Author: Anshuman Rawat

(13 January 2012) — As the US starts to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, global security analysts are voicing fears that the exit would mark the return of a global terrorism infrastructure in the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

“It is only a matter of time before the Taliban returns to rule Afghanistan. The big question is whether it has learnt its lesson during the last decade of war with the US, and is willing to give up its links with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda,” Dr D. Suba Chandran, director at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), a New Delhi-based centre for peace and security studies in South Asia, told Asia360 News.

“Doubts persist about that because the Taliban refused to snap the links even after the 9/11 attack, which led to the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 in the first place,” Dr Chandran said.

The US withdrew 10,000 troops from Afghanistan before an end-2011 deadline set by US President Barack Obama. This was the first step in the planned pull-out of combat forces that involves the recalling of a further 23,000 US troops in the summer of 2012 and a complete exit by the end of 2014.

Under the strategy, which aims to continue a long, slow war to convince the Taliban that they cannot win, US advisers would be attached to Afghan combat units to provide them military intelligence and to call on US backup forces when needed.

However, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s troops not expected to win the war against the Taliban, the country could be thrown back to the 1990s, when the violently-enforced Islamised Taliban rule turned it into a breeding ground for terrorists across the globe.

“Unless a legitimate political solution is put into place, Afghanistan will spiral into a full blown civil war between the Pashtun [the tribe to which the Taliban belongs] dominated south and the Tajik and Uzbek minority factions in the north,” Michael Hughes, an Afghanistan observer, pointed out.

The US military withdrawal would allow intensified fighting and spark a race between Pakistan and India to step in.

Pakistan would try and ‘install’ a friendly regime in Afghanistan, even if it means backing the Taliban. India, Afghanistan’s biggest regional aid donor with US$1.3 billion worth of current projects from construction of the parliament building to highways, fears that the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan could expose it to a hostile, Islamist militant-infested neighbourhood.

India’s fears are further raised by the prospect of the reduced space that the US would be left with to carry out its strikes against terrorist safe havens in Pakistan. Once out of the firing range of US drones and helicopters, terrorists who converge in this volatile Afghanistan-Pakistan border region can easily carry out their mission of mayhem in South Asia.

As it were, Pakistan’s relations with the US have soured after a NATO bombing accidentally killed 24 Pakistani troops on November 26. Since then, the US has halted drone strikes from its base in Pakistan, allowing the resurgence of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups.

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told CNN on November 9, 2011, that the period after the withdrawal of US troops would be a very difficult one for the region. “I get a feeling that maybe we will revert to the regional instability that preceded the 2001 US-led invasion”, he said.

But it is not just India and Pakistan that may be affected by the US military withdrawal. China will be keeping a close eye on the situation too as it continues to battle Islamist separatists in the restive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which are said to receive arms training in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Terrorist elements that form the sleeper cells in much of the rest of the world also trace their roots back to Afghanistan.

In the absence of US and NATO troops and with more than a third of its people unemployed and living below the poverty line, a fragile and turbulent Afghanistan may prove to be a security hazard for its immediate neighbours and beyond.

(9 December 2011) — Myanmar got its clearest invitation to return to the global community when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the country on November 30 to support “a movement for change”.

The country’s first visit by an American state secretary in 50 years followed a series of extraodinary moves by the military-backed government that included talks with

Aung San Suu Kyi, who led her party to a landslide elections victory in 1990, shortly before the military junta seized power.

The reform-minded moves also included bringing in a law that gives workers the right to strike, and releasing more than 200 political prisoners.

On November 25, Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy applied to re-register as a political party, paving the way for the icon for democracy to stand in the by-elections early next year.

Myanmar, in its campaign to re-engage with the world, has come a long way from the enforcement of martial law in 1988 in response to demonstrations calling for an end to military rule.

At the time, the military regime formed the State Law and Order Restoration Council and ordered multi-party elections, which saw Suu Kyi’s party win 392 out of the 485 parliamentary seats in May 1990 — despite her being under house arrest.

However, in June 1990, council chief Saw Maung ruled out an immediate power transfer, saying that a new constitution was needed first. The following month, the council issued declaration 1/90, empowering the elected representatives with “the responsibility to draw up the constitution of the future democratic state”.

Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy objected to this as the legislature had been elected to form a national government, and not to be a constituent assembly. In response, the military regime started to arrest political party leaders for refusing to comply with 1/90.

In March 2010, however, the first whiff of reform arrived in Myanmar.

After two decades of absolute military rule, a 17-member election commission was named to oversee fresh polls, in a move that was greeted with scepticism by the rest of the world.

The commission was headed by a former military officer described as a hard-liner and came with new laws that prohibited those with criminal convictions or who are members of religious orders from belonging to a political party.

This effectively disqualified from elections jailed political activists, including many National League for Democracy leaders, as well as Buddhist monks who led the anti-government protests in 2007.

Suu Kyi, who had spent most of the last two decades under detention, was released on November 13, 2010, six days after the elections.

Her party, the National League for Democracy, boycotted the elections because the electoral rules would have forced it to expel its imprisoned party members.

The elections brought to power a nominally civilian government dominated by the army and its proxies. Amid allegations of widespread fraud by opposition groups, the military leadership said the elections stood for Myanmar’s transition from military rule to a civilian democracy.

More signs of reforms came in January this year, as the government authorised Internet connection for Suu Kyi, a major tool for her to garner international support.

In March, Senior General Than Shwe, who was chairman of the State Peace and Development Council, formerly the State Law and Order Restoration Council, resigned as head of state in favour of his trusted lieutenant Thein Sein.

Under President Thein Sein, the pace of reforms speeded up. The government released more political prisoners, eased media censorship and stopped coercing armed ethnic groups to join the nation’s Border Guard Force.

Myanmar also legalised labour unions, freed the Internet of government censorship and began a programme to revamp the banking system, leading to the arrival of automated teller machines in some banks this year.

In September, the government suspended a China-backed dam project in northern Kachin state to “respect the will of the people” — a rare concession to public pressure that surprised analysts in the west, as well as China, Myanmar’s strongest ally during its international isolation.

In November, just four years after the bloody putdown of protests by Buddhist monks, Myanmar’s parliament approved a law that guarantees the right to protest, albeit with conditions. Protests remain prohibited at factories, hospitals and government offices, and permission to protest must be sought five days earlier, with details of slogans and speakers provided. Staging a protest without permission carries a penalty of one year in prison.

No reason has been given for the regime’s sudden change of heart.

President Thein Sein himself was a member of the military junta and recently maintained at a press conference that “there are no political prisoners; all those who are in jail have broken the law”.

His comment sparked fears that Myanmar’s reforms were a cosmetic exercise designed to win global support.

“There is some risk that they may not continue to change,” Aung Din, a former political prisoner who now leads the US Campaign for Burma advocacy group, told Reuters.

Even Suu Kyi said it was too early to reward the regime for a job half done. “I haven’t changed my mind on sanctions,” she told Associated Press on November 30.

In the US, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Clinton continue to emphasise that Myanmar’s leaders must do more to reform, release more political prisoners and end long-running conflicts in ethnic-minority areas.

“One of the reasons that I’m going is to test what the true intentions are and whether there is a commitment to both economic and political reform,” Clinton told CNN on the eve of her Myanmar visit.

It is too early to draw any conclusions about the reforms in Myanmar. However even government officials note that they are in line with the political winds of change sweeping across the world.

“The president was convinced about the global situation; he saw where the global stream was heading,” U Nay Zin Latt, adviser to President Thein Sein, told the New York Times, alluding to people’s movements like the Arab Spring, which is posing a challenge to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

The world now waits to see where Myanmar is heading.

(3 February 2012) — No elected government in the history of Pakistan has survived a full term in office. In fact, up to late last year, the impoverished yet nuclear-armed country has come under military rule more often than it has enjoyed democratic government. 8,839 days over 8,830 days to be exact, according to the Centre of Civic Education Pakistan as of September 15, 2011.

However, for the first time in the history of independent Pakistan, the all-powerful military, which sees itself as the principal guardian of the nation, now seems unsure of itself as it ponders its next move in the standoff with the civilian goverment.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has openly challenged the generals over the ‘memogate scandal’ — an alleged note from Pakistan’s political leadership that urged the US to prevent any possible coup by the Pakistan military. He further upped the ante on January 11 by sacking the defence secretary, Naeem Khalid Lodhi, a retired general close to the military establishment.

Tensions have calmed down slightly after Gilani, now the longest-serving premier of the country, extended an olive branch of sorts last week  during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He told reporters, “I want to dispel the impression that the military leadership acted unconstitutionally or violated rules […] We have to be seen on the same page.”

Still, the continued survival of the civilian government despite its very public and combative confrontation with the generals is seen as a remarkable new development in Pakistan political circles.  After all, seasoned pundits would tell you that “removing a civilian government was something the generals used to do between lunch and tea”.

For decades, the military has maintained its stranglehold over the country by controlling the presidency and playing the political parties against each other, while receiving abundant backing from the US, first for supporting  the US during the Cold War and now for its campaign against terrorism.

But the US Marines’ daring capture of terrorist Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad in 2011 robbed the armed forces of their public adulation. People in Pakistan treat the incident as the greatest national humiliation since the 1971 war with India that had resulted in the break-up of Pakistan and hold the military, which they used to deify, singularly responsible for it.

Crucially, the incident has also weakened US support for the Pakistani army. Few in the US believe that the generals did not know about Osama’s hideout a few hundred metres from their academy.

At home, the military is increasingly isolated. The president and the prime minister are united against the army. The supreme court, while hostile to the president, has become an independent centre of power since the chief justice successfully led a movement to oust former president Parvez Musharraf in 2008.

Significantly for the military, the US has now virtually replaced India as the bogeyman of the Pakistani people. The incessant drone attacks by US and NATO forces inside Pakistan’s territory, which often result in deaths of innocent civilians, and the US demand on Pakistan to carry out military operations against its own people in the tribal areas have made the US the most hated nation among most Pakistanis, especially among the poor and religious.

Security experts like India’s Mahroof Raza have suggested that terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba are finding it difficult to keep their foot-soldiers focused on India, especially Kashmir, and that the new generation see the NATO and US soldiers in Afghanistan as much better targets for the fulfillment of their psychological jihadi calling.

In fact, the Pakistani military itself is so submerged in containing secessionist demands from elements in its south-western Balochistan province, violence on its Afghan border, and frequent skirmishes with the US and NATO over drone attacks on its soil and occasional Pakistani military casualties, that India seems almost a diversion at this point.

With fewer people apprehensive of a war with India anytime soon, the daily reliance on the military has receded from public consciousness.

The army is now being forced to sit back and hope that the supreme court would dismiss President Asif Ali Zardari in an old corruption case. Army chief General Kayani believes that Zadari is directing the government against the army, with the prime minister as the public face of the challenge.

The military feels that any preemptive move on its part to dislodge the government may not find popular public support under the present circumstances. Moreover, given the military’s current lack of standing with the US after the Osama capture, the US is almost sure to favour Zardari.

Losing to Zardari in the current tussle will confirm the diminished authority and influence of the military.  For the moment though, no one quite knows how the present narrative might evolve. For a change, not even the military. And that is what makes the current imbroglio intriguing.

(16 December 2011) — As global headlines sway between economic meltdown in the West and violent uprisings in the Middle East, one social group is silently writing its own story in large parts of Asia.

In one of the largest demonstrations in China since the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, a public protest by the people of the northeastern town of Dalian in mid-August this year resulted in authorities shutting down a chemical factory believed to be a health risk after being damaged in a storm.

In the same month, India witnessed a spontaneous middle-class anti-graft movement converging around a previously unheralded hunger-fasting activist Anna Hazare. The government eventually caved in under the force of public opinion and agreed to draft anti-graft legislation.

But this is not just a story of China and India. People’s movements shook political plates across Asia this year.

In July, in a rally that marked the 14th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China, more than 200,000 demonstrators marched in Hong Kong for universal suffrage and against a controversial plan to scrap by-elections.

In same month, more than 20,000 protesters took to the streets of the Malaysian capital city of Kuala Lumpur to demand electoral reform.

Thousands of people in Bhutan also took to social media this year to protest a government ban on public smoking. In Male, Maldives – Asia’s smallest country by population – several thousand demonstrated against the government’s handling of the economy.

Unlike the mass discontent caused by the economic meltdown in Western nations and anger against theocratic regimes in the Middle East, appraisal of growing public protests in parts of Asia makes for an interesting reading.

There can be no single explanation for the new middle class activism that is sweeping across the continent. However, the broad undertone of the trend is that the emerging economies are experiencing socio-political churning brought about by growing political demands of its burgeoning middle classes.

Recent estimates by various international development banks illustrate the point.

According to the Asian Development Bank report Asian Development Outlook 2010: Macroeconomic Management Beyond the Crisis, the Asian middle class (defined as people earning between US$2 and US$20 a day) accounted for 21% of the total population in 1990 and an imposing 56% in 2008.

From a global perspective, Deutsche Bank says Asia’s middle class is one of the fastest growing population groups in the world. Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that the size of Asian middle classes, which now accounts for less than 25% of the world’s middle class population, will double in the next 15 years.

Significantly, a large percentage of the middle class growth class in Asia is occurring outside large global centers like Shanghai or New Delhi, in smaller towns and villages.

On one hand, the development presents a daunting challenge to previously unequipped local governments to pursue policies that help sustain the growing middle class. At the same time it brings an opportunity for the burgeoning middle class to exert pressure on local governments to improve governance and service delivery.

The underlying idea behind the term ‘middle class’ embodies not just the material aspects of a particular section of society, but also – more often than not – its aspirations such as better education and wider exposure to the world beyond the immediate environment. It is this development that encourages the middle class to be more aware of – and consequently, more vocal about – seemingly highbrow matters like civil liberties and free choices.

A survey of 13 emerging markets by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in Washington, DC, the middle classes consistently give more weight to free speech and fair elections than do the poor, who are more concerned about freedom from poverty.

But India had democracy before it had vast wealth and the Chinese middle class was more likely to demand political liberalization prior to the 1989 Tiananmen protests than it is today.

The argument can be extended to Dalian, which is a prosperous town that has reaped the dividends of Beijing’s economic growth. And so overthrowing the Chinese government in favour of a new democratic order is not a burning priority for the city’s middle class. In fact, rural people in China who still do not receive the desired benefits of the nation’s economic boom are more likely to support democracy than the urban middle classes, who are just starting to express themselves on issues of corruption and environment. So what explains the recent spurt in street activism?

Manu Joseph, the editor of Indian news weekly magazine Open, calls India’s anti-corruption movement “a self-righteous middle-class uprising”. In a conversation with a television panel, he said the shock success and the scale of the protests were partly because they were broadcast round the clock on cable TV, the staple diet of the middle classes.

Elsewhere in Asia too, the focus on corruption, environment and governance reforms suggests the current middle-class activism is more of a protest movement towards better service delivery for the middle classes rather than a push for political revolution.

But in most emerging economies, corruption is not a legal matter; it is a highly political one. It is seen as both the cause and effect of undesirable politics. Hence, there exists a real possibility the present middle-class protests — against corruption and service delivery shortcomings — could shape a larger transformation movement in their respective nations.

For that to happen, the middle classes would not just have to ensure economic growth, but also select the most suitable tool for achieving their goal. As long as the middle class in Asia believes that they owe their present affluence to the present day political order, the present protests will not uproot political templates.

Over the years, the Western idea that political freedom is essential for economic freedom has lost credibility in the East, especially in China. The present financial troubles of Europe and the US may further discourage the middle class of Asia from effecting a systemic change.

(9 December 2011) — More than 3000 government officials from over 160 countries agreed to a new international architecture for aid last week in the port city of Busan, South Korea. The Fourth High Level Conference on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4), which ended on December 1, was aimed at improving the way official development assistance (ODA) is being delivered to the poor.

What was achieved however was a declaration on how to do better, with the harder work of adopting concrete actions, time bound commitments and measureable targets deferred till June next year.

Yet some are encouraged by the outcome. New donors such as India, China, Brazil and Russia acceded at least in principle to international best practices on how aid is to be delivered.

They have vehemently resisted throughout the conference to being held to the same  standards as the traditional donor countries, arguing that tying aid to transparency, accountability and monitoring mechanisms would hinder rather than facilitate aid delivery.

In the end, a compromise was found in the declaration recognising that “the  principles,  commitments  and  actions  agreed  in  the  outcome   document  in  Busan  shall  be  the  reference [for these countries] on a voluntary basis.”

“It’s a big step forward that China is at the table, but it’s a pity that they aren’t yet ready to promise to act on what they say,” said Antonio Tujan, chair of BetterAid.

Critics have pointed out repeatedly that China exhibits a remarkable lack of transparency on the ODA it provides, especially to Africa, where it conducts business with regimes such as Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe. China has never released data related to aid, apart from one white paper this year that revealed that it had given about US$40 billion in ODA over the last six decades. Much of that aid has gone to African countries where Beijing has growing interests in oil, minerals and other natural resources.

However, China is increasingly aware that its “mercantile approach” to aid is meeting resistance, Andrew Mitchell, UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, said on the conference sidelines.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State was less diplomatic, cautioning in her keynote address during the conference for “the recipient nations [to…] be wary of donors who are more interested in extracting their resources than in building their capacity”. Though she did not mention any name, the general consensus was that her barb was aimed at China.

According to Professor Deborah Bräutigam in China, Africa and the International Aid Architecture published by the African Development Bank, China and India along with Russia and Brazil are blurring the boundaries between aid and commercial investment, undermining the hard-won consensus that aid should be devoted exclusively to reducing poverty.

Still, there is a strong demand for Chinese assistance in Africa.

“A lot of African leaders say that with Western donor countries, they just end up having negotiations after negotiations after negotiations, but with China, things happen,” former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair explained.

With the increasing aid largesse of these fast growing developing countries donors, things will keep happening.  Countries such as China and India do not give out official annual ODA figures but estimates put the total aid flow from the emerging donors at US$11–41.7 billion, making up 8-31% of global gross ODA. Going by the higher estimates, China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia give more ODA than half of traditional OECD donors.

The largest donors by volume in 2010 were still the UK, France, Germany and Japan and the US, which continued to be the largest single donor with net ODA disbursements of US$30.2 billion.

However, “the politics have changed”, Paul Okuma, head of Secretariat Africa Civil Society Organization Platform on Principled Partnership, told Inter Press Service. The European Union and the US are no longer the only drivers of development aid.

“The thrust for all development actors is to get along with China to support the need of the state, which is growth. The option we face is to work with citizens in developing countries to be more aware of their own development effectiveness,” said Okuma.

“This is the lesson in Busan.”

(16 December 2011) — On 16 December 1971, the Indian army forced the ‘unconditional surrender’ of 90,000 Pakistani troops occupying East Pakistan after a decisive 14-day operation in support of the independence movement, giving birth to the nation state of Bangladesh.

At the end of British rule in the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the region east of India was made part of Pakistan, on the basis of their common faith in Islam. However, despite the fact that the two regions on either side of India shared the same religion, deeper socio-cultural differences existed between them right from the beginning. This subsequently gave rise to student movements in favour of greater autonomy for East Pakistan 13 years after the formation of the larger Pakistan state. By 1969, the protest snowballed into a nationwide movement.

In the elections of December 7, 1970 the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman-led Awami League won 160 out of 162 seats in East Pakistan, making Awami League the largest party in the Pakistan National Assembly. But the ruling military leadership of Pakistan blocked the Awami League from forming a government. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declared independence from Pakistan and led a mass non-cooperation movement against Pakistani military leadership from 26 March 1971, which is celebrated as Bangladesh’s Independence Day ever since.

The Pakistani military leadership retaliated brutally and massacred thousands of Bengali speaking citizens in Dhaka city over the next several months – forcing up to 10 million people taking refuge in India. A Bangladeshi government in exile was formed during the nine month struggle, even as the Pakistani leadership imprisoned Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in West Pakistan.

In December, India, which provided significant moral and material support to the East Pakistani independence movement, launched a massive offensive against the Pakistani forces in East Pakistan and ended the West Pakistani occupation forces within two weeks. On December 16, 1971, Lt. Gen A. A. K. Niazi, Commanding Officer of Pakistan Army forces located in East Pakistan signed the Instrument of Surrender.

News of surrender of the Pakistan army spread like wildfire across the new country. People danced on the roofs of buses and marched up and down city streets singing the new nation’s anthem, Sonar Bangla (“Golden Bangladesh”). Carrying pictures of their beloved leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, people brought out green, red and gold banners of Bangladesh and hoisted them atop homes and official establishments.

The erstwhile Pakistan Observer newspaper, renamed The Observer, published its first issue in independent Bangladesh on December 18, 1971, with the screaming banner headline “Bangladesh comes into being”. Pakistan eventually recognised Bangladesh in 1974.