Iron merchants and the call to arms

There are several reasons to explain the vacillation we are seeing, several reasons why the call to arms is not being made and will not be made unless the hands of our merchants are forced, by circumstances more than anything else.
The most obvious reason is that these are conservative people who take their prayers and fasting very seriously. Ordering an operation in Karachi is easy – it costs them nothing. Setting all reservations aside and ordering a full-fledged operation against the Taliban, who claim to be fighting for the greater glory of Islam, is mentally and psychologically more difficult.
Not that they agree with the Taliban or are closet fundos…far from it. But schooled rigorously as they are in the tenets of the faith, entering a minefield strewn with Islamic symbolism presents its own problems: who is a martyr and who is not? Who are more to blame, the Taliban or the Americans? Whose cause is more just? For a conservative party with strong right-wing and religious leanings these are not unimportant considerations.
There is also the fear of provoking a Taliban backlash in Punjab. Not to be forgotten in this context is Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s almost plaintive plea to the Taliban in March 2010 that as the PML-N and Taliban had the same outlook regarding Gen Musharraf’s foreign-dictated terrorism policies the Taliban “…should not carry out acts of terror in Punjab.” (On drone strikes Shahbaz Sharif is a total Imran Khan, thinking that everything stems from them.)
Pakistan may have many hidden fault-lines but a visible one is the tendency among well-heeled Punjabis to think of Pakistan as little more than an extension of Punjab. As long as there is peace in Punjab, and flowers on the Lahore Mall, and the Motorway – the country’s best stretch of road providing the quickest passage to Islamabad – all is well with the world. The Taliban turning their attention to Punjab, much as they visited their wrath upon KPK and Peshawar in the last few years – in the process wrecking the power prospects of the Awami National Party – would shatter this idyll and raise questions about the PML-N’s competence.
Not to be discounted is another fear, that if a call to arms is made and war is declared against the Taliban, the army would be in the driving seat and its role in the running of things inevitably would grow larger.
Time was when the PPP was haunted by its experience at the hands of Gen Zia. Now it is the PML-N leadership haunted by Kargil and, more than that, October 12. The army spreading its wings, even if necessity forces this move, would trigger unpleasant memories.
There is also the problem of capacity. One of the sharpest paradoxes in today’s Pakistan is the spectacle of a mass party, the PML-N, led by a tight cabal comprising intimate family members and with just one or two outsiders, most notably Ch Nisar. The Taliban have a consultative process. There is a democracy of sorts in the corps commanders conference when it is convened at General HQ. The closest parallel to the PML-N’s style of decision-making is what we get to see in The Godfather. This narrows the scope, or rather the quality, of decision-making.
Imagine a room in which are sitting, solemn-faced, the PM, the Punjab CM, Hamza Shahbaz, now increasingly the other brother Salman Shahbaz, Ishaq Dar, Nisar and, on occasion, Saad Rafique, with two or three young Punjab bureaucrats sitting to one side and taking notes and even passing on suggestions to the leaders on bits of paper. Can anyone in his right mind suppose that these politburo members could bring themselves to endorse a full-fledged military operation against the Taliban? If their hands are forced they will do it, not otherwise. Not because their intentions are at fault or their sincerity is amiss, but simply because the way the PML-N leadership is structured, it precludes (a) rigorous analysis and (b) decisiveness.
In normal times you can get away with anything. God knows Pakistan has had no shortage of lacklustre or mediocre governments and it has survived through them all. But these are not normal times. So much is at stake, not least the country’s future. The choices before us are not easy. Poor leadership, therefore, is a luxury we can ill-afford at this point.
That’s the rub. Even as time is running out for us our confusion, the strain so strong in us to get lost in secondary things, would amaze anyone who took time out to observe our antics. Doing the right thing is a distant dream; we seem to have lost the ability to even think clearly. I don’t want to use the word survival because it sounds too apocalyptic. Let’s just say that the country’s wellbeing is on the line and we are caught up in esoteric discussions about who is a shaheed and who is not.
The army has taken issue with Jamaat chief Munawar Hasan for dubbing Hakeemullah Mehsud a martyr, saying that this is all the more deplorable “…coming from the Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a party founded by Maulana Maudoodi, who is respected and revered for his services to Islam.” Respected and revered by whom? Is this a point on which there is across-the-board agreement in Pakistan? If anything, there is no shortage of Pakistanis who think that the Jamaat influence on our national life has not been for the good. The army statement seems unmindful of this distinction.
And Maulana Fazlur Rehman, never one to lag behind where the sowing of confusion is concerned, telephones the Punjab CM to point out the omission of a religious column in the nomination forms for the local elections, and the CM quickly assures him that the omission would be rectified, and it is. I dare not be more explicit about the column in question because it is liable to be misunderstood. In Pakistan today it is a small step from being misunderstood to being denounced…and we have plenty of people who are ready to issue fatwas at a moment’s notice.
So here we are, exercised about non-issues or secondary issues while delivering great Hamlet speeches – to do or not to do – about matters that should engage our attention a bit more.
People always ask, but what should be done? Lenin asked this question in a famous essay. He was putting the question to the Russian revolutionary class, or rather his own Bolshevik party, and the way forward he points out in that essay is also meant for his own crowd. But there’s no leader here and no action-capable party, just a mass of incoherent individuals babbling in different tongues and pulling in different directions. So what should be done becomes the most pointless question of all.
Anyone would have thought that the Taliban had done the Pakistani state a favour by cutting through the fog and naming Mullah Fazlullah as their leader. If there was a clear message anywhere it was this, his selection signifying not just an end to the prospect of talks but an intensification of violence and terror on the part of the Taliban. But trust the Pakistani political class not to heed this sign and to keep talking in a confused manner.
There are illusionists who think that the government’s outwardly soft posture is the disguise behind which an iron fist is being readied, that all this peace talk is a prelude to action. If only this were true. The army is going through an uncertain phase with the next army chief yet to be named, another example of our quick decision-making. The political side is the cabal described above, operating on the principles of a Masonic lodge. Is this anyone’s idea of clarity and action?
Email: winlust@yahoo.com