Renting peace mercenaries

PAKISTAN gets paid by the United States for its military operations in Fata, or so it seems to be the common impression. How this payment should be spent is presently an issue of contention between the two governments, bringing into sharp relief the mercenary dimension of this cooperation. The US Government Accountability Office is refusing to pay the latest instalment of 81 million dollars, saying that Pakistan Army has been unsuccessful at defeating terrorists in the Fata region. The money is being diverted for buying India-specific weapons, the American officials insist. How that money is spent is none of the Americans’ business, answer back their Pakistani counterparts. Given that since 2002, Pakistan has received 10.8 billion dollars as US assistance, including some 5.5 billion as Coalition Support Fund (CSF) for military operations in Fata, the spat over paltry 81 million makes no sense. But it is the debate surrounding the deal that makes an ugly reading. How much ugly, a glimpse, of it was provided on Wednesday at the hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee where Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who chairs the Pakistan Caucus on Capitol Hill, was trying to build a case for uninterrupted American support to the newly elected government. The PPP is doing negotiations with the militants from a “position of strength”, she said. She also had some fine words for President Musharraf “who also wanted to work with the new government”, but “Sharif has to be watched”. Her warm sentiments for the new Pakistani government did not greatly impress the other witnesses at the hearing. One of them was Thomas Pickering, a veteran diplomat, who is presently US ambassador to the United Nations. In the tribal areas of Pakistan you might have to spend money on “things that may not pass the muster. It is better to spend $100,000 on renting a tribal than spending $100 million on killing him and his tribesmen”.
Renting mercenary soldiers for war in banana republics is quite a time-honoured practice but hiring them for peace is something Pickering would have to elaborate. Maybe, he said this recalling the hiring of elements of the erstwhile Northern Alliance in the final phase of US war against the Taliban regime. Or, maybe the United States is already working on this in the tribal areas and its rented men get shot dead as enemy agents by the Taliban. But to think that renting peace mercenaries at a scale warranted by the enormity of resistance by Taliban in the Fata area would be a preposterous idea, at least for the time being. History tells us that renting hardy tribesmen has been a long-nurtured dream of successive world powers. They resisted being cultivated and fought back the British and defeated the Soviets. Even today they are defending their autonomy and what the Americans call ‘way of life’ at a tremendous cost. Yes, there appears to be some logic when the US and its European allies tell Pakistan to ‘do more’ as they pay for it, but renting the tribal for hundred thousand dollars a man is likely to remain a dream of Thomas Pickering.In the meanwhile, however, the government of Pakistan may like to enlighten the people as to what are these CSF funds and why we get them when ‘we are fighting international terrorism in our own national interest’. Unfortunately, some Americans have an extremely negative and insulting opinion about the people of Pakistan: one would recall with immense shame the remark of a public prosecutor in a court trying Amil Kansi some years back that “Pakistanis would sell their mothers for money”.



Sixty years of catastrophe

THE 60th anniversary of the creation of the Israeli state provides an appropriate occasion for looking back at the past, if only to assess the situation now and plan for the future. It has been 60 years of pain, of hopes constantly dashed — and that is only for the Palestinians living in exile. For those in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, it has been 60 years of absolute misery — being forced to live, not in the sunlight like other peoples, but in the shadow lands of constant humiliation, discrimination, injustice and oppression, of homes bulldozed, lands stolen, arbitrary arrest, no work, being forced to live in squalor, sons anddaughters slaughtered by Israeli military. It has been 60 years of fear and exhaustion. No wonder for Palestinians it is the 60th anniversary of “Al-Nakba”, the Catastrophe. Nor is there any sign of the catastrophic consequences ending. Indeed, for the Palestinians in prison-camp Gaza, things have never been worse. Despite the Bush administration’s prediction of a settlement by the end of the year, the so-called road map is kept locked away by the Israelis. Indeed, the way things are going, with the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert under investigation by the police, there may not even be an Israeli government to negotiate with at the end of next week.
Britain’s and France’s involvement prior to the creation of Israel — the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement — and those also of the US, the UN and the then Soviet Union at the time are well-documented and well-known. The USSR was initially a wholehearted supporter of Israel and rushed to recognize it in the hope that it would become a close ally. Well-documented and well-known too is Britain’s and France’s subsequent alliance with Israel which they saw as an strategic ally in their bid to the doomed effort to maintain their continued colonial presence in most of the Arab world. It was an alliance that saw France become the Israelis’ initial military backer, providing them with arms and planes and the means to go nuclear with the construction of the Dimona reactor; at its worst, it saw all three in military action together in 1956 in the hope of doing to Nasser what the Americans finally did to Saddam Hussein in 2004: topple him. The past cannot be unmade. It is what happens now that is important. The Palestinians do not expect the British or the French to undo the great wrong they wrought all those years ago. The only reason there are expectations of the Americans, and resentment when they do not deliver, is that they have the power to force change, to end the oppression and bring a new Palestine into being. As for Israel, despite its show of celebration for the anniversary, it has never been more unsure of itself. It has lost so many of its friends by its oppressive policies, there is deep conflict within between secularists and Jewish fundamentalists and a paralysis as to how to deal with the Palestinians and its neighbors. It resembles a society slowly coming apart at the seams. Sixty years on, it is a state heading nowhere.

—Arab News