The self-appointed custodians of the national interest have been outraged at the temerity of the self-appointed custodians of the constitution and the petulance of the self-appointed custodians of the public interest.
The self-appointed custodians of the constitution have been shocked that anyone could upbraid them for upholding the constitution without fear or favour.
And the self-appointed custodians of the public interest — those paragons of virtue who hector and lecture and preach from their televised bully pulpits each evening — cannot believe anyone could question their motives or intentions.
There is a word to describe it all, but it’s probably best not printed in a family newspaper.
What does it all mean?
It’s a strange world in which everyone is clamouring to be the target of an army chief’s wrath.
In eras past, a sidelong glance or a misspoken sentence by the chief would have had folks preparing their resignation letters or reaching for their passports.
Not anymore.
He meant me! No, he meant us! No, no, we were the targets!
The ostensible targets are squabbling over who was the main target.
Rule No 1: when folks argue over who was the primary target, look elsewhere for the primary target.
The army high command has two principal constituencies: the rank and file and the public at large.
In the best of worlds, both can be kept happy simultaneously. In the not-so-elegant Pakistani universe, keeping both happy simultaneously isn’t always possible.
The armed forces are restless. They are being barracked and shellacked like never before. If the army were running the show directly, they would understand to some extent. If the army were overtly interfering in politics, they’d take it on the chin.
But it’s a new world out there. The old order is crumbling, the locus of power is shifting and the army is feeling harassed and aggrieved. They’re just trying to do their job — defend Pakistan — but no one seems to understand.
Steps up the chief to reassure his skittish tribe. I’m here, I’m on your side, I’ll stand up for all that is great and good, i.e. us.
If that means a swipe or two against other institutions and pillars, so be it. To the skittish armed forces, swipes against others are the kind of red meat they crave.
Talk tough and you look tough, and looking tough is hardwired into the military psyche.
But that’s also why everyone else has almost gleefully leapt on the chief’s words and claimed they were meant for them.
For words are not actions and without actions, everyone else senses impotence.
Show us what you’ve got, the media has taunted and the court has almost roared, guessing that blanks were fired to please the army’s principal constituency.
More curious has been the PPP’s response, of which two distinct strands were discernible the past week.
One camp argued the party had been kept in the loop by the chief, a signal that this wasn’t about the PPP and the government but about the robes and the preachers on TV.
There was almost smug elation in this camp, like schoolyard victims who’ve discovered the big, bad bullies have turned on each other and left the victims to walk off with the prom queen, in this case a clearer path to re-election.
When your enemies fight among themselves, they’re less likely to see you as the enemy.
The other camp was eyeing Balochistan warily, sensing a dry run there for bigger things on the national stage.
The sparring between the army and the court is a sideshow, according to this PPP camp. Instead, the Balochistan template is seen emerging:
Army keeps security situation messy by eschewing the political for a military approach; court pounces on mess to declare government has lost its writ; next step: wrap up government and install an efficient and establishment-friendly government.
Take the testing of the judicial waters in Balochistan and magnify it to the national level and you end up with that rumour that just won’t die: an extended caretaker set-up, with elections postponed.
Convoluted? You bet.
But it hints at the undercurrents everyone knows exist, though few know which direction they’re pulling in.
Elections have a way of unsettling everyone here. Last year, around this time, the Senate elections were on the horizon and the speculation and rumours began to grow.
Somehow, somewhere, something would happen to prevent the Senate elections from being held on schedule.
If the Senate was a prize worth winning — or, conversely, denying — and hence the speculation and uncertainty in the run-up to the Senate elections, a general election is of an order of magnitude greater.
Surely, the great unseen and the unknown would not countenance a hammer blow. PPP wins, PML-N wins, whoever wins wearing a civilian cloak, the establishment loses.
The Mehrangate judgment has laid bare just how terrified the swaggering men in uniform were of a girl with a voice and with the people behind her.
Two decades on, a full civilian term leading to an election with another full term a possibility — the beast may have grown weak but its instincts will be the same: civilians win; establishment loses.
Since the past informs the present, at least in terms of perception, the uncertainty will grow as a general election inches closer. And so will the howling and the bickering and the confusion.
But there is a problem: the closer the election draws, the less time there is to engineer a derailment.
Even in the land of perma-crisis, some crises need time to gestate if the inevitable is to be delayed.
And time is running out.
Still, the rumour mill is quietly throwing out a date: watch out for January.
But it may already be too late.
An on-time election looks about as likely as anything can be in this land of unlikely events.
The writer is a member of staff.
cyril.a@gmail.com
Twitter: @cyalm
Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2012.
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Well-known historians have all maintained that to Jinnah the Muslims of undivided India were a separate cultural entity requiring their own homeland.
Jinnah’s desire to see this through was born from his awkwardness with the idea of a post-colonial India subjugated by the ‘Hindu-dominated’ Indian National Congress: even though the Congress was almost entirely secular.
However, there is absolutely no evidence that Jinnah’s push to carve out a separate Muslim country was made in order to construct an Islamic state.
For years Pakistanis have debated about how Jinnah went about claiming Pakistan. Was he able to think it through, or did he fail to perceive the vulnerability of his claim?
Many also believe that his claim in this respect was too open-ended. That’s why it was easily exploited by some who eventually turned it into a monolithic entity and a militaristic bastion of Islam.
It is ironic that the first Pakistani head of state to sincerely try to realise Jinnah’s concept of Pakistan was a military dictator. Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s regime (1959-69) still remains perhaps the most secular in the country’s history.
Apart from, of course, sidelining the democratic aspects of Jinnah’s concept, Ayub otherwise went about defining (through legislation) his understanding of Jinnah’s Pakistan.
To him it was about a secular Muslim majority state sustained by the genius of entrepreneurial action, a strong military, and the spirit of modernistic and progressive Islam of the likes of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Iqbal and Jinnah.
However, in a naturally pluralistic society like Pakistan with multiple ethnicities, religions and Islamic sects, if one takes out democracy from the above equation, one would get (as Ayub did) ethnic strife, religious reactionary-ism and class conflict.
The class-based and multi-ethnic commotion in this respect opened windows of opportunity for well-organised leftist groups who were not only successful in forcing Ayub out (1969), but they also eschewed the religious opposition to the Field Marshal’s government.
Left parties like the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), National Awami Party (NAP), and student groups like the National Students Federation (NSF), in the former West Pakistan, achieved this by attacking Ayub’s ‘pro-rich policies’ (state-facilitated capitalism), and, on the other hand, neutralised the Islamic fundamentalists by adding a new twist to Jinnah’s image.
For example, the PPP advocated Jinnah to be a progressive democrat whose thinking was close to the ideas of ‘Islamic socialism’ first purported (in the region) by such leaders of the Pakistan Movement, as Chaudhry Rehmat Ali, and Iqbal.
After the breakaway of East Pakistan in 1971, and the coming to power of the PPP (led by Z A. Bhutto), the authoritarian centre-right secularism of the Ayub era (and concept of Jinnah), moved towards the populist left.
But the Bhutto regime was highly mutable. Though it remained populist, it regularly shifted from left to right on an issue to issue basis.
A study of Jinnah’s quotes used on state-owned media of the period suggests a regime trying to push Jinnah as a democrat who was not secular in the western sense, but a progressive Muslim whose faith was pluralistic in essence and ‘awami’ (populist).
Such quotes, that became a mainstay just before the main 9pm news bulletin on the state-owned PTV, suddenly changed track when Bhutto was toppled in a reactionary military coup by General Ziaul Haq (July 1977).
From 1977 onwards, no more was Jinnah being bounced between Ayubian secularists and Bhutto’s Islamic Socialists. He now became the property of the ‘Islam-pasand’ (pro-Islamic state) lot.
PTV and Radio Pakistan were ordered to only use those quotes from Jinnah’s speeches that contained the word ‘Islam’.
A concentrated effort was made to remould him into a leader who conceived Pakistan as an Islamic state with a strong military.
In 1978, the order of Jinnah’s celebrated motto, ‘Unity, Faith, Discipline,’ was reshuffled to put the word ‘faith’ first instead of the middle.
Then Zia’s information ministry suddenly unearthed a diary kept by Jinnah in which he had supposedly expressed his desire to see Pakistan as a country run on Islamic laws (instead of democracy), and emphasised the political and ideological role of the military. The diary turned out to be a desperate forgery.
Also, Jinnah’s August 11 speech was expunged from the school textbooks, as if it never existed.
By the end of Zia’s dictatorship (1988), Jinnah had been turned into a pious, 20th century caliph of sorts who presided over the creation of a ‘citadel of Islam’.
However, a decade later during the self-contradictory military dictatorship of General Parvez Musharraf: who was advertising himself as an updated version of Ayub Khan: Jinnah was made to slightly shed the facial hair that Zia had hung on him. Jinnah now became an enlightened moderate.
But Jinnah’s emergence of (now) becoming a moderate Muslim, at once clashed with his more pious, quasi-Islamist image that was cultivated for more than a decade by the Zia regime. This reignited the debate about exactly who or what Jinnah really was.
Today, with Pakistan facing the deadly spectre of Islamist terrorism, growing societal conservatism, a free (and somewhat anarchic) media, an activistic judiciary and the steady resurgence of the secular Muslim intellectual: all trying to figure (or refigure) Jinnah, something unprecedented happened.
Not since the Ayub dictatorship and during the early years of Bhutto’s government has a mainstream political party openly described Jinnah as a progressive, secular Muslim. But recently the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) did just that.
Well, this means at least in Karachi, the Jinnah who wanted a progressive, secular and democratic Muslim majority country is back. And this time he’s not confronting grumpy Islamic parties, but a monster that not only considers him a heretic, but a majority of Pakistani Muslims too.
Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2012.
As I write these lines, my home is an ice box: chilly, dark and silent. The only sound coming out is the protesting beep from the cellphone announcing imminent death with its battery ready to die. Let it die, I say to myself. What’s the use of a cell phone when it does not work? The landline does not work; the television does not work; the internet does not work; the laptop does not work because its battery is down. The food in the freezer is thawing at the speed of lightning screaming out for urgent care.
Chucking it out is the safest, unless one wants to invite food poisoning.
So, what does work? Thankfully, we still have hot water in our faucets and gas in our cooking range. Cooking and bathing are two activities that lift life a little.
Driving around town scouting for cafes like Starbucks that offer Wi-Fi or ‘hotspots’ where Wi-Fi is available consumes half the tank in the car. If the petrol finishes we are stranded. We are told petrol is available but is being rationed. The gas stations in our area are shut because the power is down. Minutes before we lost power on Monday evening when Hurricane Sandy made a landfall some miles away from where we live in New Jersey, we pulled up the garage door and got the car out. It’s electronically operated. Our neighbours did operate their garage doors: “you pull the string hanging in the garage. It will disable the electronic connection,” we were told. Having lived here for a decade, we still don’t know the ins and outs, to put it simply. For example, I habitually push the light switch down as we do in Pakistan. But in the US, it’s the reverse. When you want a bulb to come on, you push the light switch up!
When will power return? “It will be days before power lines are restored,” the officials had warned before the monster storm hit. I find this strange. In Pakistan if the power is down for more than 24 hours, one creates such a ruckus, making the fellow at the receiving end answering phones for the electric company feel like a heel.
The Americans don’t protest. They suffer in silence.
Natural calamities like Hurricane Sandy may not be common, still they strike, kill, and destroy leaving man and technology powerless. America can land a vehicle on Mars and monitor its movements as it roves the planet, but it cannot fix its power lines that fall easy when harsh wind comes calling.
Trees, old beautiful trees, gorgeous in summer and breathtaking in autumn with their leaves turning gold, crimson and amber, suddenly become man’s worst enemy.
They crash on homes, roads, cars, people and electric lines. As I drive around, huge trees lie uprooted everywhere. Imagine it takes decades for them to reach their verdant glory; but seconds for them to fall and surrender to the might of the wind.
Americans are planners: they don’t move without their schedules. They are calendar-centric. “Let me check my calendar if I am free,” they say when you invite them for coffee 10 days in advance. They plan their vacations a year in advance and make their airline and hotel bookings accordingly. Their lives are programmed and run on a well-considered plan. I have always admired this habit, something we Pakistanis are not given to. We don’t like a daily, monthly or yearly schedule. We let life flow and live without a timeline or a timeframe. Why stress? We say. Take each day as it comes. Well, that too makes sense. What tomorrow brings, none knows.
Americans didn’t know that Hurricane Sandy would arrive a week before the presidential elections, washing with it all the elaborate planning, TV ads and last minute canvassing by Obama and Romney camps. President Obama had moved his ‘heavy artillery’ Bill Clinton to accompany him on a whirlwind tour of states crucial for his victory.
Fate had other plans.
Hardest hit are the TV channels that made millions during this year and would have piled up some more in the last one week when Obama and Romney’s final surge to bombard viewers would have occurred.
While Mitt Romney has blasted President Obama for a ‘big government’ Hurricane Sandy has proven Romney wrong. It is the government that has come to the rescue of its citizens facing widespread death, sickness and destruction. Rescue workers were on red alert and worked around the clock to respond to calls for help during this time.
The mayor of our town called us a day in advance announcing a shelter that had been set up, where we could go and seek refuge if our homes and lives were threatened.
It’s called a ‘warming and charging’ station. People go to charge their cell phones or laptops or to warm themselves. We did visit the shelter and was amazed with its efficiency. Polite and smiling attendants met us, showed us the coffee and bagel stations, pointed to the electric outlets where we could charge our phones and laptops.
The place was brimming with seniors. They seemed to be having a party. Warm, cozy and comfortable, some planned on checking in for good.
The shelter was later moved to a school auditorium where they had put up cots, pillows and blankets for people to spend the night.
The government is compassionate, kind and caring. It may not be able to restore power even long after it goes, but can extend all possible help should one be in need.
The rising death toll caused by catastrophic flooding and destruction of entire neighbourhoods, and billions of dollars in property damage is what Hurricane Sandy has left behind. It is being called the ‘Storm of the Century’ but floods, droughts, heat waves and storms are only expected to get worse: with every part of the world facing deadlier and costlier weather disasters, say weather pundits.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had endorsed President Obama as president for another four years because both believe in the effects of climate change. The billionaire mayor said that Hurricane Sandy had reshaped his thinking about the presidential campaign and that as a result he was endorsing President Obama.
The president responded with a pledge: “He (Bloomberg) has my continued commitment that this country will stand by New York in its time of need. And New Yorkers have my word that we will recover, we will rebuild, and we will come back stronger.”
anjumniaz@rocketmail.com
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“THE army chief does not express personal opinion. Whatever he says is the collective view of his institution.”
These were General Jahangir Karamat’s words a few hours after he ceased being Pakistan’s chief of army staff; his tenure prematurely over after his controversial call for the setting up of a National Security Council.
In his second term in office, a ‘heavily mandated’ Nawaz Sharif wasn’t willing to brook any ‘nonsense’. He asked for his army chief’s resignation. A BBC colleague suggested we try and get the general’s view.
We called Army House from London expecting a rebuff. But the operator put us through to Gen Karamat in the shock and confusion that must have followed the chief’s decision. The general denied he was sacked: “I resigned because I didn’t want this controversy to damage the country”.
I put it to him: “Was the NSC statement your personal opinion or did it represent the collective wisdom of the army?” He responded with his “collective view” statement.
We also interviewed Sharif’s top aide Mushahid Husain. With unmistakable triumphalism, he said the decision showed who was boss.
It wasn’t long before it emerged that many generals, and most notably the CGS (chief of general staff) Lt-Gen Ali Kuli Khan (Khattak) who was in Peshawar for the day,
later protested to the chief that he had decided to go quietly and not allowed them to sort out the government.
Sharif handpicked Lt-Gen Pervez Musharraf because he was advised his choice didn’t have a big constituency in the army, given his ethnic origins. Therefore, he would remain grateful at being elevated and follow orders without question.
It wasn’t long before the all-powerful prime minister found out how wrong he was. After a disastrous Kargil misadventure and continued defiance, when he tried to sack the army chief, he was overthrown, jailed and exiled.
Whether it was an ‘individual’s decision’ or the collective will of the institution manifesting itself, Pakistan was going to be set back another 10 years as, following in the footsteps of Ayub and Zia, Musharraf declared himself the monarch.
Frankly, as the Supreme Court proceedings in the Asghar Khan case and its ruling demonstrated, even when the army wasn’t directly, blatantly in power, it or its key individuals were still controlling most of the levers of power, even to the extent of manipulating elections.
In fact, just before the PPP government was sent packing in 1990, I was working for the Herald and wrote a story on how politicised even Gen Beg’s spouse was. Addressing a Rawalpindi Garrison Women’s Club meeting, she let loose on PPP’s ‘atrocities on the poor Mohajirs in Sindh’.
The PPP had already had to climb a mountain to form a government as another ‘individual’, the then ISI chief, had created an alliance to block its progress in the 1988 elections.
Anyway, after I wrote the Herald story on Mrs Beg, the then corps commander in Karachi requested a meeting. Gen Asif Nawaz Janjua was a bellicose officer who was supposed to be feared. As one prone to living dangerously, I agreed.
Ushered into his office and introductions over, the aides left the room. The general didn’t offer me a seat. I pulled a chair and lowered myself into it anyway. He reached into a drawer, pulled out a copy of the Herald with each of my stories marked by a coloured flag.
“Yaar, what’s this?” He barked, opening the page to the Mrs Beg story. “The chief called me from ‘Pindi. He was very upset.” I responded: “Is it untrue? If the chief wants he can issue a denial. But I have a number of witnesses who heard the speech.”
The general almost exploded: “I am sure she said it. But national interest bhi koyee cheez hotee hai (is also something). Do you have to report everything?” My current sense of realism, pragmatism … Ok, Ok … cowardice was still several years away. No family, no material possessions, nothing to lose.
“General, I thought this was going to be a grown-up conversation, a meeting to share our respective perspectives. Not a lecture on national interest. Had I known, I wouldn’t have bothered to come.” I started to get up.
The corps commanders, or at least Gen Asif Nawaz, had desks the size of football fields.
The big, burly officer got up and started to storm round his colossal desk. I rose to my full five-foot-nothing frame and braced myself. As he neared, I saw a half-raised right hand. Then I realised he was offering me his hand as he said: “Good. Now we understand each other perfectly.”
There was no mention of my journalism anymore and none either of national interest. He ordered tea, biscuits and a friendly chat followed. All my quirky views were heard without a frown. Things have moved on over the past two decades.
Now, Gen Kayani voluntarily says he has no monopoly over defining national interest. He says there is a need for all to follow the constitution. He acknowledges mistakes have been made in the past but calls for the rule of law to deal with those at this ‘defining moment’ in our nation’s history.
The army chief’s statement and the chief justice’s apparent retort to that have been described as ominous signs of this and that. I firmly believe that the past is another country. It will haunt us but we’ll never return to it.
I don’t feel the need to qualify criticism of the military by paying a perfunctory tribute to the several thousand soldiers who have laid down their lives valiantly battling the forces of darkness. Where I stand ideologically, they are my heroes anyway.
As for whether some generals indulged in corrupt practices or are clean as a whistle, we’ll wait for the due process of law to tell us. But we won’t abandon, or abdicate, our right to ask questions because a former head of ISI says: “Shut up, idiots.”
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn , November 10th, 2012.
WHEN General Kayani said recently that no institution or individual had a monopoly on defining the national interest, he failed to mention that for decades, the military establishment has enjoyed precisely this unilateral control over Pakistan’s destiny.
The most recent example of this misplaced arrogance came when (mercifully) retired generals Aslam Beg and Asad Durrani both admitted their involvement in sabotaging the PPP’s re-election bid in 1990. Leading this gang of visionaries was their don, the late, unlamented Ghulam Ishaq Khan.In their collective wisdom, they declared Benazir Bhutto a security risk and decided to beef up the opposition by forging the IJI alliance, and by doling out funds to a bunch of unprincipled politicians. What other skulduggery they got up to in order to achieve their end God and the intelligence community only know.
From the early days of Pakistan, the army has used an infant nation’s fear of India to force through a militarist agenda that survives to this day. By manipulating politicians and buying and bullying the media, the army has forced us into a strategic straitjacket that has all but eliminated options.
While his predecessors had begun it, Ziaul Haq took the whole process of indoctrination to another level by defining Pakistan’s ideology. Thus, the army became not just the guardians of our physical boundary, but of our ideological frontier as well.
And to ram the fundamentalist message home, he encouraged a number of extremist groups to rampage across the country. Of course, his cause was aided by the fortuitous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where militant groups soon waged a jihad at the behest of the US and Pakistan.
By conflating faith with national interest, our military rulers sought to harness religion and nationalism to unify the nation behind them. In the event, they only succeeded in unleashing forces that were soon out of their control. They also set us on a path to confusion and chaos.
Those who followed the third debate in the recent American presidential election will have noted the close proximity in the positions taken by both candidates on foreign policy. This is because there is a consensus on national interest, and this united approach dictates US foreign policy, irrespective of who’s in power.
No such consensus exists in Pakistan, and when our leaders talk of seeking one, they are actually kicking the ball into the long grass. When President Zardari recently spoke of the need for a consensus before an army operation could be launched in North Waziristan, he was actually making an excuse for inaction.
But to be fair, there is considerable unanimity between Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif over the need for peace with India. The only apparent reason progress has been so painfully slow is that the military establishment has been dragging its boots over the issue.
While the army once filled the political space by virtue of its overbearing presence, it is suddenly facing competition from other players like the judiciary, the electronic media and an increasingly vocal public. Its confidence and its morale dented by repeated terrorist attacks on its installations and personnel, as well as the American raid in Abbottabad, the army is feeling it has lost control over the public discourse.
Yet our mainstream politicians have been unable to shed the inhibitions caused by years of subservience to the military. Thus, they have been overly cautious in calling our generals to heel. When Gen Kayani spoke recently, he forgot — or just did not know — that the national interest is not defined in GHQ: it is debated in parliament. Of course, the military has an important role in advising the government on security issues, but ultimately it is the elected government that determines exactly where the national interest lies.
Confusion over this was underlined the other evening at a dinner party in Karachi. Present were two old friends who are sophisticated and widely travelled. Both are highly intelligent and articulate, but ended up in a shouting match over the use of drones, the Kerry-Lugar act and the war in Afghanistan.
Granted, the loud argument broke out at a certain point in the evening when voices are often raised, but the passionate disagreement in a well-appointed drawing room just shows how much confusion exists over what constitutes our national interest.
Are drone attacks (that, by the way, seem to enjoy the covert blessings of the government and the army) in our interest or not? Is the Kerry-Lugar act against the national interest? Many think it isn’t because it seeks to keep the army out of politics. Indeed, should Pakistan have a close and warm relationship with the US at all?
All these issues remain cloudy due to the massive confusion we are prone to because thus far, the military has assumed the exclusive right to determine what’s best for Pakistan.
Now, for the first time since the fall of Dhaka over 40 years ago, our generals are under the spotlight. But if they don’t have a monopoly over determining the national interest, neither does the judiciary or the media. Will our members of parliament please step out of the shadows and do their job?
But forging a consensus does not mean paralysis and inaction. After the Salala incident last year, months passed before the army, the National Assembly and the government could agree on a face-saving escape route from the tough stance taken earlier.
Leadership consists of occasionally taking unpopular decisions in the national interest. What happened then illustrates the need for clarity and decisiveness.
One thing our politicians will have to get used to is that the 24/7 news and chat show programmes aren’t going to go away. Other governments function under this constant scrutiny and manage to deliver, but our elected rulers seem to be as dazzled by the cameras as rabbits by the headlights of an approaching car.
To begin a discussion on the national interest, we need to know where we stand, and where we want to get to. The duty of every state, after ensuring internal and external security, is to seek the wellbeing and prosperity of its citizens.
It can be argued that in making Pakistan a safer place, the military has utterly failed. And by supporting such a huge defence establishment, our people remain poor.
Perhaps the military needs to examine where its own true interests lie: as an overbearing Praetorian guard, or a loyal defender of the state?
The writer is the author of Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West.
irfan.husain@gmail.com
Published in Dawn , November 10th, 2012.