[lbo-talk] Pakistan: Learning a costly lesson

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Sat Feb 21 18:38:27 PST 2004


DAWN - Ayaz Amir Corner

20 February 2004

Learning a costly lesson

By Ayaz Amir

For the benefit of its military guardians, Pakistan has been running the world's costliest adult literacy programme. It took the collapse of New York's Twin Towers, followed by American threats and cajolery, to make Pakistan's military leadership abandon the Taliban and rethink Afghan policy. To achieve this end, nothing short of that cataclysm would have sufficed.

After 9/11 Gen Musharraf warned India to "lay off", his military way of saying India should not fish in muddy waters. Siding with the United States, he said, would protect Kashmir policy and the country's nuclear assets. Two years down the road he is singing a totally different tune.

The current rapprochement with India is proceeding apace on the understanding, conveyed to India in the clearest possible terms, that Pakistan was ending military support to the Kashmiri resistance. The grin on Indian faces, which Indians are having a hard time concealing, flows from this recognition.

Any number of people in Pakistan said at the time that what was no longer permissible in Afghanistan could not be sustained in Kashmir. It has taken a two-year course in realism, sponsored by the US, for this conclusion to sink into the minds of the military leadership.

Nuclear capability was the third triad of Pakistan's national security doctrine, its passport to the pursuit of a robust foreign policy. With Dr A. Q. Khan, the putative father of the Pakistani bomb, defrocked in full public view, and President Musharraf himself declaring that nuclear assets could be at risk if Pakistan did not change its extremist image, this pillar too begins to look shaky.

Not that Pakistan's new posture is wrong. It's no small irony that it's correct and long overdue. We had no business playing with the Taliban or of encouraging the Kashmiri resistance when it wasn't very clear what we were hoping to achieve.

Defeating the Indian army? Forcing India to the negotiating table? Unlikely propositions. But then the question arises, what took Pakistan's saviours so long to come to the same realization?

General Headquarters, the nerve-centre of the army, has always proclaimed its dictatorship over the national interest, claiming to read, interpret and safeguard it better than anyone else.

Fine, but then who is to blame for the massive failures of perception spread over the last four years? Who's behind the failure to connect one thing with another? Who's responsible for sticking to policies long after their utility, if any, had expired?

Most of us are prophets of hindsight. So being wise after the event is no big deal. Leadership lies in recognizing reality before it takes shape or, if that's too tough, as it takes shape.

If the Pakistani leadership is doing the right thing now, it's not on the strength of its own vision or judgment. It has had to be pushed, yelling and screaming, in the right direction.

So it's not a little funny to see some of our leaders denouncing extremism now when they were quite happy to go along with extremism before 9/11. When did Pakistan get a bad international image because of jihad? Not in the time of Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif.

Kashmir jihad used to be a covert activity until then. It only became a public spectacle and nuisance, inviting a hostile western press, during the first two years of the Musharraf regime, with jihadi groups openly collecting funds and recruiting volunteers, and Maulana Azhar Masood, one of the foremost jihadi leaders, leading public processions in various cities.

Gen Musharraf is right to say that Pakistan must improve its image, that the international community must not see it as a cockpit of jihad and terrorism. Question is, who's responsible for this image, the poor people of Pakistan or those who promoted jihad as an instrument of national policy for 15 years, if not more?

Any soul-searching should begin with the guardians who always thought they knew best. Healing should begin with the physician himself.

Since Gen Ziaul Haq's time, the army has dominated national decision-making. Even when elected prime ministers were around, it kept calling the shots. Now when the grand national strategy has come apart at the seams, and cherished policies have had to be reversed one after the other, why isn't there even a teeny-weeny acceptance of responsibility on the guardians' part for the mess the country is in?

Take the A. Q. Khan affair. Our intelligence agencies make it their business to know the drinking and sleeping habits of every Jack in the country. So if they were in the dark about Khan's freelancing, doesn't this speak of a massive security and intelligence failure? Yet while Khan takes the blame no other heads roll.

Or take the state of play with India. For all the hype about the brave new frontiers about to be crossed, we are back to the parameters of the 'composite dialogue' as drawn by India and Pakistan in September 1998.

This is hilarious. For if in 2004 we are starting off at a point where we were five and a half years ago, isn't it pertinent to ask why in God's name we wasted the intervening period?

We are not meeting the Indians halfway. Forget it. In this new climate of goodwill, we are meeting them three-quarters of the way, all the notable concessions coming from our side.

If our earlier bluster had to end in this whimpering, we could have opted for an obliging frame of mind much earlier, saving ourselves much pain and sorrow in the process.

So where lies the problem? Pakistan's troubles arise not from extremism, Al Qaeda, the Himalayas or even George Bush. They arise from a complex failure of politics, with generals in over the deep end, doing things they are not qualified to handle, and politicians, despite so many knocks, not able to get their act together.

Don't blame the people for taking refuge in mass cynicism. Seeing the same scenes repeated, the same scratchy tunes played over and over again, they've come to expect no good from any of their political masters.

Is it something in our makeup or our history which makes us incapable of appreciating the need for representative government? It's not that Gen Musharraf is inadequate or incapable.

Of course he isn't. But as long as he runs a closed ship, as long as there are just four or five, or at the most six, people taking major decisions (take a sinner's word for it), mistakes will be made.

Prime Minister, cabinet and parliament are simply ciphers in this arrangement, there for window-dressing, about as much near the heart of decision-making as Gwadar is to Islamabad. Is this the legacy the present leadership wishes to leave the country?

We may not be God's chosen people (the Israelis consider this to be their privilege) but our lot is not hopeless. We have land, the water of three rivers (three having been gifted to India), a long coastline and a people capable of hard work given the right stimulus.

It's just our politics we can't straighten out. Musharraf had a chance to do so, which is why so many well-meaning people (amongst whom, alas, I do not count myself) welcomed his arrival on the national scene. But like others before him, he too has proved that short-termism is all that anyone cares for in Pakistan.

© The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2004



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