The take-over

We are fast becoming an island under attack from an endless tsunami of fake news, fraudulent analyses, and fraudulent theories. The rising tide has overwhelmed the space for truthful debate and destroyed our collective sense of reality of the present. There is a deluge of delusions drowning voices of dissent and disagreement. The result is an intellectual wasteland where lies sprout at will and facts die before birth.

Allah willing, like every tsunami this too shall pass. This is the idea that keeps the hope alive of us surviving as a balanced and reasonable species whose critical faculties are intact, and which retains the ability of course correction in rough weather. However, the damage done is quite vast. As the calamity of misleading narratives continues to strike, there is every reason to entertain the fear that regaining our consciousness as a thinking nation will take much longer than allowed by circumstances. We will pay a heavy cost of living in denial through a constant dose of self-defeating claims of how well we are coping. Some of this cost of fake news, fraudulent analysis and false narratives is already upon us; and we are paying it through our nose.

Consider this. Since gaining independence, our strategic goal linked to our survival has always been that we should avoid being caught in a vice-like situation where our enemies (real and imagined both) are in a position to squeeze us from both sides of the borders. Every day the nation was told that we had achieved tremendous success in defeating “the nefarious designs of ill-wishers” and had “succeeded in securing our core national objective of border security.” In peace or in war time, in defeat or in victory, we never let go of the claim that we have done wonderfully well in preserving and securing our territory. We said the same thing even when we lost half of the country.

Later in national life, we created for ourselves a nuclear deterrent – the ultimate weapon (capability) of total offence and complete defence. We spread the nuclear shield all over the country to ensure that borders remain stable and we remain secure. We did other things as well. We sat in the American boat of counterterrorism and deployed all our resources on the border with Afghanistan in the name of creating security on the western front.

However, thousands of martyrs, billions of dollars and zillions of claims of success later we continue to face hostility and existential threat from that side. More troops are deployed on that side of the territory than on the border with India, our arch enemy. There too things are only partially stable. We have seen more attacks across the Line of Control and on the Working Boundary in the last few years than ever before, peaking this year. We are in a classic pincer-like situation – exactly what we wanted to avoid and what we claimed to have been our prime achievement.

This is not all. More layers of threats have been added to the traditional threats on both sides of our borders. The border with Iran has become more volatile, necessitating extraordinary measures like additional deployments and planning a visit of the army chief to the country to cool down temperatures. More critical is the lengthening possibility of the US striking inside our country in addition to the hundreds of drone strikes that they have already carried out here without a single word of apology or remorse ever expressed at any level. Now the entire defence establishment in Washington is swinging towards ‘punitive measures’ against Pakistan in the coming months. These are serious possibilities but we at home continue to distribute the all-is-well opium through press statements.

We have wrongly reduced this new global challenge to our security to the Trump Administration’s legendry stupidity, and have deliberately suppressed the context in which Washington is making these threatening plans. This context is not just the zealotry of the Trump Administration: it is set by the G-20 and Brics declarations and now the India-EU cooperation on countering terrorism (read the document to know which way the world is turning.) There is a global groundswell of concern that has started to concentrate on Pakistan which we continue to ignore and paddle-down because the truth of it is too inconvenient to accept.

At the same time, we continue to struggle and sacrifice precious blood and money against domestic terrorism whose ugly head refuses to disappear. Attacks like the one that killed at least 22 in Jhal Magsi at the Naseerabad Shrine last week rip through official stories of fascinating success and yet the mantra of glory continues to pore out without any let or hindrance. After seventy two years in existence, Pakistan in 2017 is facing dangers on all its borders; it is in the eye of the storm of global manoeuvres and has to deal with a tricky and partially-managed internal threat from myriad terror outfits at home. Is this success of policy or a woeful tale of failure? Is this the basis for claiming crowns or grounds for inquiry? Is this cause for calm and self-assuredness or for alarm and deep concern?

The right answer is well-known, but the right answer will never be at the centre of debate in the country today because the centre is dominated by a long and oft-repeated tale of the unjustness of the international community that we say does not acknowledge our sacrifices. We call this lament, this petition of being wronged by the world, ‘our narrative’. We have built an echo chamber for ourselves where we continue to shout out about our sacrifices (which are totally genuine) in the hope (which is false) that the world will realise that we have a case. Repeating the data of national sacrifice is not a ‘narrative’. In a world governed by dodgy diplomacy and economic interests, there are no takers of how much a nation has lost for what cause unless that nation is able to demonstrate its case successfully at different levels.

In World War 1, Germany alone lost over two million men while twice as many suffered injuries. Its economy was devastated and there were dislocations at a mass scale. It was not alone in triggering the war nor was it the only one suffering the losses but when the Treaty of Versailles was negotiated Germany was not even invited and was singled out along with its allies as the cause of all trouble. Its human and material losses were set aside in favour of the plan to neutralise it as the factor of trouble in Europe. It was made to suffer. Under the treaty after the war, it lost ten percent of its land and all of its territorial possessions (colonies) abroad. Almost 13 percent of its population was distributed in different regions and newly created countries and almost one fifth of its precious coal fields and industry went away because of territorial adjustments in its borders. Germany’s lament that it was a victim fell on deaf ears. Germany fell to regional politics head-down and emerged only with Hitler causing even greater and longer distress to the nation.

The point is that the complexity of global and regional politics requires talking to the world in a language other than that of victimhood. It also requires smart and intelligent debate within, one that is not grounded in grandiosity and a self-serving parade of achievements. This in turn can only happen when there is appetite and space for brutally honest introspection, shunning fakeness and pretention.

It is regrettable that, instead of looking ourselves in the mirror and acknowledging our weaknesses, a new season of hollow bombast has arrived. Our ‘narrative’ is akin to the dialogue of the deaf with himself. He cannot even hear what he is saying to the world outside much less appreciate that words spoken without facts on the ground are mere sounds without meaning.

Military takeovers destroy democracies as completely as information take-overs destroy critical national faculties like thinking, reflection, debate. They detach collective wisdom from reality and spread the disease of self-deception via fake news and fraudulent theories. Of the two takeovers it is hard to tell which one is worse. We have suffered one type of takeover in the past. We are suffering the other type at present.

The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.

Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com

Twitter: @TalatHussain12