This is now getting to be a farce

Islamabad diary
The Geo/ISI affair which began on a high note of patriotism is now in danger of descending from the sublime to the ridiculous. The complainant in an Islamabad court praying for a case to be registered against Mir Shakil-ur-Rehman and Amir Mir, Hamid’s brother, for levelling allegations against the ISI is one Arshad Butt and he is from the land of heroes, my hometown, otherwise known as Chakwal.
I know him well and let that suffice. Mention his name to anyone in Chakwal and the response will be either outright laughter or a knowing smile playing about the lips. If in a nation of 200 million souls our friends in that last school of national ideology, better known by the initials ISI, could get hold of only someone like Butt to move the said application in the said court, my humble suggestion to Lt Gen Zaheer-ul-Islam, the agency chief, would be: “Lay off, sir, you are losing your script.”
It is very rare that in Pakistan all shades of opinion are agreed on anything. But in the Geo case there was near-unanimous opinion across the board that in the manner of naming the ISI chief and carrying his photo for several hours, in the context of the attack on Mir, Geo had gone overboard. And for the first time as far as I can remember there was an outpouring of sympathy for the ISI, cast uncharacteristically in the role of the aggrieved rather than the villain.
Wasn’t that enough? Even if the agency had wanted to twist the knife into the Jang Group, subtlety would have been a more effective weapon. But the agency and indeed the army preferred something more on the lines of a battleaxe, getting the defence ministry to move a formal complaint with Pemra, the regulatory body, against Geo for acting against the national interest, citing the coverage of the Mir attack not as an isolated occurrence but part of a regular pattern.
It is easy to begin a battle. It is less easy to finish it. What did Field Marshal von Moltke, the legendary Prussian war leader, say? No battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy. Lodging the Pemra complaint was easy. Seeing it through is not likely to be that easy.
Pemra comes under the federal government, not General Headquarters, and people serving in it are ruling party appointees. And the ruling party, now suddenly freedom of expression’s biggest defender, is not about to ban Geo. We can safely bet on that.
So the ISI has to figure out some basics. It has managed to launch a pretty impressive campaign against Geo – pro-ISI rallies being staged by Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa, traditionally close to the ISI because of its Kashmir agenda, and some other dubious outfits. Half the media is attacking Geo in the most vitriolic terms, and with great gusto, the red-capped Islamist revolutionary Zaid Hamid doing his bit to stoke up the fires – incidentally, I always find him highly entertaining – and now Dr Tahirul Qadri and Imran Khan announcing to launch an anti-government agitation. Is there a pattern to all this or is it mere coincidence? We are entitled to our own guesses.
But where is all this headed? This pressure can only be taken up to a point. Beyond that the law of diminishing returns will kick in. And if the ISI doesn’t have its way, in ISI HQs there will be a lot of red faces, and that’s not a good thing because, quite apart from Geo, the relationship between the government and the army will further deteriorate…that elusive goal, ‘being on the same page’, moving further away, army and ISI seeking to get their own back in different ways.
So it may be time to pull in the horses and cut some of the adventurism that we are seeing. Everyone in this affair – government, Geo and army – has tried to do more than it could safely handle: the government wanting to make a spectacle of Musharraf and failing in that; Geo acting with a sense of papal infallibility in its reporting of the allegations against the ISI chief and then realising it had bitten off more than it could chew; and the army wanting to teach Geo an abject lesson but unlikely to get what it wants.
As for the Qadri and Imran Khan agitations they only make sense if 111 Brigade is measuring its paces and the idea is to rouse public opinion and queer the pitch. But whatever the widening space between the government and the army, and whatever the misgivings if not worse that we are seeing, it is pretty well agreed on all sides – apart of course from the red-capped Zaid Hamids – that this is not the season of coups or anything on those lines.
The government has been taught its limits; Geo has learnt its lesson (or so at least one hopes); and the army should soon realise that much as it is the country’s most powerful institution, indeed the chain that is keeping the country together (let there be no illusions on this score), there are limits to what it can do. Call this the new system of checks and balances.
Here we are also coming up against the law of unintended consequences. By bracketing a media house with the government and the army, the importance of the media house in question is being inflated, perhaps making it look more powerful than it is. Just as the government’s gambit of talks with the Taliban has so far achieved nothing except raise the stature of the Taliban as an equal negotiating partner with the government, the ISI’s campaign against Geo is almost succeeding in lending it mythic proportions.
Some of the fulminations against the Jang Group almost make it sound as if what we are dealing with is not an errant media house but a state within the state with its own agenda of relations with India, etc, and just as in Turkey the Erdogan government wants to eradicate the influence of the Gulen movement led by the Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen, so here too the aim is the same. The army does no service to itself by helping spread such an impression.
The first state within the state we have is the army. The second state is now the Taliban. Why is the ISI bent on manufacturing a third one?
There is another stark lesson to emerge from this affair: that while other threats may be manageable – the economy can be fixed, energy supplies can be increased (although it will take more than fiction to do this), the Taliban can be fought – the one threat for which there may be no answer is that posed by our mediocrity.
Power cuts tough though they may be do not, in the normal course of things, drive one to madness. But to look at the clueless faces on parade, empty visages with not a passing thought to their names, and even the heart not schooled in cynicism is left to wonder what we may have done to merit such a fate.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com