Friday Magazine – Volume 14 – Issue 51 23/12/11

2. PAKISTANIS SHOW ALARMING INDIFFERENCE TO THE HIGH COSTS OF WAR

By Muhammad Ali Siddiqi – Dawn – December 4, 2011

Even confirmed democracies recognize wars as phenomena that upset the normal schedule of events.

There was no election in Britain, for example, between 1935 and 1945; the first general election of that decade was held on July 5, 1945 after the end of World War II .In America, where by tradition a president can have only two consecutive terms, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran the White House from 1933 to 1945.

Thus it can never be business as usual while you are in the midst of a war. All wars make demands on the people, the state and politicians of any nation. Sadly there is no consciousness of these historic precedents in Pakistan, even though we are in the midst of a war that has become very costly in terms of human blood and economic devastation.

That war began in July 2003 after the Lal Masjid rebellion was crushed in a half-finished job. Until then, Islamabad’s role was a “safe” one – confined to providing logistical support to American and NATO troops across the Durand Line and to taking legal and administrative measures to control and monitor rebel groups.

During the fateful summer of 2003, however, irresponsible media coverage made heroes of criminals and Pakistan has paid a heavy price: for the first time in history, war has come home to us. That war today extends from Parachinar to Karachi. The suffering it has caused is now seen and felt in mosques, bazaars, schools, religious processions, shrines, public transit, school buses, hospitals, funerals, congregations and people’s homes.

Previously the suffering of other nations and other countries was something we read about in newspapers or watched on TV; now others read and watch what is happening at our expense. Those others include know-it-all diplomats and journalists, whose prejudices get the better of their reason and who arrogantly advise Pakistan to “do more.”

The casualties and trauma Pakistan has suffered far exceed those of most countries – excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, where numerous civilians have fallen victim to foreign invasion as well as internal civil war.

According to a government-sponsored advertisement on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 published in the Wall Street Journal 21, 672 Pakistani civilians have been killed or wounded in suicide bombings and other terror attacks during the past decade, while Pakistan’s army has lost nearly 3,000. As well, there were 3,486 bomb blasts and 283 major suicide attacks, resulting in more than 3.5 million Pakistanis being displaced. The ad put Pakistan’s economic losses due to terrorism at $68 billion.

If the world doesn’t know this, or ignores it and asks Pakistan to “do more,” it can be excused, for it accepts the truth only when it is convenient and rewarding. But why are Pakistanis themselves so indifferent to a war in which they themselves are victims? Is it cynicism, fatalism or just one more manifestation of a collective abnormality in the Pakistani personality? Perhaps we should ask instead: are those who are supposed to guide our society in war and peace guilty of a criminal abdication of their duty?

There are politicians who talk of “civil disobedience,” union leaders who threaten to paralyze the railways and electrical grid workers who burn their own utility’s transformers and vans. This is a crazy situation. Pakistan seems to have no social reformers or character builders. There are plenty of semi-literate politicians but not one person of vision who could depoliticize this over-politicized nation a little and break the people’s sadistic habit of enjoying the sight of burning vehicles.

Pakistanis believe in individual and family morality and give of their best to relatives and friends, but in the streets we behave little better than animals. And because parents and teachers themselves are steeped in medieval values, several generations of Pakistanis have grown up without the vaguest idea of what modern urban values are.

Religious leaders could have helped but most of them have turned into radical reactionaries. Pakistan is not their priority; their priorities are doctrinal agendas and canonical positions that define their thinking and are the prism through which they see foreign policy issues. If this jeopardizes Pakistan’s existence, they couldn’t care less.

With neither secular nor religious leaders available as guides, no wonder Pakistani government and society have gone adrift and failed to come up with an appropriate response to the debilitating conflict that is eating into the country’s vital organs.

(This article was edited and abridged for the CIC Friday Magazine.)

  Back to top

3. BE VERY AFRAID: STEPHEN HARPER IS INVENTING A NEW CANADA

By Gerald Caplan – Globe and Mail – December 16, 2011

Since Stephen Harper first became Prime Minister in 2006, he has already dramatically transformed Canada. But with no election due for four more years, “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

It’s in the nature of true believers and ideologues to believe that any means to their sacred ends are justified. This makes them extremely dangerous people. It’s also typical of such people that they’re often motivated by unfathomable resentment and anger, a compulsion not just to better their adversaries, but to destroy them. These are good descriptions of Stephen Harper and those closest to him.

There was never a Trudeau-land or Mulroney-land or Chrétien-land, but as The Globe’s Lawrence Martin notes, there is already a Harper-land whose nature is quite apparent. Like the American conservatives whom the Harperites so envy, our government has concocted a new reality of its own that is systematically being imposed on the Canadian people. The values and moral code of Mr. Harper’s new Canada are clear.

A central tenet of the new reality is a repudiation of the need for anything as irrelevant as evidence, facts or rationality whenever they are inconvenient; as in cancelling the long-form census without a shred of reason; as when Justice Minister Nicholson defends his back-to-the-jungle crime bills by reminding us that “We don’t govern on the basis of statistics” or, as we now know, on the basis of the findings of serious experts.

Jason Kenney can stand as a past master at inventing evidence to serve his unfailingly partisan needs. This is a man, after all, who has shamelessly claimed a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism in Canada contrary to all the facts. Just days ago, Mr. Kenney created a crisis over a handful of women who wear a veil, and who are of course Muslim.

But lying is the very mother’s milk of Harper-land morality. When you invent your own reality, you can also invent your defense. Just follow the distinguished careers of ministers Peter MacKay, Peter Kent and Tony Clement. Old joke: How do you know when certain politicians are lying? Their lips are moving.

In Harper-land, hitting below the belt is standard procedure, as the dirty tricks used against Montreal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler nicely demonstrate. Straightforward dishonesty is a case like this is just the Conservative version of free expression, as Government House Leader Peter Van Loan earnestly explained. But when the Speaker of the House brands such tactics as “reprehensible,” you know we’re no longer in Kansas, kids.

On the complex aboriginal file, Harper-land blames the victims for their own wretched circumstances and NDP MP Charlie Angus for not cluing in the clueless Aboriginal Affairs Minister. The minister’s assertion that the chief of Attawapiskat had accepted the government’s imposition of a ludicrously expensive third-party manager was, of course, immediately contradicted.

Harper-land values demand fundamental changes in governance – outright attacks on trade unions, unprecedented measures taken to silence critical NGOs, muzzling of ostensibly independent federal watchdogs.

These new values reverse decades of cherished Canadian policies. Look at the contempt the Prime Minister shows for the United Nations, as described in a recent paper by former Canadian diplomat and senior UN official Carolyn McAskie, “Canada and Multilateralism: Missing In Action.”

The Prime Minister says he has little use for the UN. But is this the Canada that played such a front-line role in previous decades? How can we spurn a whole system of organizations critical to world peace, security and development?

To damage Canada’s reputation even further, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has proved incapable of discarding the cheap politics by which he demeaned the House for so many years, complete with endlessly-repeated spin lines that substitute on the world stage for real thought.

This new Canada is a place where militarism is valued over peacemaking. Watching Defence Minister Peter MacKay taking bows at the Grey Cup game for Canada’s part in the Libyan campaign, Globe columnist Lawrence Martin observed: “The blending of sport and the military, with the government as the marching band, is part of the new nationalism the Conservatives are trying to instill. It is another example of how the state, under Stephen Harper’s governance, is becoming all-intrusive … State controls are now at a high point in our modern history. There is every indication they will extend further.”

The University of Ottawa’s Ralph Heintzman, who created and headed the federal Public Service Office of Values and Ethics, provides an important insight into what’s happening here: There is a “lack of sense of inner self-restraint on the part of the prime minister, a sense that it is some kind of war and therefore anything is legitimate, that it’s quite acceptable for a prime minister to lie, for example, about how our parliamentary democracy works.”

Politics as war is exactly what former Harper strategist Tom Flanagan has long advocated. In fact, an article by Flanagan before the 2011 election was actually titled “An election is war by other means.” He also chose to compare the 2008 campaign to ancient wars in which Rome (the Conservatives) defeated Carthage (the Liberals), “razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would grow there again.”

Alan Whitehorn of the Royal Military College of Canada wrote: “This suggests a paradigm not of civil rivalry between fellow citizens of the same state, but all-out extended war to destroy and obliterate the opponent. This kind of malevolent vision and hostile tone seems antithetical to the democratic spirit, not to mention peace and stability.”

In fact like Harper, Prof. Flanagan seems to get a kick out of “destroying and obliterating” those he’s not fond of. When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was making news, Flanagan commented: “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something … I would not feel unhappy if Assange ‘disappeared’.”

To a woman who e-mailed him objecting to his (presumed) flippancy, Flanagan responded: “Better be careful, we know where you live.” What would Freud have made of such kibitzing, I wonder? After all, the good professor has cited Machiavelli’s odious comment that “fortune is a woman and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force.”

Ironically, if you want to hear from the other Canada, the former Canada, the one so much admired by the world, you should (and still can) listen to last Sunday’s interview on CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition between host Michael Enright and Iceland’s President, Olafur Grimmson. Mr. Grimmson was the voice of humanity, thoughtfulness, pragmatism and commonsense. He is in fact the perfect Canadian and would make the perfect Canadian prime minister. No wonder the masterminds of Harper-land want to ‘disappear’ the CBC.

(This article was edited for the CIC Friday Magazine.)

Back to top

4. ICELAND FORMALLY RECOGNIZES PALESTINIAN STATE

By Staff Writer – Agence France Presse – December 15, 2011

Iceland formally recognized the Palestinian state at a ceremony in Reykjavik on Thursday, becoming one of the first Western European countries to do so.

“This is the day I formally submit to you the declaration of Palestine independence in accordance to the will of the Icelandic parliament,” Icelandic Foreign Minister Oessur Skarphedinsson said, addressing his Palestinian counterpart Riad Malki at a news conference.

Back to top