The New Nation - Internet Edition

Completing police reforms

THE President, Professor Iajuddin Ahmed had highlighted the indispensability of reforming the police force when the present government took charge. The caretaker government, since then, indicated that it was well aware of the need to improve the functioning of the police force and steps were seen taken to this end. But the reforms of the police force today are far from complete. Conceiving what these reforms should be and carrying them to a successful conclusion, remains the challenge.

The government very rightly identified reform of the police force as a major task. Only about five months are left for this government to complete its tenure. But the reforms are yet to be completed. Among the major issues to be addressed in police reforms is their subservience to the political goals of a government. One of the worst weaknesses of the police seen under party-led governments was their use to serve their partisan ends no matter whether the police observed human rights and other norms. This, together with powers of the government to control selection and posting affect the functioning of the police force. These were among the malaises that are detrimental to proper functioning of the police.

All of these issues, specially the ones of politicising the police and the in-built corruptions in the selection and posting of policemen, must be considered very important issues for the purpose of reforms. The aim of the reforms should be the introduction of appropriate safeguards to ensure that no government can quite seek to use the police force more like its own private army than allowing it to play its role as the defender of public interests. Steps to improve the physical and logistical abilities of the police force, will also have to be continued steadily.

Regulating private courier services

ACCORDING to a recent media report, the interim government has 'in

principle' approved a proposal of bringing the private courier services

under legal coverage. The courier services, according to the proposal, would need registration to operate anywhere in the country. The council of advisors meeting held last week asked the law ministry for a further scrutiny of the proposed amendments to the Post Office Act that does not endorse private postal services. The draft amendments have sought to streamline the courier services being provided by the private sector widely across the country because of postal department's often-lazy services as alleged.

Private courier service operators must follow certain rules to be specified by law and the government should have control over the fees they take from the people.

The privately run courier services do not also reach all the places, as they prefer easy routes under their limited networks connecting mostly divisional and district headquarters. Private courier business proliferated over the years offering services like sending documents, parcels and money to different destinations, mostly in towns, well connected by roads. Postal services are provided with well-defined rates of charges fixed by the government. The private service providers are free to charge any rate they themselves consider competitive.

The legal framework under which the private courier services would run, when the proposed legislation comes into force, is expected to make them more responsible to enjoy the confidence of the people as a whole for such services. The charges would also be uniform following implementation of the government rules. The government should also turn its attention also to its own postal department for improvement of the services being provided through its countrywide network for the overall benefit of the people.

Financial socialism in America

Maswood Alam Khan

When you encounter a situation in an alien landscape you grapple with your memory in search for a near experience to conceive the new circumstances in an unknown environment. You transpose your past experience as a backdrop to reconcile with the situation you are facing.

During my present sojourn in USA I am grappling in vain to conceive the state of affairs of American financial activities. I simply don't understand. With 30 years of experience under my belt as a banker from a developing country like Bangladesh it seems I am still in the kindergarten. Either I have to relearn banking from the United States of America or America, I am afraid, has got to learn a lot from the present and the past banking practices in Bangladesh.

Money seems to be growing on trees in America. It is amazing to observe how American government has been committing billions of dollars without batting its eyelashes: $85 billion plus $700 billion plus $250 billion plus bank guarantees--- all within the past three weeks, all for perking the Wall Street up, and all for pleasing the bankers who literally ballooned up the market by their reckless investment.

The more I read news about American government's weird plans to salvage the sick financial institutions the more I pity Mr. Kajal of Court Chandpur of Bangladesh who, through a Ponzi scheme, swindled thousands of rural people by offering monthly interest of Taka ten thousand for investment of Taka one hundred thousand and perhaps has now been passing his bad time in jail since 2001. How pleasant life would be for Mr. Kajal of Court Chandpur had he only been a US citizen and had run his racketeering business in America!

There was a time when it was business as usual for all the banks in Bangladesh to inflate profit in their annual reports on the strength of all loans in their ledgers as solid assets, no matter the loans could ever be recoverable or not and we too were making hay while the sun was shining as happy bankers earning profit for our banks and at the same time pocketing a plethora of fat bonuses that at times were equivalent to five basic pays a year. All on a sudden some American white men on behalf of the World Bank came to Bangladesh to gauze the health of our banks and were surprised at our fraudulent ways of making paper profit without taking into consideration the real worth of assets we showed in our balance sheets.

Sermons from Washington started pouring in for Bangladeshi banks to learn how to compute profit in the truest sense of the term. Their slogan was: "Lesser the government, better it is for the country". For more than a year in early 80s World Bank consultants (mostly Americans) with high pays and perks set up their air-conditioned camps in all the government-owned Bangladeshi commercial banks to reform financial disciplines under the banner "Financial Sector Reform Project", in short FSRP, with a long sight to denationalizing the government-owned banks. They have been superbly successful. Now all the commercial banks in Bangladesh are already public limited companies on their journey to be completely private banks within a year or two. And, of course, we are also grateful to them that they taught us, through FSRP, how to classify performing and nonperforming assets.

A loan amount which is not repaid within a specific period of time is treated as 'past due' or overdue and the banker is put on a red alert when the possibility of recovering the loan gets thinner and thinner with days passing. At one stage the loan is worth nurturing as a special loan to take care of and is termed a nonperforming asset of the bank to be appropriately classified depending upon the loan's present status. Nonperforming assets are categorized mainly as Substandard, Doubtful, and Bad in accordance with the guidelines from our central bank and as was prescribed by World Bank in FSRP. The bank which is too burdened with too many of bad loans and too few of good loans is destined to be liquidated and dead. That is what we know as modern and healthy way of doing banking business based on the capitalistic mantra: 'survival of the fittest'.

'Bad' loan, as we have been taught, is the worst asset to a banker and is usually written off from the ledger when the chance of its recovery is thinnest. To my surprise, I have been introduced by newspaper reports in America to some financial assets which are worse than 'Bad' and are popularly termed here as 'Toxic' assets.

When I first read about American government's plan of gulping toxic assets of sinking banks and financial institutions in an attempt to salvage them through 700 billion dollar bailout package my mind---to grasp the meaning of the word 'toxic'---travelled to nuclear plants where millions of gallons of 'toxic' radioactive wastes are dumped in heavily guarded underground concrete vaults to prevent contamination of soil and water.

My head simply reeled when the other day I watched on TV American bankers---many of whom were primarily responsible to create those toxic assets and who took for themselves millions of dollars as pay, perks, and bonuses---invited and cajoled by the Treasury Department as guests of honor and were reassured that they had nothing to worry about their jobs if only they restart their lending businesses as usual among themselves and to businesses and consumers---not out of their hard-earned deposits, but from new funds of 250 billion dollar the government will make available to help recapitalize their banks. In addition US Treasury Department would also guarantee new debts to be issued by those banks for three years.

To me, a kindergartener, it sounded like "Give the addict a bigger dose of narcotic drugs to calm him". Again in delirium I visualize Mr. Kajal of Court Chandpur in the ornate office of the US Treasury Department shaking hands with Mr. Henry M. Paulson, Secretary of Treasury, while receiving a check amounting 25 billion American dollar!

Markets around the world, to everybody's surprise, have rebounded on just hearing the news of the socialistic efforts of the governments on both sides of the Atlantic to salvage the bad lenders. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 936 points or 11 percent on Monday, the largest single-day gain in the American stock market history since the 1930s.

On Monday, big banks like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America agreed to take investments totaling about $125 billion. Another $125 billion is allocated for thousands of small and midsize banks.

The government hopes to earn from the recipients of the funds a reasonable return from investments in the form of preferred shares and warrants for common stock. Fantastic! Now the American taxpayers, who should now practically be shareholders in these banks, may keep their fingers crossed that they would also receive some stock dividends from the shares bought by their tax money! Now each and every American citizen should have a say which executives of which banks get hired and fired and how much they get paid. Who knows one day the government, as a fulltime trader in the Wall Street, will soon start earning enough money to completely rid the citizens from the hassles of paying taxes!

But there is a bad news from Britain, which injected its first capital into three newly nationalized banks: Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds, whose shares slumped on Monday, despite a surge in banks elsewhere.

The whole Occident is now doing what Bangladesh did in 1973 by nationalizing the banks and most of the American bankers are now doing what the nationalized banks in Bangladesh had been doing in the 70s and the early 80s to inflate profit on the balance sheets on the strength of all loans---both toxic and non-toxic.

The governments in Europe and America are becoming bankers either by nationalizing the banks or by injecting funds as equities to transfuse blood into anemic financial institutions with a view to thwarting a repeat scene of 30s economic depression.

Such bottle-feeding the adults may keep them asleep for a while. But, in the long run these drunken adults, I am apprehensive, may not garner enough strength to stand on their own feet. A short-sighted strategy to stabilize the financial system, a poor design to help the economy recover as has been proven time and again in Bangladesh!

For invigorating an economy winners should always be separated from the losers the way weeds and dead plants have to be cleared for healthy growth of a garden of vegetables. By artificially checking the recession---which is a natural business phenomenon---the American and European governments are trying their best to prevent small pox from reappearing---unaware that nature will take its toll of death through a different gateway such as an entry of a new disease like AIDS if the door is sealed for a re-entry of small pox. Recessions are healthy and necessary. Recessions weed out the inefficient and the marginal and expose fraud and corruption.

The way the American government is injecting money directly into banks is creating a bad precedence for future banking industries some of whom may---by fraud, negligence, or pretension---fall sick in the expectation that the Treasury Department, like Social Security, would always be there by their bedside with a briefcase full of dollars.

Some optimists, with the sudden surge in the Wall Street, are finding at last 'the light at the end of the tunnel'. But, many experienced Americans are finding the light at the end of the tunnel 'not as a light of relief', but a dazzling headlight of another giant train rushing from the opposite direction.

Leadership, not extremism responsible for Pakistan scenario

Asif Haroon Raja

In the 9/11 terrorist attacks on twin towers in New York in which about 3000 persons died, no Afghan or Pakistani was involved. All the 19 perpetrators of the crime were Arabs, mostly hailing from Saudi Arabia. Yet the wrath of USA fell on Afghanistan for a bizarre reason that the so-called master mind behind the attacks was Osama bin Laden based in Afghanistan. Mullah Omar kept requesting that proof of his complicity should be furnished to enable him to hand over his guest but none was provided. Terrorism became a buzzword and the fuming sole super power pounced upon militarily extremely weak and economically impoverished Afghanistan with utmost ferocity and decimated it. The whole world including UNSC supported the ghoulish invasion and its occupation under the hope that it would help in eliminating global terrorism. Iraq too was pulverised on a cooked up story of WMDs and linkage with Al-Qaeda. Both charges turned out to be totally fabricated. Saddam as well as UN inspectors kept saying till the last that there were no WMDs, but Bush and Blair ignored them as well as world protests and went ahead with the second invasion without UNSC blessing. After destroying the two countries, USA is now bent upon destroying one of its close allies Pakistan which had played a key role in ousting Taliban and in getting Karzai elected. Without Pakistan's all out military support, it may not have been possible for US-NATO forces to stay in Afghanistan for that long.

In case of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein refused to buckle under US repeated threats followed by troop mobilisation. Instead of submitting to US diktat they opted to fight the aggressor well knowing that they were non-nuclear states and their conventional means were no match to the military prowess of sole super power duly aided by all the advanced nations of the world. In our case, we had nuclear weapons and adequate conventional means to defend our homeland. However, our commando General who never tired of bragging about his boldness, turned into a kitten when he received a phone call from Washington. He hastily threw in his towel and provided US spy agencies and its military forces large-scale facilities to make easy USA task of achieving its long term objectives. He justified his cowardly act of ditching the friendly Taliban and befriending USA on the premise that had he not done so Pakistan for sure would have been destroyed.

He promised his mentors in USA that not only he would rid Pakistan of the menace of religious extremism, he would secularise the society through its enlightened moderation program. He agreed to blindly follow American dictates and develop close friendship with India by closing the chapter of Kashmir as well as other contentious issues. In other words he agreed to gradually weaken Pakistan from within by erasing the concept of Jihad and the warrior spirit from the minds of the people of Pakistan, follow the secularist path of his idol Kamal Atta Turk and accept Indian hegemony. Fortunately for Pakistan, he had to quit because of relentless lawyers movement and unexpected election results, but not before allowing CIA and RAW to make sufficient inroads into Pakistan's tribal areas in Baluchistan and FATA, weakening the administrative and political structures, destroying the judiciary, creating a mirage of economic prosperity and giving a death blow to accountability and Kashmir cause.

By officially accepting charges of cross border terrorism, religious extremism, nuclear proliferation, he energised our detractors to launch a vicious propaganda campaign and paint Pakistan in black. While Karzai began to drum up the Indian tutored theme of cross border terrorism, western media pasted libellous stories about our nuclear program and Pakistan army to tarnish its image.. Charges levied against Pakistan were never contested because of overall policy of appeasement. Having gained foolproof evidences of RAW and RAM involvement in our troubled spots, yet our leaders did not pick up courage to even name them what to talk of protesting or taking counter actions. This was in spite of Indian leaders' traditional policy of promptly throwing the blame of each and every terrorist act taking place in India at the doorsteps of ISI. With all the powers resting in his hands for eight years, he allowed US influence to permeate into each and every department and a stage came when no decision could be made without US involvement and blessing. Not only CIA and FBI were given blank cheques, US spy drones fitted with cameras were allowed to operate in our territory at will to acquire intelligence.

Having entrenched itself fully within the decision making circles of Pakistan and blackmailed the new leadership through power sharing deal and NRO, Musharraf was eased out and replaced with even more loyal and acquiescent Zardari ready to do US bidding. This change had become necessary since Musharraf was not acquiescing on enfeebling ISI, handing over AQ Khan, allowing US troops to operate in FATA and abandoning Iran-Pakistan gas pipe project. Zardari has been mandated to remove remaining impediments and to open up areas where full penetration could not be made. The major assault was made on the ISI with a view to defang it. In order to carryout offensive ground and aerial incursions inside Pakistan, it was alleged that the army and ISI were linked with the Taliban and as such the US could ill afford to share intelligence with ISI before striking the suspected targets. The purpose behind these strikes is to create fear and panic among the tribesmen and to shift the war to settled areas and major cities and make Pakistan ungovernable. It also hopes to strike high-value Al-Qaeda targets and thus swing the poll results in favour of Republicans.

Bogey of cross border terrorism has been sensationalised and magnified out of all proportions asserting that unless sanctuaries in FATA are destroyed Afghanistan could not be normalised. Pakistan has been declared as the biggest threat to world security, with nuclear weapons that could hit Israel and western nations. This wild charge has been made well knowing that it is Indian and not Pakistani missiles that can reach the stated targets. Bush and other leaders have categorically mentioned that any attack on US territory would emanate from Al-Qaeda leadership entrenched in mountains of FATA. Pakistan has been declared as a war zone and the Pentagon authorised to carryout attacks as deemed feasible. Having heard the bellicose statements of the presidential hopefuls of the two parties, it is crystal clear that both regard Pakistan as the most dangerous threat to their homeland security. Obama as well as McCain strongly feel that the threat must be neutralised at the earliest with or without the support of Pakistan. The Bush Administration seem to be in a hurry to wrap up last pockets of resistance and bag Pakistan by mid November and hand over the baton to the Democrats on a triumphant note.

The eventual goal of Americans is to deprive Pakistan of its nuclear weapons. For the fulfilment of this objective the trio of USA-Israel and India would go to any extents. They are keen to denuclearise Pakistan without having to wage a full-fledged war. They are constantly working upon our timid leadership to hand over nuclear assets voluntarily.

For this purpose, Pakistan is being deliberately destabilised and the ongoing disinformation campaign is part of the sinister plan to create misgivings and sense of disillusionment among the Pakistanis and also conditioning the minds of the world that Pakistan is a threat to world security. Pressure of all sorts is mounted on our leadership to convince them that it is neither in a position to govern Pakistan nor capable of preventing it from becoming a failed state or protecting its nuclear assets. They warn that before nuclear bombs are stolen by extremist forces they must be taken away and stored in a safe place by US troops or else UN should step in and take control. Instead of helping Pakistan to control militancy, USA is stoking it and continuously adding fuel to fire. The axis of evil based in Kabul is hell-bent to create anarchic conditions in Pakistan to attain their laid down objective.

To make the task of security forces difficult, far too many militant groups have been formed and provided funds and arms. Baitullah Mahsud was CIA's man and now Baitullah Mehsud in all probability has also been won over and is promoting American agenda under the garb of Talibanisation. To win the sympathies of the locals, he worked on the lines of Afghan Taliban by dealing with criminal elements sternly and dispensing speedy justice. He offered Sharia as the panacea for all the ills. Having created a base in South Waziristan, he created Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in end 2006 to be able to spread his influence far and wide. Members of the Tehrik under a well planned scheme began to defame the army by whispering into the ears of the people of FATA that it was aligned with the non-Muslims. The army was thus caught up in a nut cracker situation. On one hand it was ridiculed and pricked to do more and on the other it was maligned as friend of infidels. Under the garb of removing vices and promoting virtues of Islam, music shops, barber shops and girls schools were torched and kidnapped persons beheaded by criminal elements within the ranks of Taliban.

Besides, TTP, Taliban under local leadership of each tribal agency, and in Swat and Darra cropped up having links with each other. The Taliban in Swat under Fazlullah in particular have proved more brutal. While pro-government Taliban or groups are eliminated by CIA, Afghan and RAW agents, anti-government groups are patronised.

It must not be forgotten that one of the major purposes of USA to bring back BB under a deal was to affect a change in public perceptions and to convince them that the militants and extremists were the real enemies of Pakistan and the people must collectively rise to fight the menace of terrorism. Musharraf led team had failed to galvanise the public and had become extremely unpopular on account of its pro-American policies. One wonders on what grounds the new rulers hope to change the perceptions of the people when they have not brought any change in Musharraf's policies and are dancing to the tunes of USA and have so far not taken any concrete step to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. Their lacklustre attitude and hypocrisy has made them unpopular. As long as they remain tied to the aprons of USA, the people will not stand behind them. With 30% voting in favour of PPP, it cannot claim that it has the support of great majority and hence can do whatever pleases its leadership. An effort to build wider consensus on war on terror through in-camera briefing given by army has failed to deliver since lot of time has been wasted in putting the act together to evolve a cohesive strategy to tackle the threat. Wastage of time in capturing power centres and consolidating power base, in eulogising BB and approaching UN to probe her murder, indulging in unscrupulous games to defang judiciary, in projecting parliamentary supremacy and sovereignty and in taking dictations from USA has sharpened divisions between the two schools of thought, one saying that terrorism is home-grown and the other insisting that it is foreign sponsored. Irrespective of the views of the majority the PPP led regime is bent upon guzzling down the throats of the nation the idea that American war on terror is Pakistan's baby and must be collectively fought.