To the Amir Hakimullah Mehsud

Islamabad diary
Respected Amir Sahib, we have no quarrel with you. The areas under your command, where the righteous flag of the Taliban flies, we ceded control of a long time ago, and we have learned to live with the outcome. Our watchword, as you would not have failed to notice, is peaceful coexistence...live and let live. So why should we be targeted? We don’t want war – we have made that amply clear – we only want to be left alone.
Consider the following: even though American drones hit targets in the areas under your control, where our sovereignty is little more than a thing of fiction, our molten anger is still directed at the hated Americans.
The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (your partners in strategy) may carry out a daring strike in Quetta and claim responsibility for the same, foreign trekkers may be gunned down in the shadow of the Nanga Parbat in remote Gilgit-Baltistan (putting paid to the notion of tourism in those parts), terror strikes may take place almost every day in KPK, a justice of the high court may be targeted in Karachi as he was two days ago, but do we ever, God forbid, take your name or (blasphemous thought) criticise the forces under your command fighting for the greater glory of Islam?
We continue to insist that drone strikes are the root cause of the problem. What further proof is needed of our friendly neutrality? Yet your anger is directed at us. Do you have a greater sympathiser than Imran Khan? Yet two of his MPAs in KPK were killed in recent days. This approach, Amir Sahib, needs to be reconsidered.
There can be no two opinions of your superior strategy, sparing Punjab while turning much of your wrath at the other provinces. This is the indirect approach at its best, hacking away at the limbs which are an easier target, and lulling Punjab, the country’s heartland, into a false sense of security. Your reach now extends up to Karachi where in Sohrab Goth and other localities on the northern fringes of the city your presence is by now formidable.
So things are moving your way as it is. And the Americans will have moved out of Afghanistan, bag and baggage, by next year except for a token presence for face-saving purposes. And look at the positive changes wrought in Pakistan, a Taliban-friendly government in Peshawar, and a Taliban-sympathetic government in Islamabad which may blow hot and cold on terrorism but you know, as much as we do, that it will keep speaking in a roundabout manner, a skill it has honed to perfection, without ever coming to the point.
After every hit from your side, Imran Khan will stay say that it is all the fault of the drones and Nawaz Sharif will say we must talk to the Taliban. A situation more favourable to your cause would be hard to imagine. Doesn’t this call for some reciprocity, a let-up in the attacks which have rocked the rest of the country, apart of course from the sacred land of the five rivers?
We are not asking for the moon, just for equal treatment. Shahbaz Sharif entered the storybooks with his celebrated remarks that since the PML-N and the Taliban shared the same philosophy – reverence for Islam – Punjab should not be targeted. And for the last three years or more Punjab was spared, a factor that played no small part in the PML-N’s sweeping Punjab victory in the recent polls. What if Lahore had been racked by violence the way, say, Peshawar was? The polls then might have had a different tale to tell. Be that as it may, with the strategic winds blowing in your favour, and the Pakistani state having lost whatever appetite it may have had for hard decisions, all we ask for is a respite.
In this respite, trust us, we’ll call an all-parties conference, something at which we’ve become rather good over the years. When in doubt or beset by nameless fears, summon all the usual suspects, bearded and non-bearded, ghazis of the spoken word...for some of the most energy-sapping exercises in rhetoric known to the planet.
We have learned some funny phrases along the way: ‘we must all be on the same page’; ‘all stakeholders must be taken into confidence’. The comedy goes on and the ‘stakeholders’, God bless them, also go on and on, spinning more and more generalities, empty phrase-mongering with not much in it – if the Americans can talk to the Taliban, why not us?...and more on the same lines.
The Americans are negotiating a withdrawal. Do we also want to negotiate a withdrawal? Or does the difference between the two situations escape our nimble Pakistani minds?
So, mighty Amir, have no fear that we should be asking you to surrender or that before entering into talks you should be put to the necessity of laying down your arms. We are not foolhardy enough to insist on conditions we have no means of enforcing and you, as the entire history of your movement testifies, are not ones to fall for pious declarations. So what on earth will our talks be about?
Your aims are clear: the acceptance of your sovereignty over the areas under your control. And we would probably end up asking for – here it comes again – a respite: let us be...even as Pakistan’s elite classes transfer their assets abroad, most of our leading politicians and businessmen having done so already, and the chattering classes go on doing what comes best to them, pulling long faces and dissecting the country’s woes over their well-watered glasses.
We should be taking a closer look at history: Russia on the eve of revolution in 1917; Weimar Germany before Hitler’s rise to power; the defeatist mood in France on the eve of the Second World War. Why go so far? Why not recall Dhaka prior to the army crackdown in March 1971? What was plain to others seemed not so plain to us.
Countries in adversity, countries caught up in war...there’s nothing strange about that. But countries where spirit and resolve dissipate...that’s a different thing. In which category does the Pakistani malaise fall? Danger written on the wall, etched across the skies, probably branded on our souls, but we refuse to see or acknowledge it. No matter how the Taliban problem arose, no matter to what extent the Americans are responsible for aggravating it, these abstractions no longer matter. The challenge is ours to face, the United Nations or the Salvation Army not coming to our assistance. But we are lost in other things, our pursuit of the secondary to the exclusion of the primary second to none.
Respected Amir, be happy therefore at our sense of priorities. Even as you are clear about your aims, don’t you marvel at the way we run about in different directions, sometimes after Musharraf and Article 6(why can’t we let the wretched man be?), sometimes after skeletons rattling in our ancient closets?
But then it is unreasonable to assume that you will help us attain clarity. The more confused we are the easier your task. But to ask a last favour, could you shed some light on the mixture of hope and fear lurking in our hearts? Your sympathisers amongst us – Imran Khan, Chaudhry Nisar, maulanas of various ilks and brands – tell us that once the Americans are gone the threat you pose (forgive the plain speaking) will automatically disappear. Far-seeing Amir, on this crucial point will you enlighten a troubled nation?
Email: winlust@yahoo.com