What ails Afghanistan?
Syed Mohsin Shayan

SIX years after the fall of Taliban, Afghanistan is still highly unstable. And it seems to be getting worse rather than better. With each passing day the number of causalities increasing either results in deadly attacks of militants or by falling in the range of ‘friendly fire’ of coalition forces. The southern and southeastern areas are prey to violent insurgency while in the rest of the country regional military commanders and warlords have further entrenched themselves by subverting the political process and controlling the country’s drug trade.
Insecurity hampers development in much of Afghanistan, one of the least developed countries in the world. Economic growth remains mostly limited to urban areas, and in particular Kabul. Human rights abuses, poverty and insecurity increase markedly with distance away from city centers. The dinner by candlelight remains common in Afghanistan. Nationwide only 6 percent of Afghans have electricity, according to the Asian Development Bank. The electricity shortage underscores the slow progress in rebuilding the war-torn country and also feed other problems. Old factories sit idle what to build of new ones. Products wither without refrigeration and dark, cold homes foster resentment against the government and foreigners who supposedly came to develop Afghanistan.
Women and girls continue to suffer from discrimination and restrictions. Only 35 percent of school-age girls are in school. According to 2006 U.N. and Afghan government figures, most marriages continue to involve girls below the age of sixteen, many of them forced. At this point in time isn’t it worthy to ask that what exactly ails Afghanistan despite presence of 42,000 coalition forces and hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid. There could be several reasons in answer but major ills are failure of NATO and US policies responsible for mounting insurgency and most importantly India’s gratuitous way-in into Afghanistan.
The US and NATO forces’ main mission was stabilization and peace building in Afghanistan but unfortunately they are unable to achieve an inch of their stated goal. NATO forces have failed at large in their objectives because of the reality that the alliance takes a less central place in European and US foreign policy than it once did. Europeans look towards the European Union to guide and their policies and Americans confident of their own power, increasingly see NATO as main instrument of their foreign or defence policy. The dissension among NATO countries and US over latter’s terrorism combat strategies not only affected their efficiency but also hailed instability and chaos. Little development in Afghanistan and the rising graph of civilian causalities as a result of ‘friendly fire’ also back fired. Government of Afghanistan’s mum and dumb attitude over these causalities aggravated anti-government and anti-US sentiments among masses. Not only this, resentment among masses paved the way for insurgents to make a come back from back door achieving public sympathy. People of Afghanistan no more trust their government for their security and survival and turn to Taliban. It is a harsh reality that Taliban resurgence is driving strength from growing public discontent and increasing sense of insecurity in Afghan population.
According to Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007 carried out by UNODC in collaboration with Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics, in 2007 Afghanistan cultivated 193,000 hectares of opium and became the world’s biggest producer and exporter of opium. The drug running is indirectly helping the Taliban and Al Qaeda to finance their military operations.
Last but not the least is the New Delhi so-called strategic partner and a close friend of Kabul. There should not be hint of doubt in determining the India factor as irksome for stability in Afghanistan. Indian unnecessarily heavy diplomatic, economic and military presence in Afghanistan is mind-boggling. The fall of Taliban and dominance of Northern Alliance opened the gates for India to make a speedy ingress in order to block the influence of Pakistan in Afghanistan as she is truly the key to bring about stability in Afghanistan Unsurprisingly; India’s hostility towards Islamabad is sole stimulus for her huge engagement in Afghanistan. Presently four Indian consulates and an embassy at Kabul are dubiously working in Afghanistan. Worth mentioning is the fact that since Indian diplomatic missions have arrived in Afghanistan the Pak-Afghan border have grown instable. New Delhi is using its consulates and officials to monitor the day-to-day situation in Pakistan and keeping the turf conducive for RAW agents’ moves. Indian diplomatic mission not only facilitates arrival of RAW agents into Afghanistan but also recruit and train indigenous people to foment troubles at home and into Pakistan. Government of Pakistan also handed over proofs of involvement of Indian diplomatic missions for stirring up troubles in Pakistan’s tribal areas to President Karzai but it was not given due consideration.
At one hand Indians have been busy advertising the economic aid they are giving to Afghanistan to tell the world how much they wanted to help Afghanistan build. On the other hand not even a single project in Afghanistan undertook by Indian companies has so far been completed. Instead India has been deploying large contingent of armed forces into Afghanistan on the account of providing security to Indian workers. Isn’t it interesting to learn that in addition to already installed 254 Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force (ITBP), 143 BLACK CATS –a highly trained group of commandoes have also been deployed to provide security to Indian construction companies in Afghanistan. Now, of late more trainers have been sent to support already stationed a full-fledged team of Indian instructors to train Afghan and Uzbek forces. Why such a heavy deployment of army in a state where already 42000 US and NATO forces are deployed to provide security in addition to Afghan National Army and police.
There is no question about it that India’s growing military presence in Afghanistan has nothing to do with provision of security rather it is a sordid tactic to install its agent and keep Afghanistan in continuous state of turmoil. Instability and violence in Afghanistan serves no better to any other country but India itself because it help facilitates the ambition of Indian expansionism. Kabul must realize that India has no love lost for Afghanistan it is only a platform from where Indians are hitting two birds with one stone. Indian intelligence network, RAW-RAAM joint training camps, their gross diplomatic and economic presence and the cultural invasion of Afghanistan are in reality instruments to keep Afghanistan in mayhem and keep plaguing Pak-Afghan relations. The crux is that peace and stability will not prevail in Afghanistan until the Indian influence on the Afghan government and soil is not reduced if not removed. Because Indians have entirely different goals in Afghanistan therefore any effort made to contain growing insurgency and restore peace will not bear fruit.

 

Food crisis? What food crisis?
Jonathan Power


FINALLY, a voice from the UN is saying something sensible about the world food crisis. John Holmes, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief, is asking UN agencies to cool some of their dire rhetoric about the impact of high food prices. By the yardstick of the last big food crisis in 1974, that had US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger running to an emergency UN conference in Rome to pledge that “within a decade no child should go to bed hungry”, it is not such a severe event. In terms of real prices the price hike is not so high as it seems; in terms of the rise of consumer buying power over the last 34 years it is not biting so deeply.
Moreover, take wheat and rice out of the equation and many food prices have not risen so significantly — millet and barley among grains and most root staples — potatoes, yams, cassava. Not least, the crisis’s immediate solution, as it was in 1974, is only a harvest away. The sharp price rises of 1974 encouraged farmers to plant more and sell more and very soon the price of food was at historic lows. Most of the Third World’s poor — almost 75 per cent — live on the land, farming in small villagers. For them the food crisis could be a great opportunity. At last they can get a decent price for their produce — but only if governments allow the local market to pass along the price increases of the international market. Alas, many governments, fearful of alienating their more vocal urban electorates, are introducing policies that, as always in most developing countries, protect the urban dweller at the expense of the farmer.
The “world food crisis” of 2008 is a historic opportunity to allow the terms of trade to shift in favour of the rural poor. Food prices will fall of their own accord within six months to a year, but they are unlikely to fall as fast and far as they did in 1974 because the demand for food is increasing thanks to the pace of development not just in China and India but in Africa and Latin America too. If governments can help the process along by stepping up the pace of building small rural feeder roads so crops can be moved to market, encouraging the use of fertilizer, even with subsidies, and allowing the introduction of genetically improved crops despite the Luddite policies of the European Union, then enormous steps can be taken in improving the lives of the rural poor. One has only to look at Nigeria and Malawi, two countries which in the last few years have engineered a revolution in agriculture by doing some of this.
In Nigeria, according to the International Monetary Fund, agricultural growth is now 8 per cent a year, almost as good as the growth in the oil sector. (However, this figure is regarded as somewhat too high by others) Malawi’s maize harvest has increased by a third in a single year. When the great Irish famine got under way 170 years ago, Charles Trevelyan, the British Treasury official responsible for famine policy, refused to allow the procurement of home cereals for relief because it would “disturb the market”. In Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman”, the returned Irish American Malone, insists on calling the famine “the starvation”.
“Me father died of starvation in the black ‘47. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” “The famine?” “No, the starvation. When a country is full of food and exporting it, there can be no famine. Me father was starved dead and I was starved out to America in me mother’s arms.” Those governments who insist on imposing a status quo in their local rural market place are condemned to have their poorest people suffering or even dying because of it. A professor of economics at Oxford, Paul Collier, who is well known for his exploration of what makes people poor, has recently written that “the most realistic way to raise global food supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market”. This is nonsense. In some sparsely inhabited countries this might make sense. But where peasants are thick on the ground the most productive policy is to give peasants their head.
The countries that pioneered the East Asian miracle, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, were the countries that had vigorous land reform and split up their feudal estates in favour of the peasant. More recently, it was done in West Bengal, India. As long ago as the 1970s the World Bank found in study after study that a smaller average size of holding and a low concentration of ownership produced an increase in output per hectare. The solution to the current “world food crisis” is right under most developing countries’ noses. They should trust and help the peasant to respond to market forces. If some very poor people remain hungry then governments can buy locally and feed them at special low price shops.

—Khaleej Times




Pakistan: Politicians, Judges and a General
Gwynne Dyer

I WANT to inform the entire nation that on Monday May 12, 2008, all deposed judges will be restored,” Nawaz Sharif told journalists in Lahore after a crisis meeting with the head of the other major party in Pakistan’s governing coalition, Asif Zardari. But it didn’t happen, so on May 13 Sharif pulled all nine ministers of his Pakistan Muslim League — Nawaz (PML-N) party out of the government. This was not just a minor spat between politicians. It heralds a major crisis in the country that is America’s most important ally in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” and the crisis is precisely about the huge influence that the United States exercises in Pakistan.
The 60 deposed judges at the center of the dispute were dismissed last November by the country’s military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. All of them were really fired for defying his rule, and the Supreme Court judges among them in particular for being about to deliver a ruling that would have declared Musharraf’s “election” as president the previous month illegal. The constitution said that no serving military officer could run for president, but Musharraf was unwilling to take off his uniform until he had won the “election” in Parliament and been confirmed in the presidency. If the Supreme Court was going to rule against that manoeuvre, then the disobedient judges would just have to be removed. But the strategy that Musharraf and the United States had created to keep him in power collapsed when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December.
The plan was that Musharraf would allow a controlled restoration of democracy in which another close American ally, Benazir Bhutto, would return from exile and become prime minister. For historical reasons her Pakistan People’s Party stood a good chance of winning a free election. Afterward, she would work together with Musharraf, now a duly elected civilian president, who would step back from the limelight but still exercise ultimate control over the military. The strategy might have succeeded if Benazir Bhutto had not been killed in December, but much of the PPP’s popularity was really reflex loyalty to the Bhutto family. Her successor as party leader, her husband Asif Zardari, was a deeply controversial figure who could not mobilize popular support in the same way.
The PPP emerged as the largest single party when the parliamentary elections, postponed because of Benazir’s death, were finally held in February, but it did not win enough seats to form a government on its own. It had to make a coalition with the second-largest party, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, which had no secret understandings with the United States or Musharraf. Sharif was the elected prime minister whom Musharraf overthrew in his 1999 coup, and he is unyielding in his opposition to the general staying in office as president. When the two parties formed a coalition government two months ago, they agreed that the judges who were unjustly dismissed by Musharraf would have to be reinstated, but it turns out that they didn’t mean quite the same thing by it.
Sharif understood it to mean that the judges would get their old jobs back — whereupon the Supreme Court would deliver the ruling on the legality of Musharraf’s “election” as president that they were fired to forestall last October. Goodbye Musharraf (unless the army stages another coup to save him, which seems unlikely at this stage). Zardari, on the other hand, remains loyal to his late wife’s deal with Musharraf, and talks about restoring the deposed judges — but not necessarily to their old jobs, and only as part of a package that also restricts their powers. In other words, they would not be able to pull the plug on Musharraf. All the influence of the United States, of course, is behind Zardari and the PPP.

—Arab News