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Tuesday March 19, 2024

They all did this to Pakistan

The Red Zone is still thick with tear gas. There are no fewer than 500 people injured in Poly Clinic

By Mosharraf Zaidi
September 02, 2014
The Red Zone is still thick with tear gas. There are no fewer than 500 people injured in Poly Clinic and PIMS. Worst of all, at least three people have died from injuries sustained during the storming of the parliament and PM House, directed by Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri. SSP Asmat Junejo, a valiant son of Pakistan, sits in hospital, broken and bruised from the brutality he endured at the hands of Qadri and Khan's hordes of junooni supporters. What a royal mess.
The polarisation of the discourse is now so stark and deep, and people’s nerves are so exhausted that little is left in the tank for a reasoned argument or debate. Emotions are not only the primary informant of the proclamations of bored teenagers, but even of the most mature and erudite adults among us. Vileness grows in us all, but it is oxygenated by desperation. Accusations and abuse are the refuge of desperate people.
Pakistanis, desperate to live in a better country to begin with, have been rendered even more desperate by the surreal sights and sounds of the tragic circus that has been ring-mastered by Khan and Qadri.
Howling and derisive questions abound, asking, what about the prime minister? The prime minister is already done. He is gone. He may survive in office, but he rendered himself relatively ineffective within days of taking oath of office, and this has finally caught up to him. The video feeds of the Model Town tragedy taught him nothing. And the video feeds of policemen attacking TV DSNG vans in Islamabad won’t either. He will not even be able to pretend like he can govern after this latest episode.
Khan and Qadri can take credit for handing him the blade with which he made the final, fatal cut, but the litany of injuries and indignities that have been showered on democracy since May 13, 2013 is almost entirely a construction of the arrogance, and incompetence of Messrs Sharif, Dar and Assorted Sycophants.
Khan is ruined too. He thinks his self-belief and destiny afford him ‘any means necessary’. He is wrong. When the time came for making difficult choices, his personal ego won every argument at Bani Gala and in that container. A man easily moved by an SMS here and a whisper there may be better looking than the current prime minister, but he’s no better qualified to lead than him.
Of all the potential Pakistani political giants in the PTI central executive committee, none had the wherewithal to have talked him down from the ledge of that wretched container, where he lurched, taunting and teasing educated urban Pakistanis with his invective. His unchallenged vanity has produced an episode that is marked in blood, and would qualify even without any deaths, as a dark day in the country’s history.
Javed Hashmi’s revelations on Sunday afternoon confirm what those that know other members of the PTI high command have known all along – Khan’s decision-making mechanism is an uncontrollable beast.
This leaves what? The cheerleading crew, from Sheikh Rasheed to the Q League of Gujrat, and a handful of clowns that, amazingly, have successful prime time television shows. They are mascots that will find a new team. But the damage to the praxis of Pakistani democracy and politics is done.
The pro-PTI analyses will conclude that the Sharifs did this to themselves. The pro-Sharif analyses will conclude that Imran Khan did this to himself. The truth: they all got together and did it to Pakistan.
If media freedom stays as it is, there will be lots of questions about the role of the military and Pakistan’s intelligence community in all this. What did the army have to possibly gain by enacting this massive ‘conspiracy’?
Nawaz Sharif, owing to his complete lack of imagination, had decided that normalisation with India could wait. He chose warm symbolic gestures with Narendra Modi over the solid policy gains of a trade deal before the Indian elections. He completely mismanaged the talks with the TTP, about-facing a clean build up to an operation with the announcement of a government talks panel that didn’t know it was on such a panel. He chose and kept officers and advisers with low intellect, and even lower self esteem, ensuring that nothing but good news would reach him.
At no point other than the first few days, when we all believed that Nawaz Sharif had a real plan for anything, was he a threat to the centrality of the military in national security and foreign policy decision-making.
There’s no future for this country without trade with our neighbours. And there’s no security for this country without an Afghanistan in which we are not constantly meddling. Sharif made all the right noises, without having much by way of detail and nothing in terms of execution. The pace and terms of regional normalisation was and will continue to be dictated by the military, even though the overall direction is changing.
What then would explain the very strong hints of a conspiracy? Personal animus.
Sharif overplayed his hand with the whole accountability of a general schtick. Should General Musharraf face trial and conviction for Article 6 violations? Well, if prime ministers can be hanged then there’s no reason why an army general shouldn’t be prosecuted. It is a clear legal question. There’s one small problem. There is such a thing as momentum, legitimacy, and moral authority.
Democrats don’t have to like it. Indeed, we don’t. But the truth is that Pakistan has had neither its Lula, nor its Erdogan. Transcendental leaders like Brazil’s Lula can overturn national discourses and change the course of their polities because they are authentic reformers.
PM Sharif makes cabinet decisions based on advice from an unelected daughter. He certainly has electoral legitimacy (no matter the yelping from hyperventilating PTI supporters). What he lacks is moral authority. There would be few if any officers in the military who would oppose a Musharraf trial, if it was being led by a man whose moral authority they feared, who they knew led with the conviction that comes from being a true man of the Pakistani people.
Was all this engineered to prevent a Musharraf trial? No one will ever know. What we do know is that the pursuit of that case, and a host of deliberate and inadvertent mistakes has helped unravel at least a decade of work. The Charter of Democracy was signed in 2006, but the lessons that inspired it took almost two decades for Shaheed BB and Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif to understand.
In the carnage enacted by Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri, it is hard to see any such lessons being learnt right now, or for the foreseeable future. Our immediate future is one of deep and bitter polarisation, and the brick by brick destruction of an already fragile democracy.
No Pakistani politician won on Saturday night. But Pakistan’s many enemies lick their lips at the sight of who lost. The idea of a strong, stable and democratic Pakistan lost. We may ignore this, but terrorists in Fata, Afghanistan and the long-term strategists of the RSS will not. Pakistan has been weakened.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.