The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Mamata’s blackmail
Will the Centre give in?

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s 15-day notice to the UPA government to announce a moratorium on loan repayments for West Bengal ends on May 7. It is possible her party, Trinamool Congress’s support to the UPA candidate in the Presidential election may be dependent on the Centre agreeing to her demand. Such blackmail, disgusting as it is, is unlikely to yield any immediate results. At a time when Parliament is in session and set to discuss the Finance Bill it is not possible for the government to announce fiscal relief for one particular state. Realising this, Mamata Banerjee, it seems, has relented for the time being. But given her persistence and non-stop nuisance, the UPA may have to find a way out soon.

The Punjab leadership too has increased pressure on the Centre for relief on the West Bengal pattern. Both states along with Kerala are “debt-stressed”. The debt issues of states are handled by finance commissions. The last Finance Commission had offered to bail out the three troubled states subject to certain conditions. Punjab faced a high political drama, resulting in the ouster of the then Finance Minister, Manpreet Singh Badal. The Akali leadership is now asking for a “financial package” and does not ask for debt relief, whereas Mamata Banerjee is very specific about what her state needs: non-payment of loan installments for three years.

West Bengal’s debt in 2011 was Rs 1,98,195 crore, which had been accumulated under prolonged Left (mis)rule. Mamata has not contributed to this. But she is averse to levying or raising taxes. Punjab has piled up a heavy debt because of liberal subsidies, widespread tax evasion and governmental profligacy. The state leadership is keen on Central help without doing its own bit to raise revenue or stop wasteful expenditure. The appointment of chief parliamentary secretaries is the latest example. The Centre’s own finances are in tatters. How it deals with the fiscal demands of West Bengal and Punjab under pressure will be interesting to watch in the days to come.

Brain gain
When NRIs contribute to their motherland

Some of the best Indian students go abroad and this has led to some heartburns against them. The argument advanced against such students is that they do not contribute to the society that they belong to, but go out to greener pastures. What is heartening is that some of those who have been educated abroad and worked there and made a place for themselves in that society, have quit everything to come back to India. Among these, those who particularly shine are the people who set up organisations that have a social purpose. A man, who did well in real estate in Canada, came back to Punjab to open a hospital near his village. He succeeded and the hospital continues to attract talented doctors from abroad who visit it and provide their specialised skills and thus help patients.

Another Canadian came back to his village and set up a modern sanitation system. Not content with that, he soon started expanding his endeavours and, in time, was successful in providing more villages with such facilities. Many NRIs have set up education institutions in remote areas. In some cases, they had the kutcha paths of various villages paved with bricks to improve the village environs. Another group set up an ambulance service that serves five states — Maharashtra, Bihar, Rajasthan, Kerala and Punjab. They also give first-aid training to school and college students.

There is no doubt that there is a strong wish among many NRIs to improve the lot of their brethren. However, many regret the fact that when they return, full of good intentions, their efforts are thwarted by the government inertia and the vested interests which prefer the status quo. It is a matter of regret that on the one hand there is the general lament about brain drain, while on the other precious little is done to harness the contribution of those who come back with noble intentions. That many still succeed is more a case of doggedness and the ability to negotiate hurdles placed in their way. They deserve better, we deserve better.

Thought for the Day

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life. — James Allen

ARTICLE

Arab Spring takes its own course
Moving towards conservative, traditional society
by S. Nihal Singh

Numbness has descended on Syria in the political sphere as the Assad regime’s contest with its opponents, a section of them armed, is continuing to take a tragic toll of life. The Kofi Annan plan seeking a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons from towns and other populated areas has not been complied with nor have the militants agreed to lay down their arms. Essentially, we are staring at a stalemate despite the partisan rhetoric of the main players concerned. The plain truth is that the regime cannot defeat its opponents nor can the ragtag army of variously armed protesters get the better of President Assad’s elite fighting force, which remains largely intact.

The pitifully small number of United Nations unarmed observers have made a symbolic difference but are too few to influence the nature of the contest in a significant way. But no one has a better answer than the Annan plan, being breached by both sides. And indications suggest that President Assad has come to believe that with some palliatives, he can hope to survive the greatest crisis of his rule.

One must separate the external players in this drama. There are the United States, Britain and France on the one hand and Russia and China on the other. But there are important regional players, in particular Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Iran to a lesser extent. The Western powers plainly want the Assad regime to go, a policy opposed by Russia and China. But Turkey and Saudi Arabia are essentially with the West in seeking the end of the Assad regime.

The United States is loath to intervene militarily in another Muslim country after its misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. But arms and other military material are reaching the militants through various sources although the seizure of a ship loaded with arms apparently intended for the Syrian rebels was seized by the Lebanese. Turkey, which is hosting the largest number of Syrian refugees in camps, has become progressively more assertive in opposing President Assad. And Qatar and Saudi Arabia have openly advocated the arming of rebels. But nobody thus far has a magic bullet in bringing the Syrian tragedy to a speedy end.

The Arab Spring is, of course, taking its own course. In Egypt, the contest between the military and various factions is being enacted each day, with the Muslim Brotherhood watching the situation like a hawk. A dissident Brotherhood candidate is contesting the election while the main party candidate was disqualified by the Election Commission. But contrary to expectations, the extreme Salafist wing is supporting the dissident, rather than the reserve official Brotherhood candidate still in the field. The Brotherhood broke its promise of not contesting the presidency because it had gained a large number of legislative seats. For the military, it is essential to safeguard its economic empire, apart from its reluctance to give up the political power it has enjoyed since the days of the ouster of King Farouq.

Thus far only Tunisia, a relatively small nation and the precursor of the Arab Spring, is enjoying the fruits of the revolution that spread like wildfire over a year ago. Apart from Egypt’s travails, Yemen still has a long way to go, despite the dethronement of President Abdullah Saleh. America’s chief concern is the incubation of Al-Qaeda and it has a significant military aid programme, in particular the use of killer drones. In Libya, which got rid of Muammar Gaddafi thanks to the intervention of NATO forces, it is still unclear whether it can surmount its tribal loyalties, the East-West division, and knit together the various militias into a unified fighting force. While much of the world’s attention is focused on Egypt as the lodestar of the Arab world, Syria presents the greatest problems.

Part of Syria’s problem comes from its strategic location and the devilish mix of ethnic, religious and tribal people. The ruling Assad family belongs to the minority Allawites, the majority are Sunnis, and since there are significant Christian and Kurdish minorities, there is some nervousness that they will be at the mercy of the majority. Kurds, spread across more than one country, are the Arab world’s unfortunate people. After the unrest, the Assad regime gave a section of Kurds residence certificates they had been demanding for long to get them on its side.

The prospect is of further bloodshed. How long President Assad and his regime will be able to stem the tide of change remains to be seen, but his prospects do not seem to be promising. Nobody buys his constitutional or electoral ploys. The difficulty of moving out of the Annan plan is that there is thus far no better answer short of an expansionist war which would have unfortunate consequences. Apart from arming of militants already in progress, the other proposal is to form so-called humanitarian corridors to ensure food and medical supplies reaching those in need. But such a programme would require outside military intervention because Damascus would not permit it. Turkey, which has been particularly strident in its demands, would be a logical candidate for the task, but Ankara is still hesitating — for good reasons.

For now, the hope is that the arrival of many more UN monitors will make a difference. So far, it remains a vain hope.

One need not, however, take a tragic view of events in the Arab world. A revolution of sorts has taken place in many parts of the region. Long-time dictators have been toppled, but the old power structures take longer to demolish. Inevitably, vested interests grown fat over decades are resisting the change and outside players with their own interests are putting their oars in. A nexus of outside players is seeking their own interests combine with local vested interests to stem the change. Historically, revolutions cannot be stopped, except momentarily.

All indications suggest that it will be a more conservative, traditional and Islamist Arab world. As the new Turkish ruling class has shown, the more conservative and Islamic Anatolian resurgent class, the backbone support of the highly successful ruling Justice and Development Party, is the shape of the future Arab world.

MIDDLE

The invincible
by Pankaj Garg

While performing a surgery the other day and during normal ‘chats’ in the course of the operation, the nurse who was with me began an interesting conversation. She enquiringly asked me whether the children born by Caeserian section (operation for delivering the baby) were more intelligent than those born in the normal course. Since I was not aware of such a ‘fact’, I pondered over the thought while finishing the operation.

After a while I told the nurse that her information indicated logical thinking. During an operation (Caeserian section), the baby is delivered quickly and so the child has to struggle less. The risk of the child spending time without air (oxygen) is also less. On the contrary, in vaginal (normal) delivery, the child has risk, though rarely, of getting struck in the birth canal and suffering from hypoxic brain damage (damage to the brain because of decreased supply of oxygen to the brain). The nurse was happy because I had provided an explanation to her ‘fact’.

After a while another thought hit me. I told the nurse that this could not be correct since “any man-made process cannot be more efficient than a process designed by nature”. Even though a birth by operation (Caeserian section) might be faster but still it is an artificial procedure developed entirely by humans. All other species on the planet also reproduce and reproduce more efficiently, and they never seem to require any kind of operation! Agreed that operation does come to our rescue at times, but in my opinion such times are not as common as they are made out to be these days.

Man has moved away or, in more sophisticated words, has progressed from tree shades to air-conditioned rooms, earthen pitcher water to chilled refrigerated drinks, walking to ultra-modern cars, etc. But the point to ponder is that have these unnatural additional comforts and pacemakers in life really contributed to our well-being or have taken away their share from the little peace we had? Whenever man is pitched against nature, he can only win small battles. He can never win the war. Nature is invincible. So, why go against nature and not along with it?

OPED WORLD

A year after he was killed, the network Osama bin Laden led is fragmented, but it has not been eliminated.
What next for Al-Qaida?
Patrick Cockburn

A year after Osama bin Laden was killed, how relevant is Al-Qaida? In the decade since 9/11 Bin Laden was always a symbol rather than an operational commander. His death did not do much to disrupt the group as an organisation. Occasional recordings of his voice that surfaced over the years contained no new ideas and were primarily a way for Al-Qaida to show that he was still alive. In death such a symbolic but inactive leader can exercise as much influence as when he lived, so his killing by US commandos has not inflicted fatal damage to his organisation.

As the world saw One World Trade Center (R) become the tallest building in New York, it also became a time to reflect on Al-Qaida, the terrorist organisation that destroyed Twin Towers in 2001.

Yet his death was very important, less because of its impact on Al-Qaida than because of Bin Laden’s unique position in American demonology after 9/11. It is difficult to think of anybody else in US history with the same Satanic status.

Al-Qaida’s impact

President Barack Obama trumpets as one of his main achievements his administration’s success in tracking Bin Laden down and eliminating him. With him dead, it became easier for the White House to proceed with the withdrawal from Afghanistan where the presence of a few hundred Al-Qaida fighters was used to justify the presence of 90,000 US soldiers. The shock to Americans of the 9/11 attacks may be diminishing but it is still there. As a result, any act by Al-Qaida will go on having an impact out of all proportion to its size or capacity in future just as it had done over the last decade.

No US administration can afford to be seen by American voters as derelict in pursuing Al-Qaida whenever it shows the slightest signs of life. Few Americans pay attention to the turmoil in Yemen, but any stirring there by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), head-quartered there, attracts immediate official and media attention. It was from Yemen that two botched plots, the underpants bomber and explosives packed inside ink cartridges, were launched. Both failed but, as an Al-Qaida statement pointed out, these failures were a success in grabbing the attention of the world.

Arab Spring

Aside from the killing of Bin Laden, have the Arab Spring uprisings and protests over the last year knocked away one of Al-Qaida’s main ideological justifications? This was that dictatorships in the Muslim world could not be peacefully overthrown and the priority was to attack the US as their chief sponsor. In 1998, claiming that the US had declared war on God and his messenger, Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his Egyptian second in command, called for the murder of Americans anywhere in the world as the “individual duty for every Muslim”. This made limited impact at the time, but did resonate in the Muslim world after President George W Bush intervened militarily in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

It is a bit glib to imagine Al-Qaida becoming a back number in the wake of the Arab Spring.

In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Islamic and secular opponents combined their efforts to overthrow police states. But the belief that Islamic fundamentalism is passé may be exaggerated. Firstly, Al-Qaida was always a small minority and was never planning to run for election. It will not go out of business because there are other effective methods of agitation, though its appeal may be more limited. The Israeli conflict with the Palestinians festers, as the US makes no effective efforts to restrict Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and may soon explode. The political temperature of the whole region is rising and this cannot be to the disadvantage of Al-Qaida.

Islamic militants in eastern Libya, once a recruiting ground for Al-Qaida suicide bombers going to Iraq, were last year closely cooperating with Nato to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. They included such leaders as Abdelhakim Belhadj, former head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was notoriously handed over to Gaddafi’s torturers by MI6 and the CIA. Such people are now publicly distancing themselves from Al-Qaida. Likewise in Egypt the Salafists, hardliners who used to denounce democracy as un-Islamic, run successfully for parliament, are seeking to broaden their appeal, and last weekend surprisingly adopted a liberal former Muslim Brother as their presidential candidate.

But all the news is not bad for Al-Qaida because tightly run police states have collapsed across the region. There is room for small groups of militants to organise without being under constant pressure of state security forces. Whatever happens in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria over the next year, the states there will be weaker than before. Moreover, the near civil wars in Syria and Yemen are not over.

There are two other reasons why Al-Qaida has survived the death of Bin Laden and other leaders over the last year. US security officials speak of it as if it was structured like the Pentagon with ranking officers whose killing by drones or death squads would disrupt the organisation. It was always much more ramshackle than this. Few of the Al-Qaida militants killed over the last year are irreplaceable, an exception being perhaps Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. An intelligent, eloquent English-speaking fundamentalist, and one of the few effective Al-Qaida propagandists he was killed by a US drone on 30 September last year.

Franchisees of terror

A further reason is that its most powerful elements have always been franchisees not under the control of any core group. This was true of Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which, starting in 2003, became a lethally effective organisation in Iraq until much of the Sunni community turned against it. It still has the capacity to bomb Shia civilians and, though it may be weaker, it is far from being eradicated.

But Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia was always distinct from the core group of leaders around Bin Laden. From the beginning it focussed primarily on a sectarian war against the Shia targeting day labourers in the markets, pilgrims and worshippers leaving mosques. For all their ferocity, Al-Qaida suicide bombers infrequently attacked US troops in the years before the US final withdrawal. Similarly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, where the core of Al-Qaida is supposedly based, there are plenty of people who have experience in guerrilla warfare. Hatred of foreigners and infidels of all sorts is a Pashtun tradition. A kidnapped British aid worker, Khalil Rasjed Dale, was killed there at the week-end. But the local Pakistani Taliban, periodic allies of Al-Qaida, are involved in their own struggles and closely monitored by Pakistani and foreign intelligence services.

Many power centres

As a base, Yemen has the advantage of being a mosaic of different power centres and with a weak central state. President Ali Abdullah Saleh, now removed from power, used to play an elaborate game with the US whereby he would present himself as America’s loyal ally against Al-Qaida, offering even to take responsibility for their drone attacks.

Weakened but not out

Weakened though it may be, Al-Qaida will not fade from the headlines. This is partly because headline writers have got used to its existence as a universal bogeyman. The “war against Al-Qaida” since 9/11 has also produced self-declared experts, think-tanks, intelligence officers and army generals who all have budgets to defend. They are never likely to declare the Al-Qaida threat over, while emphasising, as one counter-terrorism expert said, that “we’ve made progress towards defeating Al-Qaida the organisation”.

US counter-terrorism and intelligence officers say that Al-Qaida could never again carry out an onslaught as devastating as 9/11. They may well be right. On the other hand, the very length of time it took for the US to find Bin Laden and his family, though they had been living in the same house for years, may show that their own level of competence, in contrast to their numbers and budgets, has not improved much since the World Trade Centre was destroyed.

Suicide bombers

It is a sight the world had got used to: a crater in the road where the suicide bomber detonated the explosives packed into his vehicle; the pools of blood and hunks of flesh of people caught in the blast; ruined buildings where floors have collapsed on top of each other; shocked survivors wandering amid the mangled cars and broken glass.

Almost invariably over the last decade such carnage has been the work of Al-Qaida or similar Islamic fundamentalist movements such as the Afghan or Pakistan Taliban. But the latest such explosions, coming a year after the killing of Osama bin Laden, took place this week in the Syrian city of Idlib where two suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the headquarters of army and airforce intelligence services. The Syrian government says that nine people were killed and 100 wounded.

These bombings are significant because they show that Al-Qaida is still very much in business, despite the death of Bin Laden and other Al-Qaida leaders. It not only still exists but it is becoming engaged in new conflicts that have followed the Arab Spring. Al-Qaida has always been the child of war. This was true in Afghanistan when the Taliban were fighting to take over the country prior to 2001; in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003; and in Yemen where civil conflict has escalated since the Arab Spring last year.

Sunni Fundamentalism

Al-Qaida-type Sunni fundamentalist groups flourish in times of conflict because holy war is at the heart of their faith and martyrdom opens the way to heaven. Its militants make good soldiers. A moderate Sunni in Baghdad told me towards the end of the sectarian civil war there in 2007 that Al-Qaida fighters would only be allowed back into his district if it came under assault from Shia militiamen. Otherwise, they were hated and feared by local Sunni for their ferocity, fanaticism and violence. "Why would you let them back in then?" I asked. "Because they will fight to the death," he explained.

It may be comforting for Western governments to imagine that the jihadist version of Islamic fundamentalism is a back number since the onset of the Arab Spring. There are now other avenues for effective protest by disaffected Muslim youth. But this view is deceptive because, if the Arab Spring has brought change, it is also brought armed conflict to much of the Arab world where change has been blocked, as in Syria, or state power has weakened, as in Libya.

Developments in Syria are important because Al-Qaida is beginning to show strength in a core region of the Middle East and is no longer confined to isolated fastnesses in north-west Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia.

Like 1950s and 1960s

The convulsions of the Arab Spring may have been inspired by different ideas than those of Bin Laden and his followers, but the weakening of police states across the region makes it easier for Al-Qaida to operate. The Arab world today looks more and more like it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when nationalists, Islamists, Communists, secularists and liberals contended for power. After the uprisings of last year many countries will be freer, but many will also be more divided and violent.

How did Al-Qaida survived the intense pressure placed on it by security services after 9/11 and will it be able to do so in future?

The answer is that it did so because the organisation never existed in the form that so-called counter-terrorism experts imagined. It was never a sort of Islamic Comintern, with tentacles stretching from Waziristan to Birmingham. When it was at its strongest as a cohesive group at the time of 9/11, Bin Laden could only look to some 100 men to facilitate the sort of attacks he intended. On the other hand, the ideology he espoused and the fundamentalist jihadist tendency in Islam, is far broader and far more difficult to eliminate.

Groups that have no organisational connection with Al-Qaida now employ its tactics because they are effective. As in Idlib a couple of days ago this involves what anarchists used to call "the propaganda of the deed", the destruction of a highly visible symbol of the community or state under attack. Suicide bombing in which the perpetrator knows he is going to die has the tactical advantage of enabling untrained but fanatical recruits to inflict maximum damage. But for Al-Qaida bombers self-immolation is much more than this, serving as a demonstration of their faith.

—The Independent