The president has stated that the recent amendments to the local governments law would make this grassroots system more effective. Many will disagree. To understand their disagreement, one needs to first grasp it fully that this system has caught the people’s fancy, whose articulate manifestation they gave with massive participation in the last local bodies polls. Their infatuation with the system arguably grew from its success in delivering them measurably their pressing needs and demands. And that success, in turn, was due to its considerable autonomy to function fairly free from political pulls and pressures. That autonomy has been drastically eroded by these amendments. From the outset, the system was indeed a sore point for the country’s entrenched political forces. And not too untenably. An elite traditionally given to thriving on pork barrel perceived in the system, and not so wrongly, an emerging rival to challenge its monopolistic control on the nation’s politics. The public works that it would undertake at the public expense to keep its constituents in its folds had fallen to local governments’ purview. And even as this elite had employed its clout to pack up the outgone local governments with its own men and women, it feared, and cogently, that in time the system would throw up new leaderships to finish off its stranglehold on the nation’s politics.
So long as the military regime was in office, it bore with the dispensation, though writhing all the while with fear over the threat it posed to its political hegemony. But as the political governments took over, it took up the cudgels against the system to mould it to protect and sustain its political domination. For its hatchet work, it found ready allies in the chief ministers, themselves the children of this entrenched political class, and no less uncomfortable with the rivalling power centres based in local governments. For a backup, and a powerful one at that, it had a disgruntled bureaucracy, which had no love lost for a system that had divested it of its erstwhile power, status and prestige. So these disparate forces teamed up to smite the system out of its shape. The president says the amendments were thoroughly debated and critically evaluated in the light of feedback from all concerned. But all this must have taken place in some obscure official niches. The amendments were never brought up to a public forum for open debate and discussion. As such, the people who are the system’s real stakeholders had had no hand or say in making the alterations to the system that means so much to their daily lives and in which they have developed so much of stake. The amendments have been pushed into the law without even their knowledge, what to talk of their consent or concurrence.
Of course, the people wanted to see some improvements in the system for it to become more efficacious in meeting their needs. For one, they wanted a tighter and impenetrable mechanism of transparency and accountability installed in it. Though the local governments had carried out a host of public works, still some people suspected public money having been filched as well. And the people wanted a relationship between the provincial and the district administrations whereby the former wouldn’t obstruct the working or funding of the latter. They didn’t want to see a district government as a vassal of the provincial government nor did they want to see the district nazim as an elevated bureaucrat at a chief minister’s beck and call, as have these amendments done. In fact, these amendments have taken away the very heart and soul from the system, reducing the local governments into another department of the provincial administrations. And if in the previous dispensation the nazims had an independence and autonomy that had propelled some to label them euphemistically as little emperors, in the new one they have been practically downgraded to the status of the chief ministers’ pageboys.
These were decidedly not the professed aims and objectives of the system when the president announced its introduction. These amendments have laid to rest for good the dream of a new political leadership that he had held out at that time. The revised dispensation has opened the system wide to the shenanigans of the entrenched political forces to tighten up their grip on the nation’s politics and exploit the local governments for patronage to beef up their vote-banks. No wonder, with an eye on the coming general elections, they all fought toughly the last local bodies election to capture these grass-roots governments, with the defeated now crying foul and the PML caught up in bitter dissensions.

Pullout in the air

The significance of what Iraqi President Talabani has said — that British troops could leave Iraq by the end of 2006 — is that he has set a target date which nobody else has done. Neither Britain nor the United States, who have the largest number of forces in Iraq, have ever stated clearly when a troop pullout would begin. Instead, they have consistently pointed out that setting a specific date for a troop withdrawal would be a huge tip-off to the insurgents. They have consistently maintained that they would stay in Iraq for only as long as the Iraqi government wanted them and that they would not leave until the job was finished. That task could, of course, take years which is why Talabani’s words, which introduce a date and one which is fairly soon, are so important. Up until September, Blair stated that no arbitrary date had been set for a pullout and up until last month British Army chief of staff, Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, Britain’s top soldier, called it foolhardy to set a date for UK troops to pull out. Now Jackson says Talabani’s timetable is well within the realm of possibility.
Jackson’s about-face comes with a report in The Observer that suggests detailed plans pertaining to troop withdrawal are being drawn up by UK, US and Iraqi officials and will be presented to the Iraqi Parliament next month. It quotes military sources as saying the document would lay out a detailed exit “road map” by multinational forces. British Defense Secretary John Reid has denied there was any such plan but the newspaper has stuck to its story, suggesting that Britain had already “privately” informed Japan of its plans to begin withdrawing from southern Iraq as early as next May. In the United States, it is almost certain that Bush would jump at the first opportunity to get out of Iraq, so damaging has the war been to his presidency. The news from Iraq is largely bad. Fifty-seven percent of the US public say Bush “deliberately misled” the nation about the reasons for war in Iraq. The prewar intelligence fiascoes, coupled with the mounting death toll, makes Bush’s almost daily attempts to persuade Americans that the war is still worth fighting are becoming increasingly difficult.
Bush never anticipated the depth or the difficulty of the challenge the United States and its allies would face in postwar Iraq. It is therefore with certainty that Bush seeks a way out, and a speedy one. Talabani’s warning, though, comes to mind — that an immediate withdrawal of US-led forces would be a catastrophe for Iraq and would lead to civil war with dangerous consequences for the entire Middle East. It is to be wondered whether the present conditions in Iraq in which thousands of Iraqis have been killed by insurgents should not be labeled a civil war and a catastrophe. Can conditions in Iraq in fact get any worse if the coalition withdraws? As suicide bombs going off night and day across the country despite the presence of US and British troops, the answer is that with every massacre, sometimes it appears the situation can only improve.

—Khaleej Times