on 12 November a direct hit on Al-Jazeera news agency in Kabul raised concern as earlier Secretary of State Powell had asked the agency to tone down its reports of casualties in Afghanistan.76 Despite the large number of civilians killed in dubious circumstances, no attempt has been made by either the US, UK or international nongovernmental agencies to hold an enquiry such as those held after the Kosovo conict. The military was given complete freedom in targeting policy as western politicians did not have a constituency to be concerned about if Afghan casualties ever became known. Emerging Targets and Civilian deaths The vast majority of the US-UK strikes during operation Enduring Freedom were carried out against what is termed emerging targets targets that are not pre-determined and do not exist on maps and which require immediate military response. Air attacks against emerging targets are inherently inaccurate and indiscriminate. It is attacks against emerging targets that caused the greatest number of civilian casualties. One such incident was the attack on a convoy of Afghans, including tribal leaders, from the province of Paktia on their way to the inauguration of the interim Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai.
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The incident on 30 December when the village of Qalai Niazi was struck is instructive as to the degree of violations of Protocol I and, in particular, the principle of proportionality and the advance warning rule enshrined in Article 57. The incident also demonstrates the indifference of the western media about civilian deaths in Afghanistan compared to Kosovo. The US, which at rst denied the incident, contended that the village sheltered Taliban and Al Qaeda ghters and had ammunitions dumps. Western reporters conrmed weapons stockpiles as well as civilian casualties including children. British papers reported the incident in graphic detail.77 The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times merely touched upon the event as a backgrounder to the inauguration of Hamid Karzais interim government. The Times reported a few months later that the UN estimates of civilians deaths were 52 including 25 children;78 the Guardian, however, estimated between 57 and 107 fatalities but added that innumeracy, rapid burials, damage to bodies, propaganda and remoteness impeded veriable statistics.79 Granted that Qalai Niazi was a legitimate target, and there is no evidence to indicate that the US did not genuinely believe this to be the case, questions still arise whether sufcient warning was given to the civilians or whether the force used against the village was proportional to the military advantage. The evidence gathered by journalists indicates that the answers are in the negative.80 To eliminate the alleged presence of Taliban and Al-Qaeda ghters, three waves of B-52 bombers struck the village followed by helicopter strikes. UN sources reported that civilians, including children, were strafed whilst running for cover. Since the attack had been planned several weeks in advance,81 it was not an emerging target and, therefore, the failure to give prior warning to the civilian was a violation of IHL. It was also reported that British forces were on the scene within a day of the attack, and this raises questions as to the method used to strike Qalai Niazi i.e., an alternative form of attack was available. Afghan air defences were non-existent in comparison with that of
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Kosovo where NATO aircraft were constrained to y higher and civilians became more vulnerable. In Afghanistan pilots ew at low altitudes and made greater use of PGMs and this should have resulted in fewer civilian casualties. Notwithstanding that casualty gures could have been inated or inaccurately reported by the media and human rights organizations, Afghanistan underwent the most devastating air bombing of civilians in recent times. Human Rights Watch reported: The US military takes precautions to minimize civilian loss of life during its operations but obviously not enough. There is now a pattern of mistakes, apparently as a result of faulty intelligence, that has led to too many civilians deaths and no clear changes in the way the United States plans and carries out military operations.82
Section VI- Conclusion

A general conclusion is that efforts to comply with Protocol I when airpower was used were exemplary especially in the discrimination of civilians and strictly civilian objects. In neither of the case studies were civilians directly and intentionally targeted. However, the striking of dualuse facilities was extensive and in Afghanistan, emerging targets were always presumed to be terrorists/Taliban ghters, thereby continuously causing large civilians casualties.83 It appears that in Afghanistan, the avoidance of civilian casualties was not accorded priority in planning strikes. The military was given a free hand and the Bush administration did not have political constraints. The extent of political involvement, as opposed to allowing the military a free hand in targeting, is important for compliance with IHL. There are two contradictory but important considerations: politicians desire a zero-casualty war on the one hand, and on the other, they are averse to mass media projection of casualties. The CNN effect is difcult to ignore because international public opinion is anti-war. Political rather than military necessity has become the decisive factor in targeting.
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Although the two case studies are not entirely comparable, in the 1999 conict force was used to seek compliance with limited objectives whereas in the Afghan conict the US sought the elimination of the Taliban regime and Al Qaida. In the wake of 9/11, the objectives of the Afghan war had domestic and international support. This enabled the US military to adopt rules of aerial engagement in Afghanistan that may perhaps have been unacceptable in 1999.
References:
1 Col. Phillip Meilinger, Precision Aerospace Power, Discrimination, and the future of war Aerospace Power Journal (Fall 2001), 1. See also George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War (New York: Crown, 1996). For a contrary view on the impact of modern weapons see Charles Dunlap, Technology: Recomplicating Moral life for the Nations Defenders, Parameters (Autumn 1999) The term aerial bombardment includes, among other things dropping munitions from manned or unmanned aircraft, strang, and using missiles or rockets against enemy targets on land. U.S. Dept of the Air Force, Air Force Pamphlet No. 110-31, International Law -- The Conduct of Armed Conict and Air Operations, November 19, 1976, para. 5-1 at 5-1 The militia armies in and around the Mosque of Imam Ali in Najaf , Iraq being a case in point. The US may have not signed up to the 1977 Protocols But [the US] considers itself guided if not bound by the relevant provisions of the most. Amy J. Hyatt, Ordered Chaos: The increasing complex rules of lawyers in Targeting (National Defense University, 20000) p4. The 1976 US Airforce Pamphlet and the 1991 US Rules of Engagement Pocket Card during Operation Desert Storm reected provisions of protocol 1 in regard to distinction, proportionality and necessity. See Mathew Waxman International Law and the Politics of Urban Air Operations (Santa Monica: RAND, 2000) p12. See also Michael Matheson, The United States Positions on the Relation of Customary International Law to the 1977 Protocol Additional to the 1949 Geneva Convention, American University Journal of International Law and Policy, Vol.2 (1987) Many of the ancient texts such as the Mahabharqata , Bible and the Koran have references as to how enemies during war should be treated. From a historical and from various cultural aspects of the roots and development of IHL see International Dimensions of Humanitarian Law (Paris: UNESCO, 1988) M. Sassoli & A. Bouvier, How Does Law Protect in War ?, ICRC, Geneva, 1949, p145 Jean Pictet, ed., Commentary Geneva Conventions, Vol. IV (Geneva: ICRC , 1958), p5 Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conict (London: Methuen, 1983) p325 (paperback ed.) It is generally believed that civilians did not suffer that much during the First World War but recent research has shown the opposite. See Ruth Harris, The child of the Barbarian:
3 4
6 7 8 9
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Rape, race and nationalism in France During the First World War, Past and Present, No. 141, 1993. Also note Clausewitz comment in reference to 18th Century warfare: Not only in its means but also in its aim was increasingly became limited to the ghting force itself ... All Europe rejoiced at this development. Karl Von Clausewitz, On war (Book 8) P 87. Yves Sandoz, Protecting People in Times of War, The UN Chronicle , Winter 1999, 36:4, p214 For a historical development of IHL see Best, Humanity at War and also Best, War and Law since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) Henceforth to be referred to as the Protocol I. On 26th June 2004 , 161 states had ratied the Protocol I see Appendix B for list of states and dates treaty ratied (source ICRC at http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteen0.nsf/ htmlall/party_gc) Best, Humanity at War, p320 and pp315 - 319 for a discussion of the politics that determined the nal draft of the Protocols. The US has indicated for many years that accepts the various parts of the Protocols but not the whole. It has never indicated publicly which specic parts it accepts and which it not and why. It would appear, however, that The US has problems with the following provisions of the Protocol: 1) certain provisions are viewed as politically motivated: the granting of prisoner of war status to members of liberation movements 2) provisions that grant irregular ghter legal status 3) provisions that limit means and methods of warfare including prohibition on nuclear weapons and 4) provisions that limits attack on dual-use facilities. Thus, the US and Turkey, currently remain outside the treaty system. Hans-Peter Gasser, some Legal Issues concerning Ratication of the 1977 Geneva Protocols in Michael Meyer (ed.), Armed Conict and the New Law (London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 1989) p82 Additional Protocol I, Article 48 (See Appendix A) Additional Protocol, Article 50, Para 1. See Marco Sassoli, Legitimate Targets of Attacks under International Humanitarian Law, IPCR Policy Brief, January 2003. See also William Fenrick, Attacking the enemy civilians as a punishable offence, Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law, 7:539and W. Parks Air War and the Law of War, The Air Forces Law Review, 32:1 ICRC, Commentary on the Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977 to the Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 (Geneva: Maritime Publishers, 1987) (available on on-line at http// www.icrc.org.) Development and research into precision weapons, it is argued, is in part fuelled by desire to reduce civilian casualties See John Alexander, Optional Lethality, Harvard International Review, Vol. 23:2, 2001, Col. Jay Terry, The evolving Law of Aerial Warfare, Air University, NovemberDecember 1975, p13 A. P. V. Rogers, Zero Causality Warfare, International Review of the Red Cross, No. 837, 31st March 2000, p166 O. David , The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and total war in 20th Century (Boulder: Westview, 1995) p159 Michael Howard (ed.) , Restraints on War: Studies in the Limitations of Armed Conict, (Oxford: UP, 1979) pp58-65 Javier Gomez, The Law of Air Warfare, International Review of the Red Cross, no. 323, 30th June 1998, pp 347 - 363
10 11 12 13
14 15
16
17 18 19
20
21
22 23 24 25 26
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27 Declaration to Prohibit for the Term of Five years the Launching of projectiles and Explosives From Balloons , and other Methods of a Similar Nature (Hague IV, I), July 29, 1899. 28 Hague Convention IV, Art. 27, 29 Geneva Convention IV, (1949), Art. 18 - 23 30 Rules of Air warfare, drafted by a Commission of Jurists at the Hague, 1923, Art. 23 and 24 (See ICRC website, www.icrc.org.) 31 Draft Rules for the limitation of the Dangers incurred by Civilians Population in Time of War, (Geneva: ICRC, 1958), p166 (2nd) 32 Col. Jay Terry, Evolving Law of Aerial Warfare Law, op. cit. 33 Quoted in International Dimensions of Humanitarian Law, pp116 - 117 34 Article 50 (3) 35 A.P.V. Rogers, Law on the Battleeld (1996), cited in William Fenrick, Attacking the enemy civilians as a punishable offence, Duke Journal of Comparative International Law, 7: 539. The ICRC proposed list of proposed categories of military objectives does not include television and broadcasting stations. In respect of the war sustaining entities, of the US perspective, see US Navys Commanders Handbook on the Law of Naval Operation, in Michael Schmitt, The Impact of High And Low-Tech Warfare on the Principle of Distinction , Brieng Paper HPCI (November 2003), p3 36 W. Hays Parks, Air War and the Law of War, Air Force Law Review (1990), 32:1, pp138 37 William Fenrick, Targeting and Proportionality during NATO Bombing Campaign against Yugoslavia, E.J.I.L. (2001), p491,n6. See also Michael Schmitt, The Impact of High And Low-Tech Warfare on the Principle of Distinction, pp7-8. 38 Michael Matheson, The United States Position on the Relations of Customary International Law to the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, American University Journal of international Law and Policy, 2 (1987), pp419 -431. 39 Air Force Pamphlet No. 110-31, at 5-1. 40 A.P. V. Roger, Zero-Casualty Warfare, op. cit. 41 Michael Schmitt, Rethinking the Geneva Conventions, Crimes of War Project, 30th January 2003, p3. 42 Michael Schmitt, Impact of High and Low -Tech Warfare on the Principle of Distinction, pp 10-11 43 Kenneth Rizer, Bombing Dual-Use Targets: Legal, Ethical, and Doctrinal Perspectives, Air and Space Power Chronicles, 1 May 2001, p4. 44 For a discussion of the restrictions placed on the military operating by politicians in avoiding civilians casualties see Phillip Meilinger, Winged Defense: Airwar, the Law, and morality, Armed Forces and Society, 20:1 (Fall 1993). Differing views, political and military, within NATA was another important factor constraining compliance with IHL 45 Although the CNN factor was coined during the Iraq conict, the medias impact of that war on public opinion was not comparable to that of the conict at the door step of Europe and worldwide publicity of white Europeans being involved in ethnic cleansing. NATO launched 23,000 bombs against Yugoslavia and only 20 went astray but these 20 generated more publicity and outcry then the 23,000 that hits their target. 46 Grant Hammond, Myths of the Air War over Serbia: Some Lessons not to Lear, Aerospace Power Journal, 14:4 (winter, 2000) at on-line: www.airpower.maxwell. af.mil/airchrincles/apj/apj000/win00/hammond.htm
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47 Protocol 1, Article 82 requires legal advisor to review targets and advise commanders on targets. The Kosovo conict has been referred to by some writers as the Lawyers war. At the time of the conict in 1999 Turkey, US and France were the only members of NATO not signatory to the Protocol. Most of the NATO states had instructed their aircrews not to take part in attacks of dubious legality. 48 Human Rights Watch, Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, (NY: HRW, 2000) at on-line http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm 49 Human Rights Watch, ibid. p5. 50 Timothy Thomas, Kosovo and the Current Myth of information Superiority, in Parameters (Spring 2000) at on-line http://carlile.www.army.mil/uaawc/parameters/000spring/ thomas.htm 51 See Human Rights Watch, Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, 12:1 (February, 2000) 52 UN, ICTY, Final Report o the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 8 June 2000, pp39-41 paras 80-85. 53 The ICTY report determined in this instance that neither the aircrews nor the commanders showed the degree of recklessness in failing to take precautionary measures in identifying the target that would sustain charges. Ibid, pp30-33 paras 63-70 54 Ibid. Although the Prosecutors Report did not nd evidence of recklessness it did nd that the rules of engagements did contribute to the incident occurring. 55 Op. Cit., p88 56 As discussed earlier attacks on public morale are unlawful under the protocol. See also the opinion of the ICTY Committee which asserted that attacking civilian morale is not a military objective. Final Report 55 and 76 57 The casualties were technicians, make-up artists and auxiliary artists 58 Protocol 1, Article 79. The Convention does not dene journalism. 59 Final Report, paras 55 and 76 60 See Amnesty international, NATO/Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Collateral Damage or Unlawful Killings? Violations of the Laws of War by NATO during Operation Allied Force, June 2000. See also Human Rights Watch, op. cit. where it is claimed that the Yugoslav authorities did not believe that STR was in any threat. P9. 61 Final Report, para 77. 62 Final Report, paras 47 - 55 63 The BBC, in wartime, by virtue of its Charter can be enlisted in the war-time effort; does that make BBC journalist a legitimate military target? 64 Carl Conetta, Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties, Project on Defense Alternative Brieng Report, No. 11, Revised Version 24th January 2002, pp 1 -2 at online www.comw.org/pda/0201oef.html 65 Aerial bombardment, even up to now continues but the period chosen represents a convenient cut-off point although the Talebans had given the capital, Kabul, up in the rst two months of the campaign. 66 Carl Conetta, op. cit. p5. Human Rights Watch, Civilians Deaths in Afghanistan, 20th June 2002, Press Release. 67 Marc W. Herold, A dossier on Civilian Victims of United States Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting Revised] at online www.cursor.org/stories/ civilian_deaths.htm see also BBC, 3rd January 2002, Afghanistans civilian deaths mount quoting Prof. Herold as saying: I think that a much more realistic gure would be
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around 5,000. You know for Afghanistan, 3,700 to 5,000 is a really substantial number. 68 For the methodological weaknesses of casualty gures see Lucinda Fleeson, The Civilian Casualty Conundrum: Have American news Organisations soft-pedalled the collateral damage of the ghting in Afghanistan? Or have foreign news outlets and academic studies grossly inated the toll, American Journalism Review, April 2002 at online www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2491 69 See Carl Conetta, op. cit. p8. Talebans claimed that over 5,000 civilians were killed and 10,000 wounded. 70 ibid., p3 71 ibid., p3 72 Talebans claim over 200 dead. See the Guardian, 12th October 2001. 73 The Observer, 14th October 2001. 74 The Guardian, 22nd October 2001 75 The Times, 1st November 2001 76 Carl Conetta, op. cit. p4 77 See The Independent, 1st January 2002 ( US accused of Killing 100 civilians), The Times, 1st January 2002 (100 villagers Killed in US Air strikes) and the Guardian, 1st January 2001 (US accused of killing over 100 in Village Airstrikes) 78 The Times, 1st April 2002 79 The Guardian, 1st July 2002 80 Despite the high rates of civilian deaths in Afghanistan there does not appear to be extensive research carried out although what there is is by journalists. 81 The Times , 1st April 2002 82 John Sifton, Human Rights Watch, Press Release 13 December 2003 83 Even as this conclusion is being drafted the media is reporting 17 civilians, including three children, death during an aerial attack on what was believed to be a terrorist safe house. This has been a regularly occurrence in the Afghan conict. Newsnight. BBC 2 Television, 2nd September 2004.
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SECURITY ALLIANCES AND SECURITY CONCERNS: PAKISTAN AND NATO

Shahwar Junaid *
Abstract
(With the end of the Cold War, NATOs role has undergone a radical transformation from providing collective defence to Western Europe against a possible Soviet-led ground attack to dealing with threats such as those emanating from global terrorism and sub-national militancy. Today issues such as energy security and even the fallout from climate change are also in the NATO agenda. The thrust of the Organization has accordingly become more global than transatlantic. Consequently NATO has evolved from a geographical concept of security to a functional approach. Thus in the mid-1990s after the Srebrenica massacre, the US and NATO made serious efforts to end the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina which led to the Dayton Peace Accord of December 1995. NATO deployed troops and this was its rst ever out of area deployment thereby establishing a precedent. Subsequently in March 1999, NATO forces moved to end the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. This signied a transformation from being primarily a deterrent force to using its military capabilities to achieve humanitarian goals. The way was thus paved for other interventions. All NATO members along with a number of its partners have contributed troops to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which is operating in Afghanistan. There have been declarations that ISAF will remain in Afghanistan for decades in the ght against global terrorism. Pakistans continued cooperation in
* Shahwar Junaid, a former Communications Media Consultant to the Pakistan government, is an eminent writer and intellectual. Her latest book is titled Terrorism and Global Power Systems, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Shahwar Junaid
this effort should be on the basis of a formal association. Editor). Before embarking on a discussion of specic issues concerning the activities of multilateral security alliances in South Asia and the adjoining region, as well as Pakistans concerns and interests in this regard, it is necessary to examine the purpose, origin, terminology and culture of strategic alliances - particularly those transatlantic and European strategic alliances in the economic and security elds that emerged after World War II and operated exclusively within the transatlantic arena for about four decades. Thereafter they began to extend operations to other regions through modied mutual defence arrangements under the umbrella of NATO and the United Nations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Economic Community emerged after World War II in response to concerns about the economic, political and territorial future of a weakened Western Europe that shared several national borders with the vast territories of the Soviet Union1 and the emerging communist East European countries that were its allies. The primary purpose of NATO was the collective defence of Western Europe against a possible USSR-led ground attack by communist states. An attack on one member state was to be considered an attack on all NATO members. Enhancing the stability of the region through a collective security system was expected to foster and protect the economic reconstruction of war-torn Western Europe. A collective security system had become necessary because of a series of events that took place in post-World War II Europe. Between 1939 and 1945, communist governments had been installed throughout Eastern Europe and territorial demands were made by the Soviet Union2. Moscow was reported to be a party to destabilizing political developments in Greece and Iran. The Soviet Union was also known to have acquired competence in atomic technology. These developments prompted the signing of a common defence treaty (the Treaty of Dunkirk) between Britain and France as early as 1947. However, it was clear that the combined forces of both countries would be no match for the forces of the Soviet Union in case of an attack.
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Security Alliances and Security Concerns : Pakistan and NATO
Thereafter the European Recovery Plan3 was rejected by East European states and cominform4, a European Communist organization, was created. The 1947 establishment of Cominform led to the signing of a collective defence treaty known as the Brussels Treaty (1948) by most European states. It was again clear that the combined forces of all the Western European states would be no match for the forces of the Soviet Union in case of an attack. In January 1949, the USSR established COMECON, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, in order to coordinate the rebuilding and expansion of the economy of the USSR and the war-ravaged East European states on strictly socialist lines. It was considered the Soviet counterpart of the European Recovery Plan5 and the European Economic Community rolled into one. COMECON branched into international trade and commerce. Subsequently it supplied aid to the communists in China who were eventually victorious and established the Peoples Republic of China. The blockade of Berlin began in March 1948. It led to common defence negotiations between Western Europe, Canada and the United States. As a result of these negotiations the North Atlantic Treaty was signed on 4 April 1949. NATO was created through the North Atlantic Treaty. The Treaty itself consisted of a preamble and 14 articles. Its purpose was to promote the common values of its members and unite their efforts for collective defence6. Article 1 called for the peaceful resolution of disputes. Article 2 pledges the parties to economic and political cooperation. Article 3 deals with the development of defence capacity. Article 4 calls for joint consultations when a member state is threatened. Article 5 promises the use of members armed forces for collective self-defence. Article 6 denes the areas covered by the Treaty. Article 7 afrms the precedence of members obligations under the United Nations Charter. Article 8 provides safeguards against conict with any other treaties to which members are signatories. Article 9 creates a Council to oversee implementation of the treaty. Article 10 stipulates admission procedures for other nations. Article 11 covers the ratication procedure. Article 12 allows for the reconsideration of the Treaty. Article 13 lays down withdrawal procedures. Article 14 calls for the deposition of the ofcial copies of the treaty in the US Archives.
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The North Atlantic Council was designated the highest authority within NATO7. It was composed of permanent delegates from all member states, headed by a Secretary General to run the secretariat and handle all the non-military functions of the alliance. The Council was the decisionmaking body of NATO and responsible for general policy, administration as well as the organizations budget. The secretariat, various temporary committees and the Military Committee were expected to report to the North Atlantic Council. The temporary committees were for specic assignments determined by the North Atlantic Council. The NATO Military Committee was expected to meet twice a year to consider overall policy. It consists of the chiefs of staff of the armed forces of member states. Between these meetings, the Military Committee remained in permanent session with representatives of the members attending, in order to dene military strategy on a day to day basis. These representatives were often the Military Attaches of the embassies of member states stationed closest to NATO headquarters. In a number of cases they were special appointees. Below the Military Committee various regional commands are responsible for deploying armed forces in their areas. Policy making within NATO was, and still remains, a matter of continuous consultation and accommodation: the national interests and political priorities of member states may not always coincide. When the original purpose of establishing a purely transatlantic collective defence organization became redundant with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, NATO began to look into issues of political consolidation of former Warsaw Pact states and the expansion of its membership. A series of new threats to the transatlantic alliance were identied. These included, among others, global terrorism and sub-national militancy. Today, energy security and even climate change are on NATOs agenda and its thrust is more global than transatlantic8. Allies in the pursuit of this agenda include former adversaries such as Russia and China. The original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty were twelve in number9. The Western European powers relied on the massive nuclear arsenal of the United States to deter a Soviet ground invasion. Eventually NATO technology rendered the power of Soviet ground forces irrelevant.
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The NATO arsenal included sophisticated psychological, electronic and information warfare capability as well as non-lethal weaponry sourced from member states. Greece and Turkey were admitted to the Alliance in 1952, West Germany in 1955 and Spain in 1982. In 1990, unied Germany replaced West Germany as a NATO member. In 1955, six years after NATO was established, the Warsaw Pact, a Communist military alliance was created by the USSR to counter NATO, signalling the beginning of the Cold War. This was also the signal for the creation of a powerful defence industry on both sides of the ideological divide. The global defence industry is an important partner in any military arrangement in the world - it has a vested interest in war because its wares, from the sale of which it derives its income, are only utilized in conict situations10. Similarly strategic alliances have a vested interest in continuity. In order to understand the raison detre, the organizational culture and military capability of NATO during the Cold War it is necessary to consider the sheer size of the military adversary the transatlantic allies were facing and the intensity of the threat they felt during the period. The boundaries of the USSR11 changed from time to time until the end of World War II in 1945, when the last major territorial annexations of the Baltic states, eastern Poland, Bessarabia and some others took place. Initially established as a union of four soviet socialist republics (Russia, Trans-Caucasian Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) the USSR grew to contain 16 constituent republics of the union by 195612.The Soviet Unions growing global inuence in the post-World War II era led to the establishment of a communist system of states united by economic and military agreements. COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 1949) was the Communist equivalent to the European Economic Community. The military counterpart to COMECON was the Warsaw Pact. During the 1970s, the Soviet Union achieved approximate nuclear parity with the United States and subsequently overtook it. According to estimates the USSR had a stockpile of 39,000 nuclear weapons at the time of its dissolution. Despite its position as the second service in the armed forces hierarchy, the ground forces of the USSR were the most
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politically inuential Soviet service. Senior ground service ofcers held all important posts in the Ministry of Defence and General Staff. In 1989, ground forces had 2 million men in four combat arms and three supporting services. This was the force that was exposed to attack in an unfamiliar theatre as a consequence of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1978. The USSR was weakened by the failure of its military intervention in Afghanistan where its forces faced cross-border resistance from militants who were organized, supported and equipped by the United States and Pakistan. This enterprise was the rst encounter between a new generation of local militants, born after World War II and the regions decolonization, and United States technology. It was brokered by Pakistans forces and sowed the seeds of future military and ideological confrontation in the area. The entire region was ooded with technologically advanced arms which were freely traded by militants of different ideological persuasions. There was no common agenda to bind them into a cohesive force. Eventually an agenda did emerge: a conservative Islamic state supposedly based on Shariah law was established by the Taliban in 1996, about ve years after the Soviets left Afghanistan. Initially it was accepted by the United States and its representatives were even invited to discuss cultural matters in Washington. After the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1991, it was estimated that Russia, the successor state of the USSR, had an arsenal of 16,000 active and inactive nuclear weapons13, as well as a large number of tactical nuclear weapons. Nuclear warheads based in Belarus, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan were transferred to Russia under the terms of the Lisbon Protocol to the NPT (Non- Proliferation Treaty), following the Trilateral Agreement (1995) between Russia, Belarus and the United States. Russias strategic nuclear forces include land-based missile forces, a sea-based eet and strategic aviation. The 1970s had begun with some agreements as a result of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) but both the United States and the Soviet Union continued to build
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their respective military arsenals despite on-going efforts at dtente. In 2002, the United States and Russia agreed to reduce their stockpiles to not more than 2200 warheads each in the START treaty. In 2003, the US rejected the Russian proposals to further reduce both nations nuclear stockpiles to 1500 each. This refusal was considered a sign of US aggression: Washington was accused of leaving the danger of US and Russias mutual destruction, in place. According to the Russian military doctrine published in 2003 tactical nuclear weapons could be used to prevent political pressure against Russia and its allies in Moscows near abroad. Russia continues to produce and develop new nuclear weapons. Since 1997 it has manufactured Topol-M (SS-27) ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). After the dissolution of the USSR the two million strong Soviet ground army, which had been hard hit by the war in Afghanistan, began to disintegrate. Under treaties signed with the United States and others, the defence industry of the former Soviet Union was wound down and plants were established with US funding to destroy stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The protection of technology and related human resources in the territories of the former USSR and Warsaw Pact became a major concern during the period14. Russian technology and arms were available on the black market at throwaway prices and they began to surface in Third World countries During the late 1980s, political upheaval led to the removal of communist governments in Eastern Europe and East Germany was absorbed into West Germany to form the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) in 1990. After the formal end of the Cold War in 1991 the original raison detre for the creation of NATO, the protection of territorial boundaries, practically ceased to exist. A great restructuring of military resources at the disposal of NATO began. The restructuring was primarily limited to the traditional transatlantic theatre. Consultations that took place between NATO members led to plans for a systematic reduction of troops and restructuring to create highly trained and technically competent expeditionary cadres that would be available to respond to crises anywhere in the world at a moments notice. The United States Missile Defence Program was introduced. Under this program secure and armed missile defence units, controlled by the United States, were
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to be established at strategic locations across the globe. States were offered incentives in order to provide territory for setting up these missile defence units. In the London Declaration of July 1990, NATO heads of state and government called for a process of adaptation commensurate with the changes that were reshaping Europe. In an effort to foster better relations with the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, NATO established the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. It was a forum for consultations between NATO members, East European states and the former Soviet republics. The adoption of the New Alliance Strategic Concept in November 1991 led to NATOs Long Term Study to examine Integrated Military Structure and put forward proposals for related reforms15. This provided guidance for dening the scope of missions for NATO with which the command structure would have to cope. By this time the process of enlargement of NATO was contributing to the development of the European Security and Defence Identity. Consultations culminated in the presentation of a proposed, new military command structure to Defence Ministers on 2 December 199716. Implementation commenced in 1999. The Cold War Command Structure was reduced from 78 headquarters to 20 headquarters, with two overarching Strategic Commanders (Supreme Allied Commanders), one for Europe and the other for the Atlantic. Three regional commanders were assigned to the Atlantic SAC and two regional commanders were assigned to the Europe SAC. During this period new security challenges of the 21st century, were identied and further changes were made to the command structure to allow for an effective response to such threats. Consensus on the approach to tackling international terror and subnational militancy as well as commitment of resources for the purpose, proved elusive. Apart from setting up the North Atlantic Cooperation Council as a consultative body, in 1993 NATO members endorsed a proposal to offer former Warsaw Pact members limited association with NATO under the Partnership for Peace (PFP). This program was a means of extending the NATO umbrella of security cooperation throughout Europe. It was to include information sharing, joint exercises and participation
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in peacekeeping operations, with full membership as a possibility after the fullment of membership requirements with NATO military development assistance. In March 1999 Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined the alliance. In 2002 Russia became a limited partner in NATO as a member of the NATO-Russia Council. The PFP program has 26 participating members. Between 1995 and 1999 two signicant initiatives were taken by NATO. These followed a great deal of soul searching within the transatlantic alliance. After the Srebrenica massacre, the seizure of UN peacekeepers as human shields, the failure of the United Nations mission and EU-led Peace Plans, the United States and NATO began serious efforts to bring an end to the continuing war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The genocide of Bosnians was threatening European stability. After weeks of air strikes, the Bosnian Serbs were ready to negotiate and eventually signed the Dayton Peace Accord (December 1995). At the height of the campaign, NATO deployed a force of about 80,000 troops from 32 countries. Thereafter NATO deployed another multinational Implementation Force (IFOR) to monitor and enforce the ceasere in Bosnia. A year later this was replaced by a Stabilization Force which has helped rebuild Bosnian security institutions. This was NATOs rst ever out of area land deployment and created a precedent. In March 1999 NATO forces moved against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which had begun the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo leading to the eventual exodus of over a million civilians from the province. Air strikes were launched after Yugoslavia refused to accept an international peace plan that would have put an end to ethnic cleansing and granted limited autonomy to Kosovo. Instead of capitulating, the Serbs intensied violence forcing the largest mass migration in Europe after World War II. A NATO force was sent in. The Kosovo peace keeping force (KFOR) at its height numbered 50,000 troops from 39 NATO as well as nonNATO countries. A force of about 16,000 is still in place to guarantee security. When Kosovo declared independence in March 2008, KFOR personnel were attacked by groups of ethnic Serbs and sustained one casualty.
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The Bosnia and Kosovo interventions exposed differences of opinion within the expanded membership of NATO and the difculty of sustaining military action that requires the consensus of the entire membership of an expanded military alliance. It highlighted the differences of opinion that can arise as a result of unique cultural and historical links, not shared by all members within the expanded membership. NATO had moved from being a primarily deterrent force to using its military capability to achieve humanitarian goals. This paved the way for other interventions and signalled a fundamental transformation within the transatlantic alliance: NATO moved from a geographical concept of security to a functional approach17. In keeping with this a military transformation also took place: The reorganization of NATO, after the dissolution of the USSR, led to the development of expeditionary capability for operations at a distance from the alliances Euro-Atlantic theatre. This has led to a perception that long before the actual invasion of Afghanistan through ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), supposedly in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks on US territory, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, NATO was planning to expand its area of operation and sphere of inuence through global interventions After the dissolution of the USSR, there was a period during which US ascendancy in global affairs was a reality. It was no longer clear where US foreign policy ended and that of the United Nations, reecting the interests of the international community, began. This preponderance of US inuence in world affairs added a new dimension to the transatlantic alliance and collective defence concepts. An alliance is dened as a formal association of states for the use (or non-use) of military force, in specied circumstances, against states outside their own membership18. A strategic alliance is also dened as a formal arrangement between two or more independent parties engaged in the pursuit of common goals, or, working to meet common critical needs. Such alliances may be formed in any eld of activity, including business and trade19 and at the bilateral, regional or international levels. NATO, for instance, is strengthened by social, economic and trade ties between the states of the
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European Union, the United States and Canada. Such ties can create a fund of political goodwill that is helpful when governments take a position on international security issues that do not have a direct impact on their own country but do have an impact on allies. However, the transformation of NATO from a geographically limited alliance to a functional one20, acting in consort with other multilateral and international agencies, with an interest in nation-building subsequent to military intervention, has altered the strategic concept within which the alliance functions: there is a need to review the political rather than merely military determinants of NATO in the present security environment21. For instance views on the legitimacy of pre-emptive military action differ within NATO and the EU states. This is particularly important vis-a-vis the policy of the United States towards Irans nuclear program and the massing of battleready US warships off the coast of Syria and Lebanon22. An American force is already stationed in the Gulf and these are reinforcements. Observers are concerned that this strengthened presence presages a US military operation in the region. Post-Cold War security realities have been transformed by events in the regions in which NATO is operating today. Before making commitments under a new NATO agenda, member states may need to consider their domestic political agenda and the fallout of casualties and other losses during military operations that do not have a direct and immediate impact on their national security. A review of the political consensus within NATO which gave direction to administrative change and military policy after the dissolution of the USSR has also become necessary. All NATO members have contributed troops to ISAF which is operating in Afghanistan. So have a number of NATO partner states. A number of nations are now reconsidering their position as present policies fail to produce results23. Nevertheless, there have been declarations that ISAF will remain in Afghanistan for decades to come: the objective of such a deployment without policy change with the intention of securing outcome, is questionable. Some conspiracy theorists even believe that the repeated publication and reproduction of texts and cartoons that are offensive to Islam in NATO member states is deliberate and orchestrated to provoke
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violent reaction in conservative Muslim states in the region. Violence will provide an excuse for prolonging military intervention in a region that remains aloof and out of the sphere of inuence of the transatlantic alliance regardless of NATOs presence there. The 18 March-1 May 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation of that country by a coalition of forces took place because Iraq was supposed to have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Not a single stockpile was found. Nevertheless, Coalition, United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) as well as NATO forces and a large force of American military contractors continue to occupy Iraq. As of 23 August 2006 twenty seven countries, including the United States, were listed as contributing troops to the occupation of Iraq. Australia, New Zealand and Japan, lying outside the geographical sphere of the transatlantic alliance, have contributed troops and consider themselves potential partners of NATO. The questions that need to be asked today are: What are all these countries getting out of the occupation of Iraq? What is the return on their investment in human and nancial terms? For the answer to these questions analysts will need to re-examine the meaning of various terms that have been used to describe strategic arrangements and the implication of the offshoots of these arrangements. These offshoots include the terms international coalition24 and strategic networks25. These terms are used to indicate differences and gradations in the purpose of a strategic alliance, and its operational and functional limits. All these terms are current in modern security terminology and applicable to security alliances that are operating in various parts of the world at this time under various multilateral and international arrangements sanctioned by international law. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an example of a fulledged regional strategic alliance with the collective defence of its members as one of its major goals. A coalition is simply dened as a temporary combination into one26. The purpose of combining forces and resources on a temporary basis implies that the parties concerned share an immediate need but may not necessarily share long-term goals or a vision of the future. For instance, ISAF (International Security
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Assistance Force) is the name of a NATO-led security mission that was established by the United Nations Security Council on 20 December 200127. A series of coordinated suicide attacks that had taken place on US territory on 11 September 2001 were thought to be the work of Al Qaeda, which was based in Afghanistan. ISAF was expected to remove the Taliban government, secure Kabul and the surrounding area from the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other militant factions and pave the way for the establishment of the Afghan Transitional Administration which was to be headed by Hamid Karzai28. In October 2003, the United Nations Security Council authorized the expansion of the ISAF mission to cover the whole of Afghanistan. This expansion took place in four phases. The main headquarter of the mission continues to be in Kabul. There are ve Regional Command Centres under which there are Provincial Reconstruction Teams that have a exible mandate. On 31 July 2006 NATO-ISAF took over the administration of Southern Afghanistan. Attempts to transform international coalitions into full edged security alliances are not likely to be successful unless the objectives of all members of the coalition are served by such a transformation. This has not happened in Afghanistan and this is the reason why the United States, the senior partner in ISAF, is nding it difcult to muster troops from the original members of the coalition and has been trying to induce states in the region to come to its assistance one way or another. Stages of Alliance Formation The typical strategic alliance formation process involves a number of steps. These include strategy development, partner assessment, and negotiation of terms of association, command structures and operating procedures as well as the conditions for terminating the alliance. Apart from identifying objectives and rationale for creating an alliance, the feasibility of establishing it must also be examined. Selection criteria will have to be established in order to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of potential partners, their motivation for joining the alliance as well as their ability to contribute to it. These contributions will determine the status of various partners within the policy making and command structure of the organization. This will include an evaluation of existing
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arrangements dealing with the objectives of the proposed alliance as well as other issues and challenges to the establishment of the alliance. As far as Pakistan and its contribution to ISAF in particular is concerned, it is essential for policy makers to remember that Pakistan has existing arrangements dealing with situations that the United States, NATO and ISAF would like to tackle in the Tribal belt of the country, in Balochistan and the North West Frontier Province, which share a border with Afghanistan. The government of Pakistan merely needs to perform its duties and full its obligations to the people of the area as a guarantor of their freedom, security and sovereignty. When the people of the region voted to become part of the country that was to be Pakistan at the request of Quaid-e-Azam, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, they were counting on association with a competent federation that had the capability to negotiate with external forces and bring prosperity to their area. A clear delineation of common goals and objectives makes it possible for partners within a security alliance such as NATO to arrive at arrangements for pooling resources and efforts for the achievement of those goals while remaining independent entities and pursuing independent policies in other matters. Partners within the arrangement may contribute funds, human as well as physical resources, knowledge and expertise, equipment and logistic support. Such individual contributions create synergy which multiples the strength of the collective effort, despite the divergent strategic cultures of members of the alliance29. A key component of pooled resources within strategic security alliances is the geographical location of partners within the alliance. This element of strategic security alliance culture creates a unique and inuential niche for associates and partners who may not qualify for full membership on the basis of other criteria for membership. Now that NATO is undertaking function-based tasks and moving out of its traditional geographic mode it may need to reassess established criteria for membership of its policy-making command institutions and the protection and support that is available to their members. Without the possibility of a formal association of this nature, countries like Pakistan should not even consider compromising their existing external policy arrangements.
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The perception in Pakistan is that no good has come out of the collaboration between the United States and Pakistans military as a result of NATOs counterterrorism presence in Afghanistan. There is little public support in Pakistan for association with US military initiatives anywhere in the world. Institutional support has been provided by Pakistan to ISAF initiatives secretly and without knowledge of the public30. This is no basis for considering a formal partnership with a security alliance. Any windfall in the form of nances or hardware has been of limited and supercial benet to some military institutions in Pakistan. On the other hand, association with US and NATO expeditions have wiped out grassroots public support for the institution as a whole and have weakened it. The militarization and brutalization of Pakistans territory bordering Afghanistan, where US guided missile attacks on socalled terrorist hide-outs without regard for massive collateral damage have become commonplace, and have created an untenable situation. This is the sum total Pakistan has gained from its military association with the most powerful member of NATO, the United States and its regional coalition, ISAF. In fact Pakistans citizens have been facing the fallout of escalating violence as a result of US and NATO activities in neighbouring Afghanistan for some time now. In Afghanistan, the nature, size and capabilities of the adversary NATO forces are facing, is radically different from any they have encountered before. The mindset they are facing is alien to them. The terrain is different, so is the culture of the countries surrounding the theatre of war. For these countries, including Pakistan, the rewards of any cross-border military cooperation with an offshoot of NATO remain dubious. Just as the intent and purpose of NATO intervention in Afghanistan remains dubious. A great deal must change before there can be fruitful cooperation. Above all, Pakistan must make peace with its own people rst.
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References:
1 (i) USSR : December 30,1922- December 26 1991 : Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: a constitutionally socialist state with a total land area of 22, 402,200 (1991) and a population density of 13.1 per sq. km, spanning the continents of Europe and Asia and including the Caucasus. (ii) War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West (Cass Series on Security Studies): Editors: Vojtech Mastny, Sven Holtsmark and Andreas Wenger: Routledge: one edition: May 30 2006 . (i) Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World: Polity: October 20, 1997 : 272 pages, P. 38, p.142 etc.). (ii) Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy 1917-1991; R. Craig Nation: Cornell University Press: September 1992: 360 pages (i) The Marshall Plan. (ii) The Marshall Plan: America Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe 19471952 (Studies in Economic History and Policy: USA in the Twentieth Century:: Cambridge University Press: January 27 1989 : Pages 544. Cominform: ofcially referred to as the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers Parties, also known as the Agency of International Communism: established in 1947. It was dissolved by Soviet initiative in 1956: Encyclopaedia Britannica 2004. The Marshall Plan North Atlantic Treaty. Ruhle, Michael: The Evolution of NATO: Expanding the Transatlantic Tool Kit: American Foreign Policy Interests, 29, 237-242: 2007: Copyright 2007 NCAFF. Transatlantic Relations in the 21st Century: Frank Walter Steinmeier: Hampton Roads International Security Quarterly: Portsmouth : April 15 2007 : P. 39-42. Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. Cohen, Eliot A: A Revolution in Warfare: Foreign Affairs: Vol 75, No.2: Pages 39-42: March/April, 1996. Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World: Polity: October 20, 1997: 272 pages. Armenia , Azerbaijan , Belarus , Estonia , Georgia , Kazakhstan , Kirghizstan , Latvia , Lithuania , Moldavia , Russia , Tajikistan , Turkmenistan , Ukraine , Uzbekistan . After the reorganization of Karelo-Finnish SSR on July 16, 1956 , the total number of constituent republics of the USSR was 16. Russia s Nuclear Capabilities: Adrian Blomeld: Telegraph: 5 June 2007. Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism: Joint Fact Sheet July 2006: http:// en.g8russia.ru/docs/7/html) (i) Dufeld, John S.: Natos Functions After the Cold War: Political Science Quarterly: Vol 109, No.5: 9Winter 1994-1995: Pages 763-787. (ii) NATO Europe spends UDS 12 billion a year on research and development. See Stephen Flanagan, Sustaining IS-European Global Security Cooperation: Strategic Forum (No.217) September 2005 Pages 1-6.
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16 Solomon, Gerald B:The NATO Enlargement Debate 1990-1997: the Blessings of Liberty (The Washington Papers): Praeger paperback: March 30 1998:208 pages. 17 The Evolution of NATO: Expanding the Transatlantic Tool Kit: Michael Ruhle: American Foreign Policy Interests, 29: January 2008: ISSN: 1080-3920 Copyright 2007 NCAFP: Pg 237-242. 18 Snyder, Glenn: Alliance Politics: Ithaca , N.Y:Cornell University Press, 1997: page 4. 19 Strategic Alliances-An entrepreneurial approach to globalization: Yoshino and Rangan, Michael Y. and U. Srinivasa: 1995: Library of Congress Catalog ISBN 0-87584-584-3. 20 The Evolution of NATO: Expanding the Transatlantic Tool Kit: Michael Ruhle: American Foreign Policy Interests, 29: January 2008: ISSN: 1080-3920 Copyright 2007 NCAFP. 21 War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West( Cass Series on Security Studies): Editors: Vojtech Mastny, Sven Holtsmark, Andreas Wenger: Routledge: May 30, 2006 : Pages 324: P.73. etc 22 Kramnik, Ilya: Invisible US Forces in the Middle East: reproduced in The Nation, World Focus, March 16, 2008. 23 Read:Benjamin Scheer, German Institute for International and Security Affairs and Asle Toje, Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies: Financial Times: March 12, 2008. 24 Porter and Fuller:1986. 25 Jarillo: 1988. 26 The Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English: compiled by George Ostler, Third Edition revised and supplemented by J. Coulsen: Clarendon Press: London 1941. 27 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1386 S-RES-1386 (2001) May 31 2001 (UNSCR 1386) retrieved 21.09. 2007. 28 The Nation: Page 9: Friday, December 28, 2007. 29 NATO and European Security: Alliance Politics from the End of the Cold War to the Age of Terrorism: Alexander Moens, Loenard J. Cohen and Allen G. Sens: 216 Pages: Praegar Publishers: March 30, 2003. 30 The Monks of War: Barnett Thomas P.M.: Esquire: March 2006: Pages 214-215.
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ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTOS LEGACY AND THE REBUILDING OF PAKISTAN

Iqbal Ahmad Khan *
Abstract
(The present PPP-led coalition government faces problems of Himalayan proportions. The country, following eight years of military and quasi-military rule, sits on the brink of a precipice. The situation is not much different from that inherited by the founder of the PPP, Zulkar Ali Bhutto, in December 1971. Yet, despite overwhelming odds, within the space of a few years he managed to build a new Pakistan which was democratic, vibrant, condent and progressive. That was no mean achievement. As the government of Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani takes its rst steps to rebuild the country, it should seek inspiration and guidance from the words and deeds of Pakistans most popular prime minister. This would be the greatest tribute to him and to the bravest daughter of Pakistan, Ms Benazir Bhutto. Author) Following a long period of military and quasi-military rule, Pakistan, not for the rst time in its history, stands at the edge of a precipice. The constitution embodying the fundamental principles and laws governing the state and society lies emasculated, victim of a military dictators lack of understanding and contempt for human rights and liberties, the hallmark of a civilized society. The state, confronted with the breakdown of institutions, appears impotent in discharging its basic responsibilities of protecting the life and property of its citizens and providing basic amenities. Despair and hopelessness, engendered by iniquitous economic policies, crumbling and unresponsive state institutions and lack of fundamental freedoms, has enveloped the people from the Khyber to Karachi and from Chaman to Tharparkar. It is ironical that the national
* Iqbal Ahmad Khan is a former Ambassador of Pakistan.
Zulfikar Ali Bhuttos Legacy and the Rebuilding of Pakistan
security of Pakistan in which successive governments, in particular those led by the military, have invested the major chunk of the countrys meagre resources to maintain the armed forces, have not been able to successfully confront the threat from a small ragtag body of religious extremists. On 17 October 1999 after his coup, General Pervez Musharraf described the prevailing situation in the country in the following words: Today, we have reached a stage where our economy has crumbled, our credibility is lost, state institutions lie demoralized, provincial disharmony has caused cracks in the federation and people who were once brothers are now at each others throat. In sum, we have lost our honour, our dignity, our respect in the comity of nations. Anybody reading this and unaware of its timing cannot be blamed for assuming that it was a description of contemporary Pakistan. The accuracy of this depiction of the situation prevailing in the country in autumn 1999 is debatable. However, with the exception of the economy, which has not crumbled, but could very well be heading towards a partial meltdown, it is a precise portrayal of present-day Pakistan eight years after Musharraf removed the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. In the same address, General Musharraf promised to: a. Rebuild national condence and morale. b Strengthen the federation, remove inter-provincial disharmony and restore national cohesion. c. Revive the economy and restore investor condence. d. Ensure law and order and dispense speedy justice. e. Depoliticize state institutions. f. Bring about the devolution of power at the grass-roots level. g. Ensure swift and across-the-board accountability.1 The performance of the various governments during Musharrafs rule has been pathetic. He cannot claim to have achieved even one of his objectives. His popularity can be gauged from an opinion poll conducted in June/July 2007 by the reputable United States International Republican
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Institute (IRI). The ndings of the IRI, which had in previous years been touted by the government to demonstrate the presidents popularity, revealed that 64 percent opposed Musharrafs re-election as president and 62 percent wanted him to resign as the chief of army staff.2 The benighted country is, by all accounts, worse off today than it was when Musharraf usurped power eight years ago. All the four military governments that the people of Pakistan suffered in the past 60 years painted the politicians as devils out to spread nothing but evil, promised the nation the moon and nally departed leaving behind a desolate graveyard to be tended to and transformed into a blossoming garden by the very devils they claimed to have exorcised. This pattern has not only been observed in Pakistan, but also in Latin America and Africa where former colonial control gave way to military dictatorships which left in their wake political and economic wastelands. In many instances callous external powers, normally the former colonialist or a neo-colonialist power aided and abetted the coup-makers to further its narrow strategic goals. Zulkar Ali Bhutto himself a victim of a generals lust for power undertakes an in-depth analysis of military coup detats in his remarkable book, If I am Assassinated, written in his stinking death cell with the paper resting on my knee. In the process of analyzing the extremely important and relevant subject of civil-military relations, he reaches the following conclusion. The events of the last twenty years have made me arrive at the unambiguous conclusion that, at present, the greatest threat to the unity and progress of the Third World is from coup-gemony. The era of colonialism is all but dead. Only a few places remain where colonialism has still to be buried. In those places also, the burial is at hand. The Third World has to guard against hegemony, but the best way to guard against hegemony is to prevent coup-gemony. The biggest link of external colonialism is internal colonialism, which means that hegemony cannot thrive in our lands without the collaboration of coup-gemony. Military coup deetats are the worst enemies of national unity. Coup detats divide and debase a free people. If there was any doubt on the subject,
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the events in Pakistan have shown that the people of the Third World have to primarily guard against the internal enemy, if foreign domination or hegemony is to be resisted. Coup-gemony is the bridge over which hegemony walks to stalk our lands.3 Zulkar Ali Bhutto is of the view that unlike Africa or Latin America there is a historical and deeply entrenched democratic tradition in South Asia. This was manifest in the panchayat system, in the fact that the subcontinent was a huge land mass with an enormous population, in the numerous peoples uprisings and movements that had taken place since the time of Asoka and nally in Britain conceding successive instalments of democracy to the people of India leading to total independence in 1947. For over three decades, Bhutto states, civilian leaders like the Quaid-e-Azam,and Gandhi led the masses of the subcontinent in intensive struggle for independence and freedom. Without political consciousness, without political awakening, agitations against the salt tax, the Khilafat movement, the Quit India and Direct Action movements would not have been possible, and without those convulsions the pillars of British Raj would not have collapsed. Nowhere in Latin America or Africa or in the Middle East, had the lesson in mass awakening been so long and so persistent as it had been in the subcontinent. The people of the subcontinent, both the Muslims and the Hindus, aroused and inspired by their civilian leaders, struggled and sacriced not to merely hoist two new ags but to get the fruits of freedom and democracy. Nowadays we are told ever so often that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam. This is true, but who created Pakistan? The Muslim masses, galvanized under the civilian leadership of the Quaid-e-Azam and not under a coterie of generals, created Pakistan. This country came into being by the massive movement of the Muslim masses and not through a midnight coup detat. The Muslim population and not the military generals created Pakistan. The country was created by the people and its independence can be sustained only by the people through their chosen leaders. Only those who created Pakistan in the name of Islam can order their chosen representatives how to ordain that name. A usurper or a coterie carries no mandate to full the task. Nor has the usurper or his coterie been empowered by the people to determine whether this State is being administered in the name of Islam. The interpretation has to be
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done collectively in Parliament and not by an individual or a gang with guns in their hands. The name of Islam does not come out of a barrel of a gun.4 Bhutto then narrates an incident wherein he asks General Zia ul Haq for his views on the 1973 Attock Conspiracy case. The general gave him a detailed account of his evaluation of the causes and impulses behind the plot. After hearing him patiently I was struck by the personal and selsh factor that aroused the conspirators. Not a trace, not even the pretence of an objective motivation was available in the cause of that attempt. What made it more melancholy was that it came so soon after the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. This meant that the historical tragedies arising out of military rule meant nothing to power blind individuals. The ow of blood was like water down a ducks back. The blunders of military regimes, both internal and external, were not eye openers. The pollution of the armed forces by its involvement in politics had not conveyed any message. The catastrophe of East Pakistan and the surrender of 90, 000 prisoners of war did not teach a single elementary lesson. These impressions recorded by Bhutto in his book reveal perhaps an appetite for aggrandizement, the unquenchable thirst for naked power on part of the armed forces which in his words could become a habit-forming drug.5 Military-civil relations in Pakistan have been adversarial and mutually suspicious. Inherent in the word civilization, is supremacy of civilians; yet for more than half of Pakistans history it is the military that has been in charge of the countrys affairs and during the remaining period its shadow has loomed menacingly over the civilian set-up. The consequences of this state of affairs are there for all to see and lament. The presence of the military on-stage or back-stage has proven to be disastrous for peace, progress and prosperity of the country. On occasions it appears that the negative implications of military rule are appreciated by the military itself. In a rare display of courage and candor several hundred retired military ofcers on 31 January 2008 called upon General (Retd) Pervez Musharraf to hand over power to the deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and to hold elections under a neutral caretaker set-up. The chairman of the meeting Air Marshal
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Asghar Khan expressed solidarity with the lawyers and journalists and assured them full support on behalf of the servicemen in their struggle for the independence of the judiciary and freedom of the press. Regrettably, the assembled generals, air marshals and admirals were evasive when queried regarding their respective roles in previous martial laws. Air Marshal Asghar Khan was among the strongest supporters of General Zia ul Haqs martial law and Lt. Gen. Chisti was Commander 10 Corps at the time of Zias takeover and became his partner in all the despicable actions taken by the military dictator. Those assembled were simply not prepared to admit any wrongdoing.6 It is against this background of the experience and fate of their leader Zulkar Ali Bhutto and the mind-set of the military that the new PPP led coalition government has taken over the reins of the country. As the government faces a mountain of problems, it would be wise to remember the fear expressed by the founder of their party, Zulkar Ali Bhutto: If a coup detat becomes a permanent part of the political infrastructure, it means the falling of the last petal of the last withered rose. It means the end. Merely remembering Mr. Bhuttos words will not sufce. Too much water has own under the bridge. The government needs to act upon this warning from the death cell, so that history does not repeat itself. Martial law is not law, he asserts. A regime not established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law. I do not want to escape from the law. I do not want anybody to escape from the law. But I denitely want to escape from the lawlessness of Martial Law. I want the whole nation and every citizen to escape from this lawlessness. My struggle for the restoration of the Rule of Law shows that I do not want anybody to escape from the majesty of law.7 The government must take steps to ensure that now and in future the armed forces function strictly in accordance with the provision of the constitution which clearly lays down that the armed forces shall, under the direction of the Federal Government, defend Pakistan against external aggression or threat of war, and, subject to law, act in aid of civil power, when called upon to do so.8
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In the event the Armed Forces deviate from their constitutional duty, and in particular violate Article 6 of the Constitution, the full force of law should be brought to bear upon the violators. Professor Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a perceptive political analyst, concludes one of his recent articles titled The Third Transition by drawing his readers attention to the debate in the country about trying the perpetrators of the treason committed on 12 October 1999. That call must be heeded because a vigilant civil society, free media and the accountability of coup-makers are essential in saving the country from military takeovers in the future.9 Some observers contend that had Mr. Bhutto brought to trial the top brass of the army for their acts of commission and omission in East Pakistan following the debacle in December 1971 and exposed to the public their wrong-doings perhaps the 1977 coup might not have taken place. Accountability and transparency must be the hallmarks of the new government so that some amongst us are disabused of the impression sedulously created by the coup-makers that the politicians are the bane of our society and essentially responsible for all its ills. That the new political dispensation emerging from the 18 February elections is deeply conscious of the cancer of militarization of Pakistans body-politic seems obvious from a reading of the Charter of Democracy. The Charter was signed on 14 May 2006 by former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in London, where both were living in exile. The present coalition government in Pakistan is led by Benazir Bhuttos Pakistan Peoples Party and Nawaz Sharifs Muslim League is its principal partner. Not only have the two leaders drawn attention to the damage caused by military governments and militarys interference in political affairs, but outlined measures to lend accountability and ensure civilian control of military affairs. Some of the salient points contained in the Charter include: Military dictatorships have played havoc with the nations destiny and created conditions disallowing the progress of our people and the owering of democracy. Even after removal from ofce they undermined the peoples mandate and the sovereign will of the people;
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Drawing historys lesson that military dictatorship and the nation cannot co-exist as
militarys involvement adversely affects the economy and the democratic institutions as well as defence capabilities, and the integrity of the country - the nation needs a new direction different from a militaristic and regimental approach of the Bonapartist regimes, as the current one; National Security Council will be abolished. Defence Cabinet Committee will be headed by the prime minister and will have a permanent secretariat. An effective Nuclear Command and Control system under the Defence Cabinet Committee will be put in place to avoid any possibility of leakage or proliferation. No party shall solicit the support of the military to come into power or to dislodge a democratic government. All military and judicial ofcers will be required to le annual assets and income declarations like Parliamentarians to make them accountable to the public. The ISI, MI and other security agencies shall be accountable to the elected government through Prime Ministers Secretariat, Ministry of Defence, and Cabinet Division respectively. Their budgets will be approved by DCC after recommendations are prepared by the respective ministry. The political wings of all intelligence agencies will be disbanded. A committee will be formed to cut waste and bloat in the armed forces and security agencies in the interest of the defence and security of the country. All senior postings in these agencies shall be made with the approval of the government through the respective ministry. Defence budget shall be placed before the parliament for debate and approval.
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Military land allotment and cantonment jurisdictions will come under the purview of defence ministry. A commission shall be set up to review, scrutinize, and examine the legitimacy of all such land allotment rules, regulations and policies, along with all cases of state land allotment including those of military urban and agricultural land allotments since 12th October, 1999 to hold those accountable who have indulged in malpractices, proteering and favouritism.10
In addition to the commitment made in the Charter of Democracy to remove militarys shadow over civilian life, it would also appear worthwhile to read and implement some of the points made by Sherry Rahman, Secretary Information of the Pakistan Peoples Party and member National Assembly of Pakistan, in her article published in the English daily newspaper Dawn on 29 June 2005 under the title Enigma of the defence budget. The highlights of her article are given below: Despite defence absorbing more than a quarter of the national wealth, the subject has become inured from public debate and exempt from any Parliamentary accountability. Without explanation, the formal defence allocation account appears as a two-line statement divided into defence administration and defence services in the federal consolidated fund in the demands for grants and appropriations every year. Given the constant talk of transparency and good governance emanating from the government, it is not just surprising but shocking that the defence budget in Pakistan remains above public scrutiny as well as the law. If lawmakers in Pakistan cannot discuss, let alone question the allocations and management of this chunk of the countrys wealth, then it is clear that once again, almost 30 per cent of the budgeted amount will remain out of parliaments purview. This in turn means that the armys business interests will also remain outside the public accountability mechanism.
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When parliamentarians or donors read the allocation for defence over the next scal year, it will not include the military pensions, which now run into 35.6 billion rupees. Nor will the defence outlay include allocations for the combatant accounts of the defence division which include the Maritime Security Forces, salaries for defence production, allocation for the civil armed forces, Pakistan Rangers, Frontier Constabulary, Pakistan Coast Guards, nor the substantial amount set aside for military schools, cantonments and other residuals. Why does Pakistan need a huge defence budget that is close to four per cent of its GDP, when India is spending 2.8 per cent? The entire justication for maintaining a high defence budget is negated by the welcome downturn in hostilities with India; the rationale for Pakistan remaining hostage to its Cold War garrison-state identity should also naturally be under review. For a country that has fallen behind all of South Asia in its human development index, including Nepal and Bhutan, an urgent redenition of outdated concepts of national security is surely expected. The question of maintaining the eighth largest standing army in the world, when huge undisclosed amounts on the nuclear option are disbursed, becomes critical, for the simple reason that the nuclear deterrent capability was meant to substantially reduce the need for such a large conventional force. As it stands, one of the many reasons for continued high defence spending remains a large percentage of wasted resources which has arisen out of lack of oversight from non-military sources. While purchases of bullet proof limousines by the cabinet division can be questioned because they fall under civilian oversight, no such queries can be directed at the luxury cars and goods purchased by the military, its appointment of surplus employees, nor the expenditure accruing from duplication of activities or wrongdoing. From 1977 onwards, when Ziaul Haq began the practice of maintaining funds by the corps commanders who were at liberty to use them at their discretion, many scandals over money being siphoned for political activities have surfaced.
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The inter-services intelligence agencies remain above the law and unaccountable, even though they reportedly absorb seven to 11 per cent of the militarys budget and use secret funds and ghost bank accounts to destabilize civilian political parties and their governments. The Mehran Bank scandal is an example of such nancial corruption, when bribes worth Rs 14 million were unearthed as paid out by the ISI to manipulate the 1990 elections, a fact which was admitted in court by General Aslam Beg, the former COAS. Despite public clamour about the militarys vast real estate holdings, no equation is factored in to provide for the creeping militarization of the mainstream economy. The issue which is now constantly questioned without any satisfactory response is the size and quantum of the militarys holdings in what are traditionally commercial sectors. The militarys four major welfare foundations are increasingly the subject of growing public disquiet because they pay no direct taxes on their corporate activities, operate as virtual monopolies, and elbow out civilian private enterprise in their subsidized operations. They function as military welfare trusts but provide a haven for retired and serving military ofcers who run a multitude of corporate ventures ranging from sugar, cereal, fertilizer production to running airlines, real estate, education, advertising and others. The four military foundations the Army Welfare Trust, the Fauji Foundation, Bahria Foundation and Shaheen Foundation for instance, now run a parallel commercial empire, but end up leaving scant traces of the net nancial burden they impose on the public sector, because large allocations are made from the opaque defence budget. Despite the fact that most of the foundations were raised with initial funding from the public sector and the sale of evacuee properties after 1971, their prots remain sky high because they remain above scrutiny even in their tendering for contracts and other market
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activities. The fact that government service rules prohibit public servants from running private enterprises is often ignored, while the military control of Pakistans public sector continues unabated as retired generals and brigadiers pick up lucrative posts and double pensions to run everything from public utilities, universities and accountability and national reconstruction boards. The military as a class does itself a disservice when it allows rumour to replace public disclosure. Perhaps many of its legitimate procurement and modernization demands will then not be eclipsed by the paper-trail of undocumented purchases and irregularities unearthed by the auditor-general for Defence if it develops an institutionalized mechanism of requisitioning public money for its needs. The people are not opposed to the militarys spending money in principle. They dont even mind occasionally upgrading the proverbial barracks, but only if they know where the money is going. 11
The measures referred to in the Charter of Democracy and Sherry Rahmans article can only be implemented in phases. For them to see the light of day continued commitment of the principal political players, sound understanding and effective cooperation and coordination between them and backing of the people are essential pre-requisites. The fundamental motivation in restricting the armed forces to their legal role emanates from the belief that no individual and no institution transgresses the role that is envisaged for it in the constitution of the country. Deviations from this sacred document and absence of accountability for the deviators constitute the underlying causes of political and social instability in Pakistan. In his historic and brilliant letter that Zulkar Ali Bhutto wrote from his death cell to his daughter Benazir Bhutto, he expresses his greatest satisfaction in giving the country an all-party constitution by democratic means. The Constitution of 1973 was the rst unanimously approved constitution by a democratic assembly to bless Pakistan with a fundamental
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framework based on Islam, democracy and autonomy. It was the voice of the people of the four provinces of Pakistan articulated in a constitutional document by their chosen leaders. Autonomy, which had deed solution for over a generation and which had been the bane of the politics of the Subcontinent from time immemorial, was at long last settled to the satisfaction of the people and their chosen representatives. I experienced the kind of joy, the thrill of happiness which brings tears to the eyes. With high expectation and new-born condence we started to function under the umbrella and discipline of the Constitution of 1973. Provincial autonomy had been democratically dened. It began to function in all the four provinces. This was a spectacular accomplishment.12 The Constitution indeed was a historic achievement. Passed unanimously by the rst-ever directly elected 146-member National Assembly of Pakistan it represents a lasting tribute to Zulkar Ali Bhutto. In his rst address to the nation Mr. Bhutto assured his countrymen that he would give top priority to the rule of law and to the making of a constitution. And this constitution will not be my constitution because I am an elected representative of the people of Pakistan. I am not making an empty promise. My dear brothers, friends and sisters, I will give you a constitution according to your requirements and actually what you want.13 Considered in historical perspective, no other Constitution had the full backing of the people of Pakistan as did the one of 1973. It was framed by a legislature directly elected in the freest general elections in the history of Pakistan. The opposition parties were consulted by the ruling party before nalizing the draft of the Constitution. The result was a consensus. By virtue of their complete unanimity, the Constitution can be taken to have satised the existing demands and aspirations of the people. According to the ofcial website of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Time has shown that it cannot be replaced. Constitution making in Pakistan was bedevilled, since the birth of the State, by three unresolved issues: (i) The role of Islam in the State, (ii) the degree of Provincial Autonomy, and (iii) the Nature of the Executive. Mr. Bhutto managed to bring all the political parties to agree to a consensus on the Constitution, thus,
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permanently resolving all the three issues. A new institution, the Senate of Pakistan, was created in which the provinces had equal representation, in order to redress the balance of power in Pakistan, probably the only country in the world where one federating unit has an absolute majority. The creation of Council of Common Interest also gave to the provinces a greater weight in the federal dispensation. Islam was declared to be the State religion and the Council of Islamic Ideology given charge of Islamisation of laws. The never ending tussle between the Head of State and Parliament was resolved by empowering the Prime Minister. No better tribute can be paid to the foresight and sagacity of the martyred leader.14 The importance of restoring the constitution to its pre-12 October 1999 glory by clearing it of the distortions introduced by General (retd.) Pervez Musharraf and his rubber-stamp parliament is certainly not lost upon the new government. This would be in consonance with the understanding contained in the Charter of Democracy wherein the leaders of the two major parties in the coalition government have agreed to revive the Constitution as it existed on 12 October 1999; to entrust the chief executive who is the prime minister with the appointment of governors, the three services chiefs and the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; to set up a commission which would formulate recommendations for appointment of judges to the superior judiciary and forward a panel of three names for each vacancy to the prime minister, who shall forward one name for conrmation to a joint parliamentary committee for conrmation of the nomination through a transparent public hearing process; to forbid any judge from taking an oath under any Provisional Constitutional Order or any other oath that is contradictory to the exact language of the original oath prescribed in the Constitution of 1973; to set up a Federal Constitutional Court to resolve constitutional issues, giving equal representation to each of the federating units and to increase the strength of the Senate of Pakistan to give representation to minorities in the Senate.15 But for the rebuilding of Pakistan to succeed, an atmosphere of peace, security and stability is essential. The indispensability of a conducive environment was fully appreciated by Zulkar Ali Bhutto as he worked
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day in and day out to cement together the socio-economic and political fabric of the country. In order that Pakistan evolved into a self-sufcient and self-reliant nation, peace with India became the prerequisite. We should be free from the strains and burdens of an armaments race so that both India and Pakistan can devote their energies and resources to productive development, Bhutto wrote in an article Pakistan builds Anew in the American journal Foreign Affairs.16 The result of Mr. Bhuttos vision and strenuous efforts was the Simla Accord signed by him and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at Simla on 2 July 1972. The agreement expressed the resolve of both governments to put an end to the conict and confrontation that had hitherto marred their relations and asserted their determination that the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations shall govern relations between the two countries. When he went to Simla, the Pakistan army lay defeated and demoralized, 90,000 soldiers languished in Indian captivity, thousands of square miles of territory in West Pakistan was under Indian occupation and the economy was in tatters. Yet, during one week of intense and backbreaking negotiations with the victorious Indians he was able to stitch together an agreement which started a process and ultimately brought back the POWs and vacation of Pakistani territory by Indian forces. The Accord has generally preserved peace between India and Pakistan since 1972. Both Siachin and Kargil are exceptions to the rule and call for an enquiry commission to ascertain their causes and implications. The Simla Accord was a master stroke of diplomacy on Mr. Bhuttos part. Behind it lay days and nights of hard work, extensive consultations and strategy sessions and above all a clear sense of the direction in which to steer the ship of state. In a marathon address on 14 July 1972 Mr. Bhutto informed the National Assembly of Pakistan that we made all the preparations that were humanly possible, because as I have said, we had nothing in our hands. We had no trump cards; we had no levers; the only lever was to consult our people, meet them, and also to visit foreign countries, fraternal countries, friendly countries, Russia and China. It was a fatiguing endeavour, but it was done in the supreme national interest and I think it paid dividends.17
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The importance that Mr. Bhutto attached to the power and will of the people in the Herculean tasks that he set about to undertake was also evident in the realm of foreign policy. On his return from Simla, Mr. Bhutto arrived at the Lahore airport on 3 July 1972 and told the huge crowd assembled there that as promised he had not made any nal decision on Indian soil. Whatever decision would be reached between the two countries as a result of negotiations would be subject to your approval. You have seen now that I have adhered to that promise. The agreement that has been arrived at with India can be accepted or rejected by the National Assembly of Pakistan which represents you. The nal approval will, therefore, rest with you. My Government will not decide on our future relations with India. The decision in this respect shall be made by you, the people of Pakistan and by our valiant soldiers. The right of consent is yours. With that end in view, that is, to obtain your verdict on the agreement and on our negotiation with India, I am convening a session of the National Assembly which will debate this issue and each member will have full liberty to express his views on it. Members will be free to point out its defects, and I would be very happy to learn if there is anything wrong with it. But I want to tell you that there is nothing wrong with it. This is a comprehensive and successful agreement.18 The Simla Accord was hotly debated by the peoples representatives sitting in the National Assembly of Pakistan which approved it on 14 July 1972 and the instrument of ratication was delivered to India on 18 July 1972. Students of politics and international affairs observe the sharp contrast in the manner in which the Simla Accord was achieved and the veiled and arbitrary decision taken by a coup-maker and his coterie enveloping Pakistan in the war on terror. No wonder, both the decision and Pakistans participation in the anti-terror campaign have not only become controversial but also counter-productive. This is not to say that the war on terror is solely Americas war and that by placing itself on the frontline in the war Pakistan was ghting Americas war; it is not to say that the rise of terrorism and religious extremism is not a threat to democracy; it is not to deny that the ideology of the extremists runs counter to that of the founder of the nation Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah who had envisioned Pakistan as a moderate and democratic welfare state. The terrorist killings of Pakistani political leaders, of the
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armed and paramilitary forces, police and government ofcials and ordinary labourers and workers can never be justied and condoned. It is for this reason the fact that the terrorist has struck at the very historical and ideological foundations of Pakistan and spread terror and fear among the citizenry - that the war on terror is far too important to be left in the hands of a few generals. In 2007 more Pakistanis were victims of terrorism than in all the years from 2001-06 put together. There is, therefore, an urgent need to undertake a wide-ranging review of both the policy and strategy related to the war on terror. At this stage it would be useful to heed the remarks that the late Benazir Bhutto made at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York in August 2007. We cannot allow parallel armies, parallel militias, parallel laws and parallel command structures. Today its not just the intelligence services that were previously called a state within a state. Today its the militants who are becoming yet another little state within the state, and this is leading some people to say that Pakistan is on the slippery slope of being called a failed state. But this is a crisis for Pakistan that unless we deal with the extremists and the terrorists, our entire state could founder. Ms. Bhutto claimed that there existed a broad consensus in Pakistan between the major political parties that General Musharraf had taken the right step in joining the war against terrorism. Both the PPP and Nawaz Sharifs Muslim League were committed to ghting terrorism and extremism. But while it may have been a difcult decision for Musharraf at one level, there was a consensus within Pakistan that terrorism was a threat to the outside world as well as to the people of Pakistan. The linkage of a people with the government and, in particular, a people who have beneted in terms of jobs and schools and drinking water, helped create a vested interest and the will for the people to save their own community. But when there was a government that was non-representative, the public became alienated, and turned against the government. It was in this way that a democratic government was stronger because it could reach out to the people and it could pull together the law enforcement. Terrorism was as much a military situation as it was an investigative criminal situation. Her party, Ms. Bhutto said had the ability to eliminate terrorism and give the people security, which would bring in the economic investment that would help reverse the
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tide of rising poverty in the country, which in turn would undermine the forces of militancy and extremism.19 A welcome emphasis on the process of decision-making was manifest when the newly elected Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, reportedly told a visiting delegation of senior US ofcials that in future all key decisions would be made in consultation with the representatives of the people sitting in parliament.20 The US delegation was in Islamabad to exchange views with Pakistani leaders on different aspects of USPakistan relations and to ascertain, in particular, the thinking of the new government on the issue of terrorism. Explaining his position on the issue, Prime Minister Gillani reportedly made the following points: a. The new government was determined to ght terrorism in all its forms, because it concerned Pakistan. b. His partys approach had been consistent and its sacrices included the martyrdom of its leader Benazir Bhutto. c. Pakistan backed the US-led war on terror. d. The new government favoured a comprehensive approach which included political solutions. e. Economic development of the tribal areas was important in addressing the curse of extremism.21 The terrorism question is arguably the most important issue facing the new government. It has endangered the lives and property of ordinary citizens as also the vision of the founder of the state. It calls for immediate attention. Hard work, diplomatic skills, political consensus and popular support ensured the success and durability of the Simla Accord. If the terrorism issue is addressed in the same fashion as the Simla Accord, it will only be a matter of time before it is consigned to the dustbin of history. As the government directs its energies towards eliminating this scourge, emotionalism will have to be eschewed so that objectivity and realism can prevail. The challenges before the new government are multifarious and not a single one has a simple and immediate solution. Civil-military relations, the use of force in the tribal areas and Balochistan, the restoration and
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building of institutions and the war on terror are indeed few among the multitude of problems facing the government that cannot brook delay and cry out for solutions. Ironically, the most pressing of the problems is the extreme economic distress to which the overwhelming majority of the population is subjected. Ironically, because both General (retd) Musharraf and former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz never ceased to remind the people that they had wrought an economic miracle in Pakistan. The World Banks Vice President Praful Patel has warned that unless Pakistan made painful adjustments it risked a slowdown.22 There is particular concern about the widespread and extremely annoying power outages that have aficted the country, in particular the mega-city of Karachi, the shutdown of industries and manufacturing facilities, rise in unemployment, the huge balance of trade and current account decits, rising ination and falling production, food shortages, increasing poverty levels and escalating oil and food prices. The economy inherited by Mr. Bhutto was in shambles. Both the industrial and agriculture sectors, subject to strains of various kinds, were gripped by stagnation and uncertainty. Production in the mills and factories was down as was the output in the farmlands. Side by side with laying the groundwork of a democratic polity, Bhutto launched an elaborate series of major socio-economic reforms designed to level up inequalities and iniquities of Pakistani society, to end an unjust statusquo and foster a welfare state and an egalitarian society. In his article Pakistan builds Anew in the April 1973 issue of the American journal Foreign Affairs he outlined the purpose of his socio-economic program in the following words: Our target in our socio-economic program is not only a statistically gratifying increase in the GNP but an improvement in the lot of the common man, in the living standards of workers and peasants and a radical change in the social milieu. Such a change has to be felt by the people and not only measured by economists, if it is to be real.23 Among the many disservices that the different governments under Musharrafs rule have done to the country, perhaps the worst has been the cynicism that it has bred among the people. Neither the elite, which incidentally has beneted immensely from the rich-friendly policies of
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these regimes nor the ordinary citizen have any faith in the credibility and efcacy of the whole state apparatus. Unless the new dispensation is able to restore the trust of the citizen in the governments ability to safeguard his life and property and promote his welfare, it will not be able to mobilize the power of the people in support of its policies. It is the theme of peoples power that forms the leitmotif of Zulkar Ali Bhuttos rule and to a great extent explains some of his astounding successes in extremely adverse circumstances. In his letter to Benazir Bhutto titled My dearest daughter he extols the virtues of peoplefriendly policies. Your grand-father taught me the politics of pride, your grandmother taught me the politics of poverty. I am beholden to both for the ne synthesis. To you, my darling daughter, I give only one message. It is the message of the morrow, the message of history. Believe only in the people, work only for their emancipation and equality. The paradise of God lies under the feet of your mother. The paradise of politics lies under the feet of the people. I have quite a few achievements to my credit in the public life of the subcontinent but, in my memory, the most rewarding achievements have been those which have brought smiles of joy to the weary faces of our miserable masses, achievements which have brought a twinkle to the melancholy eye of a villager. More than the tributes paid to me by the great leaders of the world, within the four walls of this death-cell, I recall with greater pride and satisfaction, the words of the widow in a small village who told me Sadko Warryian solar sain when I sent her only peasant son on a foreign scholarship.24 Even if the vehicle that Mr. Gillanis government prepares to extricate the Pakistani nation out of the present mess is sturdy and durable, it might nd it difcult, indeed impossible, to reach its destination safely and securely if it is powered by fuel that is contaminated. In other words, policies and measures may be excellent and intentions unimpeachable, but if corruption, wastage, sifarish and lack of accountability, the bane of our society, are not confronted boldly the government may fail to inspire condence among the people towards whose welfare the policies are directed. In his very rst address to the nation, which was extempore, Mr. Bhutto warned that he would come down with a very heavy hand on
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corruption. He told the bureaucracy to do its job and work like he worked night and day and to be at the service of the people. He underscored the importance of the ordinary citizen who should be able to get his work done without sifarish. I have no relations, I have no family. My family is the people of Pakistan.So it must be known clearly to everyone that there will be no sifarish from anyone, no nepotism, no corruption and no maladministration.25 As the new democratically elected government endeavours to bring the nation out of the shadow of eight years of military and quasi-military rule, it would do well to remember the inspiring words of Zulkar Ali Bhutto on his assumption of ofce as the president of Pakistan. I want to tell you my dear countrymen that I have come in at a very late hour, at a decisive moment in the history of Pakistan. We are facing the worst crisis in our countrys life, a deadly crisis. We have to pick up the pieces, very small pieces, but we shall make a new Pakistan, a prosperous and progressive Pakistan, a Pakistan free of exploitation, a Pakistan envisaged by the Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder of the nation, a Pakistan for which the Muslims of the subcontinent sacriced their lives and their honour in order to build this new land. That Pakistan will come, it is bound to come. This is my faith, and I am condent that with your cooperation, understanding and patience, we will emerge as a stronger and a greater state. I have no doubt about it.26 The greatest tribute that the present government can pay to Zulkar Ali Bhutto, the most popular prime minister of Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto, the bravest daughter of the soil is to tirelessly dedicate itself to the building of a strong and democratic Pakistan.
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References:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Address to the nation by General (retd.) Pervez Musharraf on 17 October 1991. Public opinion poll conducted by United States International Republican Institute (IRI) in June/July 2007. Bhutto, Zulkar Ali, If I am Assassinated. Ibid. Ibid. The News, 1 February 2008. Bhutto, Zulkar Ali, If I am Assassinated. Article 245 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Rasul Bakhsh Rais, The Third Transitions, Daily Times, 25 March 2008. Text of Charter of Democracy, 14 May 2006. Sherry Rahman, Enigma of the Defence Budget, Dawn, 29 June 2005. Letter by Zulkar Ali Bhutto My dearest daughter, to Benazir Bhutto/ President Zulkar Ali Bhuttos address to the nation, 20 December 1971. Website of the Pakistan Peoples Party. Text of Charter of Democracy, 14 May 2006. Zulkar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan Builds Anew, Foreign Affairs, April 1973. Speeches and Statements by President Zulkar Ali Bhutto, published by the government of Pakistan. Ibid. Ms Benazir Bhuttos address to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, August 2007. Daily Times, 27 March 2008. Ibid. Daily Times, 28 March 2008. Zulkar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan Builds Anew, Foreign Affairs, April 1973. Letter by Zulkar Ali Bhutto, My dearest daughter, to Benazir Bhutto. Address to the nation by President Zulkar Ali Bhutto, 20 December 1971. Ibid.
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OF TONGUES AND LANGUAGES:

The Tao of Translation Toheed Ahmad *
Abstract
(Pakistan does not seem to have grasped the meaning or signicance of translation. A close nexus exists between translation skills and national development. The promotion of a translation culture is also important to foster values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence among faiths, races and countries. The paradigm of Dialogue/Clash of Civilizations is best tackled through book translations rather than leaving the eld open for the media which are in a hurry to sell their daily and hourly products in an increasingly noisy marketplace of ideas. Author). The sh swims in the water but they dont realize the water. The birds y riding the wind but they dont realize the wind. The man exists inside The Tao but they dont realize The Tao. The Tao is formless. The Tao exists since the beginning. The Tao have no beginning and ending. The meaning is very complex and difcult to understand. The meaning is too wide, so it is very difcult to be explained by the word clearly. The simplest meaning of The Tao is The Way or can be said too as The Law, The Rule and others. Lao Zi, the grand Prophet of Taoism In Pakistan we dont seem to have grasped the meaning or signicance of translation. Yet we are a multilingual society where people use Translation (or its oral equivalent of Interpretation) daily. Imagine a Sindhi speaker reading the English newspaper Dawn or the Urdu Jang, a Punjabi speaker reading The News or Nawa-e-Waqt, a Balochi
* Toheed Ahmad is a former Ambassador of Pakistan.
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or a Brahvi speaker watching the news bulletin of Aaj TV, or a Pashto speaker tuning in to PTVs Khabarnama. They are all translators. Its time we wake up to the importance of this subject and study the process of Translation rather than solely consuming its products whether in the literary or education elds or for commercial, legal, scientic texts and documents, or in the burgeoning media world (lm sub-titles, television voice-overs, radio broadcasts) newspaper/magazine content, book publishing industry, computer literacy and software localisation or in international marketing and brand promotion. A close nexus thus exists between translation skills and national development. Though ancient as the hills, Translation has emerged as an academic discipline only in the last thirty years or so. In the late 1970s, the subject began to be taken seriously, and was no longer seen as an unscientic eld of enquiry of secondary importance. Throughout the1980s interest in the theory and practice of Translation grew steadily. (In that decade we were one with the world when in the early December of 1985 the rst National Seminar on the Issues in Translation was held in Islamabad. In the same decade the National Language Authority issued several books on the subject). In the 1990s, Translation Studies nally came into its own for this proved to be the decade of its global expansion. Today interest in this eld has never been stronger and the study of Translation is taking place alongside an increase in its practice all over the world. But in Pakistan we have neither formal education in this area nor any mentionable training programme for translators. The biggest casualty of this gap is the Urdu-English-Urdu area, which is ironically the most common area of our nations use of translation and interpretation. (For example, in a recent conversation with me, the Vice Chancellor of the Government College University, Lahore, lamented that people of his English Department did not liking talking to the people of the Universitys Urdu Department). Barring a few gifted and brave individuals, quackery rules this profession much like we saw in architecture during the rst four decades after independence, and in photography and lm making even in the seventh decade of our national existence. We have all heard of the great Translation enterprises of Abbasside Baghdad and Muslim Andalusia, and yet are content to believe that
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those Muslim translators were salvaging ancient knowledge in science, medicine, philosophy and the arts to serve the cause of European Renaissance, implying thereby that these Muslims had no intrinsic use for this artful skill. George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Columbia University, notes that: No civilization has experienced a renaissance in its history in one form or another without that renaissance being preceded or coming contemporaneously with a translation movement. Whether it was the ninth century Baghdad or in Europes Renaissance age, the translation movements ushered in remarkable periods of cultural upsurge. Later we shall examine this unparalleled translation enterprise of human history. In our own times, the evolution the European Union is the biggest translation project in the world. Working in over 20 languages, the EU is the single largest employer of translators and interpreters followed by the UN which deploys these skills only in its six ofcial languages. What are we missing here? The rst step towards an examination of the processes of translation must be to accept that although translation has a central core of linguistic activity, it belongs most properly to semiotics, the science that studies sign systems or structures, sign processes and sign functions writes Prof Susan Bassnett of University of Warwick in her famous book, Translation Studies, (latest edition 2002). She goes on to say: Beyond the notion stressed by the narrowly linguistic approach, that translation involves the transfer of meaning contained in one set of language signs into another set of language signs through competent use of the dictionary and grammar, the process involves a whole set of extra-linguistic criteria also. Language is a guide to social reality...human beings are at the mercy of the language that has become the medium of expression for their society. Experience is largely determined by the language habits of the community, and each separate structure represents a separate reality. No two languages are ever sufciently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.. and no language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture, and no culture can exist which does not have at its centre the structure of natural language. Language, then, is the heart within the body of culture, and it is the interaction between
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the two that results in the continuation of life-energy. In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his peril. According to Prof. Bassnett, the purpose of translation theory is to reach an understanding of the processes undertaken in the act of translation, and not as is commonly misunderstood, to provide a set of norms for effecting the perfect translation. She then goes on to pose the question whether there can be a science of translation or is translation a secondary activity. Believing that any debate about the existence of a science of translation is out of date, she says that there already exists, with Translation Studies, a serious discipline investigating the process of translation, attempting to clarify the question of equivalence, and to examine what constitutes meaning within that process. But nowhere is there a theory that pretends to be normative, and (we are) a long way from suggesting that the purpose of translation theory is to be proscriptive. Here she gives the last word to Octavio Paz, the 1990 Noble Laureate for Literature, who made a case for Translation Studies, and translation itself. All texts, Paz claims, being part of a literary system descended from and related to other systems, are translations of translation of translations, and she quotes him saying: Every text is unique and at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: rstly, of the non-verbal world, and secondly, since every sign and phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text. I would like to tell you about this latest Translation initiative in the Arab world. Kalima, a non-prot company is based in Abu Dhabi and funded by the Emirates Authority for Culture and Heritage. While its aim is to address a thousand year old problem principally by getting 100 books of knowledge translated into Arabic and published every year an awesome ambition indeed. Its driving philosophy is that
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Translation is not just some base skill but a key to a glorious treasure of thinking, ideas and invention from all around the world that can provide a platform for more advances. Its website (www.kalima.ae) lists the following four objectives that they wish to achieve: (i) To fund the translation and publication of books from other languages into Arabic. (ii) To support marketing and distribution initiatives. (iii) To support and promote the Arabic book industry on the international stage, like International Book Fairs. (iv) To invest in translation as a profession, to encourage more and better quality translators. There are 250 million Arabic speakers in the world, but only a very small proportion of translated foreign material available to read. To put this into context:

Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years and For every one million Arabs only one book is translated into Arabic each year (Source: UNDP Arab Human Development Report, 2003)
Add to this inconsistent product quality, poor distribution and piracy and its no wonder that interest in books has suffered in the Arabic world. What is this thousand year old problem that Kalima aims to address? What was happening in Baghdad, a thousand and more years ago, on the translation front? The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has recently issued a book of Prof George Saliba under the title Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance which takes an in-depth look at the enabling socio-economic factors for the rise of world beating science and technology in the Islamic lands. He postulates that scientic and philosophical ideas ourish through open discussion. Language mediation or translation played a crucial role in the emergence of pioneers of astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy,
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geography etc. Translation of Greek, Persian, Syriac and Sanskrit texts into Arabic enabled the Muslim scholars to converse freely with the great minds of these civilisations and thus while preserving the jewels of the ancients through translations into Arabic, they also created new knowledge. The great philosopher Al-Farabi once wrote that philosophy was nally freed (of persecution at the hands of Byzantine emperors and Christian Church) when it reached the lands of Islam. Many of the Baghdad scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers were also translators. Two of the most sophisticated Greek scientic texts the Almagest of Ptolemy and Elements of Euclid were translated into Arabic by al-Hallaj. The language of these translations, says Saliba, is impeccably good, Arabic technical terms and all and the Arabic translation even corrects the mistakes of the original Almagest. Who taught al-Hallaj the technical terms and who taught him how to correct the mistakes of the original asks Saliba. Early translations usually struggle with technical terminology and usually do not go beyond the letter of the text and would never have corrected its mistakes, if they could understand the text in the rst place, he observes. Furthermore we know that al-Hallajs translation of those scientic works was not the rst. In fact, we are told by some sources that those two books were already translated (into Arabic in Baghdad).... and thus we must allow for a longer period of translation so that more than one generation of translators would create enough output to produce technical terminology and teach the sophisticated mathematics and linguistic skills that were required to render Almagest, the Elements, and similar books into the kind of coherent Arabic in which they are preserved. Lets take a look at the genesis of astronomy and algebra and the role played by translation as narrated by Saliba. During the reign of alMamun, we also witness the creation of the new discipline of Algebra by Musa al-Khwarizmi (circa 830 AD), already in a mature format treating, for example, the eld of second-degree equations in its most general form. This happened before the translation of the work of Diophantus and other Greek sources. This does not mean that classical
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Greek sources, or for that matter ancient Babylonian sources, did not include algebraic problems, but the coinage of the new terms for algebra (al-jabr), and the statement of the discipline in general as different from arithmetic, required a kind of maturity that could not have come with the rst generation of translators. Similarly, a few years later, or even contemporaneously with Khwarizmi, we witness the creation of the discipline of Haya (astronomy), as ilm al-haya, which also did not have a Greek parallel. And that too could not have come about, as it did in the work of Qusta bin Luqa (e.g. translation of Arithmetica of Diophantus, still preserved in an Oxford manuscript), during the rst generation of translators. Moreover, it is remarkable to note that Qusta himself, like other accomplished translators of his time, was already composing his own new scientic books, like his book of Haya just mentioned, while he was still translating older, more common Greek scientic texts. Hunain bin Ishaq (outstanding physician and translator) did the same, and so did many others in this period. All that could not have come about at the hands of people who were translating for the rst time, and needing to create the new technical terminology for their translations as well as their original compositions. In Qusta bin Luqas Arabic translation of Arithmetica of Diophantus there is a clear adoption of the algebraic language that was developed by the Arabic-writing algebraists of Qustas time, as is evident in from Qustas reference to the title of Diophantuss work as sinaat al-jabr (Art of Algebra), a term that does not exist in Greek. This kind of liberty with the translation clearly demonstrates the dynamic nature of the translation process of the early ninth century. Classical Greek scientic texts could easily be acclimatized within the current Arabic sciences of the time, thus transforming the translation process into a simultaneous creative process as well. Furthermore, the remarkable advances that were made by Habash al-Hasib (circa 850 AD) in the eld of trigonometry and mathematical projection go far beyond what was known from the Indian and Greek sources, and they could not have been accomplished by someone who was only a beneciary of an early stage of translation.
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Let us examine the coinage of scientic terms carried out in the early decades of the last century at Osmania University, Hyderabad Deccan (established 1917), where medical, science, and engineering education was imparted in Urdu. Although I have not seen any analytical study of their translation process, I have seen the two volume dictionary of these terms published by the National Language Authority. While we can see the quaintness of these terms, I suspect that these translators were not of the category of al-Hallaj, Qusta and Hunain mentioned above. The Deccan translators were just that and did not produce any original work in Urdu in any of the scientic elds for which they established voluminous books of terminology. As rst generation translators of terminology (though some work had been accomplished at Sir Syed Ahmad Khans Scientic Society) we salute their achievement but rst it was not the kind of work that had gone in Abbasside Baghdad, nor was it followed up by a second and third generation of translators to affect renement and improvement. May be the abolition of the Nizamate and the Urdu-Hindi controversy in the Freedom Movement was the undoing of this experiment. For did not Marshal Hodgson, the inuential author of The Venture of Islam (published 1975) note: It is hardly accurate, despite certain West Pakistani claims, to call Urdu an Islamic language, in the strict sense. It was the insistence of some Muslims on treating it that way, and opening a meeting on fostering Urdu with Quran readings, that drove Urdu-loving Hindus away from it and may, in the end, have meant the ruin of Urdu in its motherland. Hodgson chose not to talk about the other side of the debate when the Hindu culture chauvinists denounced Urdu as the brainchild of the British imperialism, specically William Gilchrist, Principal of the Fort William College, Calcutta, for having produced hundreds of translations and manuals and dictionaries, with the aim to divide and rule in colonial India. I dare say that Urdu was ruined in Pakistan too, where ironically it was upheld as the national language. While Teaching of English is being offered as a specialised subject at post-graduate level in many universities of Pakistan, teaching of Urdu, to my knowledge, exists as a subject for elementary level teaching only. Here we dont even need to mention the highly developed British export industry of Teaching of English to Foreigners. Do we have anything
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comparable for spreading Urdu at least among the six million overseas Pakistanis we should not then wonder why our diasporas cultural connection with the homeland is limited to observance of the rituals of Islam (Imagine the cultural alienation of the non-Muslim Pakistanis abroad). Meanwhile the world has moved on. In the last 30 years, Translation Studies has come to be accepted as an academic discipline and is being increasingly taught at many universities. In fact the drive to create knowledge-based economies has led many countries to actively promote Translation Studies. As per the World Competitiveness Report 2006, just one Arab country, Jordan, ranks among the top 60 countries. It is directly related to the much lamented fact that the total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1000 years is less than the number of books translated into Spanish in one year. The other three Muslim countries in this list are Malaysia, Turkey and Indonesia all three countries with active state-sponsored translation programmes. Malaysia is the only Muslim country to have its universities ranked among the top 200 in the world today. Signicant books produced in major languages, and important journals, are reproduced in Bhasha and Turkish almost instantaneously. Iran is doing something similar - there people are thus kept abreast of what the world is thinking. Our elites, while maintaining a strict knowledge censorship for the masses, restrict themselves to the Anglo-Saxon worldview. Small wonder then that Pakistan is yet to nd a mentionable place on this Competitiveness Scoreboard. The Competitiveness criteria relevant to our discussion of translation, language skills and culture are as follows; 1. University Education: Whether University Education meets the needs of A Competitive Economy 2. Economic literacy: Is economic literacy generally high among the population 3. Education in Finance: Does education in Finance meet the needs of enterprises 4. Language Skills: Are Language Skills meeting the needs of enterprises
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5. Knowledge Transfer: Is Knowledge transfer between companies and universities highly developed 6. Attitudes towards Globalization: Whether attitudes towards Globalization are generally positive in the country 7. National Culture: Is the national culture open to foreign ideas. If you are not an entrepreneur, put the above questions to any factory owner, banker, university student/lecturer, media person, a bureaucrat or any labour leader in Pakistan. The answer will be a resounding no. Our competitiveness gurus are missing this whole point. The truth is there is no place to hide anymore. It is said that ambition is fundamental to competitiveness. The conclusion of the World Competitiveness Report 2006 is that: Successful nations and rms have the ability to raise the general level of ambition everywhere and for everybody. Such an attitude may very well be the ultimate engine for competitiveness. And this is further borne out by a truism in Translation Studies that most of the work done in translation is in the area of scientic, technical, commercial, legal and administrative or institutional translation. Despite this our literati think of translation as primarily a literary phenomenon. The full signicance of non-literary translation in cultures is drastically underestimated. This is not because, as is commonly thought, literary translation enjoys a monopoly of attention and prestige in the academy (it does not) but because the cultural and intellectual stakes of non-literary translation are rarely spelled out in any great detail and are generally referred to in only the vaguest possible terms promoting understanding, encouraging trade (Prof. Michael Cronin, cited below). URDU TRADITION OF TRANSLATION According to Prof Nisar Ahmed Qureshi, the foundations of early Urdu poetry and prose appear to have been mainly laid by translation. The plots of ancient Deccan masnavis were taken from Persian and Arabic sources. The earliest known prose translator was Shah Meeranjee Khudanuma of Deccan who translated the Arabic language book Tamheedat Hamadani into Urdu in the early 17th century. (Turjuma: Rivayat va Fun, 1985, National Language Authority, Islamabad). The
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late Mughals also added translation to the court arts taught to the royalty. It was thus that the unfortunate Prince Dara Shikoh (16151659), elder brother of Emperor Aurangzeb, translated selections from the Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian. These texts were further translated into Latin by Anquetil Duperron in 1801, which according to Prof. Annemarie Schimmel, so deeply inuenced German philosophy of the 19th century and thus became Europes rst introduction to Hinduism. While Shah Waliullah (1703-1762) rst translated the Quran into Persian, his sons Shah Rauddin and Shah Abdulqadir separately translated the Holy Book into Urdu in 1785 and 1790 respectively. The rst Urdu translation of the Bible appeared in 1748. So the Bible was available to the Indian populace several decades before the Quran. All these were essentially individual projects involving translations from Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit into Urdu. The rst institutional Urdu language translation was seen at the Fort William College, established in 1800 at Calcutta to train British civil servants and army personnel for service in India. According to Schimmel, The abolition of Persian, the old language of higher instruction (it) had been the depository of the cultural and intellectual heritage of Indian Islam and had produced a large literature, local languages possessed more or less only religious or folk poetry opened the way for the development of Indian regional languages which started, from the scientic point of view, at Fort William, and which entailed not only a large literary output in the different local languages but brought into existence little by little the art of translation which produced adaptations of European literature and technical works (Gabriels Wing, A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, 1962). Dr. John Gilchrist, the College Principal, who had produced an English-Urdu dictionary in 1796, assembled scholars and writers from all over the country and tasked them to produce books in simple Urdu and also Urdu versions of masterpieces of other languages, this time including English. This galaxy included stalwarts like Mir Aman Dehlavi, Haider Buksh Haideri, Mir Sher Ali Afsos, and Nihal Chand Lahori who were the rst generation of professional and paid translators.
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Similarly, the Delhi College, established 1792, pushed Urdu translation further and produced local versions of scientic and scholarly texts between the years 1842 and 1877. According to Gail Minaults article on Delhi College and Urdu (www.urdustudies.com), in the early 1840s, Principal Felix Boutros started the Vernacular Translation Society, which translated books in medicine, law, sciences, economics and history from English into Urdu. Teachers and students both participated in the work of translation, creating their own textbooks in the process an interesting blending of the oral and written traditions. Individual local benefactors helped nance the rst translations and publications. The sales of texts helped the effort along. The government also agreed to nance the translations of math and geometry texts in Urdu to bring western sciences to students in the oriental section of the College. The list of the Societys publications includes basic textbooks such as Euclids Elements, and histories of England, Greece and Rome and the geography of India. Science texts included both natural philosophy and Tibb (also from Arabic). The famous names associated with this movement were Mamluk Ali Naunatvi, Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali, Maulana Mohammed Hassan Azad, Maulvi Zakaullah and Maulvi Nazir Ahmed. The Vernacular Translation Society made it possible for students of Delhi College to participate in both the revival and improvement of Urdu literature and the promotion of the knowledge of the sciences. Incidentally, the Delhi College was the precursor of two supposedly opposing centres of Indo-Muslim cultural revival and reform in the 19th century, Aligarh and Deoband. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898) the great visionary of Indian Muslim culture, established the Scientic Society of Aligarh, the rst scientic association of its kind in India. Modeled after the Royal Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, the Society assembled Muslim scholars from different parts of the country. The Society held annual conferences, disbursed funds for educational causes and regularly published a journal on scientic subjects in English and Urdu and translated Western works into Urdu. Sir Syed felt that the socio-economic future of Muslims was threatened by their orthodox aversions to modern science and technology.
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It is interesting to make a quick comparison of these Urdu translation enterprises with that of the Bait-al-Hikma of Abbasside Baghdad. While they helped popularise western subjects, these projects, do not seem to have inaugurated any worthwhile knowledge movement. Three main points come to mind: 1. While the Bait-al-Hikma was patronised by the Caliphs of Islam and their courts, the Urdu translation enterprises were sponsored early on by the colonial British authorities. While Fort William College was meant to produce vernacular texts to train the colonial ofcials, the goal of Delhi College, Sir Syeds Scientic Society, and Osmania University to provide the Indian Muslim community access to modern education. It was a slave-master paradigm that drove these Hindustani initiatives. 2. Though both Arabic and Urdu were in their early stages of development as prose languages when the Muslims embarked upon their great translation enterprise in Syria and Iraq and when rst foreign texts were produced in Urdu, the Bait-ul-Hikmas knowledge catchment area was vast and varied, ranging from Transoxania in the east passing through the grand Sassanian civilisation of Iran, the splendour of the Byzantine libraries and Greek and Roman treasuries of knowledge to Andalusia in the west. Urdus knowledge outreach, by contrast, was limited to what was available in the subcontinent in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and English. Calcutta, Delhi and Hyderabad, unlike Baghdad, had no pretence of creating new science or of devising technologies to apply them. Hindustani translation energies were mostly consumed by literary and religious texts, while only a few books, mainly teaching texts, were produced in the eld of science. 3. The Urdu-Hindi controversy which burnt many a creative spirit raged on during most of the 19th century and beyond. Scholars were pushed into taking sides and, ironically, felt the safest inside their language trenches. The chorus of the slaves in Hindustan was but a whimper unlike the raging Muslim intellect that informed the Baghdad translation projects.
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The translation situation in Pakistan remains a hangover of this controversy, as its early proponents had all cut their teeth in a linguistic version of the Two Nation Theory and could not shake off their minority syndrome. Though a Translation House was established in Lahore and some work was done by the Pakistani version of the Urdu Development Society in Karachi, the agenda remained the same to produce texts for education of the Muslim community. The predominant concern of our literati then was to get the Urdu language promulgated as the sole national and ofcial language. There was no vision beyond the trenches in which these scholars had been born. Apparently no one had access to the details of the Baghdad translation initiative, and may be no one still bothers about analyzing it to draw lessons for us today. The rst serious attempt to examine the situation was made at a three-day seminar arranged in Islamabad by the Urdu Language Authority in December 1985. Scholars and academics from around the country examined issues in translation during three sessions, in the areas of science and technology, law, as a working language, and in media and literature. After the formal opening, the rst session was devoted to Overview of the situation. The next year, the National Language Authority published the proceedings of the Seminar in Urdu, edited by Ijaz Rahi, who contributed a pithy introduction to the volume. He wrote that the participants agreeing that translation was our national requirement discussed various problems and issues around translation. The need for translation, he wrote, was felt by those nations who yearned to acquire knowledge. In history, the nations which excelled in spiritual and material elds were those who gave a high priority to learning from the knowledge of other nations. In this outreach, translation, always served as the diplomatic bridge. In the glory days of the Islamic civilization, Muslims scoured the world in search of knowledge, and through translations, empowered their scholars and scientists. Science and technology, he further wrote, were fast changing and developing and no society could hope to progress without keeping pace with the world. It has been established that in order to benet from world knowledge, nations have to acquire the ability to translate the new knowledge in their own languages. Ijaz Rahi goes on to make a seminal
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point that post-colonial societies whose languages were damaged and downgraded under foreign rule have the twin challenge of repairing and then restoring the centrality of their languages, and at the same time to keep abreast of the world in knowledge. A tough call indeed! In its concluding session, the Seminar passed 16 resolutions. Below I reproduce texts of 10 of those resolutions with their original serial numbers to highlight the various dimension of our national translation imperative. No 1. This Seminar recommends that a Joint Committee of National Language Authority and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting be set up which may prepare a Dictionary of words and terms used in Media and Communications giving their standard Urdu equivalents, including new words and terms, and supply it to Media Institutions. This Joint Committee may work on a permanent basis. No 2. In view of the importance of scientic and literary translations, this Seminar recommends that Translations be included as a category for books awards. No 4. This Seminar recommends that all fees paid to Translators of scientic, literary, technical and scholarly texts should be exempt from income tax. No 5. Recommended that all Universities of Pakistan, which currently do not have this practice, should admit Translations of portions of any book as dissertations for Masters Degrees. No 6. Recommended that the Translation House of the National Language Authority should be upgraded on a large scale for which necessary funds should be provided to the Authority. No 7. Recommended that the National Language Authority should establish a specialised library of all old and new Urdu translations as part of the Library of its Translation House.
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No 8. Recommended that the National Language Authority should arrange for translations of the most important books into Urdu and publish them. No 10. Recommended that the National Language Authority should be given the authority for authentication and standardisation of terms coined by various individuals and institutions. Only such terms should be used for all Urdu books and publications. No 11. Recommended that in view of the shortage of good translators a Translator Training Centre should be established under the aegis of the National Language Authority. Teaching of Translation should be introduced at all Universities of Pakistan. No 16. Since use of new machine technology has facilitated translation between the national language and the regional languages, recommended that necessary measures be taken to utilise this facility. You will see that in the year 1985, these scholars were dimly aware of the machine translation facility but had not yet heard of computer aided translation or computer literacy which were subjects, it must be said, that had just begun to surface in the west. These scholars were not yet aware of the trade related needs of translation skills, nor were the subject of translation and external promotion of Pakistan or industryuniversity linkage broached at the Seminar. Given the grim translation gap in Pakistan today, we can safely assume that the recommendations of this important seminar were forgotten. Its 23 years now, no followup event has been reported from any quarter in Pakistan. Nor has any mentionable book been produced on the subject of Translation Studies, nor is it a subject at any Pakistani university or college. And these precisely were the decades that the world woke up and adopted translation as a serious academic discipline and upgraded the profession to the highest level. An area of particular concern in this domain is the near-total absence of the science of linguistics in the Urdu tradition. I had a phone conversation with the Vice-Chancellor of the Karachi University which
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once had an active Translation Centre. No more active was his reply to my query. To be fair to him he did ask the Dean of the Universitys Arts Faculty to follow this up who called me a few days later to assure me of their interest in pursuing this conversation further in view of the importance of the subject. Recently I visited the Oriental College of the University of Punjab, where I was told that Translation was formally taught only as part of the Master of Arts courses in the Arabic language. They had no linguistics expert of any of the languages taught there. I had a conversation on this subject with Dr. Saleem Malik, Head of the Urdu Department of the College, who told me that he had earned a Masters degree in Linguistics from Karachi University which he had stowed away in his desk and never felt the need for the subject. He confessed he had earned his living off his Urdu degrees. Some years ago I had a similar conversation with the Brigadier-Rector of the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, who condently told me that a special group of his academics were doing a translation project relating to the Chinese supplied equipment at the Heavy Mechanical Complex, Taxila. So much for the understanding of the subject from the head of the nations premier languages university. While the Kinnaird College showed no interest to my proposal on Translation Studies, the Beaconhouse National University and the English Department of the Punjab University seemed interested but reported no follow up. Lahores University of Management and Technology offers a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics which has a module on Translation. The situation is grave indeed for Translation Studies in Pakistan. Another building block of the inter-disciplinary area of Translation Studies is Comparative Literature, which like Urdu linguistics, is another glaring gap on our academic map. No university or college in Pakistan teaches the subject of Comparative Literature. We dont have academics trained in this area of literary studies. Not long ago I happened to see the result card of someone who had passed the examination to get a Master of Arts degree in Urdu of the Punjab University. One of the subjects he had passed was called Alami (World) Classics. Upon my asking he told me that he had read a Shakespeare play and extracts from Miltons Paradise Lost, Maupassant stories, selections from Goethe, some Chekov stories and Attars Conference of the Birds and some
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tales from Rumis Masnavi, all in Urdu translation. So here we have the early stirrings of Comparative Literary Studies. I doubt if any of our universitys English Departments offers a similar course. Foreign Language education is another connected area for the promotion of Translation Studies. Language learning, without which translation is impossible, is, if nothing, a form of prolonged interaction with another people, language and culture. It is difcult, unpredictable, occasionally humiliating and often exasperating, like all other engagements with difference. Remove language and the risk is a multicultural sweetshop of tamed, sanitized differences, the dangerous ingredient of linguistic diversity corralled off backstage in kitchens and call-centres, writes Prof Michael Cronin (cited below). We have a long tradition of teaching English, Persian and Arabic languages. Some degree courses are also offered in French and German, while the National University of Modern Languages also offers degree programmes in Chinese and certicate level instruction in Russian, Turkish, and Bhasha etc. It is interesting that except for Persian and Arabic, which are taught through Urdu, the medium of instruction for all other language courses is English. Why are we not teaching French and German and Chinese through Urdu? For one this is censorship by default to deny our Urdu knowing masses access to advanced knowledge in languages other than English. Secondly, it needs hard work by scholars and academics to erect such linguistic bridges. Why should anyone bother about any other language when our ruling elite have command of sorts over English? A Translation Studies programme will necessitate a wholesome and rigorous foreign language education programme at the tertiary level. It is said that writers create national literature while translators create world literature. One of the reasons the world knows so little about us is that so little of our rich literature, of Urdu and other Pakistani languages, has been translated into the major world languages. Most of what has been translated into English has been done by Pakistanis with no pretension to knowledge or training in Translation Studies. The golden rule here is that translators can effectively translate only into their
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native languages. I witnessed a demonstration of this principle recently in the ofce of Mr. Shahzad Ahmad, Director, Majlis Taraqqi Adab (Board for Advancement of Literature), Lahore, when a Pakistani friend who owns a language company in London was visiting the ofce of the Majlis. We were talking about the standard of translation in Pakistan. He saw a book of English translation of short stories of the late Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi lying on a corner table and picked it up. Opening its rst page, he offered to get its rst paragraph reverse translated in to Urdu through his London ofce. We met up again after a fortnight and he read out the Urdu translation. Mr. Shahzad Ahmed and we all were shocked to nd that the two texts had nothing in common. The Pakistani translator did not realise that his target language was not English but gibberish. Unfortunately much of what passes for English translations of Ghalib, Iqbal, Faiz etc., is really an unintelligible language. Though some great translations have been made into German (by Annemarie Schimmel) and French (by Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch) and Arabic (by Abdul Wahab Azzam and Ali Sawi Shalan), poor Iqbal has yet to nd a quality English translator, of the kind that Rumi and Tagore found. Way back in 1920 Prof. R.A. Nicholson put the Secrets of Self into English followed by Prof. A. J. Arberrys Persian Pslams (1948). Victor Kiernans translation effort remains a labour of love. Mr. Amjad Islam Amjad, the famous poet-playwright, once told me that the literature produced in Urdu between the 1930s and 1960s must rank as among the highest literature produced in any world language. While he is an honourable man, there is no way this claim can be proved in the absence of world quality translations in the major world languages. To illustrate the power of translation as a medium of external projection, let me quote a paragraph from Annemarie Schimmels Gabriels Wing: Some time after the publication of my Turkish prose translation of the Javidname, I received a letter, its very bad Turkish orthography manifesting that the writer was an unlearned man; but he expressed his admiration for Iqbals work, and asked for more books of his Turkish translation. He was a bearer (he wrote karson) in a restaurant in a small town of Eastern Anatolia that seems to be sufcient proof for Iqbals unquestionable appeal to simple minds too, who do not grasp properly the philosophical implications of his poems but are moved just by the
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energy they feel, even through the medium of translation. Now that we are talking of the power of translation, let me tell you about one of my historic achievements relating to this eld. Chachnama, the account of the Arab conquest of Sind, was translated from Arabic into Persian by Ali son of Mohammed Ku, a resident of Uch, in 1216 A.D. It is said to be the oldest book of history of the subcontinent. The original text was lost, only its Persian translation survived in several editions and disparate parts. Mirza Kalichbeg, Deputy Collector, Naushahro, Hyderabad District pored over several texts and published the complete book for the rst time in English translation, in Karachi in 1900. Later, Dr. N. A .Baloch, the celebrated scholar of Sindh, worked hard to piece together the Persian text of the Chachnama and published it as a parallel English-Persian edition titled Fatehnama Sindh. He gifted me a copy which kept lying in my books. Once Dr. Baloch visited Syria during my posting there, and this led me to dream of getting the Fatehnama translated back into the original Arabic. I was able to secure the agreement of the Arabic translator of the Iranian Cultural ofce in Damascus to take on the project. This is how this great text of subcontinental history was published after it was checked and authenticated by Dr. Sohail Zakar an eminent Syrian historian. In this information age, literacy has been redened. If you dont know computer operation, you are illiterate. The world now consist of knows and knows-nots. A lot is being said and written about this Digital Divide. To keep up with the world, nations face an urgent challenge to make their populations computer literate, and fast. For this to happen societies must be wired and languages made computer compliant. Pakistan is making commendable progress in providing the internet and telecom infrastructure. By the middle of this year, more than 50 percent of the population will be connected through mobile communications, including the rst in the world nationwide roll out of the state of the art WIMAX technology. Broadband penetration is set to rise dramatically in the next three years. What is lacking is the language compliance. There is no machine translation capability in any Pakistani language. Some initial work has been done at the National Language Authoritys Centre for Urdu Informatics and at the Centre for Research in Urdu
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Language Processing at the Lahore Campus of FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences. Yet it is said 90 percent of the work remains to be done. Without speedy localization, the vast majority will remain devoid of computer use. While mobile communications provides voice connectivity, data processing is all done via English. Given the present very low rate of English literacy in Pakistan, we can never hope to get our computer literacy ratio into double gures. Are we then doomed to remain a nation of knows-nots? But there is hope on the horizon. The Punjab government has recently agreed to fund a modern Translation House at the Majlis Taraqqi Adab, in Lahore to be headed by Mr. Shahzad Ahmad. At a recent meeting in his ofce setting up of a machine translation group was under discussion. Also present were Dr. Jamil Jalibi, the formidable scholar of Urdu and Dr. Majid Naeem, Head of the Computer Science Department at GCU. Dr. Naeem was requesting for provision of two experts of linguistics of Urdu and English and offered to arrange for funding and promised to provide the nal machine translation capability for Urdu in three years. So the effort is on. According to Dr. Jalibis magnum opus History of Urdu Literature, the rst grammar of Urdu was written in Dutch language by John Kettler, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Netherlands to the Mughul court. Called Lingua Hindostanica, it was published in 1743. At that time, and for centuries to come, the Urdu discourse was dominated by religious writing. No wonder today we lack expertise in Urdu linguistics and grammar in Pakistan. Here you will also see some rationale for the comment of Marshall Hodgson on the poverty of Urdu language given above. An area of substantial growth in the translation industry over the last two decades has been the activity of software localization. Localization clearly relates to the translation needs generated by the informational economy in an era of global markets, states Prof Michael Cronin in his book, Translation and Globalization. It essentially involves taking a product that has already been designed and tailoring it to the needs of a specic local market. For 1999, the world market for software and web
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localization was estimated to be $ 11 billion, expecting it to rise to $ 20 billion by 2004. More than 80 percent of e-mail and data content in the world, and 91 percent of secure websites are in English language. 70 percent of the books published today are in English, French, Russian and German languages. More and more countries are seeking to provide these technologies to their people in their native languages, the biggest of them being China, Japan, Korea, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Iran. In this localization drive, Prof Cronin sees the new opportunity for English speaking Asians. For us in Pakistan the preparations will begin with foreign language competencies and Translation Studies. Prof. Cronin, who heads the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland, begins his book by a reference to a novel The Last War, or the Triumph of the English Tongue, written by Samuel W. Odell in 1898. The new world is now the United States of the World and the English race has conquered the globe. The triumph of the English language is made easier by the mobilization of 1500 airships laden with bombs and an unquenchable primitive re. Faced with certain death from the air, speakers of languages such as French, German and Chinese decide that translation is the better part of valour and they set about translating themselves into the language of the superior airpower. In Odells book of revelation, when the tongues of re descend, the message is not to go out and preach in diverse languages but to stay inside and speak one. This is the paradigm for Cronins thesis on the increased signicance of translation in this era of globalization, especially for the minority cultures which face extinction because of the raging might of the languages of major powers. (Here we have nothing to fear from the language-less India, its constitution recognises 22 spoken languages, besides the classical Sanskrit and the co-ofcial English; the country is fast becoming an ape-civilisation of US). Translation, and by extension translation studies, he says, is ideally placed to understand both the transnational movement that is globalization and the transnational movement which is anti-globalization. He examines this aspect in some detail with a view to showing those outside the discipline that translation engages with questions which are of real importance for the
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past, present and future of humanity. An active sense of citizenship must involve translation as a core element. While discussing translation-interpretation as vital skills for a knowledge-based foreign policy, he states that Imperial Rome, Classical France and Romantic Germany accord translation a privileged role as a means of bolstering the position and standing of the vernacular as well as their economies and national power. Should it surprise us that we have failed to market our export products in language rich societies like the Arab world, Japan, China, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and Spain? A customer always buys in his own language. So it is incumbent on the seller to know the language of his target markets. I dont think that this truth has sunk in with our Trade Development Authority. Our manufacturers certainly are aware of this but lack facilitation advice or support. The Comparative Advantage of nations is to take the waiting out of wanting. Peripherality is no longer geographically dened, but now is chronologically dened. It is dened by the speed with which information-rich (nancial products, on-line support, telemarketing of products and services) and design-rich (popular music, web design, and advertising) goods and services can be delivered to potential customers. Again objects created in the post-industrial world are progressively emptied of their material content. The result is the proliferation of signs rather than material objects. This has been called aestheticization. Taken together this highlights the fact that industrial and business creativity now increasingly depends on the translation capabilities of a society. Promotion of a translation culture is also important to foster values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence among faiths, races and countries. The paradigm of Dialogue/Clash of civilisations is best tackled through book translations rather than leaving the eld for the media which are in a hurry to sell their daily and hourly products in an increasingly noisy marketplace of ideas. Making knowledge and information available in minority languages is not only an effective way of extending the range and usefulness of the language concerned but it also allows the
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regional, the national and the global to be made local in a way that is politically enabling and allows for the beginning of a recovery of control over peoples political, economic and cultural fates. Its the translation stupid!
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DIMENSION AND CONSEQUENCES OF NATO EXPANSION TO EURASIA: REVIEWING IRANS SECURITY ENVIRONMENT
Arif Kemal*
Abstract
(NATO expansion on Irans northern flank is a reminder of the latters encirclement which reached a pinnacle earlier in the decade with the US ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. However the driving force behind NATO expansion in the Eurasian region is energy and trade centred thereby signifying an obvious European dimension. A new Great Game is being enacted in the region in which Czarist Russia and Imperial Britain have been replaced on the one hand by the US-led coalition and, on the other, by Russia and China. A neoCold War could be in the making. To achieve the multiple objectives of energy security, trade corridors, stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan and stemming the resurgence of the Taliban, co-opting rather than isolating Iran is essential. Policy revisions, therefore, need to be made by both Washington as well as by Tehran. Editor) NATO expansion on Irans northern flanks is a reminder, if any were needed, of the countrys encirclement. Earlier in the decade, the process had reached its zenith with the US military ventures in Afghanistan in the east, and Iraq in the west. Yet the accretion in the encirclement caused by NATOs expansion is primarily motivated by energy and trade interests thereby signifying an obvious European connection which, in turn, implies that it is not patently Iran-specific. The measure lacks the potency to outweigh Irans geo-political standing
* Arif Kamal is a former Ambassador of Pakistan
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or to deny it the dividends that are built into the very opening of the great landmass of Central Asia and the Caucuses to Europe and the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, NATO presence in the region faces competition from Russia and China, which casts doubt upon its sustainability. The New Great Game, being played out on Irans northern flanks, therefore, presents both challenges as well as opportunities that are critical to the countrys current strategic environment as it confronts, in parallel, the sanctions regime imposed by the US after the 1979 Revolution. The New Great Game in the contemporary Eurasian scene is a replay of the 19th century contest for advantage in the region. The old actors, Czarist Russia and Imperial Britain, have been replaced by the US-led coalition with a sizeable West European interest on the one side, and, on the other by Russia (as well as China). The competing players do share common ground on the perceived threat emanating from terrorism and extremism in the backdrop of 9/11. However, the game as it emerges today, essentially relates to control over energy resources, development and pricing, and supply routes that are vital to the Western economies. It has already set in motion NATOs active engagement, both economic and military, with newly independent states in the region, and has led to an evolving response from Russia and China that smacks of a neo-Cold War in the making. Concurrently, the contest holds the promise of greater openings in trade to and from Central Asia and of its long-term development. In the scenario, Iran ought to be seen as the foremost gatepost in the neighbourhood and thus very much in the fall-out range. To recall, NATOs ascent in Central Asia was at first identified with the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) Programme started in the mid-1990s and later with the high visibility gained with its military presence. The alliance has, since 2003, successfully negotiated military transit agreements and other support arrangements with several Central Asian governments in order to linkup with its operational bases in Afghanistan. It is now designated as an area of NATOs special focus.1 The core US objectives in Central Asia relate to securing access
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to energy resources2 (energy supply routes in more specic terms), besides efforts to limit terrorism and Islamic extremism, as well as promote human rights and democracy. The primacy of energy in its agenda is based on the premise that, in the coming decades, energy scarcity and manipulation are likely to become the most likely causes of armed conict in the European theatre and the surrounding region. In this context, NATO has a new expanded role in energy security3 and, towards this end, is forging strategic partnership equations with the energy-rich states in Central Asia and the Caucuses. The focal points of the Western interest to-date are the evolving route maps of energy supply to Europe, whether potential or actualized, and the investments that come in the way. Interestingly, these ventures rest upon the premise of minimizing the Russian and Iranian connections and thus denying these geographically contiguous powers any leverage they could possibly exercise. The case in point is the BTC pipeline, designed to challenge Russian hegemony over energy in the Caspian region4 and already regarded a success story. It relives Azerbaijan from dependence on Russia5 and brings dividends to Azerbaijan as well as Europe. Similarly, the option to carry Turkmen gas to the Indian Ocean via western Afghanistan, by-passing Iran, has been in the ofng for quite some time. It would serve as a symbol and milestone6 analogous to the window that BTC is already providing. These developments are seen as a help to break the Russian and Iranian energy transit monopoly.7 Conversely, Russias drive in the region aims at enforcing its role as the source and conduit of energy supply to Europe. Moscows economic goals extend to ensuring that its rms participate in developing the regions natural resources and the Central Asian oil and gas exporters continue to use Russian pipelines.8 In pursuing the objectives, it would like to maximize its inherent geographical advantage and interdependence from the Soviet era, including transport infrastructure for oil, gas and electricity. Concurrently, Russia continues to increase, in qualitative terms, its military activity in Central Asia around the erstwhile nucleus it inherited from the Soviet era. The evolving Russian posture in the contemporary setting relates
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to restoring Moscows inuence9 in the region as a matter of priority rather than acquiesce with its exclusion. (Interestingly, President Putin is reported to have described the Soviet Unions collapse as one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century).10 Russias message across the board in Central Asia is to caution against the US presence as a major source of instability, in the wake of its drive for democratization and human rights, and to call for greater interdependence within the region to ward off US pressure. The resurgence of RussiaChina community of interest in checkmating the American inroads into Central Asia, even though in low key, is a phenomena of considerable interest. Both have shared an unease at the elevated US deployment11 in Central Asia since 2001 and have cooperated to reduce the US inuence in the region.12 Besides the traditional Russian stakes, a newer driving force in the direction is Chinas growing energy needs and efforts to acquire greater assets in the eld. Their leverage to prevent US encroachment into the spheres of inuence would enlarge as they accrue more Central Asian energy assets. Contrary to earlier projections, the post-Soviet era Central Asia is not an object of rivalry13 between Moscow and Beijing but rather a major unifying element in their relationship. An overarching objective in the Sino-Russian Strategic Partnership (1996) and its culmination in the Good Neighbourly Treaty of Friendship (2001) (love thy neighbour camaraderie14), is to limit US inuence in Central Asian geo-politics.15 This came to the fore with the 2005 SinoRussian military exercises, seen as a grand affair that took place to the exclusion of US troops even though located in proximate bases. In the current scenario, the Shanghai process has emerged as a ag-carrier of the new direction. The process though initially precipitated by a drive against terrorism and extremism, is now vital from the standpoint of its core participants: energy-rich Central Asians, and from the agenda that can take shape from a Sino-Russian convergence of interests.16 The SCO summit (2005) caused a stir when it called the US and its allies to set a timetable for their military withdrawal17 from the region. The non-renewal of the US base in Uzbekistan in the period was indeed a test case in this regard.
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What does the contemporary Eurasian scene signify for Iran and its security preoccupations? The regions proven oil and gas reserves18 are indeed tempting and perceived important as a strong alternative to the Persian Gulf energy.19 It offers the possibility to reduce the Wests perennial vulnerability to price increases and threatened cut-offs. The West is not ready to overlook the potential threat from political turmoil or terrorist threat in the Middle East and from the vulnerability of the Straits of Hormous, the lifeline of oil ow from the Gulf. The use of energy as an overt weapon is no more seen as theoretical.20 Only a halt in Irans export of 3.5 million barrels a day carries the potential of destabilizing the world energy market.21 In more specic terms, a contracting interest in Iran as a viable energy source even though a distant possibility, raises questions regarding Irans economic security. Secondly, the development of Eurasian energy potential and related infrastructure would not be unwelcome in the contemporary globalized environment. However, Irans exclusion in an expanded development, especially related to infrastructure linkup with Europe, would run counter to the countrys long-term interest. It is therefore, in Irans benet to avail opportunities to participate in Central Asian infrastructure development projects, even as a minor investor, so as to keep its foothold in the arena, work towards eroding the US sanctions regime and thus relieve pressures. The Great Game in which Russia and China are players, also holds the promise of dividends for Iran as a gatepost. NATOs operation on Irans northern ank has unfolded a mix of the alliances soft power (expressed in funding through the Euro Atlantic Partnership Programme) and hard power (military bases/ transit facilities) in line with activation of its energyrelated interests. The military presence, though ostensibly a bridgehead for Afghanistan, tends to accentuate Irans fears arising from the US policy of containment. The northern factor, however small and transient, remains agged in the wake of the massive US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq and operational bases in the Gulf. At least on the psychological level, this acquires particular signicance amidst the oft-repeated possibility of surgical strikes against Irans nuclear installations. Threat perceptions, whether rhetorical or real, have fuelled the re of
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turbulent relations between Iran and the West, particularly the US, in the past decades since 1979. The Islamic Revolution was regarded a strategic loss22 to the Wests primary interests in relation to Middle Eastern oil and Israels defence. The fears of what is seen as the countrys role in promoting terrorism and now the focus on the nuclear programme, are only sequential to this concern. In the long journey through the sanctions regime, Iran has been viewed as the single country that may pose the greatest danger to US interest.23 This, in turn, has convinced the US about the need to clip Irans wings and pursue a policy of containment. The US policy of containment that overshadowed Irans security environment since 1979, is indeed up for a reality-check so as to gauge its potency in the contemporary scene. Since the unfolding of the Islamic Revolution, Irans relations with the West and its proxies in the neighbourhood have been turbulent. The country felt politically isolated, insecure and, above all, threatened24 in the backdrop of its exposure to WMD-capable Iraq, an unstable region and lack of international support. Almost three decades later, however, most conditions have changed in Irans favour.25 Hopes for a change of regime have faded away. With the demise of al-Baath, there is no real threat to Iranian security from Iraq. In contrast to past decades, Iran enjoys good relations with most of the states within the region (Israel excluded) and is establishing growing economic relations with major powers. The sanctions regime has not bought about the isolation of Iran that was intended. Ironically, the containment of Iran carried with it the seeds of reverse effect as well. Iran has been the greatest though un-intended, beneciary of the US ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq: the fall of the Sal-driven Taliban and of the Saddam-led Al-Baath. The collapse of the rivals on both anks had, in turn, opened ood gates of Iranian inuence beyond the traditional realm.26 It also generated fears amongst the status quo forces regarding the so-called Shia Crescent which, in effect, transcends the sectarian divide.27 There is a climatic change: Iran is acknowledged and respected as a regional player,28 not just feared or dismissed as a coordinate point of radical forces. Rather than isolate and put the squeeze on Iran, it would serve Washingtons interests more, if it pursues the opposite policy. Through co-opting Tehran, the
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US would be better placed to unknot the Iraqi quagmire and to stabilize Afghanistan so as to thwart the resurgence of the Taliban. The potency of any particular threat from the north is perceptibly marginal in the overall containment scenario faced by Iran. Moreover, it carries greater inbuilt safety valves when compared with other anks. First, Irans geographic disposition and its position as the regions point of access to the outside world is indeed greater and more enduring than what any contrary assessment may like to project. Second, this advantage is re-enforced by institutional arrangements29 which now extend to coordination and response to encroachments that come from extra-regional forces. Irans entry as an observer in the Shanghai process, besides being a member of the Economic Cooperation Organization and the club of Caspian region, adds to the strength30 of the argument that it is relevant to contemporary security concerns in the region. Third, an organic linkage between Russian resurgence and its strategic stakes in Iran is indeed a vital factor in the current scenario.31 The competing interests of Russia (and of China) in Eurasia provide Iran sufcient time and space to increase its economic engagement in the region, specially a foothold in energy-related infrastructure investment, and thus, further erode the impact of the sanctions regime. The American sanctions regime already suffers from fatigue and erosion32 and therefore, newer steps unfolded in the direction are out of touch with reality. The US pronouncements and actions vis--vis Iran, though impregnated with negative images, continue to carry acknowledgement of the countrys important standing as a repository of the third largest oil and second largest gas reserves in the world and its central location between Asian and European markets.33 Today, the prime interest for stability in the oil-bearing region would be best served through a better understanding of the Iranian situation on three counts: First, Iran is now a front-ranking regional power in spite of the sanctionridden history. Second, what Iran seeks today is recognition of this status rather than exporting revolution. The nuclear issue ought to be seen as one major denominator of this urge. Third, isolation of the Iranians is likely to push them back to the psyche of the post-revolutionary period, which should be avoided. Notwithstanding the neo-conservative mindset
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and Israeli interests, it is important from the standpoint of American interests to have a re-engagement with Iran even though incremental, and to benet from the Iranian factor in assuring long-term stability in the region. This may come in time with the increasing US need to nd an exit strategy from Iraq and for that, a reduction of tensions with Iran would be needed.34 The Russia-China convergence of interests in response to NATOs expansion in Eurasia and their appreciation of Irans standing, is indeed a source of strength for the Iranian endeavour to look beyond the era of containment. This also raises questions about the very sustainability of NATOs presence in the region. Iran can hopefully rely upon this factor as a balancer while factoring in the need for a future reconciliation with the US.
References:
1 2 3 Richard Weitz, Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia, The Washington Quarterly, (Summer 2006), pp. 155-167. Ibid. U.S Sen. Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Dick Lungar, Lungar Speech in Advance of NATO Summit, The Power and Interest News Report, (November 22, 2006). Michael Piskur, The B.T.C Pipeline and the Increasing Importance of Energy Supply Routs, (The Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation, August 8, 2006). Nicklas Norling and Niklas Swanstrom, The Virtues and Potential Gains of Continental Trade in Eurasia, Asian Survey, Vol. XLVII, No. 3, (May/June 2007). Ibid. Ariel Cohen, US Interests and Central Asia Energy Security, Backgrounder # 1984, (The Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation, November 15, 2006). Richard Weitz, Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia, The Washington Quarterly, (Summer 2006), pp. 155-167. Ariel Cohen, US Interests and Central Asia Energy Security, Backgrounder # 1984, (The Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation, November 15,
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2006). 10 Richard Weitz, Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia, The Washington Quarterly, (Summer 2006), pp.155-167. 11 Ibid. 12 Ariel Cohen, US Interests and Central Asia Energy Security, Backgrounder # 1984, (The Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation, November 15, 2006) 13 Richard Weitz, Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia, The Washington Quarterly, (Summer 2006), pp.155-167. 14 Priyanka Singh, Russia and China Joint War Games: What Lies Beneath?, (September 8, 2005): http://www.ipcs.org/China_east_asia_articles2.jsp?action=showView&kValue =1848&keyArticle=1009&issue=1009&status=article&mod=a 15 Ibid. 16 Rukmani Gupta, The SCO: Challenging US Pre-eminence?, (June 20, 2006): http:// www.ipcs.org/China_east_asia_articles2.jsp?action=showView&kValue=2056&issue=1 009&status=article&keyArticle=1009&mod=b 17 Richard Weitz, Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia, The Washington Quarterly, (Summer 2006), pp.155-167. 18 According to the Energy Information Administration of the United States, Kazakhstans proven oil reserves amount to 40 billion barrels per day whereas her natural gas reserves range between 65-100 T cf. Proven oil reserves of Caspian region in totality range from 17-49 billion barrels per day and its natural gas reserves currently amount to 232 T cf. Persian Gulf region, on the other hand possesses oil reserves of 728 billion barrels per day i.e. 55% of worlds proven oil reserves, whereas its Natural gas reserves currently stand at 2509 T cf i.e. over 40% of worlds total natural gas reserves 19 Ariel Cohen, US Interests and Central Asia Energy Security, Backgrounder # 1984, (The Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation, November 15, 2006) 20 U.S Sen. Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Dick Lungar, Lungar Speech in Advance of NATO Summit, The Power and Interest News Report, (November 22, 2006). 21 Tariq Fatemi, Is US determined to attack Iran?, Dawn Newspaper, (February 18, 2006). 22 Dr. Subhash Kapila, Iran: United States - Strategic Options Re Examined, South Asia Analysis Group, (April 18, 2007): http://www.saag.org/%5Cpapers23%5Cpaper2213. html. 23 Jim Saxton, Irans Gas and Oil Wealth, The Joint Economic Committee Study of United States Congress, (March 2006)
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24 James E. Doyle and Sara Kutchesfahani, Time for a US/Iran Patch up, (March 21, 25 26 2006): http://www.carnegieendowment.org/les/LosAlamos_Iran.pdf. Ibid. Geoffrey Kemp, Iran and Iraq: The Shia Connection, Soft Power and the Nuclear Factor, Special Report 156, (November 2005): http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/ sr156.pdf. The term Shia Crescent has been used by Jordans King Abdullah twice during 20042006 to denote the expanding Iranian inuence among states and non-state actors in West Asia. A convergence of interest amongst the non-state actors across the sectarian divide, was repeatedly expressed in the period: e.g Hizbullah and Hamas shared fora to mobilize political support. Similarly, Iraqs Shia leader Muqtada Sadr proclaimed himself as the beating arm of both Hamas and Hisbullah. (Khutba at Kufa Grand Mosque during 2004 revolt in Faluja). Ray Takeyh and Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Pragmatism in the Midst of Iranian Turmoil, The Washington Quarterly, (The Centre for Strategic and International Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Autumn 2004) Priyanka Singh, Russia and China Joint War Games: What Lies Beneath?, (September 8, 2005): http://www.ipcs.org/China_east_asia_articles2.jsp?action=showView&kValue =1848&keyArticle=1009&issue=1009&status=article&mod=a. Rukmani Gupta, The SCO: Challenging US Pre-eminence?, (June 20, 2006): http:// www.ipcs.org/China_east_asia_articles2.jsp?action=showView&kValue=2056&issue=1 009&status=article&keyArticle=1009&mod=b. Dr. Subhash Kapila, Iran: United States - Strategic Options Re Examined, South Asia Analysis Group, (April 18, 2007): http://www.saag.org/%5Cpapers23%5Cpaper2213. html. Lt Col Robert C. Dooley, Iran: Threat or Opportunity? A Selective Economic Engagement Strategy Proposal, (Washington: National Defence University, National War College: http://www.ndu.edu/library/n4/n045601I.pdf. For insights into the American view of the Iranian potential, see: Irans Gas and Oil Wealth, The Joint Economic Committee Study of United States Congress, (March 2006). For a fuller review of the subject, see International Crisis Group, Iran in Iraq: How much Inuence? (March 2005, Brussels)
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Criterion

April/June 2008 Volume 3, Number 2

Shahwar Junaid 121

Iqbal Ahmad Khan 138

Toheed Ahmad 163

Arif Kemal 187

Editorial NEW GOVERNMENT, OLD PROBLEMS

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

S. Mushq Murshed Editor-in-Chief

CRITERION April/June 2008

GOVERNANCE REFORMS IN PAKISTAN

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION April/June 2008

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Governance Reforms in Pakistan

CRITERION April/June 2008

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A LIBERAL ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

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A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION April/June 2008

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

A Liberal Islam in South Asia

CRITERION April/June 2008

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

MUSLIM RADICALISM, WESTERN CONCERNS

Tanvir Ahmad Khan

CRITERION Volume 3 No.2

Muslim Radicalism, Western Concerns

Tanvir Ahmad Khan