OPED | Monday, April 27, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Crisis that is sum of its parts
Premen Addy
The US throws money at the Pakistani regime, trusting that all will be well at the end of the extravaganza. The great and good in Washington have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They once showered Chiang Kai-shek with dollar confetti in the Chinese civil war, even as his Communist opponent Mao Dzedong was announcing the proclamation of the new republic
Britain’s harassed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Alistair Darling, presented his keenly awaited Budget in the House of Commons. The nation, battered by the global recession, held its collective breath. The economy, he predicted, would shrink by 3.5 per cent in the coming year, while further Government borrowing of a massive £175 billion now will be 12.4 per cent of GDP. By 2013-14 the national debt was estimated to be 79 per cent of GDP — a crippling burden defying the imagination. Income tax has been raised to 50 per cent for those earning £150,000 and more per year. But Mr Darling was not without hope that the vast sums of public money used as bailouts for collapsing banks, together with loans for the most beleaguered sections of industry, notably automobile and construction, would be the seeds for the first green shoots of economic recovery. Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom.
Truth is that the present global recession has brought with it an overall loss to the economy, not experienced outside a world war. Panic pressing of the buttons represents desperate hope over deepening despair, something that applies surely to the current arc of crisis in international diplomacy, to wit, Afghanistan-Pakistan and the concentric Islamic neighbourhood. Taliban and Al Qaeda are the eye of the Islamist insurgency that could engulf Pakistan, in particular, in a deadly Anaconda embrace. The Swat Valley in the country’s North West has passed under the control of men committed fervently to the strictest implementation of sharia’h, including public execution and flogging for transgressors, and a circumscribed role for women in the community. The Zardari Government in Islamabad is in apparent retreat against this overwhelming manifestation of what Rousseau described as the ‘General Will.’ However, the all powerful Pakistan military remains intact and they could be the prompters and script writers in the evolving drama. We should be wiser to their workings in the fullness of time.
Confronted by these treacherous cross-currents, the US throws money at the Pakistani regime, trusting that all will be well at the end of the extravaganza. Pakistan would be saved and a discredited US policy salvaged for posterity. Like the Bourbons, the great and good in Washington have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They once showered their favoured Kuomintang client Chiang Kai-shek with dollar confetti in the Chinese civil war, even as his Communist opponent Mao Dzedong was announcing the proclamation of the new People’s Republic in Beijing. Two bulging volumes of the State Department’s “China White Paper” detailed this march of folly. The surreal US debate about “who lost China,” when the country was not America’s to lose, intensified into turbo-charged McCarthyist hysteria and witch hunt.
Moving fast forward from circa 1950 to 2009, the recent Tokyo conference of the American-led coalition of the willing decided on a massive bailout of Pakistan. A grinning President Asif Ali Zardari resembled a Cheshire cat who had got the desired cream. Meanwhile, his US counterpart Barack Obama shadow boxes with his Nato allies for more European boots on ground. He might bay for the moon, for all that it matters.
The noted US columnist Joe Klein, writing in Time Magazine, summed up his country’s dilemma. “If Afghanistan seems a bit better than expected, Pakistan appears much worse,” he wrote after a visit to both places. “There are terrorist attacks — some quite spectacular — almost every day, but the fragile democratic Government of Mr Zardari... seems unwilling to admit the extent of the problem.”
When asked about the role of his intelligence service in feeding Pakistan’s cancerous terrorism, the President responded: “The germ was created by the CIA.” A dismissive Mr Kline commented: “True enough, but somewhat dated.”
Mr Zardari: “Your Government called them the ‘moral equivalent of George Washington’ referring to the mujahideen.” Countered Joe Kline: “True again — and US complicity in the creation of Al Qaeda should not be forgotten — but the game changed after the Russians” left Afghanistan.
Methinks he’s a trifle cavalier entombing one fact from another: Their relationship in the widening eddy ignored. History is not for switching on and off at a whim.
Winston Churchill, in his ripe years, was a staunch supporter of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League, in a bid to scupper the Gandhi-led Indian National Congress’s struggle to free the country of British colonial rule. With the subcontinent’s partition, Whitehall, whether Labour or Conservative, was strongly partial to Pakistan, in continuance of its earlier indulgence towards the League, and as a bulwark against the perceived menace of an expansionist Soviet Union.
Yet the youthful Churchill, as a war correspondent in the Sudan, at the close of the 19th century, took a dim view of its Islamic practices and society as a whole. I shall omit the most excoriating lines of his account. “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities,” he wrote in The River War, “But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No more retrograde force exists in the world... and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”
With Roosevelt’s death, US foreign policy was reversed, and the Truman Administration and its successors duly came aboard the cold war vessel, thwarting Moscow in a grand alliance with the old colonial Europe. Subsequent American disasters in Vietnam, Iraq and the quicksands of Afghanistan-Pakistan were seeded in that fatefully flawed strategy. Strategic errors in war or peace, a contemporary German thinker has remarked, can only be corrected by subsequent generations.
It would appear that President Barack Obama, driven by wisdom, diplomatic insight and economic calculation is attempting to put right his country’s sins of omission and commission in Latin America and other fraught regions. His emollient voice is a welcome change from the shrill conceits of his predecessors. But Pakistan and Islamist terrorism may prove one intractable problem too many.
Karl Marx, German enlightenment philosopher, British political economist and historian and Hebrew prophet is worth returning to at this moment of global crisis, as the brilliant Christopher Hitchens advises in The Atlantic Monthly — The Revenge of Marx. You will be rewarded for your time if you do.
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