Peacemaking in poppy lands

In less than three weeks from now – on April 3 and April 4 – 26 leaders from 26 NATO countries will clink glasses in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany. Over glasses of pinot noir and pilsner, the NATO buddies will celebrate their 60th anniversary summit. It has also been 26 years since the embarrassing disintegration of the Soviet Union. Hence the two-day celebrations! The clink of burgundy glasses notwithstanding, NATO is caught up in quick sands in Afghanistan. In a recent well-argued policy paper F. Stephen Larrabee, Distinguished Chair in European Security, Rand Corporation, goes on to deduce that NATO's very reputation is at stake in Afghanistan.

NATO seems to be losing it in the craggy hills and poppy meadows of Afghanistan. Since the invasion of this beautifully desolate country in 2001, NATO has lost close to 600 personnel. Taliban, rejuvenated and resurgent, backed by stealth elements in Pakistan’s notoriously naughty Inter-services Intelligence [without whom the cold war might still have been on] is back in business. The hugely influential American think-tank Brookings Institution [which everyone at Washington reveres] accurately sums it up: The south [of Afghanistan] is in worse shape. For the last two years, British, Canadian and Dutch troops have been fighting desperately to stabilize Kandahar, Helmand and Urzugan provinces against a determined Taliban based across the border in Pakistan.

Mullah Omar’s recent statements point to the audacity and confidence of Taliban. The one-eyed boss of Taliban [good plus bad] says that NATO forces will leave defeated shortly, like the Soviets in 1989. Omar has gone to the extent of offering NATO safe passage out of the country. All independent reports coming out of Afghanistan indicate that Taliban is encroaching steadily into the provinces around Kabul. In any case President Karzai’s writ is limited to the capital only. He faces elections in August and has begun to make tough noises. He has lost his mentor’s [US] blessing, which is openly calling him a useful idiot. When news reports in American and British newspapers start calling a foreign puppet government corrupt, it should consider its days numbered.

Amidst this escalation Obama, caught up neck deep in the recession ravel, is planning a charm offensive in Afghanistan. He is poised to increase troop levels pretty soon, perhaps by as many as 30,000. Tariq Ali, the brilliant British intellectual perhaps rightly points out that Obama advisors on Afghanistan are not on the button. One reason why NATO won’t succeed in the country is because they are by and large seen as complete aliens, talking an imperial language. They don't know anything about Afghanistan. Neither the language, nor the culture. Importantly the shelf life of any foreign army in Afghanistan has historically been limited.

Holbrooke is the special envoy in the region. Now the guy did help resolve Bosnia after the Balkan war. Since his arrival, there has been a sudden change in the American lexicon. The term ‘enemy combatant’ [made infamous by that Texan brute] has been dropped now. Suddenly there is good and bad Taliban. How does one determine who’s good and who’s bad Taliban, I asked the Afghanistan Ambassador to India, Sayed Makhdoom Raheen today. ‘Those who owe their allegiance to the constitution of Afghanistan and agree on a participatory democracy constitute the good Taliban’, Mr Ambassador replied. We can’t afford to lunch with that dreaded Omar, he chuckled to make it easier for me to place the bad Taliban. Simple. [Journalists are so dumb!]

Afghans have always been warriors. They have been weird in equal measures. Today, nearly 30 years after he was killed in a communist coup, Afghanistan’s president Mohammad Daud – who overthrew his cousin King Zahir Shah in 1973 and became the country's first president -- was reburied in Kabul. Since 1700 30 men have ruled Afghanistan [Karzai being the 30th]. Of these, only four served out their terms and died a natural death. Others were dethroned, assassinated, imprisoned, deposed and killed, deposed and exiled, deposed and hanged, beaten to death and so forth.

The country continues to baffle.

Sameer

Rock the party

Now this is rare. As unusual as hen’s teeth. Our generation has seen no live performances. The famed Pakistani Sufi rock band Junoon – means madness in Arabic and obsession in Urdu – performed on the banks of the glistening Dal. A very enthused audience jived to Salman Ahmad, the lead singer, as he crooned hit upon another hit. In the VIP enclosure, Farooq Abdullah [an adrenaline high ex-CM] swayed to the hybrid tunes. The police chief soon joined Abdullah in the fun. Girls, in nearby enclosures, screamed at the top of their voices, cheering on the songster. Boys clapped wildly. The boatmen in the Dal raised their oars in a distance. Music filled the May air of Kashmir.

It was manna for the entertainment starved Kashmiris. 4000 people attended the much hyped-up peace concert. VIPs, children of bureaucrats, friends-of- the-children-of-bureaucrats, students bussed form various missionary schools in Srinagar and a footloose crowd. Security men -- comprising of the local cops [who help erect and maintain the barricades that separate the dignitaries from commoners], the CRPF [who watch over the vehicles of VIPs and can -- alas -- only listen to the tunes from the parking lot] and commandoes [who maintain a hawk-like vigil while the notables tap feet with the songster] – were present in great numbers.

Not surprisingly a great deal is being made of the rock and roll jamboree in Srinagar. It is being made to appear like a prelude to peace. Junoon -- the harbinger. The symbolism is already in place. A Pakistani band singing Sufi rock. The correlation is not too hard to fathom. Former bad guys turned good guys. Former Sufis to radicals -- back to -- Sufism. We just need to join the dots.

Connections apart, music -- no doubt -- is soulful. It is levitating. And no one perhaps needs it better than the Kashmiris. But one is compelled to question the timing of this little show. Kashmir is in a state of flux. We live in tumultuous times where cases of severe human rights violations have not been properly investigated. Where people continue to suffer on a daily basis. A dance jig by Dr Abdullah or a joyous shriek by some top official’s daughter, however shrill, at the Dal concert cannot be called peace.

They may briefly tell you that Junoon's music soared from the shores of Dal. They might as well add that it soared higher than the elegant poplars that line the high-security hotel lawns in which the band played. They won’t tell you that a few miles away hundreds of orphans sleep early – in the Kashmir Yateem Trust – because their parents were lost to the violence years. Their moist, unloved eyes deserve our respect. As do thousands of parents whose children disappeared over the years and no one – none of the VIP’s, none of the police chiefs, no judge present in the music concert – ever tells them anything about their whereabouts. Their parents’ agony – a sad legacy of war -- needs our sensitivity. They require our attention. And solidarity. Not the rock star – Salman.

Let me put this straight. I am not being sardonic here. I admit that there are many recreation outlets available to Kashmiris despite their daily brushes with violence. So you might as well argue -- why should I take offence at a harmless peace concert? Do we stop laughing because people have suffered? Or because they continue to suffer.

The answer is a big no. We must indeed try and live our lives full on. A music band complete with its gear – drums and guitars and microphones – playing in a strife-torn place, with a crowd swaying to them indeed makes great headlines. It also sends out a message. Everything is fine. Normal. There is nothing wrong in this manufactured message only that it is NOT correct.

Scratch beneath the glossy surface – the lush lawns, the imposing mountain backdrop, the legendary Dal, good-looking people, Farooq Abdullah's romps, rich brats hollering [they don’t talk in Kashmiri, by the way] – and you have the real picture. Old men humiliatingly frisked on the roadsides, village elders slapped in front of village gatherings, scores of war orphans, people carrying the sick in horse-carts with a lantern at night, dis-appeared young men, mass graves.

Scratch a little more and you have the real Kashmir. Villages with no electricity, cities with no roads, forests with no trees. Widespread corruption. No awareness for the protection of environment. A slow and painful death of the Kashmiri language in urban Kashmir. Ziltch intellectual curiosity.

Amidst all this a concert looks terribly out of place. Of course no one in the valley will tell you that they have a problem with these shows. ‘It brings peace here,’ some buffoon might tell you. Really, you struggle to say.

We desperately need a truth and reconciliation committee. We need to seriously atone. We need to learn to forget, forgive and forge a completely new beginning. We also need to be sensitive to the plight of so many of our people.

That is step one and we haven’t achieved it yet.

Rock concerts can always follow.

Sameer