The Great Debate UK

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Bombs and tipping points: Pakistan and Northern Ireland

When Northern Ireland's Omagh bomb exploded, killing 29 people, I was in England, by cruel coincidence attending the wedding of a young man who had been badly injured in another attack in the town of Enniskillen more than a decade earlier.

I had just switched my phone on after leaving the church on a glorious, sunny Saturday afternoon when my news editor called. "There's been a bomb. It sounds bad. We're trying to get you on a flight."

Memories of Omagh returned this week when a massive car bomb ripped through a market in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

Will the Taliban's bloody assault on Pakistan's cities deprive them of popular support and ultimately lead to their defeat?

The BBC's Urdu service had reported earlier this month that sympathy for the Taliban in Peshawar -- where many are deeply hostile to the United States -- was waning due to the violence being unleashed on the border city since the Army began its assault on the militants' South Waziristan stronghold.

Was this a sign the Islamists were overreaching themselves on their war against the Pakistani state, much as they had done in Swat?

Against that, as others have pointed out on this blog, a coherent leadership that might unite a stricken country against its attackers has yet to emerge.

Make no exceptions to ban on cluster munitions

- Bonnie Docherty, a researcher in the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, has conducted investigative field missions on cluster munition use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Georgia and was actively involved in the negotiations for the new Convention on Convention Munitions. The opinions expressed are her own. -

Six months after the new treaty banning cluster munitions opened for signature, half the world has formally expressed its support. So far, the Convention on Cluster Munitions has an impressive 98 signatories, 10 of which have ratified. Those figures are growing, and Albania, Niger, and Spain ratified this month. The convention will enter into force six months after the thirtieth state ratifies. Many observers predict that it will actually enter into force in 2010, a remarkably short turnaround for international law.

The groundbreaking convention absolutely bans the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions. These large weapons carry dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions and are notorious for causing horrible civilian deaths or injuries both during attacks and afterward.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions also requires countries that are party to destroy their stockpiles within eight years, clear their territory of unexploded submunitions within 10 years, and provide assistance to cluster munition victims. The convention is already having a positive effect at the national level. In March, Spain became the first among those that have signed to finish destroying its stockpiles – and Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom have started the process.

Countries that have signed the convention are convening in Berlin this week for the first time since the December 2008 signing ceremony in Oslo. Although the subject of the meeting is stockpile destruction, delegates are certain to gather in the hallways to discuss some outstanding matters of how to interpret the treaty.

The topic most debated behind the scenes will be what is called interoperability – that is, how the ban on cluster munitions applies during military operations with states that are not party to the treaty. Human Rights Watch has just released a legal analysis of the issue, and many participating countries are considering how to address it in their implementation legislation.

Despite the international support for a strong treaty, certain states are proposing a weak interpretation that threatens to undermine the purpose of the convention: to eliminate cluster munitions and their humanitarian harm.