Panama Papers Scandal: Disqualifying Nawaz Sharif for Deception is Fair

Hopefully these proceedings will set a robust process into motion and annihilate Pakistan’s corrupt dynastic politics for good …

Skeletons in the closet have led to the premature demise of Nawaz Sharif’s government yet again and his third premiership has ended in disgrace. But is history repeating itself? The question is especially interesting given that it was “strike three” for Nawaz Sharif. On the third and final occasion, dismissal from the solemn office of prime minister carries the further indignity of disqualification for life. Of course, questions also arise about the exact motivations of the judiciary in disqualifying a democratically elected leader, one who was close to setting a benchmark by becoming the first ever prime minister to complete a full five-year term during Pakistan’s seventy-year history. The ball must get rolling somewhere and the Supreme Court set a powerful precedent for a zero-tolerance approach to the use of deception in politics. However, it remains to be seen whether the high standard adopted by the Supreme Court will be applied across the entire spectrum of Pakistan’s dirty politics which is in dire need of cleansing.

It was an uphill struggle for Nawaz Sharif because he was practising deception in proceedings regulated by the very Supreme Court his PML-N party ransacked in 1997 when photographs of Muhammad Ali Jinnah were desecrated. One problem for the court is that it has many skeletons in its own closet because it has habitually upheld brutal dictatorships applying a perverse “doctrine of necessity”. Rightly or wrongly, the former three-time prime minister has become the second world leader to become the casualty of the Panama Papers, but at least Iceland’s former prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had the dignity to resign promptly. Last year’s disclosures led to the pronouncement of the Panama Papers judgment which established the Joint Investigation Team. Memorably, Khosa J drew unflattering parallels with The Godfather and mocked Nawaz Sharif by recalling the maxim that “behind every great fortune there is a crime”.

Dr. Muhammad Reza Kazimi: U.S. – Pakistan Relations: The Downside

Schoolgirls and women are coming out to throw stones. The Kashmir situation has never been so bad …

Since Washington has started an inter-agency review of U.S. funding and support to Pakistan, as stated by the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson¹, it is about time that a Pakistani re-appraisal takes place. Since Pakistan doesn’t have a Foreign Minister, perforce our appraisal shall also have to be inter-agency. To begin that process, it is necessary to set the record straight. In the latest development, an Indo-U.S. Joint Statement has designated Kashmiri freedom-fighter Syed Salahuddin, a global terrorist.² So once again there are three main issues between the United States and Pakistan: (1) Kashmir, (2) Terror and (3) Nuclear Proliferation. All three are underpinned by the presence of 2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. First, let’s come to terror. In the House Foreign Affairs Committee addressed by the Secretary of State, Congressman Dona Rohrabacher said: “Pakistan is acknowledged by most of the people I’ve dealt with, as the source of terrorism in that part of the world.”³

We cannot determine the source of terrorism, without fixing the origin of terrorism, Hilary Clinton, while Secretary of State, had admitted to the role her country had played by stating: “The problems we face now, to some extent we have to take responsibility for having contributed to it….the people we are fighting today, we funded them twenty-five years ago.”⁴ What Hilary Clinton was referring to was the U.S. resistance to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The U.S. needed Pakistan as a front- line state, in order to combat the U.S.S.R. troops using the Afghan refugees in the first instance to commit acts of terror in the invaded country. Pakistan was adjacent to Afghanistan India the apple of the U.S. Congress’ eye was not. This was a strategic consideration.

M.A. Shiwani: Democratic Witch Hunts

Pakistan’s political system is finally beginning to show that it has the capacity to uphold democratic ideals.

The robustness of the credentials underpinning democratic political systems has been the subject of great examination for decades. Democracy has, since its introduction, been labelled a mechanism of the bourgeoisie — one that retains all political and economic control in the hands of the owners of capital but creates the perception that power lies with the masses. Indeed, many democratic systems have provided proof of the inherently flawed concept of democracy but in that sense, no political system in the contemporary world has been exemplary of the principles that it champions. It is, however, important to acknowledge that in the last two years, political events across the globe have shown that democracy may not be that bad after all. In August 2016, Dilma Rousseff— the then president of Brazil was impeached because she allegedly manipulated the federal budget, increasing the political backlash the government was receiving because of its various corruption scandals.

Such probes and allegations have now become a regular occurrence in Brazil with Michel Temer — the current president of Brazil, recently becoming the country’s first president to be formally charged with a crime while in office. In similar fashion, South Korea’s apex court recently upheld the impeachment of Park Geun-hye who became the country’s first democratically elected leader to be forced from office by its parliament over a wide range of corruption scandals. These events are visibly proving that separation of powers between the government and the judiciary and ensuring that the judiciary is genuinely autonomous will bear fruit in the form of accountability; even in states that have grueling histories of rampant corruption.

M.A. Shiwani: A New Weapon to Fight the War on Terror

The Council of American-Islamic Relations has reported that Islamophobic abuse in the US, or hate crimes against Muslims, have risen by 91 percent in the first quarter of 2017 as compared to the same time last year.

It is a dark truth that since the War on Terror made its debut in Operation Enduring Freedom, terrorism in the world has only increased. Localized, reactionary militias have now evolved into transnational entities that wish to subjugate the world under their repressive regimes and the fact that no country in the world is now immune to terrorism is testament to the rapid, global diffusion of radical ideologies. A simple factual analysis will show you that interventions on the basis of the War on Terror — military combating an ideology, has only added fuel to the fire of radical Islam. Fighting terrorism with guns is no longer a viable option. Observably the recent, ‘liberation’ of Mosul, Iraq is not cause for celebration. The new weapon that needs to be used for fighting terrorism is social reform. Academics across the world have stressed that military intervention has only strengthened terrorist organizations and that curtailing the effects of terrorism, without addressing its causes, will result in failure. Perhaps nothing I write will be different from what has already been written.

I do, however, hope to provide a broader picture to show that the future trajectory of terrorism and radicalization can only be curtailed by curtailing the recruitment mechanisms of terrorist entities. The New York Times recently published an article entitled Migrant Maids and Nannies for Jihad that reports on how social media is being used to radicalize maids working in Indonesia and Hong Kong. Interviews with several maids that ended up joining networks of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) revealed a consistent cycle that resulted in radicalization: dislocation from home and the resultant isolation of Muslims that are not welcome in the societies that they work in causes a “spiritual dryness” within them.

‘The Dynamics of Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and US Relations’: A Talk by Javed Jabbar

No crisis today remains regional. There is no such thing as isolated or insulated regions … watch video

The fragmentation of the Middle East into a collection of interest groups has become a defining feature of the region’s political economy. “Palestine is essentially an Arab country, and must remain so,” was the uncompromising response given by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947 to requests made by Albert Einstein, at the behest of Zionist leaders, to support the creation of the state of Israel. Seven decades later the atmosphere is rather different and Modi has comprehensively cemented ties with Israel by becoming the first Indian prime minister to make an official visit to Israel, a premier supplier of arms and military technology to New Delhi. The passage of seventy years has resulted in the rise of new power brokers such as the Saudis who are accused of being the primary supporters of state sponsored terrorism in an official report, the publication of which is deliberately being withheld by the British government as it does not want to damage booming arms sales to Riyadh: bombs used to kill innocent civilians in Yemen. All this squares up poorly with Trump’s claim that Iran is the foremost pariah state.

The ongoing ostracism of Qatar shows that the Saudis want to call the shots on everything on their terms. In a session chaired by Dr Masuma Hasan, Javed Jabbar gave an insightful talk on the mechanics underpinning Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s relations with the US. The event was widely reported in the media and extracts of the reportage are available below. Jabbar bemoaned Saudi hegemony and recalled that the 13 sweeping demands that Saudi Arabia had made of Qatar sounded frightfully similar to a power point presentation conjured up by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company – a favourite of King Salman bin Abdulaziz. According to Jabbar, one cannot ignore the fact that only six years ago, Saudi Arabia and Qatar jointly invested in an Israeli company called IDA Holdings.

M.A. Shiwani: Of Wars and Contractors

Deploying mercenaries in Afghanistan will not only roll back the progress that has been made over the past decade, but it will also severely threaten future prospects for peace …

As the Trump Administration moves closer to releasing its policy review on Afghanistan, it has recruited Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater (now Academi) and Stephen Feinberg, owner of DynCorp International to assist the Pentagon in strategy formulation. DynCorp and Blackwater are both Private Military Companies (PMCs). In other words they are mercenaries. In accordance with its manifesto, the administration wishes to curtail the deployment of additional US troops in Afghanistan. In response, Prince and Feinberg have, rather unsurprisingly, presented a proposal that substitutes US troops with personnel provided by PMCs. Even though the Pentagon was recently given permission to deploy more troops into Afghanistan, Trump aides are adamant not to use the same policies that failed under the last two presidents and are thus seriously considering the proposal put forward by Prince and Feinberg.

Let us briefly go through the shadowy history of the United States’ use of private armies and military contractors. After the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, it was tasked with rebuilding the Afghan National Police (ANP) to fight the Taliban. Since Iraq and the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was slowly moving up the national security agenda, the US wanted to exit Afghanistan as quickly as possible while also using the bare minimum amount of resources required. It thus decided to employ DynCorp International to train the ANP, with the State Department giving DynCorp $24 million to set up training camps across Afghanistan.

M.A. Shiwani: The Islamic State, 2.0?

It is very clear that state-building and strategic development is no more a priority for the Trump Administration.

After a nine-month-long military campaign and a resultant refugee crisis that has affected more than half a million people, Mosul, according to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, has finally been “liberated” from the hold of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). What is left behind, however, seems indifferentiable from the ancient, obliterated walls of Troy. This, the prime minister claims, is still a “great victory for all of Iraq and Iraqis”. For anyone remotely familiar with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, such claims are traumatizingly similar to those made by the United States of America following its, ‘success’ in the war. It seems as if the result of Iraq’s previous, ‘liberation’, whereby Saddam Hussein was hanged and then Iraq was left for dead — much like a beast disposes of a carcass after it is done clawing on its flesh— have been forgotten.

Here, it is important to note that the situation in Iraq after the war of 2003 was worse than the pre-war situation, with 70,000 people cumulatively losing their lives under Saddam Hussein but more than 100,000 Iraqis being killed only in 2013. Is it, then, not alarming that the, ‘successes’ of 2017 are strikingly similar to the, ‘successes’ of 2003? Indian Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri — a former chairman of the United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee, in his book, Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos presents a, ‘viscous cycle of perilous interventions’, where he proves that one military intervention for ‘liberation’ is usually cause for a subsequent military intervention, also for, ‘liberation’.