Pak-US ties in doldrums
🕒 2 years ago
January 4, 2018 IST
If one were to look at the 70-year old trajectory of relations between the United States and Pakistan one would conveniently describe them as of master and servant. Once we were called a cornerstone of American foreign policy — most trusted alley of Washington East of Suez where the Americans had air bases and footholds to carry out their anti-communist operations. These imperialistic concessions were given to them by Field Marshal Ayub Khan in exchange of military assistance and political legitimacy. Forty years down the road Pakistan has been rendered into tombstone of that foreign policy.
To understand Pakistan's relations with United States — especially when they are in total mess — one would like to refer to two extremely relevant books. President Mohammad Ayub Khan's book, Friends Not Masters — a sort of shikwa (Complain) with the super power for its treatment of its most trusted ally. On the opening page of his autobiography he gives his quote that says it all about relations that rose to sublime heights and then fell to the state of being ridiculous. His words "People in developing countries seek assistance, but on the basis of mutual respect: they want to have friends not masters". Ayub Khan learnt much too late in the day the meaning of American phrase — "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
In his treatise on foreign policy "Myth of Independence", Zulfikar Ali Bhutto further sizes up from where Ayub left in his book, Pakistan's bitter exploitation by the United States through its ingress in various institutions including defence. Based on his experience of being a key member of Ayub government as well as its foreign minister, he states that the situation Pakistan found itself in was such that every decision of any importance, even as regards matters that ought to have been of purely internal concern, was affected by some aspect, real or imaginary, of international relations, especially of commitments to the United States of America. Even some times American interfered in the posting of Section Officers. He became a thorn in the eyes of the American when in 1960 as Minister for Fuel, Power and Natural Resources he negotiated with the Soviet Union for an oil agreement. It was significant since it was first break thorough towards improving relations with Moscow. "I was convinced that the time had arrived for the Government of Pakistan to review and revise its foreign policy."
Once we were called a cornerstone of American foreign policy — most trusted alley of Washington East of Suez where the Americans had air bases and footholds to carry out their anti-communist operations.
Ayub Khan was totally sold out to the Americans that he allowed them air base near Peshawar to fly their spy planes for surveillance over the Soviet Union until the day when Russian fighters caught American spy plane U-2 piloted by Gerry Powers and brought it down to the ground. Soviet Premier Khrushchev was so furious that he red-pencilled Peshawar and threatened to destroy it in case of repetition.
ZAB as Pakistan's foreign minister changed the direction of foreign policy and diversified defence procurement. He took Pakistan closest to China despite the fact Ayub offered India "joint defence against the common enemy from the north" during 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict to please American President John F. Kennedy. Pakistan owes it to Bhutto's wisdom that not only it has become self-sufficient in defence when previously it suffered repeatedly from US arms embargo.
While all his efforts to diversify and have an independent foreign policy met American resistance, it was his fast track pursuit of nuclear programme after break up of Pakistan in 1971 and Indian explosion of a nuclear device — that got Americans so angry that he was communicated he would be made an horrible example and the person who later in 1979 executed this threat was Army Chief General Ziaul Haq.
Pakistan's foreign policy fell from the sublime to ridiculous when it became a pathetic extension for pursuit of American strategic interests vigorously followed by General Pervez Musharraf. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had warned elder Bush in 1989 not to sustain and build Taliban as they would grow into Frankenstein impossible to control. As you sow so shall you reap. Both Americans and Pakistan are paying through their nose for helping a religiously fanatic force to bring down communist Soviet Union.
Notwithstanding rhetoric of American leaders like President Woodrow Wilson fighting a war to make world safe for democracy and the like, in foreign policy of a nation it is its national interests that matter most. Corner stone of American foreign policy has been the Monroe Doctrine. It first spelled out in 1823 briefly American policy as isolationist and that it would not allow European colonial powers to enter or interfere with states in the North America. President James Monroe asserted in his annual message to Congress: 'The American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers.
Being cornerstone as it is, it has remained a key factor in American foreign policy whether it is cold war, a standoff with the USSR over Bay of Pigs or its current pursuit of geo-strategic interests by creating uncertainties around the world. Its war on terror on sexed up dossiers to attack and destruction of Iraq on its mythical possession of weapons of mass destruction, invasion of Afghanistan since Taliban allegedly posed a threat to its security after 9-11, President Trump's New Year offensive against Pakistan — are all a manifestation of the super power's failure to tame Afghan Taliban to bring them around to serving its free-market imperialism aimed at seizing the Afghan resources.
One wonders who would tell President Trump that in diplomacy nice words matter more than shooting from the hip. Pakistan's foreign minister has rightly told American president "no more" of his undiplomatic nonsense. It is good to know that Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has called for National Security Committee meeting. However, it would be more appropriate to take the matter as suggested by Opposition leader Khursheed Shah to the Joint Session of the Parliament, to debate American jingoism and how to counter it effectively. Remember, Parliament's decision to stop NATO supplies after Salala incident brought the Americans on their knees.
(Daily Times, Lahore)
Pak also has an ace or two up its sleeve
Princess's tragedy
By Aritry Das
For years India has grappled with the tag of being the 'most dangerous country for women'. Successive governments introduced measures, but there is increasing evidence that they don't work – and are counter-productive. Indeed, in key Indian states, cases of sexual violence are on the rise.
The Constitution of India mandates that as a federal union of states, law and order issues remain primarily with state governments, unless there are overarching issues such as terrorism. This results in many states trying different methods to tackle growing violence against women, and creating a range of other problems rather than solutions.
States like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra are the top states for registered rapes and sexual assaults, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a federal body that collates statistics across states. These state governments are introducing new measures to increase women's safety, but experts say their moves are not addressing root causes and systemic failures in India's creaking criminal justice system.
As many as 38,947 rapes were reported in 2016, which was a rise of 12% from 2015. The number of cases reported under "sexual assault, harassment and molestation", was 84,746 nationally. This is the second-most common crime against women after "domestic violence" cases.
When Uttar Pradesh chief minister Ajay Singh Bisht, (Yogi Adityanath) came to power in 2017, he decided to tackle the problem of women's safety by creating the controversial 'anti-Romeo squad', with police roaming in civil dress to surveil public spaces to keep a check on street harassers (also known as "roadside Romeos").
The squad was eventually disbanded. But following a spate of rapes of minors, Bisht directed the police to revive the squad with the new power to issue a warning 'red card' to 'suspected harassers'. If a person is caught twice doing a similar act, he will face criminal proceedings.
The squad had earlier drawn flak after reports surfaced about them targeting and publicly shaming young men, giving moral advice to couples, while some were made to do sit-ups or had their heads shaved in public.
Vaibhav Krishna, a Senior Superintendent of Police in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, told Asia Times that police officers for 23 anti-Romeo squads were receiving gender sensitization and training programs to help them handle cases better.
The squad's further empowerment has raised concerns. Reports of the squad "moral policing" couples and a subsequent increase in sexual violence cases indicated that the measure was not working, according to PoonamKaushik, a women's rights activist and general secretary of PragatisheelMahilaSangathan.
In the neighboring state of Rajasthan, crimes against women under all sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) jumped by around 40% and rape cases rose by 30% in the first five months of this year compared to the same period last year. This happened despite the government setting up its own version of the anti-Romeo squad in 2018 with policewomen on two-wheelers.
"In Rajasthan, the government has not set up enough women's help desks or One-Stop Crisis Centers [to assist rape victims]. Instead, they are trying to create these mechanisms [anti-Romeo squad] that are working against women being in public spaces due to moral policing," said women's rights activist KavitaSrivastava, who played a key role in the framing of the Vishakha guidelines to address sexual harassment at workplaces.
Now the Rajasthan government plans to set up special investigation units for crimes against women.
Delhi, meanwhile, had at least five rapes reported every day last year, according to NCRB data. So, the state government wants to boost safety by bringing more women into public spaces through free metro and bus rides, and installing 300,000 CCTV cameras. The Delhi Police, which reports to the Home Ministry, also launched a motorcycle-fleet of female cops to patrol the streets called Raftar.
But it is hard to spot this patrol squad on the road, according to Jaya Velankar, director of Jagori, a women's organization that works to make city spaces safer. She also pointed out that unless roads are safe, free public transport won't work.
Data from Delhi Police shows that sexual violence against women has only marginally decreased in recent times. In the first six months of 2019, reported cases of rape (IPC 376) were 973, down from 1,005 cases in the same period in 2018, while cases of assault on women with intent to outrage her modesty (IPC 354) decreased by 172 and insults to the modesty of women (IPC 509) decreased by 101.
Madhya Pradesh was the first state to propose the death penalty for men who rape girls under the age of 12, back in 2017. But violence against women has not gone down. Rape of minor girls in the state made headlines throughout June this year. Now the government has taken an initiative to introduce GPS tracking devices and emergency "panic buttons" in passenger vehicles such as buses and taxis.
Maharashtra assigned a 2.5-billion-rupee (US$36 million) budget for women's safety initiatives. But sexual violence cases have risen despite this. But a survey by non-government groups Akshara and Safetipin found that 44% of areas in Mumbai, the state capital, were unsafe. It said women were only safe to walk on 22% of Mumbai's streets.
This year the Maharashtra government finally proposed safety measures such as setting up SOS hotspots, tracking apps and installing more CCTV cameras.
However, feminists are not convinced that surveillance leads to greater safety for women or a loss of autonomy.
The rising number of crimes has put state lawmakers in a difficult position and they have criticized the police, who then discourage women from filing cases, Velankar claimed. But a higher number of reported cases also meant that more women were coming out to report violence and governments now had greater responsibility to assure they get justice, she said.
The implementation of a major national scheme to increase women's safety is also not faring well. Recent reports revealed that between 2015 and 2018, states and union territories used less than 20% of the 8.5-billion-rupee ($124 million) budget allocated to them under the Nirbhaya Fund, which supports schemes for women's safety. The fund was set up in the aftermath of a brutal gang-rape of a paramedical student in New Delhi in December 2012. Delhi, which has the highest rate of crime against women, fared the worst by using only 0.84% of the 350 million rupees it received.
"The Nirbhaya Fund is used as per proposals from different departments of the central and state governments. It will not be implemented if there is no will to do so," a senior federal official of the Ministry of Women and Child Development told Asia Times on the condition of anonymity.
Experts say government initiatives and implementation of laws won't create change if a culture of impunity has made the criminal justice system weak. Kaushik noted that some of the worst accusations against the police stem from recent rape cases of minors in Unnao and Kathua, where they are alleged to have bowed to pressure from people of influence to bury cases and evidence.
The Unnao rape victim, who claimed she was a minor at the time of the incident, tried to self-immolate last year due to the police not registering her complaint against a BJP lawmaker. In the Kathua case verdict, four police officers were convicted among the six accused in connection to rape and murder of an eight-year-old Kashmiri girl.
Another major hurdle that stops victims of sexual violence from getting justice is the low conviction rate in India, which is a mere 25.5% for rape and just under 22% for sexual assault and harassment, according to NCRB data.
(Courtesy: atimes.com)
By Harinder Baweja
Pakistan has for long sponsored terrorism in?Kashmir. But is it enough for India to point to "causality", without introspecting on the fact that Kashmir has a long litany of documented human rights violations that have gone unpunished?
Think about it. Why does India get prickly each time allegations of human rights abuse in Jammu and Kashmir are placed at its door? Is it because there is some truth in the allegations? Does India have a lot to hide when it comes to violations committed by its men in uniform?
Dismissing an updated report by Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which faulted both India and Pakistan for not improving the situation in Kashmir, a ministry of external affairs (MEA) spokesperson said last week, "A situation created by years of cross-border terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan has been analysed without any reference to its causality."
Reflecting India's indignation at being called out, the spokesperson said, the report "seems to be a contrived effort to create an artificial parity between the world's largest and most vibrant democracy and a country that openly practices state-sponsored terrorism."
Let us get this out of the way first.
Yes, it can be said, with no hesitation at all, that Pakistan has for long sponsored terrorism and will likely continue to practise its "bleed India through a thousand cuts" policy. It has suffered humiliation at the hands of the United Nations Security Council, which recently declared Jaish-e-Mohammad chief, MasoodAzhar, a global terrorist. But that tag too is unlikely to lead to the Pakistani deep State severing its ties with the jihadi outfits it sees as "assets."
But is it enough for India to point to "causality", without introspecting on the fact that Kashmir has a long litany of documented human rights violations that have gone unpunished? The Valley, in fact, has erupted in anger each time the men in uniform have crossed the line, but justice – that ever so important balm for a population as alienated as Kashmir's – has mostly stayed elusive.
Let's talk about the two occasions when the Valley boiled over with anger.
First, in 2010, Kashmiris took to the streets after the Indian Army, in a fake encounter, killed three civilians and passed them off as infiltrating terrorists. The gross violation was proved beyond a doubt. The unsuspecting civilians had been lured to Machil, a forward sector along the Line of Control, and killed in cold blood. Despite an Army court martial pronouncing five of its men guilty and sentencing them for life, the Armed Forces Tribunal suspended the sentence, arguing that civilians ought not to have been in a forward location, wearing "pathan suits".
Just like in 2010, when over 100 protesting youth were shot dead, in 2016 too, the civilian toll crossed 100 after stone pelters – angry with the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani – took to the streets. Kashmir gave vent to deep anger and betrayal – not only because Wani was eliminated – but because the trust deficit between the Valley and Delhi had eroded over years, and reached break point.
The pellet gun became the symbol of oppression. It blinded, maimed and killed. The OHCHR report that India summarily dismissed, pointed to the basic tenets of injustice: "There is no information about any new investigation into excessive use of force leading to casualties. There is no information on the status of the five investigations launched into extrajudicial executions in 2016… No prosecutions have been reported."
Kashmiris live with this reality every day. Why must brazen killings go unpunished? More importantly, why lash out at a report that questions excessive use of force?
The Kashmiri wound is deep and it has festered for too long. One major step forward would be to reduce the repressive security measures. Instead of negating charges of abuse and human rights violations, India ought to take steps towards setting up a truth and reconciliation commission. Why not encourage public hearings in which victims and their families are encouraged to speak?
Reaching out and admitting to violations will help rebuild trust. It is not enough to merely look at figures that point to a reduction in infiltration. The problem now centresaround home-grown militants. Violations only fuel the cycle of violence.
Admit, address and provide justice, for Kashmir is not a piece of real estate, to be ruled by force.
(Courtesy: Hindustan Times)
By Dr Arif Maghribi Khan
"All patients are mad. All psychiatric medicines cause sleep." Yes, this is the common perception in Kashmir. While the fact remains that according to easiest classifications of diseases, there are two types of psychiatric ailments – neurotic and psychotic. In neurotic diseases, patient does not lose contact with reality.
The patient can tell you his or her name, address, locality correctly while in psychotic ailments, patient's contact with reality is lost and he or she lives in world of their own. Such patients often report seeing angels, strange figures, or hearing voices or sounds, which nobody else sitting with the patient sees or hears.
One example of psychotic ailments is schizophrenia, the prevalence of which is as low as 0.5 per 1000, while ailments like depression, anxiety, phobia form the bulk of psychiatric ailments. Even in this day and age, when all the world of knowledge and information is at our fingertips, we as a society have not been able to differentiate between the two.
So the stigma remains attached with psychiatric ailments thus delaying diagnosis and treatment. It is because of this stigma, people visit psychiatric settings with faces covered or masked. Young adults and children fear to disclose to their parents if they suffer from depression or anxiety disorders, which leads them to live an impaired life, wherein they struggle with issues like loss of interest in studies or even loss of employment as their inability to concentrate consistently tears apart their social and professional lives.
Parents are there to discipline and guide children but not to make them fear depression. Another problem hitting psychiatric healthcare in Kashmir is the myth that all medicines prescribed by psychiatrists cause sleep, while the fact is that psychiatric medicines work by increasing, changing or blocking activities of neurotransmitters.
Nerves carry information from the body to the brain and vice versa. The brain is composed of roughly 86 billion neurons. Chemical messengers called neurotransmitters carry messages between neurons to help the brain receive the information, decide what it means and execute a reaction. Neurotransmitters are responsible for emotional regulation, pain perception, motivation, concentration, memory energy, mood, sleep patterns, libido. Any imbalance can result in Depression, Nightmares, Mental Fatigue, Anxiety, Impaired cognition, attention, and arousal, Apathy, Lack of motivation, Poor attention, and Fatigue. Most of the time a qualified psychiatrist uses anti-depressants which do not cause sleep, in first few months of treatment depending upon the psychiatric ailment anxiolytics, also known as 'tranquilizers' are used.
So let's stop assuming that all medicines cause sleep and we will be dependent on them for rest of our life.
The biggest challenge faced by doctors today and specially psychiatrists is that due to easy availability of internet most patients start Google searching medicine for 8 minutes prescribed by a doctor who studied medicine for 8 years, fact is that not all information surfers get on medicine by Google search is authenticated. Patients are well advised to seek such information from doctor rather than what is searched on internet or what a specialist from other field like education or engineering has to say!
We need to fight epidemic of psychiatric ailments including drug abuse on basis of science and not search on internet. It's as simple as that, to aware common people doctors, counsellors from field of mental health need to work vigorously in community to clear myths and mist surrounding psychiatric ailments. We need to give patients of anxiety disorders or drug abuse respect and not scare them with unfounded information. Also next time we label some person as mad for being stressed kindly read this survey of again "Nearly 1.8 million adults (45% of the population) in the Kashmir show symptoms of significant mental distress according to a comprehensive mental health survey conducted by the medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) between October and December 2015. The research was done in collaboration with the Department of Psychology, Kashmir University and the Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (IMHANS).
(Author can be mailed at [email protected])