Republicans polishing favourite dark art
Michael Crowley

THINK of this week’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania as the Battle of the Bulge. That winter 1944-1945 clash was the final German offensive of substance, briefly putting the Allies on their heels, but doing little to stem the war’s outcome. Without drawing the Allies-Axis analogy any further, even if some Obama supporters would like to, it seems safe to say that a similar dynamic may apply to Tuesday’s contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Polls show Clinton holding a stubborn lead over Obama and, if she wins, she will have staved off political death one more time. Yet if Clinton wins by a narrow margin, her victory will be underwhelming. For a fleeting moment recently, it did seem that Clinton might stand a chance, when controversy exploded over Obama’s incendiary pastor, Jeremiah Wright. But Obama’s skilful address on race, coupled with the media frenzy around Clinton’s foolish exaggeration of “sniper fire” in Tuzla, slammed that door.
Given her long odds, ever more Democrats watch Clinton’s continued attacks on Obama with a queasy stomach. On Friday, Democratic chairman Howard Dean urged uncommitted superdelegates to hurry up and decide, in effect calling for Obama to be the nominee. Democrats such as Dean quite reasonably wonder whether their party has become like a family that spends millions in legal battles over an inheritance, only to find there’s nothing left at the end. Though in this case the inheritance lost is nothing less than the presidency. For as Clinton and Obama peck away at one another over honesty, patriotism and race and the like, John McCain is quietly resting, raising money, staging gauzy “biography” events and laying out campaign positions to little criticism from a distracted left. And the Republicans are laying the groundwork for the same cynical but deadly brand of politics that has kept them in the White House for eight years.
Obama’s candidacy may have reached a turning point when the Illinois senator — speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser under the assumption he was off the record —- made the comment that small-town Americans are “bitter” about their economic circumstances and “cling” to religion, guns, xenophobia and protectionism as a result. While Clinton gleefully pounced on the comments, hoping to stigmatize Obama in rural Pennsylvania, McCain and the Republican party apparatus also rushed joyfully into the fray. “I think those comments are elitist,” McCain said, charging that Obama had “disparage[d] people, who are hard-working, honest, dedicated people ... I think that’s a fundamental contradiction of what I believe America is all about.” “That sentence will cost Obama the election,” chimed conservative activist Grover Norquist.
Obama’s line was not fatal, but Norquist still has grounds for glee. For a fundamental battle has been joined here — that battle to define the Democratic nominee’s character. One recurring feature of recent presidential campaigns has been the disgraceful effort of the Republican party to compensate for its unpopular positions on major issues, from health care to Iraq, by impugning the character of the Democratic presidential nominee. Liberals have made this complaint for some time, but I lent it new credence after listening to a senior figure in the Bush political machine. “You guys never get it,” he said to a group of journalists who’d been debating the politics of some newsworthy issue. “People don’t vote on issues. They vote on character.”
The man knew whereof he spoke, for character largely explains how Bush won two presidential elections. In 2004, torture and beheadings were the norm in Iraq and America was still stunned by the bloated bodies floating through flooded New Orleans. Yet Republicans substantially focused the election around John Kerry’s persona. He was a flip-flopper, a windsurfer and snowboarder, a Swiss-educated man with a slightly “foreign” mien. Never mind that Bush was the wealthy son of a former president educated at both Yale and Harvard — he was the “regular guy.” Amazingly, one poll taken just before the election showed that pro-Bush voters cared more about “character and strength of leadership [than] how a candidate stands on the issues” by a nearly three-to-one margin. Is it any wonder American politics is the subject of ridicule and derision around the world?
It had been the same story four years earlier. A long stretch of peace and prosperity had made Al Gore clear favorite to succeed Clinton. But the GOP skillfully caricatured Gore as a pedantic snob, a know-it-all who allegedly claimed to have “invented” the Internet. That defamation campaign, in turn, was modeled after the 1988 ridicule of Michael Dukakis as a product of pointy-headed academic Boston. In every case, the GOP message to America was the same: the Democratic candidate is too fancy to understand your world. He looks down on you. He is a product of a coastal elite establishment that derides real Americans. Republicans have always known how they would attack Hillary Clinton’s character: They’ve had more than 15 years of trashing her as mean-tempered, ultrafeminist prevaricator. But Obama’s comments, which can at least be construed to deride the legitimate faith, traditions and concerns of small-towners, have opened the GOP door to tarring him with the label of elitist snob. This is how it’s going to go. In the derisive commentary of the past two weeks, we can see how Obama is heading for the Kerry-Gore-Dukakis treatment. He will be cast as a “professor” from the university enclave of Chicago’s Hyde Park. And just as Kerry was heckled by conservatives for supposedly looking French, the campaign to define Obama as “foreign,” thanks to his Kenyan father and his boyhood years in Indonesia, is already under way.
And just as the elder George Bush used Dukakis’s opposition to a constitutional ban on flag burning to impugn his patriotism, so the right is now encouraging the preposterous story that Obama is unpatriotic because he doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin and was once photographed without his hand placed over his heart during the national anthem. Attacks like these will be particularly convenient for Republicans given McCain’s unimpeachably heroic and patriotic background. Obama’s campaign handlers have proven themselves a highly shrewd bunch. They are already working to bolster his regular-guy credibility — see Obama’s recent photo-op at a Pennsylvania bowling alley and his endorsement by that ultimate salt-of-the-earth tribune, Bruce Springsteen.
That may help against Clinton on Tuesday. But an autumn endorsement by the Boss, alas, wasn’t enough to save Kerry. Obama will have to muster a better defense. He can start by choosing his words more carefully. He can also console himself in knowing that the Bush Republicans have left American in such rotten shape that even the GOP’s mendacious character politics may not be enough to save them this time around.

—Arab News

Afghan Madaaris and US
Sadaf Yunus

THE US military is funding the construction of Islamic schools, or Madaaris, in the east of Afghanistan in an attempt to stem the tide of young people going to radical religious schools in Pakistan. Looking back, it seems unbelievable that the US government would ever hatch such a scheme. But during the presidency of Ronald Reagan – when all vision was still focused on the Cold War – the US got itself into the business of sponsoring militant Islamic schools for Afghanistan, then a nation under the influence of the Soviet Union.
For many decades, international aid programs from the US and the West have contained components under the broad spectrum of education reform. Many millions have been spent – and unfortunately often misspent. Consider this painful but truthful concept : If the goal is to create at least a form of education for a state or region where there are simply no schools for children, then there is one notion of education reform that has unfortunately but successfully moved to fill this void – the Madaaris.
Since the terrorists’ attacks on 11th September 2001, the madaaris have been of increasing interest to analysts and to officials involved in formulating US foreign policies. Madaaris drew attention when it became known that several Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda members had developed radical political views at madaaris in Pakistan. These revelations have led to accusations and they promote Islamic extremism and militancy, and are recruiting ground for terrorism. Others maintain that most of these religious schools have been blamed unfairly for fostering anti-US sentiments and argue that madaaris play an important role in countries where millions of Muslims live in poverty and state educational infrastructure is in decay. In mid-1980s, in Afghanistan the Taliban were ruling that nation and Al Qaeda was using it as a safe base of operations. Indeed, the nation was being run in ways that should surely have appealed to boys who had been made militants by the US. The US agency for International Development gave $51 million in grants to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies to develop text books that preached of Jihad and the glory of weapons.
Ever since the events of 11th September 2001, the US has declared that America’s war on terrorism extends to all who harbour, aid and abet terrorism. The US State Department had been quite open in voicing its concerns about the indoctrination teachings of the madaaris in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan – even though its own US agency for International Development was funding the foreign aid program that was essentially schooling this new generation of terrorists. In the global war against all who harbour, aid or abet terrorism, Washington unfortunately does not have far to look to find those who once fed today’s militant Afghani Muslims the steady dietary mix of militarism and radical Islam. In this bizarre footnote to American folly, US historians can take their cue from the late but timeless sage of the comic pages, Walt Kelly, whose character Pogo once explained : ‘ We have met the enemy and he is us.’
It is extremely difficult to change those who have graduated through madaaris. When people come out of madaaris, they go to an environment of poverty and of hopelessness. That is why it is important that in order to reduce terrorism in the future, such areas should be economically developed. Most terrorists are victims of their own circumstances. There are some very good people who have become bad because of the circumstances. The American forces in Afghanistan are building madaaris in an attempt to persuade parents not to send their children across the border. Work has started on two ‘super-madaaris’ and more are planned. The US government is also paying for the refurbishment of mosques in the area, in the hope of winning over religious leaders. The coalition has been under growing pressure over the deaths of civilians and American military commanders say they hope the moves will convince Afghans – many of whom rely on madaaris to provide bed and board for their children – that they are on the same side.
The US military insists that the schools, which it calls ‘centers for educational excellence,’ will be administered by the Afghan education ministry, but admits there is risk that they will be vulnerable to radical Islamic preachers. More than six years after the fall of the Taliban, education remains a battleground in Afghanistan. For many children, the choice is still a religious education or no education at all. As long as the madaaris are permitted to function, they will be penetrated by Islamic groups. In Afghanistan the US will kill three to five members of Al Qaeda in a week. But in those madaaris in a week, they are producing another 50 members who are willing to go and do a Holy War or Jihad against the US. Despite US’s interest in building new madaaris and transforming the old ones in Afghanistan, madaaris in Pakistan are still a cause of concern for the US. The US, by funding madaaris in Afghanistan and at the same time voicing criticism on those in Pakistan, should take heed and seriously take a good look at its own double-standards.




Exploits of The RAW Chief
Zaineb Khan

AS PER The Khaleej Times, apparently, just days before Musharraf installed emergency rule, Ashok Chaturvedi, the head of India’s external Intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), had advised the Prime Minister that the situation in Pakistan was stable and that there was “no chance that Musharraf would declare martial law”. Yet a few days later when Musharraf actually called out the army to support his coup, the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “was livid” at his intelligence chief. The job of monitoring military and political developments in three neighboring countries - Pakistan, China and Bangladesh - is one of the main tasks assigned to the RAW. “In fact, Musharraf’s state of emergency was the worst kept secret that everyone seemed to know except for the head of RAW, Ashok Chaturvedi,” said one observer.
Ashok Chaturvedi is the present chief of Indian Intelligence agency and is designated as Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat. Ever since he took over as the head of RAW, the agency has suffered a string of scandals and embarrassing Intelligence failures. His list of public embarrassment has not only rock the Indian media, but to the distress of the world’s biggest democracy, he has made himself popular for all the wrong reasons in the international media as well. Interestingly, as per the Middle East Times, prior to being named as the head of RAW, Chaturvedi had been described as “serially paranoid and too incompetent to function. And in any other intelligence agency he would probably have been drummed out a long ago.” The list of humiliating gaffs Chaturvedi has incurred in the last year could be turned into a multi-volume novel. A recent article by Claude Salhani, editor Middle East Times, states that in a number of important meetings Chaturvedi did not even know who he was actually meeting to. On one particular occasion, Timothy J. Keating, commander of US Pacific command, on an official trip to India met Chaturvedi and Chaturvedi did not seem to know who Keating was. Interestingly, he kept on referring to Keating as John Negroponte, the US deputy secretary of states. Further, in another episode, Chaturvedi presented a briefing about his prospective of the current senior leadership in China to the Prime Minister before he was leaving to a trip to China. Ironically, the report prepared by him talked about Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, the former Chinese president and premier respectively, both of whom retired in 2003.
Chaturvedi is famous for his abrasive manners towards others. Afghan president Hamid Karzai complained that he treated Karzai like a servant rather than a head of state and spoke to him while chewing and spitting out tobacco. Recently, GB Sidhu, former special secretary within RAW, was assigned a task to look into allegations of sexual harassment, made by a senior member of the organization to a female employee who was allegedly intimidated and coerced into silence. The persistent rumor from New Delhi’s bureaucratic community suggests that the scandal involves the present chief of RAW, Ashok Chaturvedi. In an extensive investigative article, The Khaleej Times stated that Chaturvedi is using his current position to systemically downgrade and sideline all his perceived rivals within the organization. His selection controversy is under a tremendous debate nowadays.