Spine chilling toll 12,000 civilians killed in Iraq, just for 9/11 …
Bush’s vision of terror-free world — Institutional base is imperative
B. S. Raghavan
The US-led grand alliance against terror needs an institutional base, in the form of a Global Network for the Elimination of Terror, with Russia, China, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and countries of the Arab world and G-7 as members. This network must draw up properly meshed strategies and action plans, and review the nature and adequacy of their implementation. This will instill a sense of accountability, provide the needed impetus and enhance the degree of effectiveness in combating terrorism worldwide, says B. S. Raghavan.
RESONATING phrases were never in short supply during the second inaugural address of Mr George Walker Bush. On the contrary. Applying a born-again Christian religious tinge to every undertaking comes naturally to Mr Bush, who is full of messianic fervour with an apocalyptic vision of the world that is neatly segmented into good and evil. Within living memory, the person coming closest to him is John Foster Dulles, the first post-War Secretary of State some 50 years ago.
Like Dulles (who was the victim of the witticism, “Dull, duller, Dulles” for as long as he lived), Mr Bush is fired with the conviction that the US is God’s instrument to fulfil the mission of cleansing the world of evil. Ergo, those not for the US (deputising for God) are to be taken as being automatically against it.
Whenever faced with a difficult situation, he reportedly is given to fall on his knees in the White House and Camp David, his official retreat, seeking divine guidance. Hence, the Biblical flavour in his language and style straight out of the King James’ version.
Hence also his William Wordsworth-like exaltation of duty as the “stern daughter of the voice of God, who (is) victory and law when empty terrors overawe.” That explains why, of the two choices before a President re-elected for a second, and Constitutionally the final, term, he has chosen the harder one. Unencumbered by all worries about any future electoral gains or losses, and having attained the pinnacle of his political career, he could have opted for an easy-going tenure, keeping off hornets’ nests and riding into the sunset to make his pile by writing memoirs.
Instead, he has decided to boldly push ahead with tough policies and programmes regardless of the controversies they generate. He is ready to confront the nation with a heavy dose of reformist agenda on the domestic front and nothing less than the Armageddon on the external front, recalling the song, “Onward, Christian soldiers! We are treading where the saints have trod, we are not divided, all one body we, one in hope and doctrine!”
Evocative leadership
What a marked difference between the Bush persona of a fresher in 2001 and one who has literally gone through the ordeal by fire in the four years since!
Hardly known outside Texas, where he had an undistinguished record as a Governor, throughout his campaign for the first term and during the early months of his presidency, Mr Bush seemed destined to pass into history with little more than his hilarious Bushisms for his countrymen to remember.
He turned the tables on his detractors by the way he responded to the Al Qaeda’s terrorist outrage of 9/11: It was of the stuff of evocative leadership at its best.
Since that defining moment in his political career, he has never flinched or faltered in meeting the challenge of global terrorism head on, even if it has meant the US laying the lives of its soldiers on the line and bearing almost the entire military and financial burden.
He, and the US, has thereby acquired some legitimacy for the grandiloquent exposition of the mission and purpose of his second term in his inaugural address on January 20.
To many, no doubt, already uneasy about the Administration’s unilateralist proclivity and arrogation to itself of the right to pre-emptive strikes, his assertion that advancing freedom is “the urgent requirement of (America’s) security, and the calling of our time” and the implicit tone of incitement to “all who live in tyranny and hopelessness” that the US "will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.
When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you," smacked of an unabashed expansionism, but they are the natural corollaries of his fundamental premises that “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
Spine-chilling toll
India can have no quarrel with Mr Bush’s enunciation of the unfinished business of ridding the world of the barbaric scourge of Islamic jehadi terrorism casting its ominous shadow all over the world.
On the contrary, India has everything to gain by joining him in his stirring call to nations to wipe terrorism off the face of the earth and put an end to tyranny in all its forms.
It straightaway starts off with a big advantage in that it is a democracy subscribing to the same values of liberty and freedom within and outside its borders, and has demonstrated its capacity to stand up to the worst excesses of terrorism at the hands of militants funded and instigated by Pakistan.
By whatever reckoning, the provocation of 9/11 for which the US hounded and pounded Afghanistan and Iraq bears no comparison with the scale and magnitude of the casualties faced by India: The spine-chilling toll of lives of more than 12,000 civilians, and 3000 security personnel and State police lost in over 51,000 terrorist incidents in the last 12 years of proxy war waged by Pakistan speaks volumes for its will power and vitality.
India thus has sufficient credentials to impress on Mr Bush that his spirited vow to wipe out tyranny and ensure “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture” will fall flat if he persists in turning a blind eye to the realities in Pakistan.
Unfortunately, the one argument trumpeted again and again by Mr Bush and his advisers in praise of the Pakistani President, Gen Pervez Musharraf, is that he forswore years of collusion with the Taliban and the most diabolical of terrorist outfits and has pulled all stops in support of the US.
This was also the refrain of the testimony of the Secretary of State-nominee, Ms Condoleezza Rice, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during confirmation hearings. Indeed, she went several steps further, claiming rather disingenuously that "The Al Qaeda can no longer count on not being pursued in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas which had never been governed by Pakistan.
Now that territory is denied to them…Al Qaeda, which once trained openly in Afghanistan and ran with impunity in places like Pakistan… are being sought, run down and arrested like they have never been done before…The loss of Afghanistan, the loss of NWFP, means that they no longer have these territories where they can operate with impunity…"
Come on, Dr Rice, you must be kidding. Could you be so blind as not to see that Gen Musharraf has slowly begun showing his true colours after receiving all those dollops of millions of dollars of aid and waiver of loans?
If, as you say, the US is getting all the information it needs from Pakistan on the extent of nuclear proliferation resulting from Dr A. Q. Khan’s peddling of nuclear secrets to the “axis of evil”, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the US, what explanation did it get from Gen Musharraf for his pardoning him post-haste and keeping him incommunicado? You say the US has a contingency plan to prevent Pakistani nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists if they came to power.
Has the US taken care that the plan itself has not fallen into the hands of rabid fanatics still infesting Pakistan through machinations of persons of the genre of A. Q. Khan?
Why is it that the perpetrators of the horrible murder of one of your own valued correspondents, Daniel Pearl, are yet to be visited with the condign punishment the trial court had imposed on them more than two years ago?
Why is the US allowing itself to be fooled by the promises of a military dictator to restore democracy at some unspecified future date, while still reluctant to give up his title and uniform?
Blind spot
It is puzzling that the US should be hell-bent on placating Pakistan in the face of all these pointers to the latter having made a fine art of running with the hare and hunting with the hound. American columnists specialising in Pakistan affairs and some Arab commentators themselves have used words such as duplicity, perfidy and double-cross in describing the behavioural pattern of Gen Musharraf.
He deserves no praise for siding with the US, because he was simply left with no other choice than capitulation in the aftermath of the world’s outrage at the catastrophic terrorist attack of 9/11 on US soil, and he knew full well that Pakistan would have met with the same fate as Afghanistan and Iraq did subsequently if he but raised the hackles of the US at that point.
It is time US became aware that its call to arms against terrorism and professed love for democratic institutions will come to naught so long as it is oblivious of this big blind spot.
It should not view the need for the US to get its act together and arrive at a realistic Pakistan policy as arising from any game of one-upmanship that India wants to play by way of settling scores with that country.
Even were there no India on the map, Pakistan’s fragility and unreliability as an ally in the global grand design to eradicate terrorism will turn out to be the US’ Achilles’ heel.
At the same time, the US cannot also abruptly dump Pakistan whose geographical location is crucial to Washington’s security concerns and offensive and defensive strategies in this part of the world.
One reason why Pakistan has been able to get away with a successful exercise in evasion so far is the absence of a formal institutional mechanism before which it can be called upon to account for its policies and actions pertinent to the war on terror.
Contacts and dealings between the US and Pakistan had been confined to occasional summit meetings and exchanges of views and information between their functionaries on a bilateral plane.
The grand alliance against terror needs to be buttressed by an institutional base, in the form of a Global Network for the Elimination of Terror, with the membership of countries such as Russia, China, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and those belonging to the Arab world and G-7, which are of major strategic importance having substantial stakes.
It could be under the UN auspices but there is no harm if it is headed by the US. It should make it a point to hold plenary sessions at least twice a year in the capitals of member-countries to draw up properly meshed strategies and action plans, and review the nature and adequacy of their implementation.
This will instill a sense of accountability, provide the needed impetus and enhance the degree of effectiveness in combating terrorism in a properly synchronised manner on a worldwide scale.