Pakistan’s governance gap filled by overzealous courts

The following first appeared in The National on 23 February 2010.

In one small village in Pakistan’s tribal areas, parents became alarmed when their children came home from the only school available, a madrasa, and told them that they were not “real Muslims”.

The predominant Pashtun society of the tribal areas takes a dim view of a maulvi (religious scholar) interfering with non-religious matters. The community decided to set up their own school to provide their children a proper education. But after failing to obtain funding from the government or charities, they had little choice: they had to send their children back to the madrasa.

I heard many variations of this story while on a recent trip to Pakistan. In the absence of effective governance, the people are often left to fend for themselves – or must permit more insidious forces to fend for them.

It is not that the inhabitants of the tribal areas are diehard Taliban supporters – most are not. They have the same aspirations of any parent, that their children have a better life than they, but the avenues for advancement are limited at best.

American diplomats and pundits have been warning that the Pakistan is dangerously close to becoming a failed stated. It is not, not yet.

Certainly, Pakistan’s struggles with security, with corruption, with high inflation, unemployment and with social unrest, paint an image of a nation in turmoil, and it is.

But there is a more worrying issue facing Pakistan. If allowed to continue, it could indeed threaten the integrity of the state. If you ask any Pakistani what their federal government does for them, the answer is likely to be: nothing.

Governance is absent or barely present in much of the country; politicians are seen as almost universally corrupt, rapacious, and/or populist demagogues; electricity brownouts are common, leading both to frustration and a hamstrung manufacturing sector; gas for cooking and heating is rationed in most cities and villages; tax collection is almost as spotty as the services the government provides. All of these problems have been exacerbated by the problem of militancy.

There is an undeniable anger at the state of affairs among the people, but it is shrouded in despair at the lack of apparent solutions. Throughout the country’s history, Pakistan has struggled with corruption and incompetence in civilian administration. The solution always lies with the army, seen by most Pakistanis as competent by comparison and above the petty politicking and avaricious nature of their civilian governments. At least, this was true until Pervez Musharraf took over.

For many Pakistanis, Mr Musharraf’s time in office exploded a myth that the military was more competent at administration than civilians and that it was not corrupt. Today, the central government is more than simply ineffective in Pakistan, it is disillusioning. There is no obvious solution to any of these problems.

Any of these issues, taken separately, would not amount to an existential threat. It is their combination that may prove so deadly. Worryingly, Pakistan seems to lack either the capacity or will to treat its disease. The executive branch is seen as corrupt and is the subject of mockery by the people. The legislative branch is atrophying. No MP or political party wants to be the one to take up the task of solving any of the myriad problems knowing that they will require difficult and, at times, unpopular policies. There are no votes to be had in doing so.

The only functioning branch of the government appears to be the judiciary led by the chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and this carries its own peril. It is no secret that the president Asif Ali Zardari opposed the reinstitution of Mr Chaudhry, who was sacked during the latter days of the Musharraf presidency. A series of standoffs between the judiciary and the executive have shown exactly what Mr Zardari feared.

Mr Chaudhry declared the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) unconstitutional late last year, which withdrew corruption charges and convictions against hundreds of Pakistanis, but most notably Mr Zardari. He spent time in prison for corruption and could, in theory, be ineligible to hold office without the protections offered by the NRO. Thus far, the chief justice has declined to rule on the issue of Mr Zardari’s eligibility to hold public office. The threat of a ruling hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the executive, however, as was no doubt intended.

The president is not the only one under the watchful eye of the chief justice. He has the power to take what is called suo moto (of his own accord) notice of an issue, meaning that he takes on a case without it first being offered by a petitioner. Mr Chaudhry has exercised this special jurisdiction to tackle any number of human rights issues, including old cases of people suspected of disappearing for political reasons. The result has been greater attention by all branches of government and the bureaucracy to their duties.

The consequences have been sometimes bizarre. When bomb blasts went off during the Shiite celebration of Muharram in Karachi this month, the leadership of the dominant party in the city the Muttahida Qaumi Movement asked the chief justice to take suo moto notice of the bombing and the security lapses. It is illustrative of Pakistan’s problems that a party that is part of the ruling coalition of the Sindh province where Karachi is located should ask the judiciary to handle issues that are its responsibility.

Despite the seemingly well-intentioned nature of Mr Chaudhry’s tenure, there are worrying tendencies toward advocacy that, in the absence of a functioning legislative and executive branch, are creating a dependency on him to perform duties nominally outside of his job description.

Pakistan needs institutional reform to tackle its many issues, and one man is not an institution. Eventually, Pakistan’s leadership will have to face the fact that its problems are growing worse the longer they are ignored. Unfortunately, it seems that they are all waiting for someone else to do it first. Meanwhile Pakistanis are left to fend for themselves, as best they can.

Change we can believe in? Maybe – just not quite yet

The following first appeared in The National on January 20, 2010.

American presidents are almost always failures in their first year. The gap between their campaign promises and reality is too far to bridge in only 12 months. Barack Obama’s first year in the White House has been no different.

New poll data from The Washington Post and ABC News shows that barely one third of the American public thinks that their country is headed in the right direction. Mr Obama’s campaign message may have been one of hope and change, but as a president he seems to have fallen short of most American’s expectations.

On terrorism and the war in Afghanistan, his policies enjoy popular support but his domestic politics have been less favourably received. Since April he has steadily lost support for his work on the economy, the budget deficit and health care. The amount of government spending is a particular worry and most Americans now favour a smaller government that offers fewer services.

But polls are only snapshots, and public opinion is a poor measure of the correctness of one’s actions. Regardless of what one thinks of Mr Obama’s politics, he has set out to solve many of America’s most persistent problems with an energy rarely seen in any US president. The problem is that he has failed to make significant headway on any one issue, leading many to accuse him of “dithering”, or worse.

The financial crisis left Mr Obama with the weakest economy of any incoming president in decades, but Mr Obama managed to prevent the recession from turning into a depression. Cash injections into the banking system have proven controversial, but the alternative was an implosion of the financial sector. We may never know what would have happened if Mr Obama had allowed many banks or borrowers to reap the fruit of their own poor judgment, but the consequences were too dire to risk. But now, with banks making record profits, people blame Mr Obama, despite the fact that the bank rebound is probably only a good thing.

The health care debate has also inflamed partisan tensions, a situation not helped by dismissive pundits on the Left and populist ranting on the Right. In the debate over public health insurance, the right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh has framed the battle as one of himself and the founding fathers standing against Comrade Obama. Popular debate on the subject has been reduced to its basest form.

Mr Obama has only himself to blame for this situation. His message of change had the ability to inspire both at home and abroad, and it won him an election, but it also set him up for a massive fall. Normal campaign promises are difficult enough to keep, his are almost certain to go unfulfilled. Too much of his authority derives from his personal appeal and his oratorical strength, too little on his ability to execute the demands of his office. Yes, people like Mr Obama, but he’s not what they hoped he’d be.

This is all the more tragic given that it is difficult to fault Mr Obama for what he has done in his first year. He inherited a financial disaster, two mismanaged wars, a damaged US image abroad and a nation divided ideologically after eight years of a controversial president. His policies have been shaped not by the need to reshape the way Washington does business, as he had promised, but by what he believes will work. On Iraq, this has worked to his favour. On Guantanamo Bay, this has earned him the ire of both human rights groups and the Muslim world.

This is of course what every president does, but people do not want Mr Obama to be like every other president. The people who voted for him want him to be something more, and the people who did not, gloat. But should Mr Obama continue on his current course, he may survive his critics and may even do some good in the world.

The concern is that the expectations of the people will come back to haunt him. His first test comes in Massachusetts where a long-time Democratic Senate seat is threatened by a Republican upstart. Should the Republicans win, it could be a dire portent for the November legislative elections. Mr Obama was in the state to rally support for the Democratic candidate: “If you were fired up in the last election, I need you more fired up in this election.” The problem is that the fire seems to have gone out of Mr Obama’s message. He is no longer the young visionary candidate who inspired rapturous crowds; he is now a president, and so far an unimpressive one at that. This should worry him more than most who have held the office for one year.

As ordinary as Mr Obama has been as president, he is not an ordinary president. History has conspired with his race and his message to propel him into the White House. The world was tired of the way things were, they were looking for a change and Mr Obama promised it. What he has delivered instead is competent management.

It would be a mistake to misjudge Mr Obama’s style of politics as a betrayal of his ultimate goals. The essential problem facing Mr Obama is that Washington, the US and the world not only do not want change, they do not need it. What is needed is a better health care plan and a better role for the world’s most powerful nation in global affairs. These are massive undertakings, but they hardly constitute a revolutionary new way of doing things.

But a revolution is what was imagined by his wide-eyed supporters and what his detractors are preparing to defend against. Mr Obama may very well have become the hero in a Greek tragedy of his own creation. And given the scope of the expectations placed on his presidency, Mr Obama may still be a failure in four years, regardless of what polls might say.

Endgame in Afghanistan is security, not a troop pullout

The following first appeared in The National on 7 December 2009.

How Barack Obama came to decide on a new Afghanistan strategy is by now well known. By late October both the fact that additional troops were required and the number of troops to send had been agreed upon. What remained was to decide whether to announce a tentative withdrawal date.

The US president was in favour of this to gain “leverage” with the Afghan and Pakistani governments as well as to reassure a war-weary public at home. He got his wish, but as a result the president was left with a war strategy that satisfied neither his allies nor his opponents.

Mr Obama wants these additional troops in and out of Afghanistan in a year and a half. Those that have raised a hue and cry over his supposed artificial deadline would do well to remember that the so-called “surge” in Iraq lasted approximately the same amount of time. Furthermore, he has stated that the situation in Afghanistan after 18 months would shape any decision to withdraw.

Those that wanted a firmer expiration date for the conflict do not warrant more than a brief rebuke. After eight years of fighting the coalition has left Afghanistan in a worse state, destabilised Pakistan, and sparked what could potentially be a regional power struggle centred in Afghanistan. At the very least, Afghanistan must be stabilised to undo whatever damage has been done thus far.

Yet, there are genuine concerns about the new strategy. Foremost among these is the limitation Mr Obama has placed on the US commitment to Afghanistan’s security. Mr Obama has made it clear that he will only do so much before Afghanistan’s security would be exclusively an Afghan problem and he wants this to happen as soon as possible. To do this he has taken more than a few pages from the strategy in Iraq. For better or worse, the war in Afghanistan is shaping up to be another war in Iraq.

The surge in Iraq worked in large part, because both the Mahdi Army and the majority of Sunni insurgents either stopped fighting or switched sides. There is reason to believe that the Taliban will react the same way: this has been a penchant of Pashtun tribal fighters going back to the time of the British Empire. Some may choose to side with the coalition either out of hatred for the Taliban or naked opportunism. The result will probably be a decrease in violence after a brief spike at the beginning of the fighting season in May next year.

But the surge was not a success in Iraq because violence went down. It was successful because it gave an opening for the government to assert itself, and allowed politics to replace violence as a means to resolve conflicts. This will be a greater challenge in Afghanistan.

The Taliban are not winning with arms, they are winning with better governance. They are better than Kabul at providing services and upholding law and order.

The situation in Iraq should serve as a warning to proponents of the surge in Afghanistan. Security gains there have slid backwards as some Sunnis have returned to violence or, at least, grown openly hostile to Baghdad because of its failure to uphold promises. In some ways, the imminent US withdrawal has escalated simmering political tensions as minority groups scramble to grasp what they can in advance of that date.

The situation could potentially be worse in Afghanistan. For all its many flaws, the Iraqi government is a democracy that is largely representative of its people. Hamid Karzai’s government has only the veneer of democracy and popular representation. He exploits ethnic ties and teams with local power brokers and warlords to project Kabul’s authority. Unless he is forced to change his ways, security gains will only allow him to entrench his interests and enshrine corruption and cronyism as the status quo in Afghan politics. For the sake of Afghanistan’s future, the centre of political power must be in Kabul, but not in this way. The Taliban feed off Pashtun national ambitions, but mostly from legitimate grievances with the central government. Any security gains are illusory so long as those grievances exist.

Even if the additional troops remain in Afghanistan for longer than 18 months, and even if security dramatically improves, the end result remains in doubt. The US singles out al Qa’eda as the reason it must finish the fight in Afghanistan, but the Taliban not al Qa’eda are the main enemy to be defeated. However, it will be al Qa’eda, not the Taliban, that will be the ultimate victors should the US fail in Afghanistan.

Terrorism is a tool used by such groups to goad the enemy into alienating a population through heavy-handed tactics and breaking its will to fight through a long, expensive and ultimately futile fight. Al Qa’eda specifically states that its goal is to bankrupt the US through expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US may be far from bankrupt, but a withdrawal that does not leave Afghanistan free from the clutches of the Taliban will validate al Qa’eda’s tactics and long-term strategy. It would, in all likelihood, encourage like-minded groups to employ the same strategy to the detriment of global security. This means that setting prior limits on a commitment to a fight risks validating the strategy of al Qa’eda. This not only applies to the US, but to its allies, which includes the UAE.

The war in Afghanistan must be won to avoid this, but the long-term solution is not to fight al Qa’eda with soldiers. That is the least effective and most expensive method.

The goal should be to prevent the creation of other Afghanistans, underdeveloped corners of the world whose grievances can be exploited to build a safe haven for terror groups and a hornet’s nest for any would-be invaders.

There are many potential Afghanistans. Failure to prevent their decline, could result in some sort of military intervention to counter what is, essentially, a non-military problem. Al Qa’eda is winning because it set the terms of the conflict in Afghanistan. It is the responsibility of the international community to ensure that they do not do so again.

The Taliban ought to remind us that history is reversible

The following was first published in The National on 22 October 2009.

At the end of every year Time magazine names its person of the year. The publication gives the award to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year”.

The award, with some notable exceptions, is a fairly accurate reflection of what was the most important story of the past year. The obvious choice this year is Barack Obama, but the US president would probably prefer not to receive it – he appears to have had enough trouble dealing with a Nobel Prize. Should the editors at Time decide to spare Mr Obama the headache, there is another, more suitable alternative.

December 2009 will mark the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and it seems appropriate for the magazine to mark the occasion by naming a man of the decade. There is precedent for this. In 1999 the magazine named a man of the century, Albert Einstein. But it should have been Adolf Hitler for demonstrating the awful potential of the most important political force of the modern age: nationalism.

Time chose science rather than politics as the defining characteristic of the century. But politics, man’s relationship with other men, more accurately reflects the state of mankind, not his achievements. And nationalism has changed the face of those relationships. Its rise marked the end of the age of empires. No longer is the world controlled by a relatively small group of global behemoths: empires controlling vast swathes of territory encompassing multiple groups of people of various identities. Scientific advances such as the computer, the aeroplane and the mobile phone may have made the world appear smaller, but in many ways it is a much bigger, much more daunting place in which to live.

The postcolonial, post-Cold War world is a far more cluttered place. In many corners of the globe, countries are being divided into smaller pieces and national identity is being more narrowly defined. The process has been often bloody.

There are of course important counter-examples, the United States being the most prominent. China and India also stand out as two populous and diverse but prosperous nation-states, as does what is left of post-Soviet Russia. However, in these countries stability and security are at times strained by violent internal strife, but they are held together by the strength of their respective governments. But, in countries with weak or new governments there is a potential for disaffected groups of people to coalesce into a political force and threaten the existence of a state with violence. Nowhere is this better seen than in the conflict that has taken up the better part of this decade: the war in Afghanistan.

Much of the world is beginning to show signs of recovery after the geopolitical balance of power was upset by the fall of the Soviet Union and before that the end of the imperial age of the 19th and early 20th centuries. New countries are emerging to fill the power vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. But Afghanistan was left out of this process. Or, more appropriately, it regressed.

The insurgency in Iraq ended when people grew tired of vying for control of the nation’s future through violence. They turned to politics instead to settle their grievances. But where the Iraqis had the advantage of a recent memory of a modern state and the collective identity it provides, the majority of Afghans have no experience of modern governance. In fact, more than half of the country is estimated to be under the age of 14 and thus, they have known nothing but near constant conflict. Instead tribal and ethnic identity have supplanted all other forms of identity.

They are certainly not unique in this regard. In many parts of the globe tribal ties and ethnicity are important or, at times, the defining aspects of a state. But the situation in Afghanistan stands out since there has been no modern form of government in the country since the 1970s, and then it dallied with it only briefly.

Afghanistan today is almost a window into the distant past, a Hobbesian world of pre-modernity where life is “nasty, brutish, and short” and a man’s right to another man’s property and life are defined by his ability to take them. And no man better embodies the recent history of Afghanistan than Mullah Omar, the father of the Taliban. He arrived on the scene in the midst of the Afghan civil war, a period of violence where life was literally nasty, brutish, and short, and imposed civic order through the strength of arms. The Taliban are an undeniably abhorrent organisation whose world views are incompatible with modern notions of human rights. But they and their ideological leader Mullah Omar also serve as a warning.

Several centuries of global development have been missed or lost by Afghanistan. In the absence of effective forms of governance and a lack of social and economic development, Afghanistan went backward, quickly. And its decline has had a severe impact on regional and international security. The poisonous effect that the Taliban have had on Pashtun tribal politics has focused and inflamed their nationalist sentiments, which now threatens the stability of Pakistan. Now Pakistan – as Afghanistan became before – is a safe haven for transnational terrorist groups.

But Afghanistan is only the world’s most extreme example. Despite the progress that most of the rest of the world made in the last century and the promise of even more in this one, there remain regions of the globe where our history is their present. And unless these areas are carried into the modern age, history’s bloody heritage has ways of catching up to us.

In support of Hitler’s nomination for man of the century, Elie Wiesel wrote that because of the German leader, “man is defined by what makes him inhuman”. He showed us the horrific potential of man’s hatred.

But Mullah Omar has shown us that man does not really change, and that the relative progress mankind has made in building peaceable civil societies is not irreversible. There is always is a Dark Age lurking somewhere around the corner.

US must find courage for a knifefight in Afghanistan

The following was first published in The National on October 13, 2009.

Much has been made of the current popularity of a certain book in the Obama White House. Lessons in Disaster blames the American defeat in Vietnam on a failure to establish clear goals for its involvement there, and it appears to be having a marked effect on thinking on Capitol Hill. In particular, the chapter entitled “Never deploy military means in pursuit of indeterminate ends” appears to have frozen a hitherto decisive strategic discussion on the war in Afghanistan.

Divining the influence of the book has captivated the US press, and at least at one press conference the White House has been asked about it. Members of both the current and previous US administrations have been at pains to distinguish the war in Afghanistan from the disaster of Vietnam, with some justification. But one comparison, at least on the US side, is apt: the whys of the war have a habit of being drowned out by the hows as the fighting drags on and victory grows ever more elusive.

But the shift from why to how is also natural, and not necessarily a bad one. In many ways, too much attention on the purpose of the war now threatens defeat. The US invaded Afghanistan to overthrow al Qa’eda in response to the September 11 attacks. The Taliban were only important insofar as they stood in the way of capturing Osama bin Laden. With the architects of the most horrific act of terrorism on US soil in hiding, America became complacent. Neglect of post-war reconstruction efforts and the failure to develop an effective Afghan government allowed the Taliban to regroup and re-insinuate itself into the country. In the eight years since, the Taliban have become the main adversary while al Qa’eda and bin Laden have faded into the background.

Enter General Stanley McChrystal, whose suggestions on a new strategy to reverse the negative trends in Afghanistan are currently under discussion by the Obama administration. The new commander of the US and coalition forces has advised focusing on protecting the population and increasing troop levels, both to accomplish the first goal and speed up the training of Afghan forces. Much like the feted “troop surge” in Iraq, the aim is to employ the principles of counterinsurgency to create a period of relative security which boosts the authority of the central government over the population.

Mr Obama is less receptive to such suggestions than he might once have been. Not only are the lessons of the US military’s last major defeat being digested, but the controversial outcome of the recent Afghan presidential elections has cast doubt on the appropriateness of Gen McChrystal’s advice.

The Afghan government has been a persistent impediment to progress. The controversy surrounding the re-election of Hamid Karzai has only posed an even greater barrier to securing the country and overcoming the Taliban. Whereas once it was only corrupt and ineffective, its basic legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Afghans is now in question.

Even counterinsurgency’s most ardent advocates admit that military efforts in Afghanistan depend on events in Kabul. The support of the population is crucial. Unless the US, its allies and Karzai’s government become better than the Taliban at earning the trust of the Afghans, any victory will be temporary. And as coalition forces are seen, at best, as guests in the country, the Afghan government has a central role to play in any counterinsurgency plan.

Unfortunately, despite the legitimate medium and long-term concerns the White House has about Gen McChrystal’s new plan, there are few good alternatives. A group led by the vice president, Joe Biden, is advocating another course of action: reduce forces and focus efforts on killing senior al Qa’eda and Taliban leaders. With the success of unmanned drone aircraft assassinations of top targets in remote locations, it is easy to see why this might be a tempting alternative to putting additional American lives in danger. But it would also be a mistake. To do so would let the initial reasons for invading Afghanistan shape the strategy for a war that is no longer about killing members of al Qa’eda. Gen McChrystal’s advice is troubled by concerns about the long-term effectiveness of counterinsurgency, but Mr Biden’s plan promises only short-term gains. If organisations like the Taliban and al Qa’eda have demonstrated anything, it is that their existence does not depend on one man or any group of men.

The choice facing Mr Obama is not easy, but all signs point to his embracing Gen McChrystal’s suggestions – he did, after all, hire the man for his specific expertise on counterinsurgency. But the detractors have made their voices heard and the whys will have to be answered before the US renews its commitment to Afghanistan.

The worry is that every time Mr Obama has justified the war, he has framed it as if September 11 happened yesterday and al Qa’eda presented a clear and present danger to America’s national security. It doesn’t, and continuing to paint it as such has poisoned an urgent debate on the most effective manner to win in Afghanistan. After eight years, the war has only made the world less safe by destabilising both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the US has a duty to undo what it has done.

In any war, and especially in wars fought by democracies, why you fight is exceedingly important. Mr Obama is concerned that accepting Gen McChrystal’s call for more troops would be his Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And just like Lyndon Johnson, Mr Obama would be forced to stand before the American people and lie, saying he would not commit “American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land”.

He would do well to recall another quote by John Paul Vann, a leading figure in the Vietnam War: “This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle – you know who you’re killing.”

The US faces defeat if it retreats to the air against an enemy that must be fought with knives and rifles. And even if knives and rifles do not guarantee victory, America owes it to the Afghan people, and the world, to try.