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Debacle as debate

By Syed Talat Hussain
January 08, 2018

The inevitable has happened: the Trump administration has moved exactly along the lines that almost everyone in Washington and some of us here had been pointing towards. That way there is no element of surprise in the steep fall of Pakistan’s security relations with the US. The obnoxious presidential tweet and suspension of military and security aid in its wake is a culmination point in a long crisis of trust, confidence and failure of bilateral diplomacy.

Perhaps the failure is a result of the Indo-US nexus. Perhaps it is one piece of the large conspiracy to put Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in the context of global terrorism and then proceed from that point to make a case for de-nuclearisation. Perhaps Pakistan is paying the price of being in the China camp and is now facing the ire of Washington – egged on by Delhi, endorsed by Japan and quietly but effectively being championed by the UK.

But no matter which way you look at it – conspiracy, failed diplomacy, anti-nuke gambit, blowback of big geo-political jostling in the Asia-Pacific region – the bottom line is that this has happened. Pakistan is facing a uniquely troubling scenario of a superpower (the US), a regional power (India) and its most significant neighbour (Afghanistan) all aligned like a drawn bow shooting in our direction.

This should really have engendered a serious, reflective and dispassionate debate within. It is not a happy scenario. No country wants to be encircled this way. This is not a joke. This is serious business. But look at how we are debating this challenge. The public and political (say decision-makers) discourse has been funny and frivolous, tragic and divisive or, at best, shallow and clichéd. We have not touched in any significant way on the core point brought out by the collapse in our relations with Washington: where do we go from here?

There are any number of what-ifs that this core point contains: what if Washington does carry out a lightning strike deep inside Pakistan? Local reporters from the border areas have been indicating extreme activity of drone flights over Upper and Lower Khurram, Orakzai, North Waziristan and the settled district of Hangu. In groups of twos and threes, drones buzz overhead three, sometimes four, times a day. A hundred plus flights have been reported privately in the last one month. There have been drone strikes in the border region where the Haqqanis are. Pakistani officials insist that these recent strikes have all been in Afghanistan. Locals believe otherwise.

But, that aside, if Trump is looking for a trophy and wants to embarrass Pakistan with that trophy, he would go after the targets on his own without letting Pakistan know about it. That’s what the OBL operation under Obama was. Trump would want to do something similar in a more drastic and dramatic way. What would we do then? Zero debate on this.

There is even less debate on how we have landed in this situation in the first place, where we have to run from pillar to post to justify our position to every significant world capital besides tugging at our friends’ coattails seeking immediate intercession to prevent Washington from taking its bullying to the level of outright hostility.

We had numerous warning signs that this ordeal was coming our way. Why did we not end our pointless games of political engineering at home and instead disinfect the environment that was built to point us out as the bad guys? More to the point, we had a full year (in fact many years, if you start counting the countdown from the days of OBL operation) to prepare for the day when Washington would try to point a direct finger at us and threaten us so directly and openly as Trump has?

The whole reason we have such a large foreign, security and diplomatic structure is to produce a viable way forward in dire diplomatic situations. We hear great lectures on the art of diplomacy and have been going hoarse telling ourselves what a great job we do in steering Pakistan’s ship out of crises. Whatever happened to this wisdom? Where were the hoity-toity baboos of the Foreign Office and the security establishment feeding on state resources all the time and feigning as experts of ‘such matters’? Which policy paper was produced to debate the probability of Washington’s coercion going to new levels?

Nothing of the sort happened. The entire system remained locked in the political farce at home and pretended as if the rest of the world does not exist. Even now the farce continues in Balochistan. As for the Foreign Office, it remains frozen in time. It is led by senior cadre who want to end their impact-less careers with the glory of the next grade before they fade out to begin post-retirement lectures on how to govern Pakistan.

This lethargy, absence of priority and inability to foresee what was really written on the wall has now translated into a bout of useless discussion post-Trump’s tweet. We have suddenly discovered the need for ‘national unity, harmony and oneness’. There isn’t a corner in this country from where calls to national cohesion are not being issued – almost as if national unity is an emergency button that can be pressed to eject safely from a grim national crisis. And having wrecked national unity and internal harmony for years, we want to build it in days, nay hours, nay in one media event. As a result, instead of discussing how to react to Trump’s America we are busy figuring out, in the most pointless way possible, what to do with the torn fabric of national cohesion.

At the same time, we have deemed it appropriate to declare an open season of hate on Trump. Not that he does not deserve all or everything nasty that gets said about him, but this hardly qualifies as a sane reaction to the policies he is pursuing towards Pakistan.

He has been called an idiot before so Naeemul Haq (of Imran Khan fame) calling him that will hardly inflict a deep wound upon him. Through prompted programmes on TV, he is ridiculed as a total weirdo. Through WhatsApp groups videos of his idiocy are shared with great delight among the educated class. There seems to be a belief permeating the high and low end of national debate that by rubbing Trump’s nose in the dust we are responding ‘aggressively’ to US moves. The belief is shaped partly by our own experience of the past few years where every delicate argument is settled favourably by heaping ridicule on the opponent and abusing him out of the debate.

It also grows out of the wrong but popular thesis that all this trouble is because of Trump and if we could somehow discredit him, his moves would also be discredited. An extension of the same thesis is that Washington’s coercive policy towards Pakistan is a temporary phenomenon and if we recount enough times what great pals we have been in the past and how wrongly we have been treated, there will be a window of opportunity open up for us in the US. We have conveniently forgotten that the Trump administration’s allegations have bipartisan backing. He is speaking the same language that most of Democrats did when Obama was in power.

Also lost on us is the futility of arguing over aid numbers. Even if the US is lying about how much money it paid to Pakistan in the last fifteen years (we are still preparing our own document while the US document is circulated every year), how does that materially change our diplomatic and security dilemmas? And if we don’t need US military, security and economic aid we can cut to the chase and tell the US firmly: “From January 2018, we won’t accept any more aid from you. You can pack up all your aid bags and leave. Nice knowing you!”

But we won’t do the obvious and the natural, and instead just jump around wasting time and breath. We will beat on Trump, call him stupid, and feel good. We will beat our chests, mourn how we are wronged and feel satisfied that we have done our national duty. We will beat around the core questions raised by US warnings about our domestic policies and pretend that we have answered all of them. That’s what we have done in the last few years – even when OBL was caught from and killed on our soil. That’s what we are doing even now. This is a national debacle. This is no national debate.

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

Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com

Twitter: @TalatHussain12