Jonathan Power
Iran could become another Turkey: "democratic, pro-western and bomb free"
As the possibility of a UN-backed plan aimed at limiting Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons has been given a glimmer of hope—in not being rejected outright by the Iranian government—it is worth considering why Iran is being singled out so acutely and unfairly over its nuclear policy.
Clearly, the west and Russia are engaged in discriminating against it. Brazil has had a nuclear-enrichment programme for decades (including a large ultracentrifuge enrichment plant, several laboratory-scale facilities, a reprocessing facility to make plutonium, and a missile programme). In the 1980s it built two nuclear devices.
Three years ago I asked the chief of mission at the US embassy in Brasilia if Washington was worried about Brazil. “Not at all,” he replied. “In the early 1990s Brazil dismantled its nuclear weapons’ programme, and Argentina, its supposed enemy, has done the same.” “But,” I insisted, “Brazil still has its enrichment programme and a reprocessing facility.” His answer: “We have no worries about Brazil. We see eye to eye.” However Brazil still resists, in part, the probing eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog.
Read more »
James Crabtree
Ten years ago Pakistan had one television channel. Today it has over 100. Together they have begun to open up a country long shrouded by political, moral and religious censorship—taking on the government, breaking social taboos and, most recently, pushing a new national consensus against the Taliban. One channel in particular, Geo TV, has won a reputation for controversy more akin to America’s Fox News than CNN or Sky News. Some Pakistanis see it and its competitors as a force for progress; others as a creator of anarchy and disorder. Certainly, the channels now wield huge political influence in a country where half the population is illiterate. But their effect is now felt beyond Pakistan’s borders too—revealing an underappreciated face of globalisation, in which access to television news means that immigrant communities, and in particular Britain’s 0.7m Pakistanis, often follow events in their country of origin more closely than those of the country where they actually live.
I went to Islamabad this April to learn about what many Pakistanis call their “media revolution.” The previous month, during a spate of anti-government protests, Geo TV had again demonstrated its influence by using its popular news programmes to support a “long-march” by opposition groups on the capital Islamabad, and even hosting a celebratory rock concert on the city’s streets when the government caved in to demands to reinstate the country’s most prominent judge.
Read more »
Jeffrey Henderson
Discuss this at Prospect’s blog, First Drafts
South Asia has been dominated by two military conflicts in past months: Pakistan pounding of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, and the obliteration of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Disturbing as these conflicts are, both may be dwarfed by a wider and more significant trend in the region—the rise of a newly assertive China.
At Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chinese companies are building a new port that could serve as a refuelling and docking facility for the Chinese navy as it extends its presence (presently confined to helping police pirate activities off the Horn of Africa) across the Indian Ocean. China has also provided much of the military hardware that underpinned the Sri Lankan victory.
Read more »
Moataz El Fegiery
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo today is meant as a fresh start for America’s relationship with the Muslim world. But the simple fact of choosing Egypt, a bellwether state in the Arab world, matters just as much. The Bush administration, in another Cairo speech by Condi Rice in 2005, pushed it pro-freedom agenda by openly criticising Egyptian democracy, embarrassing the government and bolstering Egyptian human rights activists. Bush’s mistakes in Iraq ultimately lead such words to be associated only with unwise military intervention. But even this should not entirely over-shadow the real successes of some US democracy promotion policies; successes Obama would do well not to forget when he speaks tomorrow.
The speech is something of a diplomatic rebirth for Egypt itself, and an end to a recent diplomatic freeze with the US following President Mubarak’s first White House visit in five years. This freeze was in part a legacy of pro-democracy pressures from both Europe and the US between 2003 and 2005, which implicitly helped to trigger a wave of popular opposition protests unprecedented in the country’s history. The Egyptian authorities, in turn, were forced to show relative tolerance, both towards demonstrations and increasingly vocal criticisms of political and social conditions. Similar tough love strategies had also begun to show democratic chinks of success in Iran, the Middle East’s other key strategic state.
Read more »
Aatish Taseer
My parents met in Delhi in March 1980. My Pakistani father was in India promoting a book he had written on his political mentor, the Pakistani leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. My mother, a young Indian journalist, was sent to interview him.
Their affair began that evening. My father took my mother’s number, they had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and for a little over a week they disappeared together.
My parents met at a time when they had both become politically involved in their respective countries. The state of emergency that Mrs Gandhi declared in 1975 had come and gone—she had returned to power and the terrorism in Punjab that would take her life was about to begin.
Read more »
Kishwer Falkner
Why have the political trajectories of India and Pakistan been so different, given that each was cut from the nearly identical cloth of empire? If the characteristics of a resilient democracy include pluralism, control over defined territory, a sense of being one nation and, for poor countries, the ability to develop—then it seems to have taken India about 30-35 years to become one, from the early 1940s to the late 1970s. Pakistan, by contrast, remains far from the democratic goal.
But from the outset in 1947, there were several factors which favoured India over Pakistan. The basis for founding Pakistan was the protection of a religious group, while for India it was national self-determination. Given the extent of ethnic, linguistic and religious difference, India was pluralistic from the start. Pakistan, however, was premised on the idea that Islam would be in danger in an independent Hindu majority state, particularly if it was to be a democracy. The numbers could not favour Muslims—who made up only about 10 per cent of India’s pre-partition population. The result of the campaign for a separate Muslim homeland was that as partition drew closer, large numbers of Muslims who had lived across India moved to the provinces of northwest India, to settle amid different ethnic and linguistic communities.
These communities, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Punjab, had historically been among the least exposed to democracy and pluralism under British rule, as they had comprised the security perimeter of British India. They were heavily militarised, as the “steel frame” had to be maintained against the Russian empire. The third of what came to be Pakistan’s four provinces was Balochistan. It was created late in the 1880s, and was made up of mainly princely states, with entrenched authoritarian aristocratic rulers. Sindh, the fourth province, which hosted the port city of Karachi, had a rural interior with large tracts of land owned by “waderas” or feudal lords—the Bhutto family alone was estimated to own 40-60,000 acres of prime land, worked by serfs.
Read more »
Kamran Nazeer
Discuss this article on First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
The emerging results from Pakistan’s election show that Pakistan Muslim League-Q—the PML faction allied to President Musharraf—has been badly beaten. This isn’t in itself a ringing endorsement of constitutional democracy in Pakistan, but the details of the results suggest that there may be more hope for democracy than some had dared wish for.
For a start, what’s more remarkable than Q’s losses in terms of seats is the identity of those that lost—including its president, Shujjat Hussain, and the speaker of the national assembly, Ameer Hussain. In a country where leading political figures typically contest multiple constituencies and achieve political status only as a result of their pre-existing social and economic connections, these defeats look like major breakthroughs for democratic rather than feudal politics. Voters have decided that, no matter who they are, these men who unconditionally supported Musharraf have to go.
Read more »
Ayesha Siddiqa
Nuclear weapons are a matter of great national honour in Pakistan. A traveller driving around will see representations of the missiles on walls and the back of trucks. Since the nuclear weapons programme began in the 1970s, the Pakistani public has been led to believe that the weapons are guarantors of the state’s security. But with the country continuing to suffer civil unrest, some fear that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of religious militants. This does not go down well in Islamabad. The government not only claims that it can protect these weapons but also sternly warns the west against any attempt to step in to protect or neutralise them—late last year Frederick Kagan, architect of the US surge in Iraq, draw up contingency plans for US troops to invade Pakistan and secure the nuclear arsenal in the event of the country falling into chaos.
Pakistan’s nuclear journey began at a conference in January 1972 in Multan, in the wake of the country’s crushing defeat by India in the 1971 Bangladeshi war. At the event, chaired by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a decision was taken to build a nuclear weapons programme to respond both India’s attempts to build a bomb and to its advantage in conventional weapons. New Delhi carried out its first peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974, after which Islamabad became more active in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Pakistan initially lagged behind India in terms of scientific and technological capacity, but this gap was filled when the infamous AQ Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist employed at a nuclear facility in the Netherlands, decided in the wake of the Indian tests to provide blueprints and contacts to Pakistan to help create a uranium enrichment facility. In 1976, Khan returned to Pakistan, founding a nuclear research laboratory at Kahuta (subsequently named after him), which ultimately provided the enriched uranium for the six nuclear tests conducted in May 1998.
Since then, Pakistan has twice come close to a war with India (1999 and 2002) in which nuclear weapons might have been used. That prospect terrifies the international community, as does the fear of nuclear material being stolen by Islamic militants. The latter anxiety is reinforced by the fact that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies were deeply involved with establishing the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Many people in Pakistan believe that the relationship between parts of the military intelligence establishment and Islamic militants remains intact.
Read more »
Moni Mohsin
Faced by an Islamist insurgency, an economic crisis and growing separatism in the provinces, Pakistan urgently needs a strong government that will stand united in the face of these multiple threats. What is the likelihood of such a government emerging from this election?
On the face of it, depressingly small. There are no saviours in the wings. Since the sacking of an intransigent chief justice and the subsequent crackdown on civil society, President Musharraf and his parliamentary allies, Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q), have haemorrhaged support. The assassination in December of Benazir Bhutto, leader of the country’s largest political party, the Pakistan People’s party (PPP), has further eroded their legitimacy. What little goodwill they had built up through economic growth in the last five years has been lost through recent microeconomic mismanagement resulting in acute power shortages and spiralling wheat prices. Bereft of the carapace of his military uniform, Musharraf is exposed, isolated and increasingly unpopular. He has no obvious role left to play in a democratic dispensation. Even his creatures, the leadership of the PML-Q, are distancing themselves.
The other contenders are the PPP and Pakistan Muslim League-N. Still reeling from Bhutto’s murder, the PPP is now led by her widower, Asif Zardari. Widely perceived to be corrupt and autocratic, Zardari was known as “Mr Ten Per Cent” during his wife’s two tenures as prime minister but was nevertheless bequeathed the chairmanship of the PPP in her will. He is struggling to keep the party united in the face of attempts by rival parties to lure away candidates. Nawaz Sharif, the PML-N’s leader, twice ousted as prime minister amid charges of corruption and misrule, is also deeply compromised. Having been deposed in a military coup in 1999, he cut a deal with Musharraf to go into voluntary exile in Saudi Arabia for ten years in return for his freedom.
Read more »
Moni Mohsin
When news of Benazir’s assassination broke, my nephew gasped, “She can’t be dead! She’s always been a part of my life.” So strong and ubiquitous was her presence, he cannot imagine Pakistan without her. No one can. She grew up in the public eye, and we knew her through all her incarnations from pimply adolescent to the first female leader of a Muslim nation. Dressed in signature 7-Up green shalwar kameez, her head covered by white chiffon scarves, this arresting, contradictory woman, with an impossibly tragi-glamorous family history, had the wherewithal to save her country but repeatedly disappointed throughout her two terms in office. We had expected so much from her the day that she was swept to power in 1988, washing away a decade of General Zia’s military oppression, and hoped this third opportunity would see her redeem her past failings. Religious extremists put paid to that.
Benazir’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was a charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious demagogue who created the only political party with a national footprint in Pakistan. A deeply conflicted personality, he was ultimately most true to his roots as a feudal land owner. He espoused socialist principles, but his politics were about the cult of personality. He posed as a man of the people, but his lieutenants were from the privileged classes. He claimed to be a nationalist, yet personal ambition paved the way for the dismemberment of the nation in 1971 and for an orgy of economically ruinous nationalisations. The eldest of four, Benazir, or “Pinky,” was the apple of her father’s eye and his anointed successor; dynastic ambition trumped democratic process.
She was a creature of her father, mirroring many of his paradoxes but without his petty vindictiveness. Like him, her western liberal persona was cultivated at western academic institutions, first Harvard then Oxford. These experiences honed her sharp mind and inculcated easy familiarity with western liberal tradition. However, a strong sense of entitlement and an autocratic nature were also part of the patrimony. This duality wrestled for her soul and largely explains her blemished political history.
Read more »
Read 1 comments »
