In my view the really big news today is the growing rapprochement between Pakistan and India. On Tuesday, Pakistani PM Zafarullah Jamali put forth six steps to promote confidence-building between the two countries, "including immediate resumption of air, rail and bus links and exchange of high commissioners between the two countries" (Dawn). India says it will respond Wednesday, but is already getting its rail service ready for the change. Pakistan has also restored diplomatic relations with India and is thinking seriously about granting India Most Favored Nation status with regard to imports and exports.



The likelihood is that these peace moves have been pushed behind the scenes by the US, which gained enormous diplomatic authority through the successful Iraq war. I am not implying that they threatened anyone, only that Asian countries with small nuclear arsenals can only be nervous after what happened to Saddam. There seems also to be the hint of a carrot. Pakistan owed the US $3 billion before September 11. As a reward for allying with the US in the war on terror, the US has already forgiven about $1 bn. of that. The Pakistanis are asking that another $2 bn or so be forgiven. My guess is that the US is making such debt forgiveness dependent on progress in Indo-Pak peace.



Likewise, Pakistan's offer to abolish its nuclear program if India will almost certainly comes as a result of pressure from the US. India rejected this idea out of hand, though. It seems to me that US security officials must hope this is a way to roll back the threat of nuclear holocaust in South Asia, through mutual relinquishment. The odd thing is that Pakistan has a greater need for these weapons strategically, having only one tenth of India's population and an army half the size. Yet it is now proposing abolition. The problem is that India has the weapons not just for the Pakistan front but also as a deterrent to China, a much more powerful and important rival with whom India shares a border. So, the Indians may balk at this plan because of the China factor. Despite the fevered dreams of the American nationalist hawks, it seems to me a little unlikely that nuclear weapons can be gotten out of the hands of the Chinese.



The opening of transportation links between the two countries would exciting, if it happens. In the new, post-Soviet and post-Taliban Central Asia, this move raises the possibility of new overland trade routes between India and Uzbekistan, flowing through Pakistan and Afghanistan. The economies of all four (and the rest of Central Asia) could be enormously helped by this trade. Afghanistan has been pressing Pakistan for this move during the past year, and probably has lobbied Washington for it. The tolls on transhipped goods could be an important source of income for the Karzai government. India and Pakistan have long practiced economic boycotts on one another. Pakistan now seems willing to go to a free trade regime with India. It may as well, since the goods would just leak back in through Central Asia and Afghanistan, anyway. An India and a Pakistan that traded vigorously with one another might be far less belligerant.



The trade of Central Asia and South Asia hasn't been this potentially important since the days of the Silk Road!

*AFP is reporting that Jay Garner, head of the Pentagon's reconstruction effort in Iraq, has appointed 5 Iraqi leaders as the core of a new Iraqi government. He is said to have named: Massoud Barzani from the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Jalal Talabani of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim from the Supreme Assembly for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord.



This report is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, the last leadership conference in Baghdad decided to meet in June and elect a transitional government. Garner appears to have forestalled that process by jumping the gun. Then, some press reports had said that L. Paul Bremer, the State Department favorite to head the civilian administration of Iraq, would preside over the formation of an Iraqi government. If the AFP report is true, Garner has attempted to constrain the range of decision-making to be exercised by his local and civilian successors. He says he realizes the list could change. But kicking someone off after they have been appointed won't be easy. This is a fait accompli, folks. The list has 3 Sunni organizations, one Shiite organization based in Iran, and one unrepresentative wealthy Shiite expatriate against whom crowds in Iraq have chanted. Since Shiites are 60% of the population, they are woefully underrepresented here.



Barzani and Talabani are long-time Kurdish political leaders of real standing, who have been actually tested by the electoral process in Iraqi Kurdistan under the US no-fly zone in the 1990s. They make perfect sense, and you could not have one without the other (they feud occasionally). Chalabi has all along been the Pentagon's choice for Iraqi president of a transitional government. Iyad Allawi and his Iraqi National Accord represent former Baath officials, mostly Sunni, who turned against the regime and cooperated with the US CIA & etc. They are said to be popular in the Sunni center of Iraq, in places like Tikrit and Falluja, though that allegation has yet to be tested. I can only think that the Kurds and Shiites would find it difficult to forgive them their former associations. (I am now told that Allawi himself is Shiite, but an organization of high Baath ex-officials would be largely a Sunni constituency).



The LAT is reporting that Garner says none of the remaining 4 slots on the leadership council will go to Shiites. This seems to me a very big mistake and Bremer should simply undo that dictat when he arrives. As things now stand, the Shiites are virtually disenfranchised--SCIRI can't possibly represent more than 20 percent of them, and since very few are wealthy expatriates, Chalabi represents almost none.



The big surprise here is Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI was threatening not so long ago to have its militiamen shoot at US troops if they overstayed their welcome. SCIRI turns out not to have as much support inside Iraq as was once thought, though they are influential in some cities near Iran and are doing organizing everywhere in the South. They are far less important than the Sadr Movement, from all accounts. In essence, in choosing the al-Hakims and SCIRI, Garner has more or less excluded the powerful Sadr movement, which appears to have the allegiance of several million Shiites in Iraq. It also excludes the al-Da`wa party, which refused to deal with a Pentagon office and insisted on having its relations with the US be mediated by civilians. The al-Hakims are close to Iranian hardliners and this choice likewise excludes moderate Iraqis following the quietist Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. In short, the inclusion of al-Hakim is extremely puzzling from a political standpoint.



Garner envisions these five as being joined by others, up to a nine-man committee (note that no women appear to be in the running). But these five surely have an advantage now. They appear to be the picks of the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz team at the Department of Defense.



I can't imagine these five getting along with one another very long, nor can I imagine the disenfranchised Sadr Movement agreeing to its own voicelessness for very long. Put on your seat belts; this looks like a very bumpy ride to me.

*Emile Lahoud, the president of Lebanon, rejected US Secretary of State Colin Powell's demand that the Hizbullah militia in south Lebanon be replaced. He said that Hizbullah is a legal political party, and expressed satisfaction that its guerrilla actions had gotten the Israelis back out of south Lebanon after 18 years.



The Israeli and Zionist Right has it as a principle that they should never give back up land once they manage to grab it, so Ehud Barak's 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon was widely seen by them as a mistake. In the Arab and Muslim worlds, however, it was seen as only right that the Israelis leave Lebanon, where they had no business in the first place. Some fear Ariel Sharon has his eye on the waters of the Litani River in Lebanon, and that Sharon has a history of sticky fingers and aggressive acquisitions.



In the Middle East, Powell's demand that the Lebanese army should take back over policing the South would be seen as preparing the way for another Israeli incursion, since the Lebanese Army is a pushover compared to Hizbullah. Most recently Hizbullah has been shelling the Shibaa Farms area, a sliver of land occupied by Israel from Syria in 1967.



Hizbullah's depute leader, Shaikh Naim Qasim, replied to Powell: "Lebanon refuses to take dictation from America." The Hizbullah also denied responsibility for 1980s actions of terrorists against the US embassy and the Marines, saying it exists only to fight Israel aggression in Lebanon.



Actually, responsibility for those actions was claimed by Husayn al-Musawi of Islamic Amal, a Baalbak-based group. See "Amal's relationship with Iran," by Bill Samii. But Hizbullah is being disingenuous if it denies acts of terrorism against others than Israelis.



*Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, Tehran-based leader of SCIRI (the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) again repeated that an early departure by US and British troops was an Iraqi, regional and international demand. Emissaries of his Supreme Council met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher. -al-Hayat.



*Agence France Presse has an interesting article about the ways major hospitals in the Shiite parts of Baghdad have been more or less administratively taken over by Shiite militias headed by clergymen. The lay hospital administators are complaining that the clerics are demanding to see the books. The hospitals need the militiamen to protect them from having their medicine stores looted. Some clerics are even bringing in medicine. But when asked, the clerics say that have been sent by the Najaf Seminary Campus (al-Hawzah al-`Ilmiyyah). That is an ambiguous phrase, since it could refer to a number of leading Najaf clerics. But in the case of the hospitals, I'd bet the clerics taking them over are emissaries of Muqtada al-Sadr. He and his organization appear to have made a decision just before or during the war that they would try to step into such popular welfare roles if the Baath fell. They have taken over several large mosques, as well. This technique was used in Lebanon by Hizbullah and in Iran by the Revolutionary Guards. Disbursing healthcare, or being seen as the provider of it, is very useful to fundamentalist religious organizations.



*The training of police and soldiers by US forces (some of our reservists are normally policemen and can give good training) continues. But most Iraqis appear still to live in a state of unsettling insecurity. AP's Nico Price says that even where traffic cops have been returned to the streetcorners of the capital, no one pays any attention to them. Apparently being able to thumb your nose at traffic regulations is universally considered a key element of democracy. :-)



*A clerical commission (Shura) in Kabul that reviewed the proposed new Afghan constitution insists that Afghan law be identical to Islamic law. Deputy Chief Justice Ahmad Manawi said Friday, "The only source of legislation in Afghanistan is Islamic Shariat law." Shariah is not actually just Islamic law, but is rather an elaborated system of interpreting it, based on medieval jurisprudence and sometimes in the modern era a fundamentalist literalism. Algeria and Egypt fought virtual civil wars to stop this sort of thing from happening in their country, but apparently the US's response to religious radicalism in Afghanistan has been to ensconce religious law in that country!

Size of reconsituted police force currently deployed in Baghdad: 3,000

Population of Baghdad: 5 million

Days since new Baghdad police chief has resigned: 1

Size of police force in Chicago: 13,000

Population of Chicago proper: 3 million

Number of days since Shiites in slums of East Baghdad have seen a US Patrol: 4

Number of radical Shiite militiamen patrolling slums of East Baghdad: 6,000

Percentage Iraqis without access to clean water: 40

Number of Iraqi children who are chronically malnourished: 1 million

Number of press reports saying most of Baghdad has security, electricity, water: 0





*Villagers of Qawwam Bakr near Babil in south Iraq say they have found a mass grave. The bodies are victims of Saddam’s brutal crushing of the 1991 uprising against him. So far 35 bodies have been recovered.

*A heavy exchange of fire took place between the volunteer Najaf police and an armed local clan on Friday morning. About ten men showed up, shooting off AK-47s in the area around the Imam Ali shrine. Two civilians were wounded in the skirmish. The attackers are also said to have thrown a hand grenade. Reuters says the men who launched the attack were themselves wanted suspects in the murder in early April of Abd al-Majid al-Khu’i (Khoei), a pro-American cleric. Two of the ten were apprehended, Mehr al-Baghdadi (who was slightly wounded in the leg) and a man called Ihsan.



Reuters says, That “after the men were taken into the police station, seven others stormed the station from a cemetery with AK-47s to try to free them.” The volunteer police pursued them into the cemetery, but apparently no further arrests were made.



The incident demonstrates the continuing danger that some saboteur will manage to harm the shrine of Imam Ali and get the US blamed for it, angering the world’s 120 million Shiites (and most other Muslims, as well).



*Al-Hayat reports that a Shiite cleric in Iraq, Sayyid Ali al-Husayni al-Baghdadi, has called for jihad against the US and British troops, on the grounds that he does not think they will cease their occupation any time soon. Likewise, the head of the Guardianship Council in Iran, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, said on Friday according to wire services, ''I urge the Iraqi people to remain united, follow clerics, make nonstop efforts to expel the enemy from Iraq's unsoiled land and establish an Islamic government ... This is the way. They (Iraqis) should learn from Iran's Islamic revolution.”



In contrast, the young Najaf leader Muqtada al-Sadr forbade action against the coalition troops at this time, because of an “imbalance of forces.” Likewise, the Sunni mosque preacher of Falluja called on his townsmen to stop trying to fight the US troops there, since it is impossible for the locals to defeat US tanks and “they will kill you.”



On report I saw (by Mohamed Hasni of Middle East Online) claimed that Muqtada believes in the theory of wilayah or the rule of the clerics, along the lines of Khomeini.

*Basra has a new governor, and it is Denmark’s former ambassador to Syria, a convert to Islam. Ole Woehlers Olsen will be put in charge by the British, who conquered the southern river port of 1.2 million. Apparently it is hoped that his being a Muslim convert will make him acceptable locally. The appointment is seen by some as a way for the coalition to reward Denmark for its support of the Iraq war. My guess is that Olsen is a Sunni, and the Arabic press says his Arabic is fluent, which is a plus. He is said to be married to an Algerian physician. It is also a plus that he will be seen as potentially even-handed and not bound to promote his relatives the way a local tribal sheikh or businessman would be. But he will be administering a largely Shiite city, and he is a foreigner, so he has a lot of hearts to win. It is, by the way, remarkably difficult to find out what is going on in Basra; some enterprising reporter should survey the emerging new power structures. I know that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has opened offices in the city, but there has been little reporting on what the city’s Shiites think.



*L. Paul Bremer III, a former State Department counter-terrorism expert and a protégé of Henri Kissinger with some rightwing credentials, will be the civilian administrator of Iraq. I’m not sure how this affects the reporting line of Jay Garner, the head of the reconstruction effort, who currently reports to the Department of Defense. I’m also not sure what exactly Bremer’s relationship will be with the provisional Iraqi government scheduled to be elected in late May. If I am confused, imagine what the Iraqis feel like.



*More confusion. The holy city of Najaf, which some reporters are now saying has a population of 900,000, has several rulers. The military mayor is Lt. Col. Chris Conlin. He has apparently appointed a former Baathist officer who is a Sunni from Basra—Abdul Munem—as the mayor of Najaf, according to Megan Stack of the LA Times. He apparently switched sides and launched an anti-Saddam mutiny, and this is his reward. But Najaf also has a town council that includes leading clerics and local tribal sheikhs, from what previous reports in the Arabic press indicate. And, it has some 5000 local militiamen loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite firebrand. Abdul Munem appears to be organizing a police force loyal to himself.



I’ve been following Lt. Col Conlin in the press, and he seems really bright and well informed. But this idea of putting a former Baathist Sunni in control of Najaf strikes me as a harbinger of trouble. His police are likely to come into conflict with the al-Sadr militia. They may well win, being well paid and well armed via the Americans. But that won’t make them or us loved.



*Yet more confusion. According to the Washington Post, the city of Amara is now ruled by one Karim Mahoud, a Marsh Arab who fought guerrilla style against Saddam. He runs the city’s militia. Amara, with a population of 283,000, is a major Shiite city in the South. There is some support there for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and there looks to be a budding competition between that party and Mahoud’s militiamen. Of course, some Marsh Arabs support an Islamic state, and the WP did not reveal Mahoud’s position on such matters. Stay tuned.



*Charles Krauthammer, that great Middle East expert, has ridiculed those of us who are concerned about theocratic tendencies among the Shiites. He says that Shiism is not hierarchical. (Compared to what? It is hierarchical compared to Sunnism). Anyway, rival ayatollahs with militias that fight among one another is not a promising picture. Then he says that the Iraqi Shiites don’t want Iran-style clerical rule. He points out that most Iranians don’t want that. This is an example of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. Countries have political rhythms. Iraqi Shiites are not where Iranian ones are. Iraqi Shiites have had decades of authoritarian secular nationalist rule by a Sunni elite, followed by a Western occupation. A lot of them, certainly a plurality, are responding to all this by demanding an Islamic government. It may not be clerically. But they want Shiite law to be the law of the land.



The Algerian and Egyptian governments have fought tooth and nail for years to prevent the installation of Islamic law as the only form of law in their countries. The people who have implementation of shariah or Islamic canon law as their project know very well that power goes in such a system to the interpreters of the law. And those will be Muslim clerics. Shiite law in Iraq will put the judiciary in the hands of the ayatollahs.



Although Sunni and Shiite Islamists are at the moment united in calling for Islamic law, the moment the Shiite version of it is ensconced in the Iraqi system, the Sunnis are going to realize that they have been had, and there is going to be fighting about it. We have seen these things before. In 1980 General Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan implemented the governmental collection of alms (zakat), giving it to the Sunni clergy to distribute to the poor. The Pakistani Shiites were outraged that their alms were going to the Sunni clergy, and a 100,000 Shiites demonstrated in Islambad. Zia backed down and exempted Shiites from the governmental alms tax. (Some Pakistani rich families then promptly converted to Shiism).



So, Mr Krauthammer, Iranian-style clerical rule is not the only danger inherent in the rise of Iraqi Islamism. And, yes, you guys have unleashed it. Deal with it.

*There was more trouble in Falluja yesterday, where US troops again fired on and killed civilians demonstrating against their presence. The troops allege that Baath loyalists fired at them from the protesting crowds, and they had to fire back. It is a very difficult situation. The troops can't lose control of the situation, of course, and obviously cannot allow themselves to become sitting ducks. And, the Saddamists still in this Sunni city are deliberately trying to provoke such incidents. A local Sunni cleric advised the troops to withdraw from residential areas and to avoid shooting into the crowds. But those solutions may not deal with the problem, either. I guess I fear that if these demonstrations and killings go on, there is a danger they will completely alienate the Iraqis from the US and British troops. A lot of them aren't happy at the occupation to begin with, but many are willing to give the US a chance. That number could plummet if this Falluja situation isn't taken care of. Is it a job for Special Forces, who might be able to track down the Saddamist saboteurs?



*There are rumors in the Arabic press that a US attack on al-Qaeda remnants in Eastern Afghanistan may have netted some more big fish, but I can't confirm them yet from the Western press. The rumors come on the heels of the Pakistani Ministry of Interior's capture of Walid bin al-Attash, a key al-Qaeda leader who had been implicated in the bombing of the USS Cole. (I mind them all, but that one I take as a personal affront.) In the same sweep, in Karachi, the Pakistanis caught the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad.



*The Shiite party-militia Hizbullah in Lebanon is reaffirming its intention to go on fighting in the South until it liberates the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms. How complex the US Iraq mission is can be demonstrated by just one question. If given a choice of supporting 1) Israel, 2) the U.S. or 3) Hizbullah on this issue, which do you think the Iraqi public would choose? Which do you think the Iraqi Shiites would choose?



*SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON of the Knight-Ridder newspapers describes the Friday prayer sermon in Kufa last Friday of Muqtada al-Sadr, the young leader of the Sadr movement: "Sadr challenged the faithful to embrace Islamic rule and turn away from four ayatollahs in Najaf who are the present Shiite spiritual leaders. 'We are the true believers, not the others,' Sadr said.*



*In reply on a list to a Le Monde article from Iraq that played down the Shiite radicals:



Sophie Shihab's report from the ground is very useful, and of course she

is correct that the "radicals" are a minority. I don't draw the same

conclusion from that fact that she does, though.



The dangers are manifold: 1) That the radicals will gain enough militia

control on the ground to dictate subsequent politics for urban Shiites; 2)

that their popularity will spread to the rural areas; 3) and that

gradually the Iraqi population will get tired of and annoyed with the

Americans, and the radicals will be able to exploit that sentiment to

catapult themselves to political leadership of the South. Point 3)

depends on how long and how ostentatiously the Americans remain. I read

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as being eager to push on this issue, and fear a

confrontation down the road.



I doubt the tribal chieftains or the villagers in the South are interested

in radical clerical Shiism in the least. (One exception maybe the

displaced Marsh Arabs). Where the radicals have shown any strength at all,

it largely is in urban places, towns and cities of 50,000 or more.



The phenomena of the Sadr Movement and the SCIRI militias are mainly

important in places like Baquba, Kufa, Najaf, Karbala, to some extent in

Kut, and in the slums of east Baghdad. Since these towns and cities have

a combined population of several million, they are not insignificant, but

they are not a majority of the Shiites, either.



The problem is that they have armed paramilitaries, and these have seized

a good deal of urban territory, raiding Baath arms depots and storing arms

in mosques. It may be possible to roll these neighborhood militias back,

but there could also be trouble about any attempt to do so. The danger

for the Americans is that Shiites do have a certain amount of solidarity.

If US troops shot a number of Sayyids or descendants of the Prophet in

front of a Shiite shrine in the course of putting down a riot, the

resentments could spread rapidly.



Muqtada's popularity among the poor does not seem impeded by his age (late

20s or 30); they don't care how many books he has written. He has

cleverly inducted Ayatollah Kazim al-Ha'iri (in exile in Qom) as the

Object of Emulation in whose name he speaks.



And, there are many mysterious things going on. Shaykh Muhammad

al-Fartusi suddenly came from Najaf a couple of weeks ago and began

preaching at one of the largest mosque congregations, al-Hikmah. It now

turns out he says he was sent by al-Ha'iri to take over that mosque. How

did this happen? How many other large mosque congregations are being

essentially usurped by al-Ha'iri's/ Muqtada's emissaries? Note that

al-Fartusi is supported by a neighborhood militia of Sadriyyun, and was

briefly arrested for traveling with a fire arm.



While Sistani's quietism could be a brake on the momentum of the radicals,

it is not clear that he will be happy with the Americans still being there

next year this time, either.



Anyway, it isn't a matter of simple numbers.