Help Wanted?

Byline by M J Akbar: Help Wanted?

The key to understanding the latest turn in Anglo-American policy towards India and Pakistan is that recent incidents of terrorism in Britain owe as much to local Muslim anger about Kashmir as they do to Iraq or Palestine. A good percentage of British Muslims are Mirpur-Kashmiri in origin, with links to jihadi groups in Pakistan, and provide an abundant source of British-Muslim suicide terrorists.

Tony Blair, anxious to sew some of the tatters on his reputation before he leaves office, is keen these days to address the "root causes" of Muslim anger, and Kashmir is right up there along with Palestine. He has made a well-advertised trip to Palestine. Kashmir is more complicated. But by any logic, George Bush is the better interlocutor, since he has excellent personal relations, as well as political leverage, with both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf.

This perhaps was why it was Bush who raised the issue of Kashmir during his talks with Pervez Musharraf on Friday 22 September in Washington, rather than the other way round. It is logical for Musharraf to bring Kashmir up. Why did Bush do so? I am not revealing any state secret. This comes straight from Bush himself.

This nuance has not yet reached the attention of Indian public opinion, which is understandable. It also seems to have eluded the Indian establishment, which is less explicable.

During his comments to the media after the talks, Bush said that he "admired" Musharraf’s leadership and praised him as a symbol of moderation, according to the news agencies, AP and AFP. He then added that he "raised the Kashmir issue with the Pakistani leader". Bush went on to ask Musharraf: "What can we do to help? What would you like the United States to do to facilitate an agreement? Would you like us to get out of the way? Would you like us not to show up? Would you like us to be actively involved? How can we help you, if you so desire, to achieve peace?"

It was an interesting, and even remarkable, array of options. Musharraf did not tell us what his answer was, but he certainly would not have kept silent. Instead of Pakistan asking for America’s help, it was America asking what it could do to help. We will learn about the implications of these remarks when they begin to take effect on policy. Musharraf informed Bush that his meeting with Dr Manmohan Singh in Havana had been "excellent" and that India and Pakistan were "moving on the Kashmir dispute especially". The story from Delhi so far has concentrated on the "joint mechanism" for a concerted effort between India and Pakistan on terrorism. The stress has not been on Kashmir, but maybe Musharraf understands what happened differently.

Bush linked Kashmir and Palestine. He agreed that the US could not impose a settlement in either dispute. But, he added, "We can help create the conditions for peace to occur. We can lay out the vision. We can talk to world leaders — and we do."

The September pirouette began a few days earlier with a slight thud, almost inevitable since Bush and Musharraf have to negotiate through so many thickets to find common ground. But it quickly picked up momentum and indeed some style, since both knew what they were doing. That their meeting ended in laughter and expressions of admiration says a great deal about the confidence Bush has in Musharraf, who has proved a master strategist. Who else but Musharraf could sell the deal he made with the Taliban as another tactic in the war against terror? And Bush bought it.

But was it a one-way swap? Did Bush have something to sell as well?

Pakistan has been in the news in an American campaign season (the elections to Congress in the first week of November) for the worst reason on Bush’s long list of problems: Osama bin Laden.

Five years ago, America went to war against a Taliban-led Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden, the self-declared mastermind of 9/11. If the Taliban had handed over their permanent guest to America, the case for an invasion would have collapsed. Five years later, Osama is still free, and questions are being asked. On the weekend before 9/11 I happened to be on a CNN programme called At War This Week. I pointed out that while America, despite satellites and the most sophisticated military and intelligence presence in the region, claimed that it could not find Osama, Osama seemed perfectly capable of finding America whenever he wanted. He had just reasserted this ability by sending another tape, replete with his familiar themes, to Al Jazeera in the week before the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Did these tapes reach Doha on Alladin’s magic carpet? It was common knowledge that the tapes went from Osama’s residence to Qatar by old-fashioned, almost antique, Cold War tradecraft: letter box drops and a courier system. If British and American intelligence agencies, honed on Cold War espionage, could not discover a fairly porous human chain, then one had to suspect either their ability or their intention. It is a tough choice.

Such were the dilemmas that persuaded Wolf Blitzer of CNN to ask Bush, during an interview, whether he would send American troops in pursuit of Osama if he received reliable intelligence that Osama’s safe haven was in Pakistan. Bush replied in the affirmative. Was he taking Pakistan agreement for granted, or had a deal already been made with Musharraf that American troops would be permitted to use Pakistani soil for their operations? Musharraf objected to Bush’s unilateral decision, but this clearly had no impact on the bonhomie of their meeting. American troops are already in Afghanistan, with close communications support from Pakistan, and the border isn’t etched on stone.

Diplomacy is about give and take, and Musharraf has taken back with him to Islamabad some forward movement on Kashmir from his linked trip to Havana and Washington. The sentence he used at the White House — "we are moving on the Kashmir dispute especially" — was not accidental. The use of "especially" was particularly deliberate. We are not aware of the full meaning of this word. Perhaps we will discover that after the first phase, that of a "joint mechanism", is in place.

The "joint mechanism" between India and Pakistan on terrorism opens the way for a bilateral body that has the ability to monitor and investigate terrorist incidents in Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of India, since this mechanism has been designed to allay Indian concerns about Pak support for terrorism in India. This is an extremely bold move, since Delhi has co-opted the country it has accused of terrorism into the solution of the problem. The presence of Pakistan police officers in Delhi and Mumbai, and certainly Srinagar, will arouse unprecedented levels of interest. The reaction of Indian intelligence officers will be even more interesting.

No one sane would want to sabotage a solution to the Kashmir problem, and if George Bush and Tony Blair can help attain one, then may they get half of the Nobel Peace Prize money that awaits Musharraf and Manmohan Singh. The tough part is the definition of a solution, even after we have managed to define terrorism. The official Islamabad line, repeated as frequently as you want to hear it, is that the violence in Kashmir is not terrorism but a war of liberation. Words words words: and how much blood flows between them…

The disconcerting fact about the Havana deal is that it is a marked departure from the line that Delhi has been taking for at least a year. The immediate reaction to the Mumbai train blasts, for instance, was to blame Pakistan. Whether wise or not, that certainly begs a question: what has happened in the weeks since that incident to persuade Dr Manmohan Singh that Islamabad can be a partner in the solution to our most difficult and painful problem? Every citizen has the right to know the answer, and judge its credibility, otherwise suspicion will provide its own set of answers. Before a solution obtains the grandeur of a multilateral approval, or a bilateral agreement, it must pass the sieve of a national, unilateral acceptance.

The first base is home, and it always comes first.

Holier than me

Byline by M J Akbar: Holier than me

An intriguing part of the conversation between the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and "an educated Persian" now made world-famous by Pope Benedict XVI, is that the Persian seems to have no name. There is no mention of it in the speech made by the Holy Father during his "Apostolic Journey" to the University of Regensburg on 9/12.

The Persian must have been an intellectual of some importance if he was good enough to merit an audience with an "erudite" emperor. Does his name exist in the original text, since it was "presumably the Emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402"? Was the name mentioned in the version produced by Professor Theodore Khoury, which the Pope has read, and which he used in a speech on a critical aspect of a sensitive theme at a time of conflict, on the Islamic doctrine of "holy war"? I ask because names lend greater credibility to text. Was the name omitted because Muslims of the educated kind preferred anonymity? Not at all. Imam Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun were household names at the time of this dialogue.

There are other uncertainties in the Pope’s speech, which purports to be about "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections" in which he quotes Manuel’s ignorant, but, given the history of the early and medieval Church’s continual diatribe against Islam and its Prophet, predictable view. This discussion on "holy war" appeared in the seventh conversation and was "rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole". It is interesting that Pope Benedict should select what was "rather marginal" for emphasis and ignore the apparently more substantive issues that were discussed. What is genuinely disconcerting is that the Holy Father should accept Manuel’s taunting, erroneous and provocative depiction of the Prophet’s message without any qualification. Pope Benedict is not at all disturbed by phrases as insulting as "evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". This is utterly wrong, as even a cursory understanding of Islam would have made apparent. Are the Pope’s speechwriters equally biased or ignorant? The Pope treated Manuel’s observation and commentary as self-evident truth.

I have a further question: Why didn’t the Pope quote the Persian scholar’s answer to Manuel? It was a conversation, after all. Are we to believe that the Persian gave no answer, that he did not challenge such a rant? He could not have been much of a scholar in that case. If he did not reply he justifies his anonymity.

I am not erudite enough to have read the dialogue in the original Greek, or Professor Khoury’s edited version of it. I can only go by the Pope’s speech in Germany.

Some uncertainties can be explained by the distance of six centuries, as for instance the sentence that the conversation took place "perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara". The fact that we are reading Manuel’s record, rather than the Persian’s, also explains why it lays more stress on the emperor’s view of theology.

What is aggravating is that the Pope has been free with assumptions, and liberal with its first cousin, innuendo. The peaceful piety of Manuel becomes an indictment of Islam, which is held to be violent in preference and doctrine. The innuendo is cleverly expressed, indicating that some effort has been taken to be clever. The famous verse of the Quran, that "There is no compulsion in religion", is juxtaposed with the proposition that "According to the experts, this is one of the Suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat". The implication is that when he was not under threat, he drew out his sword and went on a rampage. This is the kind of propaganda that the Church used to put out with abandon in the early days, adding gratuitously comments about believers and "infidels". This is the line that those who have made it their business to hate Muslims, use till today. But the Vatican had stopped such vilification, and it is unfortunate that Pope Benedict has revived it.

If he had consulted a few experts who understood Islam, he might have been better educated on "holy war".

It is absolutely correct that no war verse was sent down to the Prophet during his Mecca phase. Despite the severest persecution, to the point where he almost lost his life, he never advocated violence. There are innumerable verses in the Quran extolling the merits of peace, and a peaceful solution to life’s problems — including a preference for peace over war. The Quran treats Christians and Jews as people of the Book, despite the fact that they did not accept the Prophet’s message. It praises Jesus as "Ruh-Allah", or one touched by the spirit of Allah (this is the best translation I can think of). Mary, mother of Jesus, is accepted as virgin, although the Quran is equally clear that Jesus is a man, and not the son of God.

The war verses are sent to the Prophet only when he has been in Medina for some time, and has become not only a leader of the community but also head of a multi-faith state. War, in other words, is permitted as an exercise in statecraft, and not for personal reasons, including persecution. Further, it is circumscribed with important conditions. Surely no one, including Pope Benedict, believes that a state cannot ever take recourse to war? Indeed, the history of the Vatican is filled with war. The Quran’s view of war, as an answer to injustice, certainly merits more understanding than censure.

Manuel’s view is better understood in the context of his times. He was monarch of a once-glorious but now dying empire. The Ottomans had been slicing off territory for centuries; the first Crusade had been called by Pope Urban II three centuries before to save the Byzantines from Muslim Turks. The heart of the empire, Constantinople, was now under serious threat. If Tamerlane (another Muslim) had not suddenly appeared from the east and decimated the Ottomans, Constantinople might have fallen during that siege which so depressed Manuel. It was hardly a moment when the Byzantines could have the most charitable view of an Islamic holy war. What is less understandable is why Pope Benedict should endorse a fallacy.

The present Pope is not a successor to the great and wise John Paul II. He is heir to predecessors like Pope Nicholas V who issued "The Bull Romanus Pontifex" in January 1455. This Holy Father sought "to bestow favours and special graces on Catholic kings and princes, who ... not only restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens (that is, Muslims) and of other infidels, enemies of the Christian name, but also for the defence and increase of the faith vanquish them..." He then praises King Alfonso for going to remote places "to bring into the bosom of his faith the perfidious enemies of him and of the life-giving Cross by which we have been redeemed, namely the Saracens and other infidels..."

And so on. This was the philosophy that created the Inquisition in which Muslims and Jews were killed and driven out of Catholic kingdoms in Spain and Portugal after the Christian reconquests. Do note that Muslims did not have any exclusive copyright over the use of the term "infidel".

I have no particular desire to introduce 16th century dialectic into contemporary attempts to bridge inter-faith misunderstanding, but it is pertinent that Nicholas V became Pope some sixty years after Manuel’s conversations with the unnamed Persian. Equally, there is no point in quoting from, say, Dante’s rather bilious descriptions of the Prophet and Hazrat Ali for that language belongs to a different world.

A suggestion to those who believe in an "international outcry". Hyper-reactions tend to suggest nervousness. Islam is not a weak doctrine; it is built on rock, not sand. Reason is a more effective weapon than anger.

What a Fall

Byline by M J Akbar: What a Fall

I first saw the Niagara as a child, in the Readers’ Digest, in the form of a retro wavy-line illustration for an article on a man who jumped over the Falls in a barrel. It was the kind of article that used to make Americans, who owned the Digest, rich, and Indians, who read it, literate. The chap inside the barrel was either mad or French, or possibly both, but he survived to become an international icon. Why did he dare death? Perhaps because circus had not been replaced completely by television as family entertainment, and the world still bred stuntmen who could put their heads in a lion’s mouth for a living.

He could not have made that jump from the American side of the Niagara Falls, or he would have landed on hard rock and reached purgatory rather than the Digest. The Niagara river sweeps to the edge of the precipice with a brisk, choppy urgency, and then divides unevenly on either side of an island before descending with a crash, a roar and a cloud into the gorge. The American falls are linear, much smaller, and hit huge boulders of rock.

The Canadian falls form a horseshoe over which an olive green river changes colour suddenly at the invisible line of descent, turning an exquisite jade interspersed with powerful, broad rolling columns of milk-white. Ever so often, foam ascends up the fall, like a salmon cascading up a perpendicular storm. The gorge is enveloped by a mist that rises into a vague, unthreatening, unsteady mushroom cloud.

Remarkably, the river turns placid very quickly, as if energy has rebounded into the air rather than travelled forward with the water. The man in the barrel understood that if he developed just a little extra momentum, he would be pushed by the force into the calm.

However, despite being mad, or French, he had the gumption not to try and repeat the stunt.

I was told of a child of five who fell from a boat gone amok on the regular part of the river, and survived because of his life vest and the unmentioned possibility that the Almighty had personally drafted his destiny. One acrobat strung a tightrope through the wet cloud, from one end of the horseshoe to the other, strapped a man, seated in a chair, on his back, began to cross, stopped halfway, placed the man-plus-chair on the metal wire and walked on to the other side. By the time he returned to save his partner in the act, he was still sane, but his companion had turned into a gibbering idiot.

There is something in the Niagara air that encourages dubious behaviour. For some reason — possibly a holiday mood — I began surging with puns. Let me offer you a particularly poor one. The Canadians have the Niagara Falls; the Americans have the Niagara Fallout.

One should have known by the signage of the first restaurant to greet us in the city of Niagara: Bar B.Q. Village. Restaurant. Indian Cuisine. Pakistan and Bangladesh Foods. Halal. There were more nations represented in the Sunday tourist melee than sit in the United Nations. A walk through the promenade was a journey through a dictionary of languages. Of those I could recognise, if not understand, Gujarati was at the top, closely followed by Tamil. If American is given its correct due as an independent tongue, and the subcontinent variety formally disowned by Oxbridge (see placard), then English came pretty low on the list. Identities swarmed by: an Arab pushing his mother in a wheelchair; Afghan women in headscarves gossiping on the railing; a bald man in a red Suisse T-Shirt; a Latino honcho with a padded crotch. The most visible faces were Chinese and Indian, a display of the new purchasing power of their surge-economies. Judging by the number of Louis Vuitton bags, Indians and Chinese are either getting richer at a fabulous pace or Chinese counterfeiters have taken over the commerce in quality brands.

Canada and America share the Falls. There is the occasional spiteful jibe from America, which is uncomfortable with being the junior partner, but the wonder of the world is peacefully shared. What would have happened if the Niagara had been on the border of India and Pakistan? War would have broken out over the small patch of green separating the two sections, for starters: if we can fight over the frozen water of a glacier, we can certainly go to war over the flowing torrents of a fall. Media would have constantly described it as the most scenic battlefield in the world. Every evening, frontier guards from the two countries, flaunting military plumes, would have high-goosed to assert sovereignty to the plaintive sounds of some forgotten British Indian Army hymn. The national flags would flutter high. In addition, 30 saffron banners would wave over Shiv temples on one side, and 48 green flags would test the breeze over mosques on the other. There would probably be one shrine at which troops from both countries would forget their differences and pay common homage. The most fascinating aspect of an Indo-Pak Niagara would of course be the fact that there would be no water in the fall. We would have drained the water upstream and diverted it to wheat production. At the bottom of the gorge, dhobis would be washing dirty linen in the trickle that survived the water-hunters.

Capitalism starts where nature ends. Cross the street from Niagara, stroll up a mild incline and you suddenly arrive on a street that makes money out of fear. It is an extraordinary fact that children who do not display the slightest tremor at the ferocity of nature, available free at the Niagara Falls, pay good money to enter Frankenstein’s Gothic-lettering laboratory. The fear-shop managed to mix up Frankenstein with Dracula, but that is a minor quibble. Puns rule on Fear Avenue: a deep baritone voice orders the passer-by to step into Frankenstein’s world to kill time. Across the street, King Tut’s eyes glow a deep red, his slab-shaped beard moves to and fro and periodically he utters a few words which, fortunately, I cannot decipher. Why does artificially induced fear, which needs to cross but an age-line to slip into laughter, work? It must be because the child’s imagination is still pristine, endless, and unburdened by the mundane facts that govern life’s reality. Is age the slow erosion of imagination?

The big debate in Canada is whether the looming labour shortage should be solved by immigration from abroad or more babies at home. (I shall bravely resist the temptation to labour away at another pun.) Canada has enough space, a First World economy and not enough people at the bottom end of the economic pyramid, hence the soft immigration policy. Basically all you have to do is turn up, even using political asylum as your stated reason, hang around for three years and they make you legal. An Indian working in my hotel told me that he had come for a cousin’s marriage 15 years ago, and never returned. There are a million South Asians in Toronto, and Punjabi is their national language. Some turn up to claim political asylum. That is probably why the waiter with a heavy Bangladeshi accent at one Indian restaurant told me that he was from Afghanistan. My sympathies are with this young man. Canada cannot be the happiest destination for Bengali sons whose mothers ordered them to wear monkey caps when the Kolkata or Dhaka temperature dropped in November. The winter temperature in Toronto can stay at minus thirty for months. You need a bear hat around here rather than a monkey cap.

America 1968

Byline by MJ Akbar: America 1968

Washington: America has returned to 1968. On 31 August, a vital deadline at the very top of George Bush’s agenda passed, and no one died at the deadline. Instead, the intended victim was frisky to the point of being cocky. Thursday was the day given by the international community, led by the United States and followed by the United Nations, for Iran to submit to pressure and abjure its nuclear programme. The weight of the Security Council lay behind the ultimatum. Far from cowering, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited over a hundred and fifty journalists to Tehran, including the powers that be from American media, to taunt Bush to a one-to-one debate, lecture America and its allies on good and evil, and litter the world with one-liners. In essence he had asked two questions (to echo Stalin’s question to the Pope): How many divisions does the Security Council have? The second question was to America: How many divisions does the Pentagon have to spare for Iran?

Washington, for a change, did not need additional evidence in its search for the fabled "weapons of mass destruction," this time in Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported this week that Iran continued to produce enriched uranium, albeit on a small scale and at relatively low levels, at its Natanz facility. Iran’s answer remained what it has always been, and one which should be familiar enough to the Indian subcontinent: its nuclear facilities were there only for peaceful purposes.

Good night.

On the domestic front, Ahmadinejad is a touch more forthcoming. He accuses the West, alias America, of mouthing human rights while maintaining the world’s most notorious prisons, and being the source of all the problems we face, while behind him banners declare: "Nuclear Energy Is Our Inalienable Right."

Good morning.

Compared to Ahmadinejad on a nuclear future, Saddam Hussein was an overblown mouse when shock and awe smashed his regime and toppled his preposterous statue. Saddam was always less than met the eye and, like any bully-cum-dictator, vulnerable to a deal. Ahmadinejad is not interested in stupid statues. Everyone who has met him has returned impressed with his intelligence. He could be more than meets the eye.

Strength is a relative matter. You are not as good as your arsenal. You are only as good as your capability. When George Bush was planning the invasion of Iraq, one country that kept very quiet indeed was Iran. Three years later, Iran is doing the talking, and America is wondering what to do. Bush has snared America in a self-made trap, and Iran is laughing all the way to a nuclear bank. It is still a long walk. Iran is nowhere near weapons-making capability yet. But it is on the way.

If there is one alphabet that George Bush would love to have changed in the four-letter word that has begun to haunt him, it is surely "q." He will never say this himself, but everyone around him, both his friends and his opponents, are saying it. There is a palpable sense of regret in Washington that a mistake was made three years ago. The mistake was not going to war. The mistake was going to war with the wrong country. How they wish today that Bush had gone to war with Iran rather than Iraq. This is the unstated, or at least understated, revisionist view. After all, the rationale against Iraq was simulated, so it could easily have been whipped up against Iran — mullahs make a better target for racial profiling in any case than clean-shaven Baathists.

David Remnick of New Yorker gave some hint of this manipulation of the media recently: "...the Administration and its surrogates have issued a stream of disinformation about intelligence and Iraq; paid friendly ‘columnists’ like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher tens of thousands of dollars to parrot the White House line; accredited to the White House press corps a phoney journalist and ex-prostitute (Jeff ‘Bulldog’ Gammon aka James Dale Guckert) as a reliable pitcher of softball questions; lightened the Freedom of Information Act requirements; and pioneered a genre of fake news packaged video ‘reports’." He goes on, but I won’t.

If only all this had been directed against Iran ... Bush might even be triumphantly holding a few traces of future weapons of mass destruction before the cameras, possibly protected by some spacesuit type of clothing.

Iran’s current confidence is based on some solid parameters. Start counting.

1. The Pentagon’s infantry capability is seriously degraded by Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the British, who always brought up the tail, have stopped wagging. There have been cases where infantry units sent on leave have been turned back after barely touching down in the United States, such is the shortage of troops.

2. The proponents of the air-power-is-sufficient school have plaster on their lips after Lebanon. Israel’s failure to destroy the Hezbollah despite overwhelming air power has made the old wisdom the new wisdom: air power alone cannot bring victory. Ground troops have to follow through. So what will the bombing of Iran achieve, except a political fallout that might go out of control?

3. On the ground, the two most powerful militias in the region are allies of Iran: Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah in Lebanon and Moqtada Sadr’s militia in Iraq. By one of those ironies made in heaven, both are also functioning members of their respective governments — and so leave America in the unhappy position of not knowing quite what to do. Sadr’s men inflict serious casualties on Iraq’s America-sponsored Army whenever the Army attempts to control them. America’s human losses in both Iraq and Afghanistan are rising at haemorrhage levels, without a bandage in sight.

4. The credibility of both America and its principal ally in the region, Israel, has been damaged. There is a new mood in the air. This has affected America’s political credibility as well in the world’s toughest neighbourhood.

5. Washington’s seemingly inexhaustible treasury has been discovered to have limits. Bill Clinton, who has begun campaigning for his wife Hillary, has gone on the offensive. He left a budget surplus, he says: Where has this five trillion plus dollar deficit appeared from? Misadventures, of course.

6. The sanctions aimed against Iran are either innocuous or unimplementable. The best that Nicholas Burns (he who negotiated the nuclear deal with India) can come up with is sanctions against nuclear parts, a freezing of Iran’s overseas assets and a ban on the travel of their officials who have anything to do with their nuclear programme. Iran has long removed its assets away from American reach, and Vladimir Putin has already asked why any sanctions should apply to Iran’s peaceful nuclear sites, as for instance at Bushehr, where Russia is supplying equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. No one has any answer. Burns incidentally did tell American television that even India had agreed to sanctions against Iran. He is cashing his chips even before the nuclear deal with India has gone through.

Nuclear poker is not easy when you don’t have too many cards.

The most important change in America is that of public opinion. The majority seems finally to have lost its appetite for war, and does not believe that Iraq has anything to do with the war against terror. A desperate Bush is raising the most extraordinary demons. He now considers the "Islamic" threat to be as dangerous as Fascists, Nazis, Communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century. Each one of those threats had the power and institutionalisation of a state. Bush’s "Islamic fascists" have become as big a danger to the world as Communists without being in power in a single country, from the shadows. For Bush, "It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."

This is what makes America 2006 akin to America 1968. The mood had begun to shift against Vietnam in 1967, but it was in 1968 that the shift became decisive. The response of the establishment then (which was Democratic) was to call the battle against those dirty Vietnamese Communists the "decisive ideological struggle of the 20th century".

It didn’t work in 1968.

It won’t work in 2006.

End of the Beginning

Byline by MJ Akbar : End of the Beginning

The war that has been restarted is one without either boundaries or mercy, since the fire that is heating this cauldron is wild.

Washington: On Friday 25 August the Washington Post published a startling story from its Baghdad bureau. I can do no better than to quote its opening paragraph: "British troops abandoned a major base in southern Iraq on Thursday and prepared to wage guerrilla warfare along the Iranian border to combat weapons smuggling, a move that anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called the first expulsion of US-led coalition forces from an Iraqi urban center. ‘This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!’ trumpeted a message from Sadr’s office that played on car-mounted speakers in Amarah. ‘We have to celebrate this occasion!’"

They did. They celebrated a holiday and thanked God.

There was an exploding mine wherever I looked in that opening paragraph. The British Army was going to abandon a base to undertake "guerrilla" operations? Against insurgents who thrived in the shadows? Weren’t the British supposed to be the heroes and role models who had won the war in the south while the Americans were swatting moles all over the rest of Iraq?

Details painted the larger picture. Local resentment had boiled into anger when British soldiers entered a mosque to make arrests. Insurgents, clearly loyal to Sadr, began shelling the British base, Camp Abu Naji, which had 1,200 soldiers and was on the border of Iran. In simple language, the British withdrew from the camp, which was looted when they left, so clearly the withdrawal was less than orderly. The decision may have been encouraged by the fact that "the 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Army’s 4th Brigade mutinied".

In the British military dictionary this was called "repositioning".

In the Arabic military dictionary this is called "defeat".

The story went on to say that local Arabs of Amarah called on Sadr’s soldiers all day to congratulate them on their victory. And just in case you were wondering, Moqtada al-Sadr was one of the leaders who were instrumental in the formation of the present government in Baghdad.

Are you confused enough, or would you like some more information?

The only stark, non-confusing facts on the Post page were in the list of American dead that was placed just beside the story, based on a Pentagon notification. There were seven more American names, bringing the total of American deaths to 2,617. On the Op-Ed page, columnist David Ignatius reported from Baghdad that in July more than 1,500 Iraqis had died in Baghdad alone. He added, however, that tough action by the Americans had led to a marked improvement. Far fewer Iraqis were dying.

The British retreat from Amarah is not the beginning of the end. That would be an exaggeration. But, as was remarked of a different war, this does seem to be the end of the beginning.

It is an assessment that suits Washington as much as Baghdad. You get a strong sense that the beginning that George Bush made, along with Tony Blair, five years in Afghanistan and three years ago in Iraq, has come to an end, and they do not know which way to turn. Bush and Blair look deflated. Their faces are tense, not intense.

The question was always dominant, but is now consuming America: why are American troops in Iraq? What precisely is their mission statement? Surely America has not made this huge investment in men, money and national credibility in order to become the policeman of a chaotic Baghdad?

Bush’s answers change as regularly as the seasons. He now thrusts his jaw in the vague direction of television cameras and asserts that American troops will never leave Iraq under his watch, that he will never cut and run. Why? Because the job is not finished. What is the job? If he does not kill terrorists in Iraq, he says, they will come to America to kill Americans.

Unfortunately, where Bush sees terror, most Americans see quicksand.

This narrative cannot be propelled even by the discovery of plots by British intelligence. The 9/11 Commission has now debunked one of the key arguments that took Bush to Iraq, by clearly stating that there was no link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Bush has responded with an unbelievable assertion, that he never said so. Certainly Dick Cheney did, when he alleged that Mohammad Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence agent. You can perhaps get away skating on such thin ice when the voter gives you the benefit of the doubt. It was benefit of doubt that re-elected Bush. But now the doubts have multiplied, and the benefit is streaming in the opposite direction.

Bush still has loyalists who sincerely believe that he did not lie before his Iraq misadventure; but they now concede that he was misled. The distinction is not going to be very clear to the thousands upon thousands of young men, both Iraqi and American, who have died because Bush was either deceived, or he deceived the world. The difference is going to be lost on those Iraqis who were tortured and raped and killed during this war without a mission, as America’s finest journalists are revealing in news reports and books of chilling horror, like the just-published bestseller, Fiasco. Inevitably, the price of war has reached the American middle class: through daily images on television, through a deficit that has crossed five trillion dollars, through gas prices that have jumped and house prices that have dropped. The middle class has kept Bush and the Republicans in power, and there are increasing signs that it is no longer buying the Bush narrative.

For five years Bush and Blair have rather enjoyed their leap into history. Suddenly, in the last few weeks, the politics of the rebound has reached their doorstep. Blair might have the easier journey as he exits that doorstep, for the parliamentary system has sufficient flexibility for change. By next summer, unless he is blessed by extraordinary luck, Blair will be an ex-Prime Minister. Bush will not be ex-President till January 2009, but by next summer he just might be wishing that America had a parliamentary system and he could retire to his ranch. If the Democrats win even one of the two Houses of Congress this November, they will start impeachment proceedings against Bush for misleading America into the septic morass of a war without horizons.

When the objective keeps changing, so does the definition of victory. American soldiers have been more confused than clear in the various campaigns of Iraq, since no one knows who is an enemy and who is a friend.

America is beginning to recognise the price, but the greater cost will of course be borne by Iraq and the region. The war that has been restarted is one without either boundaries or mercy, since the fire that is heating this cauldron is wild. All we need is a few more noble intentions, like the current favourite of some American policymakers: to divide Iraq into three independent nations, for Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. The day a Kurdistan begins to look possible, Syria, Iran and Turkey will send their armies to smash the thought. They will not be squeamish about the blood they will shed. The Kurds are living so far in a zone of calm, but it is the calm of a dead sea.

What options does Bush have? The best option is the most obvious. All the nations of the region, who are staring at a growing disaster, need to sit at a table to discuss what can be saved from this wreck. America needs to be at this table as well, along with France and Russia, and Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. America can bomb rock and sand, draw blood each day from the shadows and comfort itself with passing lullabies, but will not bring peace. Peace will come through collective will and this can only be determined when nation-profiling ends, and diplomacy begins.

An Alaska Diary

Byline by MJ Akbar: An Alaska Diary

Alaska, perched on the crest of the world, has the majesty of royalty. It is therefore best seen at a slight distance. Get too close and you get soggy from the drool of hauteur; go too far and you miss the grandeur. The liner moving north from Vancouver swims effortlessly within continual view of mountains bursting with forest, punctuated by fingers of water that have curved inland. When, with nightfall, we retreat into the anonymity of ocean, a brilliant moon rises to create glittering, shimmering, luminous pathways that stretch deep and long into the seas. The stars become signposts for meteors. You stand at the centre of a gigantic silence, a silence that is almost still. The endless universe wheels and orbits without a sound. Our minute life on earth is enveloped in sound, whether in the broken discord of jagged human conversation, or the circular, addictive, hypnotic music of waves.

We are on a cruise from Vancouver in Canada to the Hubbard Glacier, a six-mile wide and 300-foot wall that strides a horizon of sea, mountain and sky. We find our feet again after 38 hours on water, on the small, midway island of Shee, at Shee Atika, shortened by European colonists to Sitka. Light rain is indistinguishable from mist, and mist indistinguishable from clouds, which frolic along the slopes of mountains. This was once the capital of Russian colonisers, who came to loot and stayed to loot: the Russian-American Company modelled itself proudly on the East India Company. The Robert Clive of the Russians was Count Alexander Baranov, who built himself a fortune and a palace before he was destroyed by the jealousy of his masters. The streets of pretty Sitka are lined with shops full of junk. Not all the junk was boring: I doubt if you could buy a brown fur thong anywhere except in Alaska.

One minor mystery solved. Why did the Russians sell this vast country called Alaska, commanding the strategic heights of a continent, to the United States in 1867 for a mere $7.2 million? Because Alaska didn’t belong to the Russians, of course. They discovered the land in 1741 thanks to the seafaring of Vitus Bering (hence the Bering Sea), and became rich selling the fur of seal, otter and blue fox to the wealthy Chinese. In 1799 arrived Count Baranov, and was driven out three years later by the Tlingit Indians, whose land he had seized. It is always the return engagement that is decisive (in 1756 Siraj-ud-Daula defeated the British in Calcutta; in 1757 he lost to them at Plassey). Baranov returned in 1804, and that was that. Descendants of Tlingit Indians now help you out of the boat that brings you ashore across the lagoon and help you up the wharf.

While different nations found their own exciting ways to be defeated, the Indians of Alaska may have been the only natives to be destroyed by a curious form of escalating generosity. A chief honoured his appointment by giving what was called a potlatch (is this the origin of potluck?), a feast in which everyone was invited within sledding distance, and every guest was honoured with expensive gifts of skin and cloth. There was no limit to how long a guest might stay. A chief might be reduced to just his own skin at the end of a potlatch. His opportunity came at the return feast, when he expected a bit more than he had given. It is easy, even without a degree in economics, to appreciate that the escalation of perpetually rising expectations doesn’t work. Demand exceeds supply, leaving inflamed egos that erect barbed wires across unity. It must have been easy for Robber Barons, or even Robber Counts. The American Wild West begins south in the deserts of California made famous by Clint Eastwood and ends in the icy wastes of the north made famous by polar bears. Occasionally, the twain did meet. There is a gun framed on the wall of the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau, the new capital of Alaska, with the caption "C-H-E-C-K-E-D but never claimed. This weapon was checked at the US Marshal’s office in Juneau, June 27, 1900 by the notorious gunfighter Wyatt Earp.

Left by ship on June 29." The saloon was carefully nurtured to look like a Hollywood set pretending to be real. A multi-jacketed pianist occupied a corner, and shot off an occasional joke between the tinkle-tonk ragtime. A queue of tourists jammed the entrance, eager for one more memory for the folks back home. It seems that the Red Dog Saloon always made more money out of the tour boats than the locals, which may explain why the centrepiece is a life-size local mannequin’s jeans being torn off by a bear chasing the former up a pole.

The saloon has the good sense to have a sense of humour. One sign puts it simply: "If our food, drinks and service aren’t up to your standards, please lower your standards." A second placard points out that "The cooking has never killed anyone, but the miners have hung more than one cook." The miners were the gold diggers who arrived in a rush and more often than not left in despair. The gold rush began 13 years after America bought Alaska, when two drunks, Dick Harris and Joe Juneau, set out from Sitka on a pay of four dollars a day and the rights to two stakes out of three. Before they discovered gold, however, they discovered "hooch", the mind-stunning liquor made by the Hutsunuwa tribe. The town was first named Harrisburg, but Harris turned out to be such a crook that they changed the name to Juneau. Both drank away their fortune, possibly making it good fortune in the process. They died penniless. As you leave the saloon, there is a practical order: "Gold dust dropped on the floor belongs to the sweeper."

You cannot see a glacier move, but I might have seen one melt. The Hubbard Glacier stretches back 90 miles from the seashore. Glaciers are not icebergs; they form because snowfall on mountain ranges exceeds the rate at which snow melts. The snow presses forward, until the unstoppable force meets the immovable sea, and huge storeys of ice fall off like roaring waterfalls into the water. Our huge ship moves slowly into the sea passage that ends in the blue-streaked-with-brown ice wall called Hubbard, a survivor of the mini ice age in which 10 per cent of the earth’s area was covered with ice.

There is a good scientific reason why the ice is blue; naturally, this escapes my understanding. But it is a blue that makes the colour synonymous with cool. As the glacier gradually looms nearer, our ship becomes smaller; proportions determine the psychology of vision. Thunder breaks out at eye level; eyes swivel right to follow the sound and see ice crashing from the block. A cold wind that seems to rise from the roof of the glacier swarms around our heads. Sunlight melts into the blue and fades into the brown; the sea has been chopped up into tiny pieces of water that jump and rest with polite serenity. The glacier is a solid, stolid, impassive giant now, which suddenly snorts out ice instead of fire. The ship turns and slowly circles the giant, and it is time to turn back.

The giant gradually diminishes into a pygmy, and the ship becomes large again.

Lost Plot

Byline by MJ Akbar: Lost Plot

So five years after 9/11 are we back to the beginning? Not quite. Complexity has been replaced by simplicity, but the magnitude of ambition remains steadfast. However, there are subtle changes in the big story, and fresh curves in the small ones: the diameter has changed, there is more than one centre in this circle, and the spokes spreading from these centres to the edge have multiplied. One size does not fit all.

The good news I presume is that the plot to blow up ten aircraft over the Atlantic was pre-empted. The police had to move on suspicion and information from the shadows of an uncertain world, so there is a natural degree of scepticism in the absence of hard evidence. But those entrusted with our security need the benefit of doubt.

We hear that the famed British intelligence picked up the first signals as early as last December. It was a long wait, but they surely had their reasons. They had a mole from within the British Muslim community, and they received much better intelligence from Pakistan. During the G-8 conference in St. Petersburg, George Bush went out of his way to praise General Pervez Musharraf for help in the Bush-Blair war on terror. Did this information travel from Islamabad to London around that time?

The focus is again on Pakistan, but that is a known, familiar and legitimate focus for any spotlight. The real worry for Tony Blair should be at home.

Five years ago, he, along with Bush, bombed Afghanistan to destroy the perpetrators of 9/11. This time, almost all the suspects are British-born. Why? What has happened that has alienated British Muslims from Blair? What is Blair going to do now? You can’t bomb the suburbs of London, can you?

Bush and Blair are good at winning a war on the ground. They are experts at losing the battle for the mind. Their firepower is impressive. Their persuasive power is abysmal. There is no mystery in this. No one really believes what they say, because they have made a habit of shifting the truth to define their objectives, or shifting the objective when facts have changed.

Armed action always finds support when it is perceived to be just, which is why there was so much support for the war that ended the Taliban government in Kabul. But five years later, the limitations of even a just war are also obvious. Bush and Blair went to war to find Osama bin Laden. If the Taliban had handed Osama over for trial, the ostensible reason for war would have disappeared. Five years of power later, Bush and Blair still cannot find Osama. Osama bin Laden can find any television channel he wants, when he chooses to send a videotape message. Any journalist from a television channel can get in touch with his group. Those videos do not travel from Pakistan to Qatar on a flying carpet, do they? But the combined might of CIA, MI6 and Pakistan’s ISI cannot find Osama.

The true consequences of the unjust war that Bush and Blair perpetrated, in Iraq, are being measured in slow, painful, bloody, deadly steps. War is a difficult business; occupation of necessity will turn brutal when soldiers come under pressure or succumb to the worst form of temptation, as in cases of rape and consequent murder. Bush and Blair may tabulate death with the cold eye of a statistician. Young men in anonymous streets might react differently. Blair invites so much scepticism that many young Muslims in Britain simply disbelieve that there was a "liquid plot", and that this is another effort to exploit insecurity for political gain. They do not keep such thoughts to themselves anymore. They tell CNN.

Bush has a worse problem. The Democrats in America did not waste much time before wondering whether the timing of the plot disclosure had a political dimension.

Five years down a difficult line, there are too many questions, wherever one looks. A favourite phrase of America and Britain five years ago was narco-terrorism. Terrorists were using the wealth from Afghanistan’s poppy crop to finance their evil. It is sometimes dangerous to lose as effective an alibi as the Taliban. In the five years of Bush-Blair management, Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation has reached a record high. This narcotic is not meant for Afghans, or it would fetch a very devalued price. Its true value comes from the euros and pounds and dollars it fetches in Europe and America. Those are the currencies that keep farmers in Afghanistan happy, and the criminals who run the drug trade in comfort. Have you ever wondered why not a single supply line of drugs from Afghanistan to the West is ever busted by the military forces stationed in Afghanistan? I may have missed the news, but have you ever heard of smugglers being caught and punished?

Failure is terrible, and terribly contagious as well. It wreaks havoc on both foe and friend. High on their own agenda, Bush and Blair blithely ignored one of the real causes of international conflict, and thought that an occasional verbal morsel thrown towards Palestine would see them through their terms in office. They contorted the logic of their own favourite moral horizon, democracy, when free elections brought into power a force they did not want. There was more than one way to deal with Hamas. They chose obstinacy. When you have blindsided yourself, reality becomes invisible.

Their policy towards Palestine was at least partly rooted in contempt for the Arab, born out of the conviction that the Arab could never fight, and even if he did, was no match for Israel. Bush and Blair had absolutely no idea of the forces that they had revived, or given birth to. In five years, Arab governments may have remained their usual static self, but the Arab street has become a different place.

There was a virtual smile on the faces of Bush and Blair in the first week of the Lebanon war, when with characteristic smugness they rushed weaponry to Tel Aviv and gave Israel "time" to finish the job (that is, eliminate Hezbollah) before they defined the terms of a ceasefire. A month later, Israeli tanks lie disabled before shocked cameras. A small paramilitary force of irregulars without a single tank, battleship or airplane, with rockets that were widely dismissed as defunct, has held its own against the fabled might of the Israeli Defence Force. Time has stripped away the disinformation that all sides use during war. For instance, Israel accuses the Hezbollah day in and day out of hiding behind civilians in order to justify the awful destruction of a nation, but no one tells you that Israeli military installations are in civilian areas in north Israel.

At the moment of writing it is unclear how the war will pause (it will not end, it will only pause). But this much is clear. The myth of Israeli invincibility lies buried in the hills of Lebanon. The body language, as well as language, of Shimon Peres, a veteran of every war that Israel has fought, has changed in 30 days. The last statement that I heard him make on CNN had more fizzle than fizz: "We did not start this war, so we don’t have to win it... We have to stop it..." When was the last time that Israel’s media were demanding the resignation of their Prime Minister in the middle of war? There was no last time. This is the first time. The days when an Israeli general could stroll into Beirut, conduct operations at will, and stroll back, are over. The cost of even trying to stroll towards the Litani river has been very heavy.

Problems cannot be solved unless they are first understood. Bush and Blair now give the impression that their sole purpose is to stretch whatever remains of their credibility to last till they have to leave office. They need the enemy they set out to destroy, or the logic of their survival will collapse.

Bush still jumps from one inappropriate phrase to another, unable to see the damage he causes in the process. When claiming the obligatory victory against terrorists who had failed to carry out the "liquid hijacking", he blamed it on "Islamic fascists". I wish someone would tell him that there is nothing Islamic about fascism. Some Muslims are indeed fascists. I could name a few who survived on American cash and goodwill. Why blame Islam for the sins of a few Muslims? Bush and Blair are believing Christians who go to church as often as they can. Does anyone in his senses describe their wars as "Christian wars"?

The sadness is that 9/11 was a historic opportunity to find answers in a spirit of collective sorrow. Instead, all we see is the debris of unanswered questions. Bush and Blair perhaps believe that they can survive on the strength of media headlines. Today’s headlines are so often tomorrow’s boomerangs. Bush and Blair have lost the plot.

Post-prime Minister

Byline by M.J. Akbar :Post-prime Minister

Candour is injurious to the health of any government. This is a widely-accepted non-partisan fact. Any President or Prime Minister who went about distributing truth with the sincerity of the Salvation Army would soon find himself in the Salvation Army. But to treat Parliament like a bunch of gulls is not very good governance either. Opposition MPs may be on the wrong side of the House because of past foolishness, but that does not make them gullible.

Parliament was in an understandable uproar after Justice Pathak found former foreign minister Natwar Singh guilty in an odd sort of way: of having used influence to get the Iraq oil deal, presumably for friends as well as the Congress, but without gaining any personal financial benefit either directly or through his son. Parliament’s anger was over the fact that the inquiry report had reached media before it was shown to Parliament. Dr Manmohan Singh has applied his familiar remedy, yet another committee, this time to enquire. If he thinks that this is a bandage for yet another self-inflicted wound, then he is in some unreal world. He has merely added weight to suspicions that his government and party may have more to hide than the principal accused.

Justice Pathak seems to wear a robe with two pockets. One is a very large pocket. It is stuffed with chits that are so clean that you cannot find anything on them. These are the clean chits he hands out to the Congress. The second pocket is very small. It holds only one chit, an unclean one, soiled with the scrawl of contorted logic. This he has handed to Natwar Singh. There shall doubtless be rewards for doing so. Shall we say, a chance of becoming Vice-President of India next year with the help of this government?

Natwar Singh is being held guilty of doing something which he never denied — writing a letter of recommendation. If this was the standard benchmark of public probity, no Cabinet minister would last in his job. Actually, the biggest money-grabbers in politics never write letters at all. Their word is sufficient guarantee for any corrupt deal.

If Prime Minister Singh really wants to find out who leaked the Pathak inquiry report, all he has to do is telephone his finance minister, P. Chidambaram. Chidambaram is a clever and knowledgeable man who makes it a point to know far more than he tells. I would not advise the Prime Minister to telephone his home minister, Shivraj Patil, despite the fact that the latter is in charge of the police, both the public and the secret police. Shivraj Patil knows far less than he tells, and he doesn’t tell too much.

There is the palpable reek of failure in the high offices of the Manmohan Singh government: home, foreign and finance. Defence is managed ably, because it would be difficult to mismanage this department, but the relevant point is that defence minister Pranab Mukherjee is not interested in his job. He is certain he should be in charge of a more active office, and given the disarray elsewhere, surely he has a point.

The high crisis areas are home and finance. If Shivraj Patil continues as home minister much longer, Mumbai’s Muslims will soon stop worrying about Narendra Modi. The home ministry is taking revenge upon the city’s Muslims, particularly those who are poor (in other words, most of them) for the terrorist outrage on Mumbai’s trains on July 11. Groups have complained to Mrs Sonia Gandhi and while she has given them time, there has been no effort to change the attitude of the home ministry. You can see the seepage of this culture in the shocking and shameful incident in Delhi, where the rooms of a visiting Pakistani delegation were searched by spooks in their absence. The delegation included as eminent a visitor as the human rights activist and lawyer Asma Jehangir. It was kind of Prime Minister Singh to write a letter of apology, but words are less important than action. His letter confirms that the incident did take place, and the home ministry was guilty. Has the Prime Minister held any officer accountable? Is there a departmental inquiry? Will any action ever be taken? Does the home minister have anything to say?

No is the probable answer to all three questions.

The finance minister thinks that his core responsibility is the protection of share prices rather than vegetable prices; while economic reform, the ballast of this government’s declared momentum, has ground to a halt. Strangely, the Congress part of the coalition government has begun to come apart under the pressure of time. Strange, because the Congress has the experience, and wanted to rebuild his support base with effective use of power. Instead, non-Congress ministers are the new stars. Lalu Yadav, who disguises a sharp mind with gallery humour, is now the subject of discourse in management schools. Dayanidhi Maran keeps the DMK flag high. Praful Patel is doing a fine job in a tough ministry. Kamal Nath is the only Congress minister who has enhanced his reputation — and will probably be punished (as Mani Shankar Aiyar was) for being too successful.

The foreign ministry is floating in a vacuum because it has lost its head. This may be a bad pun, but I can’t think of a better one. Jokes may be ill-suited to a time of violent turmoil across the world, but gallows humour has its virtues. There is a fusion of wars in the Middle East, that is not only changing the region dramatically at this very moment, but which could set off fires towards our doors. America and Britain are trapped in a morass they do not understand. Iraq and Lebanon are becoming one war: I wonder how George Bush would have reacted if hundreds of thousands of Shias had gathered in Baghdad to support Hezbollah under Saddam Hussein’s watch. Washington would doubtless have accused Saddam of abetting "terrorists". Well, an Iraqi regime wrought by George Bush and Tony Blair has not only officially condemned Israel but has also permitted the most massive pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in the region. Hezbollah, of course, has turned conventional wisdom on its head and won significant battles against overwhelmingly superior forces armed and re-armed by America; its success will have ground-breaking implications.

The region is in turmoil and the land up to the Nile is in flames. Never has India been so marginalised as under the watch of Dr Manmohan Singh. This is not a reflection of the stature of India in the world, but reflection of the stature of this government. India’s foreign policy is the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, who made this nation synonymous with a virile independence. Four decades after his death, India’s voice has been reduced to an occasional bleat from the shadows. I cannot imagine Nehru or Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi without a role to play at such a moment; but then they never decided that their foreign policy would become "congruent" with America’s.

Ironically, the Natwar Singh letter to the Saddam government is also proof of a time when the Congress was considered a friend of the Arab world. This relationship, built with care and consideration by Nehru and Indira Gandhi, had enough depth and credibility to permit India to improve relations with Israel without affecting its ties with the Arabs. We had become, with time, a unique resource in international diplomacy. The drift from the Arabs began with the BJP, although Atal Behari Vajpayee tried, sporadically, to try and check the drift (relations with Saudi Arabia, for instance, improved dramatically under his watch). Under Dr Manmohan Singh the drift has turned into a directionless swirl. He is clearly a foreigner in the foreign ministry.

The moment has definitely come for the Prime Minister to reinvent his government. If he does not do it soon, Mrs Sonia Gandhi will come under pressure to reinvent the whole government, including him.

Yo, Singh!

Byline by MJ Akbar: Yo, Singh!

Ever since the G-8 summit at St. Petersburg in Russia in late July, I have had a recurring nightmare. This summit will surely go down in history as the Open Microphone Extravaganza. We learnt how precisely President George Bush talks to his friends and fellow leaders when an open microphone conveyed his conversation to the world. He was on neither a protocol nor a grammar leash. He addressed Tony Blair, surely his best international ally and certainly his most obedient poodle, thus: "Yo, Blair!"

Normally, friends tend to be on first-name terms in private and often in public. Bush, in a sign of unconscious superpower superiority, sticks to the surname. "Yo!" is New York street diction, always one syllable short of respectful. But there it was, loud and clear: "Yo, Blair!" It was a summons. Tony Blair obediently cringed, washed his hands with dry air, and talked to "George". A little later Blair asked "George" whether he could go to the Middle East. George chattily told "Yo Blair" not to bother; Condi (the well known nickname of secretary of state Condoleezza Rice) is going, and that should be good enough for a mere Prime Minister of Britain. Blair was suitably obsequious. Bush was at his cheesy best with the microphone live. He told anyone who was listening (unfortunately, the whole world) that Russia was a big country (Gosh!) and at one point, in the friendliest way possible, with no malice whatsoever, used a four-letter word, making life easy for cartoonists for at least one day. It is only fair to report that Bush did not massage anyone’s neck at St. Petersburg. He did that when he stopped in Germany to meet Angela Merkel on his way to the summit. The staid German Chancellor, caught by surprise, looked horrified in the subsequent pictures. We are not privy to her private comments, but Bush seemed very pleased with himself.

India was rising when I was awake, but had risen in my nightmare and had displaced Canada to become a full member of G-8. Washington ignored the Canadian threat to walk out of the North American Free Trade Area, and welcomed Dr Manmohan Singh’s India. This G-8 summit was held at Agra. Dr Manmohan Singh was now Bush’s best buddy rather than Blair, who had disappeared from the picture. Dr Singh, as ever his meek and humble self, was sitting in a corner, a happy smile lighting up his visage. All the microphones were alive. Indian journalists sat in row after endless row in the hall, clutching immobile pads, pens and tape recorders. They had no questions, for they were even happier with Bush than their Prime Minister. The only journalist to ask questions was a teenage reporter from a television channel, who asked three rapid-fire questions and turned to her cameraman to check whether they had enough sound bites for the single minute that had been allotted to non-criminal news on their top-rated television news show. The cameraman nodded in the affirmative. She turned back to Bush and asked if he could please identify himself, and explained with a full sense of responsibility, that she did not want to make any mistakes. Bush grinned, looked back into the half-visible corner, and shouted, "Yo, Singh!" Dr Manmohan Singh shuffled up, washing his hands with dry air, and said in a soft small voice, "George, do you think I could go to Iran?"

"Yo, Singh!" replied Bush, slapping the Indian Prime Minister’s back hard enough to make the latter wince. "India is a big country." Dr Singh smiled profusely at the compliment. "India has nine time zones," said Bush, as he got up to massage the Indian Prime Minister’s shoulders, adding a neck-rub in honour of the special relationship. "I am going back to America tonight, Singh! Gotta sleep in my own bedroom, ya know. Afraid I can’t go to see that old tomb with a baseball cap that you wanted to take me to in the moonlight. Your old Mughal kings made love in tombs, did they? Strange people. We don’t have kings in America! What do you want to go to Iran for? Condi is going. Anything you want to know about Iran or Pakistan, just give her a call. She’s good, Condi. Asks all the right questions." He then gave the sweetest of grins to Condi, and my nightmare ended in streaming sweat.

Thank God it was only a bad dream. Thank God it’s all untrue. Dr Manmohan Singh would never behave like this; never. He is India’s Prime Minister, not Britain’s! If he wants to go to Iran, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, he will tell Air India to keep two jumbo jets ready and off he will go. He will never make India’s foreign policy congruent to Washington’s foreign policy, or, worse, the US Congress’ domestic policy. He will never cap India’s fissile material production just because the White House or the Democrats, willing advocates of the non-proliferation treaty lobby, want him to do so. He will never waste forty or fifty billion dollars in nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes just because Republicans want for their nuclear industry customers with more money than sense. Dr Manmohan Singh sits in a chair once occupied by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. He will never bargain away India’s nuclear defence interests. That was a stupid nightmare. It is daylight now, and the coffee he likes is an excellent brew from South India. There is no way India’s foreign policy is going to be outsourced to legislators on a hill in Washington.

George Bush seems, by the evidence from St. Petersburg, to have slipped into some twilight zone where the real world has been replaced by a portrait painted by self-serving sycophants. What else can explain his comments on the war in Lebanon, heard through that deadly open microphone? (Just a thought, which you should dismiss: did the steely Vladimir Putin’s steely intelligence operatives deliberately keep a microphone alive? After all, there is no condemnation quite like self-condemnation.)

Live microphones have trapped American Presidents before. When Jimmy Carter was in Delhi a generation ago, and Morarji Desai was Prime Minister, he told us precisely what he thought of India’s ambitions. Mrs Indira Gandhi certainly did not need any reminding. Then there was the classic instance of Ronald Reagan threatening to bomb the evil empire when he thought only his pals were listening. The muscle in Reagan’s policies was persuasive enough to unravel the Soviet Union.

But Bush exposed himself as clueless of the complexities that determine war and non-war (there never has been any peace) in the volatile Middle East. At the very least Bush might want to read the Stratfor report (posted on 25 July and available very easily on the web) on the current war in Lebanon. It has not been written by Mullah Longbeard but by George Friedman. I do not know George Friedman, or his ethnicity, but I could give long odds that he has no beard at all. Bush policy in the Middle East has all the forethought of a knee-jerk. It used to be "I know best." That has been replaced by "I know all."

There are people in Washington who see and think, and can detect reality in the cocoon or when it emerges from the shadows of an embryo. Condoleezza Rice is among them, according to those who know anything about her. But it is hard to conduct rational policy when it is constant headbutting irrational conviction. An analysis of the Lebanon war will have to await, at the very least, more than the length of another column. But even a few sentences are sufficient to convey that this, Israel’s longest modern war, will not reach a ceasefire that brings much satisfaction to Israel for the very good reason that Hezbollah will be stronger at the end of the fighting than it was at the beginning. The depletion in its ranks will be more than compensated by new recruits; its arms replenished, and its ability lauded. At least one section of Washington now wants to engage Syria again in Lebanon. This is implicit recognition of what anyone could have predicted, that the vacuum left by the departure of the Syrian Army from Lebanon was not going to be filled by the Lebanese Army.

Dr Manmohan Singh used the correct phrase when he informed Parliament that India was sending Rs 10 crores for Lebanese rehabilitation. He called the region India’s extended neighbourhood. When there is conflagration in the neighbourhood, the last thing to do is make your foreign policy congruent with the whims of an administration that cannot distinguish between a fire extinguisher and firecracker.

Reinvention is the mother of necessity

Byline by MJ Akbar: Reinvention is the mother of necessity

Governments tend to begin to lose the plot in the third year of their terms. That is predictable and comes with the calendar. The trouble with Dr Manmohan Singh’s government is that more than one plot is meandering out of control. In fact, there are so many plots around, that Delhi is in danger of looking like a colony.

The nuclear deal with America has been a principal focus of the Prime Minister. From 18 July last year, every step along the way has been greeted with relief and applause in Delhi, and all scepticism brushed aside as prejudice, every question dismissed as bias. When the committees of the American legislatures endorsed the enabling Bill in June, the reception in Delhi’s establishment was triumphant. If he has done it once, he has done it a dozen times, but foreign secretary Shyam Saran led the cheers. It was clear to the blind that new conditions had been imposed, but this was airily shrugged off as non-binding. This was the term used.

What were the conditions?

From 31 January next year, the President of the United States would provide the US Congress with a report on the rate of production of fissile material useable in nuclear weapons, the assembly of "nuclear-explosive devices" as well as the amount of uranium mined in India. Currently, these are secrets that the Prime Minister is not obliged to share with every member of the Indian Cabinet, and indeed does not. But from next year, we were ready to share it with every member of the US Congress! The deal needs annual approval, and that approval is dependent on Congress getting this report. I may be short of the kind of IQ required to run the Government of India, but one hopefully has basic common sense. What is non-binding about this condition?

The American President also has to tell his legislatures what he has done to "encourage India to identify and declare a date by which India would be willing to stop production of fissile material". What could be more specific than this? Other voices, including that of secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, have confirmed that America does not recognise India as a nuclear-weapons state and that this deal is a process by which India’s nuclear capability can be monitored and kept under control. The exact phrase used by the US Congress is "reduction and eventual elimination".

It soon became evident, that not only were the conditions binding, but the binding was going to begin pretty soon. According to a commitment given by Dr Manmohan Singh to Parliament, India would not accept inspections until all restrictions had been removed. That sequence has been turned upside down. The inspections come first. But the triumphalism of Delhi did not wane.

Suddenly, on the eve of Dr Singh’s visit to St. Petersburg in late July, word was put out that he would express some reservations about the deal to President Bush when the two met. What happened in the three weeks between Delhi’s welcome to the House committee conditions and Dr Singh’s visit to St. Petersburg?

In terms of public perception, the most important event was the anger of scientists who had fathered our nuclear programme, and the support they received from those who were still serving but could not, by the terms of their employment, speak out. Dr Homi Sethna cannot be accused of being partisan, or of bias, or ignorance. Ditto Dr P.K. Iyengar, another former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Suddenly, they were not alone. But the Prime Minister has ignored criticism before, unwavering in his conviction that this is the agreement that will protect the nation in the foreseeable future. He also surely sees it as a historical achievement (as probably does the Bush administration, although for entirely different reasons).

The most credible assumption is that President Abdul Kalam has either written to or had a word with the Prime Minister, and that Dr Singh carried to Bush not his concerns but the President’s concerns. President Kalam has built up extraordinary credibility with the country, winning the affection of its children and the trust of its adults. There is nothing false about his humility, nothing artificial about his simplicity. If our presidential elections were direct, rather than indirect, President Kalam would be re-elected by a substantial margin. Add to this his professional reputation as a scientist and the leader of the team that gave us Pokhran 2 on 11 May 1998 (there are fascinating details in former foreign minister Jaswant Singh’s fascinating new book of memoirs, A Call to Honour, published by Rupa). Such stature is difficult to ignore. The President does not have executive powers in our polity, but he has every right to advise his government. President Kalam’s moral authority is his strongest weapon.

It is bad news for a government when a President has to intervene.

The Prime Minister clearly had to be convinced about the drawbacks, but the problem is elsewhere. Dr Singh has been very poorly served by his administration, and in particular the foreign office. It is India’s ambassador to Washington and the foreign secretary who should have flagged the problems, instead of placing their personal reputations above the common interest. Professionals lulled the Prime Minister, which is why the concerns took so long to reach him. We do not yet know what objections he has raised, but the need for vigilance has increased.

The nuclear deal is the key element of a foreign policy that is drifting in the shallows. The government has lost the plot on economic policy and domestic security as well, as is apparent from any day’s headlines. The Natwar Singh episode indicates that the government even tends to lose its balance. After months of completely disproportionate harassment in the name of investigation, and more than one jolly trip abroad, the authorities have found nothing. It is probable that the Pathak enquiry commission will exonerate both Mr Singh and his son very soon. The Prime Minister still cannot find a replacement for a foreign minister who could hold his own, and has no response to faintly-disguised taunts from Islamabad on the subject.

What should a government do when it has lost its way? Actually, the simplest solution is to stand still and ask for directions, but governments are terrified that they might be caught doing the obvious thing. Complication is more their style.

A reshuffle is not the recipe. The UPA government has to reinvent itself. Two years in power have separated the theoretical from the possible, and the possible from the practical. The basic doctrine of the Manmohan Singh government is a common minimum programme full of good intentions that no one quite knew how to put into practice. The Prime Minister needs to reinvent the route map. We all want economic growth with a human face, as it was quaintly called. But more attention should have been paid to the contours of the human face. Words are used at the highest levels of government, with no effort to flesh them out. You get the sense that the partners in this coalition do not have a common agenda, but a dozen private ones — including saving up for that very rainy day called a sudden general election.

The politics of options has begun two years before it should.

Terror and Sensexocrats

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar: Terror and Sensexocrats

Mumbai now has three major religions: Hinduism, Islam and Wealth. These broad categories may have soft edges, allowing much seepage, but the contours are valid.

The anguish of terrorism breeds a thousand questions, each troubling, one more difficult than the other. Anger is inevitable, but insufficient. Judgment is necessary, and retribution essential, for a state cannot be impotent against those who seek to destroy its peace. But it is equally vital to understand the problem, if only to better understand the enemy. Solutions are eventually found not by the judge but by the scholar. The hunt for villains is incomplete without the hunt for answers.

The answers do not belong to easy questions. A parade of the usual suspects is necessary to police work. Pakistan has topped just about every list of suspects that I can recall. Let us agree that some intelligence agency in Pakistan is clever enough to be guilty each time. We then also have to agree that we have been able to do nothing about it.

There is a pattern. Delhi accuses, Islamabad responds with denial and a request for hard evidence. Threats follow from Delhi; cease, or else. Sometimes the "or else" is accompanied by the rattle of sabres. In 2001, after the attack on the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly building on 1 October and the Parliament building on 13 December, the rattle of sabres was heard across the world. Then? Then nothing happened. On 25 August 2003, bombs left 40 dead in south Mumbai. On 29 October 2005, 59 died in Delhi’s markets which till that moment had been humming with Diwali joy. Each time the Prime Minister dressed wounds with rhetoric about Pakistan. What happened?

A lot of nothing.

Why do the usual suspects remain usual? Who are the fifth columnists of our country? "Suspect" is a word as wide as the horizon since hard evidence is rarely offered to back up the suspicion. Is suspicion a device to appease media frenzy, to buy time, to ensure that the people are diverted from asking hard questions from their own government?

Why are the usual suspects not penetrated, exposed and uprooted during the fallow months between terrorist outrages? The latest on the list of regular suspects is SIMI, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India. The mention of SIMI certainly encourages some television channels to fill their screens with caps and beards. SIMI is a public organisation with office-bearers. If they are guilty why cannot the police destroy them while the conspiracy is being hatched instead of waiting for the violence to blast our lives? Their name has been fed to the media before. What did the police do after that? "The usual suspects" is a phrase from the film Casablanca and is used by a cynical police chief who knows that suspects are obligingly expendable during a crisis.

Of the thousand questions that trouble me, two leave me helpless.

Who and where are tomorrow’s terrorists?

Why did yesterday’s terrorists in Mumbai target first class railway compartment?

The answer to the second will offer clues to the first.

Terrorists succeed because they keep ahead of those on their tail. Mumbai’s terrorists are now mining the many layers of anger in a complex metropolis vulnerable to innumerable forms of misery. Examine the events that preceded the train terrorism in July and you can see the seismic tremors building, whether connected or separate, in advance of the earthquake. Even nature intervenes to rev up the Misery Index.

Mumbai now has three major religions: Hinduism, Islam and Wealth. These broad categories may have soft edges, allowing much seepage, but the contours are valid.

The rich were always a separate culture. Now they have their own gods, their own demons, their own rituals, their own prayers and, naturally, their own sacrificial goats. In this respect, as in so much else, Mumbai is only the advance face of India.

India is dividing into two worlds: a political democracy, where the poor live, and an economic sensexocracy in which the rich and the rising middle class bow to consumerism, salaries and a stock exchange. The Sensexocrats are the new Brahmins, the new ruling caste. It is not an accident that the finance minister of India, Palaniappan Chidambaram, declared, after the train terrorism, that the Mumbai Sensex had survived. The Sensex was safe and therefore his India was safe.

The Democrats of our serfocracy are permitted the privilege of voting once every five years. That is their only relationship to power. Very suitably, they are given a holiday to celebrate such a festive occasion, which of course also serves to reinforce our image abroad as a free nation. But the freedom of the poor ends with that vote. Other freedoms are the privilege of the Sensexocrats, a prominent sub-caste of the group, equivalent possibly to the Kayasthas, being the media. (I am a Sensexocrat of the media sub-caste.)

Sensexocrats periodically offer Democrats economic crumbs from a Barmecide’s Feast (a feast in which food is an illusion). When Democrats get angry, the Prime Minister, whoever he may be, gives a speech with a carefully depressed face. When Democrats get desperate, and resort to violence — as the Naxalites are doing — Delhi, lost in dream world delirium, selects a response from Alice in Wonderland. Off with his head, said the Queen!

The terrorists of Mumbai are expanding their theological base. Marx thought religion was the opium of the masses. He never paused to consider what religion might one day think of Marx. The mixture of communal venom with Marxist anger is just the kind of acid that the desperate need to set off a deadly conflagration. Some politicians will of course never resist encouraging such fires.

Is this where the next terrorist is coming from — from the despair of the underclass of Mumbai? Is the Naxalite a terrorist? Is the Naxalite a fundamentalist? These questions are urgent and relevant. Terrorism is born in the mind, and that is where any battle for prevention has to take place. The police and the Army can take charge of the cure. But if prevention is better than cure, then it becomes the responsibility of political class and its surrogates, including media. It is they who must engage in the tough task of reducing despair, and spreading social justice along with prosperity.

Why do I feel helpless? Because the answers lie in nuances and the Sensexocrats are blinded by headlines.

High-flying Rumours

Byline by MJ Akbar:High-flying Rumours

Every lie must be denied; otherwise it becomes an attachment to the truth. I am not equally sure that rumours deserve similar attention, because a denial tends to live in the same haze as the rumour. The smoke-and-fire axiom begins to operate: could there be smoke without fire? Prime Ministers must be particularly careful about smoke.

What is a rumour? It is much more than repetition of a lie, for a lie rarely travels very far. A rumour finds legs only because it has the possibility of being true. The success of a lie depends on the credibility of the perpetrator. A rumour succeeds because of its persuasive ability, because those who hear it are amenable, consciously or subconsciously. Why are they amenable? Because there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to give credence to the rumour.

Could there be denial without some, however fleeting, truth in it?

Spread a rumour that Manmohan Singh has taken money in the growing Navy scandal, and no one will believe it. There is no evidence that in a lifetime of public service Manmohan Singh has taken an illegitimate rupee.

No one would have believed a rumour in July 2005 that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was about to resign. In July last year he was in full command of his Cabinet, and had the determination of a leader with an agenda, focused around what he believed would be a historic deal with the United States. The process began with an agreement signed by defence minister Pranab Mukherjee on 28 June last year, and gathered momentum during Dr Singh’s visit to the White House later last year.

Is it irony, or merely poetic justice, that Dr Manmohan Singh’s political credibility began to waver after President George Bush’s pseudo-historical visit to India, and his announcement that Washington was ready to go ahead with the nuclear deal? Euphoria, particularly of the premature kind, tends to breed errors, even among the most balanced of men. Dr Singh had a significant lapse of judgment when he dismissed opposition to the Bush visit as "communal". Suspicion about what was being cooked in the cavernous kitchens of Delhi and Washington was not a by-product of latent communalism. In any event, to call Marxists, who led the demonstrations against Bush, communal is apolitical if not absurd. The government quickly stopped parroting this line, but even this small self-inflicted wound created an opportunity. For the government was up against something far more potent than communalism: nationalism.

Suspicion became a worry when the terms of engagement were revealed. Dr Homi Sethna, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and a founding-father of India’s nuclear programme, read the details and said that what Dr Manmohan Singh was about to sign was worse than joining the NPT regime. No government in Delhi of any colour ever dared to compromise India’s independent nuclear assets by joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. We are now on the verge of surrendering our independence, and all we can hear is the sound of silence. Dr A. Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, has outlined how precisely commitments made by Dr Singh to Parliament and the people have been blatantly undermined and notes that if the deal goes through in its present form, it will "compromise the sovereignty of this country for decades to come". He has exposed the very enormous financial price that India will have to pay as well: between Rs 300,000 to Rs 400,000 crores in nuclear reactors that will be totally dependent for their existence on a yearly audit of our policies by the US Congress. Dr P.K. Iyengar, another former chairman of the AEC, has called the deal "giving up sovereignty". These men have spent their lives translating an Indian vision, crafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, into reality. They do not have a political or personal agenda.

It is in the nature of coalition politics that the first people to exploit weakness or uncertainty at the centre are partners and allies: the Opposition, depressed and moribund, wakes up much later, if it wakes up at all. It is axiomatic that a politician will, at some point in his term of power, give priority to the politics of re-election over the demands of governance. This is accepted, and even acceptable towards the end of a term of power. But if there is the slightest doubt about how long a Prime Minister will stay in office, politicians will grab any chance to appease their constituencies instead of appeasing the Prime Minister.

Democratic politics is a terribly uncertain game at the best of times, and only the very complacent waste opportunities. Arjun Singh sent off the first, powerful, signal that the time for political expediency had arrived. He brought reservations back to the forefront of debate, for in conflict lay votes. It was known that the Prime Minister was unhappy, but his unhappiness made no difference. If a Prime Minister cannot assert his authority, authority simply latches on to anyone who will. Dr Ramadoss, nationally unknown but influential Tamil leader, who leads a small party of just six MPs, has bull-charged his way into centre space by converting his regional needs into a national dilemma. The Prime Minister cannot restrain his "Backward castes" activism, since the only way to do so is to either sack him or change his portfolio. Dr Singh can do neither. The senior party from Tamil Nadu, the DMK, is happy to go for the jugular on behalf of the workers of Neyveli, and once again the Prime Minister is helpless. In a fit of pique, Dr Singh responds by halting all disinvestments across the country. The trouble is, this hammer will not kill the fly.

Two years ago, when the world was young and every horizon just a footfall away, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised reform with a human face, a curious phrase, but one whose meaning was nevertheless clearer than its grammar. It meant that economic reforms would not be pushed through at the cost of the working class or the peasant. That policy has now been stood on its head. If this were by the collective will of the government, it would be understandable. But both the Prime Minister and the finance minister have become hostage to office, and the allies know it.

There is a perceptible sense of drift alternating with freeze, as the axle of power is challenged by the spokes: the wheel cannot turn in a predetermined direction. Dr Singh has made the nuclear deal with the United States his highest priority. There is something sincere about this, since a fulltime politician would have hedged his bets and left wiggle room for escape if the deal began to unravel. But sincerity is no substitute for being right. As details have begun to emerge, there is unease in the highest quarters of the Congress as well, because, if eminent Indians like Sethna, Gopalakrishnan and Iyengar are right, the Congress will pay a very heavy political price.

It was the accumulation of such internal tensions that gave wing to the rumour on Friday. The rumour was not total speculation, or the idea without precedent. It is not widely known that Dr Manmohan Singh once sent his resignation to P.V. Narasimha Rao. Rao ignored it. But this time Dr Singh is the Prime Minister.

Have you ever seen straws floating in the wind? They are like rumours: no one knows where they come from and where they are headed. But they do predict a storm.

Summer in Moscow

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Byline by MJ Akbar:Summer in Moscow

Moscow seems shamefaced about summer. Thirty degrees centigrade in the forenoon of last Wednesday is forty degrees higher than during my last visit in December. Moscow then was a grey world flecked with snow white. The wind screamed at the fur hat and taunted the ear muffs. Local faces had the confident serenity of a winter people, and a mild chuckle in the eyes at the visitor’s bewilderment at winter. Summer heat has surprised men and disoriented technology. The air-conditioner in my fancy, new hotel room leaks like an overburdened tarpaulin in monsoon. Complaints evoke genuine sympathy and the occasional mechanic, but no solutions. If the heater had been giving trouble in December they would have known precisely what to do. The male dress code for summer is linen half-sleeves. For women, it is a bit of an undress code: they peel off as much as they dare and store up the sun in their skins for the long dark winter just around the corner.

I wonder if the side-to-side and back-to-back traffic at noon is another sign of summer, with people finding any excuse to get out of office. This is not office-rush; this is out-of-office rush. By Friday afternoon this escalates into out-of-town mass escape. The weekend is sacrosanct from Siberia to California: as they put it, only thieves and policemen work on weekends. Not even newspapers are published on weekends. Information is an unnecessary intrusion on tranquillity. If a world war broke out on Saturday Muscovites would probably not know until Monday. On the other hand, they did fight a world war, albeit a cold one, for five decades — with both sides taking the weekend off. Very civilised. I wonder what would have happened if the Soviet Union and the West had fought each other on all seven days.

The role model for new Russia is a former KGB agent, Alexander Lebedev. A fortnight ago he threw a party in England at the 8,500 acre estate in Northamptonshire where Princess Diana was born and now lies buried. When Lebedev throws a party, it travels very far indeed. His idea of entertainment was a volatile mixture of Russian Wild East, Hollywood, confused Arabian Nights and high art. Extras in 18th century dress lounged among the distant trees. Others wandered around leading wolves on a leash. Cossacks charged across the English landscape. A camel or two sauntered by. The Christ Church Cathedral schoolboys’ choir sang from the balcony to shift the mood. One of Russia’s finest pianists, Andrei Gavrilov, soothed guests along with oysters and champagne. After dinner dancing was in charge of the Black Eyed Peas (a band) with help from a videolinked U2.

The guest of honour was former Comrade Mikhail Gorbachev. The cause: funds for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation to help children suffering from cancer. Money was raised by auction (of a ride in the world’s fastest MiG, for instance). Salman Rushdie was among the guests, but I have no idea whether he coughed up anything. One million pounds were raised in a single night. How much money was spent on that single night? £1.3 million. Lebedev could have saved everyone the trouble and handed his bill for the party to the foundation, but that wouldn’t have been any fun, would it? Charity begins at home.

How did Lebedev become a billionaire, starting from a KGB salary? He resigned and set up an investment company during the heyday of Gorbachev’s glasnost. He stood on the same side of the barricades as the reformers when the old established order nearly pulled off a successful coup in 1991. In 1995 he was rewarded with the chairmanship of the National Reserve Bank, which was struggling to stay in business. It stopped struggling after Lebedev got the account for Gazprom, the massive state-owned energy conglomerate. Lebedev now owns 31% of Aeroflot, among other things. He also contested for mayor of Moscow and semi-secretly dreams of becoming President of the Russian Federation one day.

Watch the news.

I gather that the new international corporate mantra for upwardly mobile management types is to look each morning in the mirror and call yourself a rock star. This apparently provides enough of an ego boost to send your competence soaring. But take your time about behaving like Lebedev, or indeed any other rock star. Here is what I gathered from one article in a magazine abandoned at an airport. When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt went to Namibia to have their baby in the mother of all nations, they demanded, and got, a no-fly zone over their villa. Foreign journalists were permitted to enter the country during their stay only if the Jolie-Pitt gang had cleared their arrival. A South African journo who violated this ban ended up in prison for three days. Namibia declared a national holiday to celebrate the birth of the infant Jolie. What makes you laugh-cry more? Rock-star stupidity or Namibia’s idiocy? Elizabeth Taylor wanted Buckingham Palace swept for security when she went to collect the gong that made her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (It exists. Britain still rules a couple of tiny islands in the West Indies.) Tom Cruise’s servants had to sign a contract that punished them with an escalating series of fines if they were caught passing on information to the media. A nanny could, theoretically, end up with a bill for a million dollars. Any management trainee with a hint of such airs is likely to get the sack rather than a promotion.

Maxine Maters, my Dutch friend who lives in Moscow and is the publisher of Moscow News, thought it a big relief that Holland had not qualified for the World Cup. It gave her the liberty of being neutral. Modestly, I pointed out that I had the same freedom. India had not qualified either. I changed the subject before she could ask me at what point of the tournament India had been eliminated.

I had the liberty of being neutral while watching Argentina play Germany on the big plasma screen set up in the hotel foyer. The commentary was in Russian, and it did not matter. There is no verbal commentary that can match the swooping cameras darting upon faces, on the field, on the sidelines or in the stands. Cameras create the ratings in sport. If the cameras had been inside our hotel at that hour, they would have dwelt I suspect on the undress-code ladies occupying the sofa between me and screen. I did wonder though if the real game of these ladies was football.

Since neutrality is anaemic, I have tried out a variation of historical determinism in order to find out who I should support. This system might also be called Losers’ Ladder. It is based on empire and colonies. As an Indian, my first preference was for the old colonies: Australia, Ghana, Togo. The whimper-exit of Ghana eliminated that option. My sympathy should, logically, have then transferred to the comparatively underdeveloped world, and thus to Latin America. The Latins also play great football. But, frankly, it is difficult to support a continent one has never visited. You can’t put a context to your cheering. Logic took me to the next category: the countries in which one had good friends. I am pleased to report that some of my best friends are English, but England ruled itself out because it had made the mistake of ruling India once. That left me with Germany and Italy.

Both won on Friday night. Thank you, Moscow.