Nawaz League Enters into Electoral Alliance with Banned Extremist Organisation

Qadri Factor: Zardari under pressure from MQM, Q League

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Pakistani militant leader Maulvi Nazir killed in U.S. drone strike

By Jennifer Rowland Thursday, January 3, 2013 - 8:33 AM Share

Leader downed
A U.S. drone strike launched Wednesday night killed top Pakistani militant commander Maulvi Nazir, who was considered by the Pakistani military to be one of the "good Taliban" because he focused his attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan rather than the Pakistani officials and security forces targeted by other factions of the militant group (AP, Reuters, LAT, NYT, Post, The News). The drone-fired missile struck a house in Angoor Adda, near the city of Wana, South Waziristan, killing nine people inside.
On Thursday morning, another drone attack, this time in North Waziristan, killed four people whose identities could not be verified (AP, Reuters).
The Pakistani Army is set to discuss the Pakistani Taliban's conditions for a ceasefire at a corps commanders' meeting on Friday, but has also asked the government to come up with an official response (ET). Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud said last week that his group could agree to a ceasefire if the government "adopted Sharia after changing the Constitution, revised foreign policy and ended its engagement with the war on terror in Afghanistan."
The father of Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by Taliban militants in October and is still recovering at a hospital in England, has been offered a job at the Pakistani consulate in Birmingham, close to Malala's hospital (AFP, CNN).
Familiar events?
Times reporter Thom Shanker published a must-read on Wednesday outlining the parallels between NATO's ongoing withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 1989 Soviet withdrawal strategy, which is widely remembered as a precipitator of the ensuing Afghan civil war (NYT).
A new look
Plastic surgery is on the rise in Afghanistan, and not just to mitigate the terrible effects that war has had on the appearances of many (LAT). As Bollywood movies and Turkish soap operas have soared in popularity in Afghanistan, and more women are entering the workforce, cosmetic surgery for the sake of beauty is becoming a much more common practice.
-- Jennifer Rowland

Can You Fight Poverty With a Five-Star Hotel? - By Cheryl Strauss Einhorn | Foreign Policy

Can You Fight Poverty With a Five-Star Hotel?

The story of how the World Bank's investment arm hands out billions in loans to wealthy tycoons and giant multinationals in some of the world's poorest places.

BY CHERYL STRAUSS EINHORN | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013

Accra is a city of choking red dust where almost no rain falls for three months at a time and clothes hung out on a line dry in 15 minutes. So the new five-star Mövenpick hotel affords a haven of sorts in Ghana's crowded capital, with manicured lawns, amply watered vegetation, and uniformed waiters gliding poolside on roller skates to offer icy drinks to guests. A high concrete wall rings the grounds, keeping out the city's overflowing poor who hawk goods in the street by day and the homeless who lie on the sidewalks by night.
The Mövenpick, which opened in 2011, fits the model of a modern international luxury hotel, with 260 rooms, seven floors, and 13,500 square feet of retail space displaying $2,000 Italian handbags and other wares. But it is exceptional in at least one respect: It was financed by a combination of two very different entities: a multibillion-dollar investment company largely controlled by a Saudi prince, and the poverty-fighting World Bank. The investment company, Kingdom Holding Company, has a market value of $12 billion, and Forbes ranks its principal owner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as the world's 29th-richest person, estimating his net worth at $18 billion. The World Bank, meanwhile, contributed its part through its International Finance Corporation (IFC), set up back in 1956 to muster cheap loans and other financial support for private businesses that contribute to its planet-improving mandate. "At the World Bank, we have made the world's most pressing development issue -- to reduce global poverty -- our mission," the bank proclaims.

Why, then, did the IFC give a Saudi prince's company an attractively priced $26 million loan to help build the Mövenpick, a hotel the prince was fully capable of financing himself? The answer is that the IFC's portfolio of billions of dollars in loans and investments is not in fact primarily targeted at helping the impoverished. At least as important is the goal of making a profit for the World Bank.
I reached this conclusion after traveling to Ghana -- in many ways typical of the more than 100 countries where the IFC works -- to see firsthand the kinds of problems the World Bank's lenders are supposed to tackle and whether their efforts are really working on the ground. I pored through thousands of pages of the bank's publicly available reports and financial statements and talked to dozens of experts familiar with its performance in Ghana and many other countries.
In case after case, the verdict was the same: The IFC likes to work with huge corporations, funding projects these companies could finance themselves. Its partners are billionaires and massive multinationals, from oil giants like ExxonMobil to Grupo Arcor, the huge Argentine candy-maker. Its projects include not only glitzy hotels and high-end shopping malls, but also gritty gold and copper mines and oil pipelines, some of which end up benefiting the very corrupt, authoritarian regimes that the rest of the World Bank is urging to change. Nearly a quarter of the IFC's paid-in capital from member governments -- now standing at $2.4 billion -- came from U.S. taxpayers, and every president in the World Bank's 69-year history has been an American. But the United States has had little complaint with these practices, even when they have become a subject of public controversy.
Not long ago, the World Bank's internal watchdog sharply criticized the IFC's approach, saying it gives little more than lip service to the bank's poverty-fighting mission. The report, a major 2011 review by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, found that fewer than half the IFC investments it studied involved fighting poverty. "[M]ost IFC investment projects generate satisfactory returns but do not provide evidence of identifiable opportunities for the poor to participate in, contribute to, or benefit from the economic activities that the project supports," the report concluded. In fact, it said, only 13 percent of 500 projects studied "had objectives with an explicit focus on poor people," and even those that did, the report found, had a "limited" impact. The IFC did not dispute the conclusions.
There is certainly need in countries like Ghana, whose per capita GDP ranks in the bottom third of the world, with life expectancy in the bottom 15 percent and infant mortality in the bottom fourth. The IFC committed about $145 million in loans and equity in Ghana just in fiscal year 2012. Yet Takyiwaa Manuh, who advises the Ghanaian government on economic development as a member of the National Development Planning Commission, told me she doesn't think of the IFC's investments "as fighting poverty. Just because some people are employed, it is hard to say that is poverty reduction."
But the policies continue. Why? Tycoons and megacompanies offer relatively low risk and generally assured returns for the IFC, allowing it to reinvest the earnings in more such projects. Only a portion of this money ends up benefiting local workers, and critics contend that the IFC's investments often work against local development needs. "The IFC's model itself is a problem," says Jesse Griffiths, director of the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), a Belgian-based nonprofit. "The IFC undermines democracy with its piecemeal, top-down approach to development that follows the priorities of private companies."
"We're not saying we're perfect," Rashad Kaldany told me. He is a veteran IFC executive and currently its vice president for global industries. The IFC operates "at the frontier," he said. "We know that not every project will work. It's about trying to make a difference to the poor and about achieving financial sustainability" -- twin goals that are challenging in combination.
When it comes to luxury hotels like the Mövenpick in downtown Accra, however, the IFC offers no apology for its investments, even making the case for them as an economic boon for poor countries. A January 2012 report from the World Bank says hotels "play a critical role in development as they catalyze tourism and business infrastructure," noting its partners include such "leading" firms as luxury chains Shangri-La, Hilton, Marriott, InterContinental -- and, of course, Mövenpick.
In Accra, Mary-Jean Moyo, the IFC's in-country manager for Ghana, told me the new hotel fights poverty by creating jobs. To illustrate, she recalled how the Mövenpick's manager "noticed that a few boys roller-skate on Sundays outside the hotel. The manager decided to hire them to work at the pool. That is development and helping local people." How many were hired, I asked. Six, Moyo responded.
When I spoke with Stuart Chase, the Mövenpick's manager, he told me that other kinds of investments besides the new hotel he was clearly proud of would do far more to stimulate Ghana's economy and reduce poverty. Chase, who has lived and worked in Ghana for years, mentioned the country's congested and potholed roads, poor electricity system, limited food supplies, and lack of trade schools. "There is no hotel school and no vocational training in the country," he complained. As a result, all the top staff members among his 300 employees are foreign.
Besides, Accra already has close to a dozen luxury hotels. Before taking over the Mövenpick, Chase managed another nearby five-star hotel owned by Ghana's Social Security and National Insurance Trust, the country's pension system. So when the IFC decided to finance Prince Alwaleed's hotel, it was entering into direct competition with the people it claims it wants to lift out of poverty. Moyo acknowledged to me that the IFC didn't study the local hotel scene before making this investment, unlike its standard practice. "We knew the company and had another successful investment in Kingdom that made the Ghana deal attractive to us," she said. The other investment? A $20 million deal in 2010 to help develop five luxury venues in Kenya, complete with heated swimming pools, golf courses, and organized safaris.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who sits on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that has jurisdiction over U.S. participation in the World Bank, called the Ghana loan "not an appropriate use of public funds" when alerted to it by a 2011 Washington Times article. The U.S. Treasury Department, which administers American participation in the World Bank, defended the loan, telling the newspaper that the IFC package replaced funding expected from private banks that pulled out when market conditions soured, putting the entire $103 million project at risk. When I was in Accra in July, however, at least two other major hotel projects were under construction with private financing obtained in the same period. The prince's representatives didn't respond to requests for comment.
LUXURY HOTELS AND RESORTS are hardly the only IFC investments that offer at best limited prospects for serving its poverty-fighting mandate. Founded just a dozen years after the World Bank itself, the IFC has in recent years become its fastest-growing unit. It now has a staff of some 3,400 people in 103 countries and made $15 billion in loan commitments in 2012 across about 580 projects -- more than double its 2006 total and a figure that's projected to grow to about $20 billion in the next few years.
The original notion was that while the World Bank was lending directly to poor countries, the IFC would stimulate the growth of private business, entrepreneurship, and financial markets in some of those same countries by lending to and investing in for-profit corporations. The founders, notably including a General Foods executive named Robert Garner, emphasized that the IFC would participate only in projects for which "sufficient private capital is not available on reasonable terms."
That concept has become muddied over the years, as well-heeled borrowers with excellent credit have sought to take advantage of the IFC's relatively attractive loan terms and other investment vehicles, plus, in some cases, the cachet associated with World Bank support. The IFC's growth got a boost in the early 1980s when it was permitted for the first time to raise money from the global capital markets by issuing bonds. More recently, its growth has accelerated as it has entered new businesses, including trade finance, derivatives, and private equity, sometimes to the annoyance of private banks with which it competes.
Today, the IFC's booming list of business partners reads like a who's who of giant multinational corporations: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Mitsubishi, Vodafone, and many more. It has funded fast-food chains like Domino's Pizza in South Africa and Kentucky Fried Chicken in Jamaica. It invests in upscale shopping malls in Egypt, Ghana, the former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. It backs candy-shop chains in Argentina and Bangladesh; breweries with global beer behemoths like SABMiller and with other breweries in the Czech Republic, Laos, Romania, Russia, and Tanzania; and soft-drink distribution for the likes of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and their competitors in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mali, Russia, South Sudan, Uzbekistan, and more.

The criticism of most such investments -- from a broad array of academics and watchdog groups as well as local organizations in the poor countries themselves -- is that they make little impact on poverty and could just as easily be undertaken without IFC subsidies. In some cases, critics contend, the projects hold back development and exacerbate poverty, not to mention subjecting affected countries to pollution and other ills.
The debate is swirling as the World Bank has a new leader, installed in July: Jim Yong Kim, an American physician who recently stepped down as president of Dartmouth College. The bank declined to make him available to comment for this article, and in his brief tenure so far, he has given little hint of his view of the IFC. In both his statement when he took office in July and on his first overseas visit, to Ghana's neighbor to the west, Ivory Coast, he did note briefly the importance of the IFC within the World Bank Group and of the private sector to global job creation.
The IFC is also in the middle of a change in leadership. Its former head, Lars Thunell, recently completed his term, and Chinese national Jin-Yong Cai, a Goldman Sachs partner who was in charge of the firm's Chinese banking operations, succeeded him in October. At that time, Kaldany, who had been serving as the IFC's acting CEO, stepped back to the post of vice president for global industries.
The IFC's operations have been the subject not only of outside criticism but of significant parts of 2011's stinging internal report and other critiques from within the World Bank. The 2011 document, in which the bank's Independent Evaluation Group examined the IFC's activities over the previous decade, portrayed a profit-oriented, deal-driven organization that often fails to reach the poor, and at times may even sacrifice the poor, in a drive to earn a healthy return on its investments: "Greater effort is needed in translating the strategic intentions into actions in investment operations and advisory services to enhance IFC's poverty focus."
But the IFC's money-generating strategy has at least one benefit: It sustains the jobs of the people who work for it. The "more money the IFC makes, the more the bank has [available] to invest," says Griffiths, the director of Eurodad. "Staff is incentivized to make money."
Francis Kalitsi, a former IFC employee who is now a managing partner at private-equity firm Serengeti Capital in Accra, has a similar view. "To get ahead, you had to book big transactions," he recalls of his time at the IFC. "The IFC is very profit-focused. The IFC does not address poverty, and its investments rarely touch the poor."
The IFC sets annual targets for the number, size, and types of deals employees should complete, and it awards performance bonuses for reaching these targets, according to several current and former IFC staffers. "If you don't reach the target, you don't get a bonus," says Alan Moody, a former IFC manager who now works elsewhere at the World Bank. Deals often come to the IFC from private companies, not the other way around. "We choose our projects by identifying key clients and asking them what their needs are," says the IFC's Moyo. That means, though, that by following private companies' priorities, the IFC makes investments that are not necessarily aligned with countries' own development strategies.
Even if the IFC focused more of its resources on poverty, it doesn't have a good way to track whether its work has any impact. The 2011 report -- which advises that the IFC "needs to think carefully about questions such as who the poor are, where they are located, and how they can be reached" -- criticizes the IFC for lacking metrics for its investments, saying it fails to "[d]efine, monitor, and report poverty outcomes for projects."
The IFC does not contest these criticisms. Its management responded to the evaluation group's report by stating, "We broadly agree with [the] report's lessons and recommendations" and conceded that the "IFC has not been consistent in stating … the anticipated poverty reduction effects of a project." The IFC notes that it several years ago began using a Development Outcome Tracking System (DOTS) to measure the effectiveness of its projects at spurring economic development and alleviating poverty. This system, however, has drawn snickers from a number of IFC clients. They note that the DOTS ratings rely heavily on self-reporting by the recipient companies and depend to some extent on financial data for the entire firm, often with multiple divisions around the world, rather than focusing on the specific area of the IFC-funded project. Still, Kaldany expresses enthusiasm for the effort, saying it is pathbreaking and getting better.

Meanwhile, there has been little evidence of change on the ground. Everywhere I looked -- in Ghana, in nearby West Africa, and globally -- the IFC still seems to be giving its mandate to fight poverty short shrift.
In finance, for example, R. Yofi Grant, executive director of Databank, one of Ghana's largest banks, told me that the IFC's practice of providing loans at attractive terms to multinational companies "crowds out local banks and private-equity firms by taking the juiciest investments and walking away with a healthy return."
Grant says that the IFC recently organized a $115 million financing package for global telecom giant Vodafone to expand its operations in Ghana, even though six telecom companies already operate in the country. Despite such robust private investment, the IFC's loan package for Vodafone was its second in two years. "That is not poverty reduction, and these are not frontier investments," Grant says, referring to the IFC's refrain that it invests where other financiers might not. "The IFC says all the right things and does all the wrong things."
A THOUSAND MILES EAST of Ghana are Cameroon and Chad, which exemplify a major and highly controversial domain of IFC investment, one where the stakes are often higher than with hotels and shopping malls. That domain is energy.
As of the end of 2011, the IFC reported a $2 billion oil-and-gas portfolio, investing with 30 companies in 23 countries and, the IFC boasted, achieving "Award Winning Recognition from the Market." But critics, including environmentalists and nonprofit groups such as the Bretton Woods Project and Christian Aid, contend that the projects often exacerbate the poverty they are supposed to alleviate. The projects, they say, frequently escalate local conflict and corruption, displace communities, disrupt livelihoods, and contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
In 2003, an independent review panel within the World Bank even recommended that the bank, including the IFC, pull out of all oil, natural gas, and coal-mining projects by 2008, saying such loans do not benefit the poor who live where the natural resources are found. But the World Bank's board overruled these recommendations. The bank ultimately agreed to an approach that is "business as usual with marginal changes," Emil Salim, the Indonesian official who led the bank's review, told Bloomberg News in 2004. In a conference call with reporters at the time, IFC executive Kaldany said, "There was very broad consensus that we should remain engaged; we do add value."
The example of Chad and Cameroon, however, offers a more complicated picture. In 2000, the IFC invested roughly $200 million with ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others, along with the governments of Chad and Cameroon, to support the construction of a nearly $4 billion oil-pipeline project that experts estimate will generate more than $5 billion in revenue over the 25-year life of the project from wells mainly in landlocked Chad to a port in Cameroon.
The two countries are even poorer than Ghana to the west. Per capita income in Chad ranks 193rd in the world, compared with 185th place for Cameroon and 172nd for Ghana. Life expectancy at birth in Chad, at 48.7 years, is the world's absolute worst, and the country has been ruled for the last two decades by heavy-handed dictator Idriss Déby.
"Conditions were and are a hardship and horrible," says Peter Rosenblum, co-director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University, who argued that the pipeline project should demand protections for the civilian population. The bulk of the oil revenue was supposed to be set aside for food, education, health care, and infrastructure. But in the face of attacks from rebel groups supported by neighboring Sudan, and asserting a need to defend the pipeline, Déby instead channeled substantial chunks into arms purchases, bringing criticism not only from human rights groups but from the World Bank. As critics of the project had warned, the oil bonanza increased the stakes for control of the country and added to the civil strife.
What happened with Chad is not an isolated incident. Despite perennial controversies over energy and mining projects, often the subject of fierce disputes related to everything from their environmental impacts to the extent they boost authoritarian regimes, the IFC continues to invest in them extensively. Just in 2012, the IFC announced investments in mining projects for gold, copper, and diamonds in places like Mongolia, Liberia, and South Africa, as well as investments in oil and gas projects in Colombia, Ivory Coast, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Moreover, as with Chad's Déby, the IFC continues to lend and invest in countries with heavy-handed rulers such as Syria (Bashar al-Assad) and Venezuela (Hugo Chávez). Kaldany told me there were about a dozen dictatorships, which he wouldn't name, where the IFC would simply not do business. But then there is a second tier, where he is inclined to work. "It is a tradeoff. We can have a positive influence," he said, referring to a recent IFC deal in now civil war-torn Syria to fund microfinance. He said the IFC is insisting on increasingly tight financial controls in such countries to ensure that the proceeds from the projects are targeted directly to the poor rather than to sustaining the dictators' hold on power. He acknowledged that the controls in the Chad case were not nearly tight enough and that the IFC ultimately had to pull out.
The IFC's critics see two obvious ways to fix it: dramatically overhaul its priorities or sharply reduce its funding and channel those resources toward the type of World Bank projects that more closely align with its anti-poverty mission.
Kaldany said that the IFC is seeking to increase its number of small projects, of under $5 million and tightly targeted on the poor, and to devote more attention to the poorest of the poor countries. In the most recent fiscal year, it generated 105 of the smaller projects, 20 percent of its total deals, although a much smaller percentage of its total dollar outlays. (IFC officials couldn't immediately provide that number.)
But don't count on a new direction. Although its new leadership has remained publicly mum, the IFC's new chief, Cai, has told people he strongly supports its current strategy.
IN ACCRA, NOT FAR from the new Mövenpick, the IFC's posh offices -- sporting a lawn, flowers, and private parking -- sit amid a slum, surrounded by an imposing concrete wall topped by coils of barbed wire. The only paved part of the road to the IFC is directly in front of the guarded complex, which has no sign announcing its identity. The rest of the road is a winding, dusty dirt path filled with potholes and surrounded by hovels erected out of battered metal or wood.
Barefoot children sit amid goats and roving chickens, on ground dotted by garbage and litter. Women cook tiny fish strung onto sticks over an open fire, ignoring the near-100-degree temperatures. I approached them one day in July, and some of them said they had lived there for 15 years. When asked whether they knew what the World Bank is, they said no. When told that it fights poverty, many of them laughed.
"We need help, and we know there are places that help," said one woman who was cooking as two young boys clung to her legs. "But we have never heard of them.

Pakistan to seek technology from China to monitor Social Media

India: Gang Rape: Forgotten Facts

Gang Rape: Forgotten Facts

By

Dr Javed Jamil

The New Year celebrations were postponed in many places throughout the country as India did not feel like ceebrating in the wake of the gang rape of its “brave daughter” and her subsequent death. That the people felt enraged gives some hope that social vices would now start receiving much greater attention than they get till now. For last 20 years, I have been speaking and writing extensively on commercialization of human susceptibilities particularly alcohol, gambling and commercial sex. I have often felt frustrated why these issues do not jolt even those whose religious consciousness regards them “Prohibited”. I am piqued even more now because not even the mass rage against Delhi rape case attracted any debate on the real factors involved in sex related crimes. The whole issue has unfortunately been given a man-woman turn, as if it is only crimes against women that are on the rise and all other crimes have disappeared. Three factors that have been completely sidetracked are:

1.      The failure of judicial system as a whole at the international level in controlling crimes;

2.      The largescale commercialization of sex and its destructive effects; and

3.      The relationship between rapes and alcohol/drugs.

We are living in a world where the more advanced and extensive the judicial system of a country is the more horrendous are its crime statistics. This is true of all the developed countries including US, Eurpea and Australia. In all thee countries, Fear of God and Fear of Law have become too week to have any demeaning effect on crimes. Thanks to the rise of New World Order, the judicial system has not only been catering to the neds of the forces of globalisatiob but has become a big money-spinner, which makes people engaged in the system rich without delievering what it is supposed to it. Despite their horrible failure, they have no dearth of people showering encomium on these systems. No wonder then that rapes are becoming increasingly common throughout the world; and Western countries including USA, France, UK and Australia occupy top ranks in the list of maximum rates of rapes. More than once a minute, 78 times an hour, 1,871 times a day, girls and women in America are raped with more than 90000 raped every year. India with its mixture of Westernise legal systems and fast wesrternising socioeconomic system is also becoming increasingly criminal.

Sex has of course become the pivot on which the wheel of world economy revloves. The merchants want men and women together everywhere to keep the wheel rolling without caring much for their security. They are busy in publishing reports that prostitution and pornography in fact have a depressing effect on the incidence of rapes, as if  prostitution and pornography are no crimes themselves. I have seen people arguing for hours to prove that eve teasing is a much bigger crime than rapes, prostitution and promiscuity. I don’t blame them because this is the kind of the ideological feedback they get from the media.

In  this article however, I would like to focus more on the relationship between alcohol/drugs and all sex related problems including rapes.

It is widely known that alcohol increases the risks of unhealthy sexual behaviour. Studies of AIDS in other countries, such as Thailand, indicate that alcohol consumption influences many dimensions of sexual behaviour. One such study, which included students, soldiers, and clerks revealed that “heavy drinking increased the odds of having had sexual intercourse; increased the odds of having visited prostitutes; and decreased the odds of consistent condom use in sexual encounters with sex workers (VanLandingham and others, 1993).” Another report says, “The relationship between drinking and HIV risk behaviours, such as visiting commercial sex workers or having sex without condoms, is not one of simple causality. It has been argued that drinking behaviour co-occurs with other dangerous factors; such a risk-taking Includes beverages made from sugarcane alcohol and agaves, such as mescal and sotol. Aguardiente means "burning water" (Aledina-Mora, 1999).”

 

Here are sme of the findings of reports on the relationship between rapes and alcohol:

·           Alcohol use by the victim or the perpetrator is frequently associated with acquaintance rape.

 

• In one, study 26% of men who acknowledged committing sexual assault admitted that they were intoxicated at the time of the assault, and an additional 29% reported being mildly buzzed—55% were under the influence of alcohol.

 

·          In the same study 21% of the college women who experienced sexual aggression on a date were intoxicated at the time of the assault, and an additional 32% reported being mildly buzzed—53% were under the influence of alcohol.

 

http://www.montana.edu/wwwai/imsd/alcohol/Vanessa/vwrapefactsheet.htm

The effect of alcohol can also  be seen in the cases of abuses. The National Incidence of Child Abuse and Neglect reported that “there is certainly a reason to suppose the number of cases of actual abuse might be rising, since child abuse could be expected to rise when drug and alcohol abuse were increasing and when broken homes were becoming more complex.”

The Effects of Alcohol on Men

A report sumsup the effects of alcohol on men and women in terms of their sexual behaviour:

    “Men expect to feel more powerful, sexual and aggressive after drinking alcohol. Expectancies have power of their own, independent  of any genuine physiological processes. When people expect a  certain outcome, they tend to act in ways that enhance the  likelihood that the outcome will occur. For example, if a man feels  powerful and strong after drinking alcohol, then he is more
 likely  to assert his viewpoints forcefully and to end up in a verbal or  physical argument. Studies show that men who think they have been  drinking alcohol (whether or not they really have) feel sexually  aroused and are more responsive to erotic stimuli and rape scenarios.

“Many studies show that men are more likely than women to interpret a variety of verbal and nonverbal cues as evidence that  a woman is interested in having sex with a man. For example, males were more likely than females to rate revealing clothing, secluded date locations such as his room or the beach, drinking alcohol, complimenting a date, and tickling a
 date as more indicative of a desire to have sexual intercourse.

“The tradition of female reluctance and male persistence makes it easy for men to ignore the woman's "no" and force sex on a genuinely unwilling partner. Both the man and the woman might not view this situation as rape. But if sex occurred without verbal

consent, or force was used to obtain sex against the woman's will, then what happened is legally defined as rape.

“Alcohol consumption by men is likely to enhance the likelihood that misperception will occur and lead to sexual assault. For example, for some men going out on a date or going to a party includes an
 initial hypothesis that sex will occur. Drinking alcohol may cause men to interpret or reinterpret a woman' s behavior as a sign of her desire to have sex with him-in a way that fits his initial hypothesis. And he will ignore what she is doing or saying that shows that she is not interested in sex. If a man starts out on a date thinking, "I'm going to have sex," he is starting out with a hypothesis that doesn't take the

other person into account. It is a rape mentality.”

 The Effects of Alcohol on Women

The same report also describes the effects of alcohol on women:

“Alcohol consumption may cause women to ignore or miss cues that suggest an assault is likely . It may keep a woman from realizing that her friendly behavior is being perceived as seduction. (Research studies have shown that men are inclined to misperceive a woman's friendliness as a sign of sexual interest.) Drinking may keep a woman from noticing a man's attempts to get her into an isolated location or his encouragement to drink even more. Alcohol consumption may also decrease the
 likelihood that women can successfully resist an assault, either verbally or physically.

“Men frequently feel justified in forcing sex on women who, they believe, have been leading them on or are being sexual teases. Legally sexual provocation, whether intentional or not, is not justification for rape; sex with someone unable to give consent (e.g. drunk) is also rape.

 “There are many stereotypes about women who drink alcohol. One common belief is that women who drink alcohol are more sexually available
 than women who do not drink. The results of one study showed that a woman who had a few alcoholic drinks was viewed as more likely than a woman who drank only soft drinks to respond positively to a sexual advance, as more willing to be seduced, and as more likely to engage in sexual intercourse.      Another study showed that men were more likely than women to assume that a woman who drank alcohol with her date was interested in having sex with him. Forty percent of the men who took part in this study felt that it was acceptable to force sex on a drunk date. In a different study 75 percent of a group of acknowledged date rapists said that they sometimes got women drunk in order to increase the likelihood of having sex with them. Many date rape victims report that their attacker fed them drinks for several hours before the attack.

 “Women who were drunk when raped are often viewed by others as partially responsible for what happened. Interviews with a group of  college students showed that the male attacker was held less responsible for the rape when he was intoxicated than he was when he was reported as being sober. In contrast, the female victim was

held more responsible when she was intoxicated than when she was reported as being sober. Thus, in terms of how others will perceive their behavior, the costs of intoxication are higher for college women than for college men. “

Alcohol remains the most commonly used date rape drug, being readily available as well as legal, and is said to be used in the majority of sexual assaults. Many assailants use alcohol because their victims often willingly imbibe it, and can be encouraged to drink enough to lose inhibitions or consciousness. Sex with an unconscious victim is considered rape in most if not all jurisdictions, and some assailants have committed "rapes of convenience" whereby they have assaulted a victim after he or she had become unconscious from drinking too much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug

However, in the typical Western style, the emphasis in all such writings has been not on curbing drinking habits but on insisting that drinking of women do not absolve the rapist of his crime. An article by Jaclyn Friedman (WeNews commentator) says:

 

“Blasting women with warnings about getting drunk in public does little to help them and sidesteps men's responsibility for sexual assault, writes Jaclyn Friedman. She advocates three steps that could be more effective.

“(WOMENSENEWS)--In 1992, while I was an undergraduate, I was raped by a fellow student while we were both drunk. He was not a date. I didn't even like him when we were sober. But we were at a party together, a party at which I tried too hard to "keep up" with my friends in the alcohol department and wound up far more drunk than I wanted to be. So I went back to my room. And he followed me. And then he raped me.

Looking back, I can imagine a number of social or institutional interventions which might have helped prevent this attack from happening. But none of them includes the approach that so many articles on this subject take, which is to "raise awareness" among young women that getting drunk in public puts them at greater risk of exploitation and sexual assault.

Why is this an impotent approach? For all the same reasons abstinence-only education does nothing to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (and may even contribute to it).

Very few people of any age or gender go out and drink enough to get drunk thinking it's a responsible thing to do. However true it may be that it's safer not to get drunk (approximately 70 percent of rapes among college students involve alcohol or drug use), it's not like young women don't already hear about the risks from parents, college administrations, the nightly news, or any of the 25 "CSI" or "Law and Order" clones on TV.”

While there is no reason why the act of a rapist should be condoned on account of the vulnerability of his victim due to any factor, including alcohol, there is no reason why a campaign against alcohol should not accompany the campaign against rape. It may be argued that in India’s case, it is mainly the rapists who are under the effect of alcohol; and women in most cases are not inebriated. But this gives even a greater reason why all the activists campaigning against rapes, particularly women,  must wage a simultaneous war against alcohol and drugs.

In the final analysis, three importane elements have to be recognised in any drive against rapes:

1.      In order to control rapes, rapes should be seen as one of the crimes. All serious crimes including murder and rapes are on the rise; and if the situation has to change we will have to adopt a different legal ideology which hanuts the criminals and adequately punishes them. The old dictum that “Ten criminals can be freed but one innocent should not be hanged” is nothing but an excuse for saving the criminals. Instead of looking things in indidividual caseds the net effect has to be ensured.

2.      The commercialisation of sex and nakedness has no place in a civilised society. There should be a concerted campaign against all its ramifications;

3.      There should be a campaign against all the factors that lead to crimes including rapes; neglecting anyone will have disastrous consequensces. Alcohol in particular needs urgent attention.

4.      Moral Empowerment of society is required if cvilised behaviour is to be ensured.

Comprehensiveness is the key to any planning, and this is what is also required in dealing crimes including rapes.

* Dr Javed Jamil is Executive Chairman, International Centre for Applied Islamics, and Director PEACE. He is also author of more than a dozen books including “Islam means Peace”, “The Essence of the Divine Verses”, “The Killer Sex”, “Rediscovering the Universe”, “The Devil of Economic Fundamentalism” and “Islamic Model for Control of AIDS”. Also has more than 200 articles and papers to his credit. His soon-to-be-published works include “Scientific & Social Paradigms based on Qur’an” and “Westernism: the Ideology of Hegemony”. His recent approach paper, “Muslim Vision of Secular India: Destination & Roadmap” has attracted huge attention.  

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