Of Pakistani bondage

There is no end to the ironies which afflict our increasingly caught-in-a-bind republic. George Bush, sure to be commemorated as one of the greatest disasters to reside in the White House, may be about to depart into the pages of history or into well-deserved oblivion. But in one country on the face of the earth his policies will live on: Pakistan which in the 61 years of its existence has yet to learn to think for itself.

There may be second thoughts in the United States itself about the way the Washington-led coalition circus is stuck in Afghanistan and making no headway there despite seven years of toil, effort, sweat and money. The commander of British forces in Afghanistan may have brought himself to say that military means alone could not solve the Afghan problem. But among what passes for the Pakistani leadership there is nothing resembling second thoughts.

President Asif Zardari, democracy's ultimate gift to this confused and now increasingly demoralized land, lets no opportunity go by without insisting that the so-called war on terror – a nomenclature we have adopted with a zeal not even to be found in Washington – is not just America's war but ours too. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani parrots much the same theme. The army too is sold on the same song.

Each act of terrorism – and such are the wages of this conflict that after seven years of being hooked to Washington's war chariot terrorism instead of being licked is on the rise in Pakistan---is used to bolster the contention that this is now our war. No questions are asked as to how we got into this mess in the first place.

If this is our war then General Pervez Musharraf should still be president of Pakistan. There should be no reason to hate him because his outstanding legacy, the thing for which he will always be remembered, was how he jumped into America's lap post-Sep 11, giving birth to the legend – to which Pakistan's confused English-speaking liberati still

subscribe – that Pakistan was saved. That if Pakistan had hesitated and not swung so decisively to America's side it would have been made a Tora Bora of, and bombed into the stone age. It was this mental cowardice – and the ambition of benefiting from America's largesse – which set Pakistan on the path leading eventually to the nightmare our army and people now face in the tribal areas.

This is brilliant firefighting. First set things on fire, create conditions which give rise to extremism and militancy, and then announce that extremism represents the greatest threat to national security and must be eliminated.

Most Pakistanis have no taste for the Taliban brand of Islam: the Sharia, or somebody's mutilated understanding of Sharia, imposed at gunpoint. Why is it then that among ordinary Pakistanis (as opposed to the English-spouting liberati) there is not much support for the 'war on terror'? Because most Pakistanis, despite revulsion against the Kalashnikov, consider this to be America's war, and consider the Pakistani leadership and the Pakistan army as playing America's game.

A Dawn editorial (and this was yesterday) has these pearls of wisdom to offer: "What is at stake is our future. Pakistan cannot be allowed to become a theocratic state, for that would nullify (Jinnah's)…values." A fine sentiment – but which misses the point completely. Our role as American ally, or American satellite which is nearer the truth, is what has led to the rise of Talibanism in the tribal areas. Talibanism is not the disease itself. It is a reaction to, or a consequence of, our decision to blindly side with America in Sept 2001.

There was no Al Qaeda or militant Islam in Iraq prior to the American invasion. The American occupation gave birth to a resistance which, as was only to be expected in a Muslim country, acquired an Islamic colouring and spoke in an Islamic idiom. To each his own beliefs and iconography. Christian soldiers in western armies still make the sign of the cross, or at least some of them would do. So nothing amazing if in moments of stress or danger a Muslim, whether warrior or not, and even if not devout in the faith, should invoke Allah's name or seek inspiration from Ali. And this has nothing to do with being a Shia or a Sunni.

Should we expect the Taliban to quote Marx or Guevara? If they are up in arms against a foreign power and what they take to be its local collaborators they will use the idiom which comes most naturally to them: the language of Islam even if their interpretation of Islam may leave something to be desired.

So what are government and General Headquarters trying to sell? In 1988 (Feb 29) Lt Gen Hamid Gul, then ISI head, gave an in-camera briefing to parliament. His purpose was to sell and extol the virtues of the then Afghan jihad whose leading spearman, in defiance of common sense, Pakistan had chosen to become. Ten years later another in-camera briefing of parliament seeks to justify and sell another holy war, the 'war on terror'.

This war is tearing Pakistan apart. It is kindling fires all over the country. Tribesmen who guarded our western marches all these years have turned bitter and hostile. The army was a symbol of respect and authority. More than 100,000 troops are now deployed in that inhospitable terrain and the situation far from improving gets more difficult by the day. At the height of the Kashmir insurgency a couple of thousand guerrilla fighters at the most tied down 4-500,000 Indian troops. But ignoring the lessons of Kashmir the army thinks it will get the better of the Taliban insurgency who have more fighters than the Kashmiris ever had.

The army's Achilles' heel is its American connection and as long as that remains there is no winning this war or pacifying the tribal areas. This doesn't mean going to war with America, as the liberati tend to distort the argument. It means repudiating the written and unwritten agreements concluded with America in 2001, including the five year military-cum-economic aid package concluded at the time. What good has this package done us? What peaks of economic glory have we scaled with its help?

So now is the time to disavow the American empire at whose altar we've knelt all these years. America is distracted by the financial crisis and the presidential election. Bush, Cheney and the neo-con war party would have dearly liked to bomb Iran. The opportunity for them to do so, if it ever existed, has gone. Iranian defiance (as opposed to our cravenness) has been vindicated. If we break loose from America's embrace and renegotiate our terms of friendship with it America will gnash its teeth. Economic pain it can also inflict but how much worse can our economic situation get? How much deeper can we plunge?

Who knows in the very act of breaking the mental shackles which bind us to the US we might discover the freedom and self-respect we have always fantasized about but never achieved. It's quite possible that the moment we announce our dissociation from America's war aims the fever of extremism from Swat to Waziristan will subside. It won't immediately disappear but it will become amenable to treatment.

But to move towards any kind of national salvation we will need leaders whose minds are free. Musharraf looked more his own man than the present leadership and that's saying a lot. Zardari says the world is a safer place because of Bush. Mental kowtowing can't be carried much further than this.

About the in-camera session I am not supposed to say anything although heaven knows no mighty secrets were divulged. The question-answer session the next morning was largely wasted because the kind of pointed and informed questions that should have been asked were not asked. As the principal opposition party it was up to the PML-N to do most of the probing but living up to its reputation as the Permanent Walkout or Naraaz Party, it announced that the briefing not being comprehensive enough its members would not ask questions, a puzzling standpoint to say the least.

An hour or so into the question-answer session which was being handled by the director-general military operations (now promoted as the DG ISI), the army chief, with a slightly bemused expression on his face, went away. Had he other matters to attend to or had he had enough for the day?



Email:chakwal@comsats.net.pk