Pakistan is committed to weed out extremism through a well-thought strategy in accordance with the country’s ground realities and has adopted both short and long-term objectives to counter the menace. It is an established fact that illiteracy, poverty and despair crop up due to long unresolved political disputes, which breed extremist and terrorist tendencies. Pakistan is confronted with the menace of extremism and terrorism. There are many reasons for this societal ill, but illiteracy and poverty as being among the main causes that generate extremism and terrorism. The denial of justice, the linking of religion with politics, persecution, non-fulfillment of grievances, inequitable distribution of wealth etc, etc. all contribute to the birth of extremism. A sense of deprivation arising out of political disputes, and that sense of deprivation, then taking to extremism and militancy, because people are poor, and illiterate, and they get indoctrinated by the pseudo religious scholars. President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s call to eminent scientists, scholars and educations to lend support in the eradication of extremism from the country underlines his commitment to rooting out all form of extremism. The promotion of education at all levels will act as one of the means to achieve this objective. Pakistan is certainly moving in a clearly defined direction to get rid of the malaise of extremism.
During the Afghan jehad and the Cold War, in which Pakistan played a key role in collaboration with the west, this region became a “breeding ground” for armed militants. Two hundred thousand Afghan Mujahideen were trained for the Afghan Jehad. When jehad came to an end in 1989 after defeat of Soviet Union, USA and the West left the region leaving Pakistan alone; during that period, the jobless jehadis turned on other areas and other targets. Pakistan itself became their victim. Militant madrassas (seminaries) are a by-product of Afghan Jihad. One wonders that how a superpower can ignore those root causes in its campaign against terrorism. United States is the sole superpower in a unipolar world, and Pakistan is a developing country. We need development in economic and social sector. Political analysts argue that US has been part of the problem regarding the proliferation of terrorism from Madaris, therefore, US should be the one to be part of solution by generously aiding in eradicating poverty, deprivations, illiteracy and inferiorities from the region. So addressing political disputes will help reduce the threat of Terrorism. Pakistan’s stance is laudable and it deserves all out support to achieve the objective of rooting out extremism and terrorism by using tact, prudence maturity and pragmatism instead of relying on force which has always been counter productive.
Seminaries have been in existence in the subcontinent for centuries and had played a significant role in promoting religious education and assumed the tasked of imparting Quranic teachings amongst its adherents. Islamyiat is normally taught in the government and private-owned schools as one of the curriculum amongst many subjects. Why Quranic teachings have not been enforced in schools other than madrassas? The reason may be that Islam has been divided along the lines of sects and almost every sect has its followers and preachers. Each Madrassa, therefore, imparts religious teaching in line with the beliefs of the sect it belongs to. Madaris have played a very positive role in preserving the traditions of Islam, but few Madrassas started fanning religious sectarianism and extremism to the immature minds of the students. Madaris came under severe scrutiny when possible links of these Madaris have been alleged in 7/7 London and Egypt bombings.
President General Musharraf has promulgated an ordinance amending the Societies Registration Act 1860 requiring the 11,882 seminaries in the country to get registered with the government. The registration process is in progress and is expected to be completed by the end of November. A recent agreement between Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and organizers of Madaris provides encouraging signs. The representatives of country’s leading alliance of seminaries ‘Ittehad Tanzeemat Deeni Madaris’ (ITDM) had agreed to get registered their 9,000 residential institutions around the country. Now, the Prime Minister has tried to bind the organizers of Madaris to some extent. Under the presidential ordinance, a new section has been added to the act. The section 21 provides that no seminary will operate without getting itself registered. But, few Madaris say that they will submit registration only after the government removes their misgivings. They have laid two pre-conditions - only residential Madaris will be registered, and the seminaries will not disclose their sources of income. Both the demands have negative repercussions, as the nonresidential religious seminaries creating religious hatred, will not come under the purview of the government and the seminaries wants to shun transparency and accountability process by the governmental agency. It is a fact that these Madaris are getting aid from foreign countries. Madaris are harbingers of peace until they receive Zakat from the local philanthropists and rich people. But, once they start receiving aid from foreign countries, the whole complexion and manifesto of the madrassa would undergo a dramatic change. The whole registration process will become futile if these Madaris are not held accountable to any government agency for their omissions and commissions. In addition, amendment in the syllabus and curriculum in schools is being focused on learning, asking madrassas to teach all subjects and not just religion so citizens can become educated and skilled to take professions other than just being religious teachers. Nevertheless, the issue about registration of Madaris in the country is finally being tackled in an appropriate manner.
About 1,400 foreign students are still studying in different Madaris of Pakistan. The government had asked them to leave Pakistan. One should not have any problems with the decision to expel unwanted elements from religious schools as it is the image of Pakistan, its Madrassas as well as Islam that is being tarnished. But one has some reservations because deportation of en masse foreign students will send out some very negative and untrue perceptions about Pakistan i.e., that all madaris are ‘breeding factories’ for global terrorism and that all foreign Muslim students in our Madressahs are apprentices to terrorism. Instead of deporting all students, the more rational approach would have been to expel only those negative elements against whom there may be reasonable or sufficient evidence. This slight shift in the decision would not only pacify the religious hardliners who are exhibiting great resentment and anger, but the governments of the countries the unwanted element belong to would not have any grounds to complain.

Pakistanis must be equal to the challenge
Nasim Zehra

As the Pakistani state and society continue to respond to one of the worst natural disasters that hit the country in October, they are in a race against time on two related fronts. One, protecting the hundreds and thousands of women, children and men from death and disease that the harsh winter, unmet medical needs and shortage of clothing and food has already inflicting on them. Providing relief is a daunting task given the terrain that the suffering people inhabit. The most heavily damaged area consists of a very difficult terrain where about 80 percent of nearly 5.7 million affected people live. For most of the population basic services and facilities like clean drinking water and safe disposal of waste are not available. The earthquake has turned a difficult situation to a hellish one.
Linked to this challenge of reaching the people in dire need of relief is the challenge of resource mobilization. Already the UN is warning that because of funding shortages helicopters, the only lifeline for those stuck in the hilly terrain, will have to be grounded. According to their preliminary estimates by the government, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, more than $5.2 billion is required for relief and rehabilitation; $3.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation and $1.5 billion for immediate relief operations. Pakistan seeks another $400 million for relief already provided by diverted marked budgetary allocations.
The most pressing need is to acquire the $1.5 billion for immediate relief operations. There is a direct linkage between the nonavailability of these funds and increase in the death and suffering of the devastated people. Hence failure is not an option. There are internal and external sources to be tapped. Despite the generous material support from many governments and special efforts by countries like the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China, it is unlikely that all these funds will be forthcoming from the international community.
As for the internal government and nongovernmental sources, the government’s efforts to systematically mobilize funds from internal sources have not yet surfaced. There has been consistent appreciation, within and outside of Pakistan, of the incredible compassion and generosity displayed by the ordinary people in Pakistan in the wake of the earthquake. However Pakistani society’s tremendous potential to financially contribute to relief and reconstruction has yet to be recognized by the government. Reportedly 5.7 billion rupees was pledged locally while 5.4 billion rupees had been deposited in the banks. As for the government, President Musharraf’s decision not to spend scarce resources on buying the multibillion-dollar F-16s from the US has been welcomed by all.
Other areas for budgetary cuts, especially in the operations of Pakistan’s civilian and military bureaucracies, must be explored. For example annual military exercises due shortly and which involve millions of rupees of POL could be postponed. Clearly postponement of these exercises is unlikely to undermine the professionalism of Pakistan Army, one of the finest in the world. The priority in the immediate context has to be to end the suffering and ensure the rehabilitation of the millions of our people. Clearly the planned project of constructing a new GHQ, with the projected cost of billions of dollars, must be put on hold.
The government needs to undertake an exercise immediately in time for presentation at the Nov. 19 donor conference outlining specific steps it is taking to mobilize Pakistani resources to meet the immediate and medium-long term reconstruction needs. Equally critical is the step the government is already taking, that of ensuring transparency in the receipt and expenditure of the funds it is receiving. This is essential if we are to tap greater Pakistani resources and also to inspire others to contribute more generously to help us successfully meet the challenge of relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction.



An identity for Europe
Fareed Zakaria

ONE week is a lifetime in the world of journalism these days. We’ve now been through two cycles of commentary on the French riots. The first saw the troubles as part of the broader clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. “Fallujah-Sur-Seine?” asked the neoconservative Weekly Standard. The columnist Mark Steyn went further, drawing dark parallels to the Muslim conquest of Europe in the eighth century. But the riots had little to do with Islam. There were no green flags, no crescent signs, no slogans about Palestine, no rhetoric about Islam. The young men interviewed were irreligious and talked about respect, jobs and discrimination, not jihad, suicide and virgins in paradise. The pictures looked more like those of America’s race riots in the 1960s than of Fallujah or Ramallah.
The next wave of analysis focused on economics. France has a staggeringly high unemployment rate in its ethnic ghettos, ranging from 15 to 30 per cent. It has produced only a few hundred thousand private-sector jobs over the past 25 years, while the United States has generated almost 50 million. But if the chief cause of trouble is unemployment, there are millions of unemployed Frenchmen who are white and of European descent, and they are not rioting. France has a work problem. The country has the shortest number of hours worked per capita in the entire industrialized world. The average Frenchman works 24 per cent fewer hours than in 1970. The average American, by contrast, works 20 percent more. Last year’s best seller, Bonjour Paresse (“Hello Laziness”) is a satirical description of the dreary work environment in French companies. (“Rule No. 5: Never accept a position of responsibility for any reason. You’ll only have to work harder for what amounts to peanuts.”) This cocktail of unemployment, underemployment and stagnation is not an Arab problem, it’s a French problem.
France’s current crisis is in reality a combination of several factors, including those listed above. But it is fundamentally a problem of national identity. And this is not a peculiarly French problem. Western Europe today has almost as many foreign-born citizens as does the United States. But its countries don’t think of themselves as immigrant nations. The centers of society remain tightly knit, insular and largely homogenous.
Theory and practice diverge sharply. Europeans claim to have given up their old national identities, but have they really? France speaks of a republic of values, but scratch beneath the surface and it is a republic of cloistered communities. Other European countries speak of post-religious, post-national identities, but at heart they remain countries where identity is defined by family, community and territory. This is, after all, what so many of us find admirable about Europe. Its communities are rooted in specific places — terror. People don’t move; they give a place a sense of historical continuity. The ties to the land remain deep. But these very traits — seen in those wonderful French movies about the countryside — become deeply oppressive to outsiders struggling to find a place at the table. A recent French study showed that job applicants with “French-sounding names” had 50 times the chance of being interviewed as those with Arab- or African-sounding names. The biggest cause of its lower growth rate is a lack of immigration. And things are only going to get worse. Put simply, Europe has too many retirees and too few workers. The only real solution to this is some increased immigration. But if immigration ineluctably causes social chaos, Europe is doomed.
What is the solution? Is it a Frenchman’s nightmare — Americanisation? In some ways, yes. France and other European countries need to move closer to a national identity based on ideas and values. And they need to take active measures like affirmative action to integrate their new minorities. Without affirmative action (in schools, colleges, business, the armed forces), America would not have the sizable black middle class that it does today, which is the most effective balm to the problem of race relations. One country has moved in that direction, with notable results. Britain has over the past 20 years redefined its identity. In a remarkable discussion in Prospect magazine last April, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown explained his definition of British identity: “A belief in tolerance and liberty, a sense of civic duty, a sense of fair play, a sense of being open to the world.” When pushed as to whether these were really in any meaningful sense “British,” Brown persisted, saying, “[These are] the ideas that underpin our history. We were talking about liberty and opportunity long before America was established. And America is based on British ideas... And if you look at British history, then the fact that four nations eventually came together means that Britishness could never be based on ethnic identity.” Britain has not solved this problem. But it is searching for a solution that honors the past, embraces the present and prepares it for the future. One cannot say as much for the rest of Europe.