Education of the nation

Islamabad diary
Army, air force and intelligence agencies are fighting on many fronts. The army and the air force are engaged in the fighting going on in the tribal agencies, currently the heaviest fighting taking place in the Tirah Valley where previous to this no one dared venture, Tirah being more shut off from the outside world than the Gobi Desert. Finally its gates are being opened and its hitherto impregnable peaks assaulted. Soldiers and officers are laying down their lives but the push goes on.
Army, Rangers and intelligence agencies are carrying out the cleansing operation in Karachi…the MQM under serious pressure, known killers and hit-men being picked up from Nine Zero, and all the signs saying that the long-serving MQM man serving as Sindh governor, Ishrat-ul-Ebad, may be on his way out. Thus the MQM’s untouchable status is finally ending. The media too is slowly casting off its fear, reporting on the MQM now more open than it has ever been before.
When will that happy day arrive when media channels, otherwise so brave and intrepid, no longer feel obliged to carry the MQM supremo’s interminable speeches live, interrupting all other programmes? Only then will Karachi be able to claim that its long nightmare is ending. That will also be the day when the Caudillo and his party realise that the game is up for them.
Free and endless publicity – publicity dictated by fear – has been the party’s lifeblood. Choke this off – deny the Sattars and the Rizvis the coverage of their endless press conferences – and the party will know, as the Urdu saying goes, the price of daal and atta.
No one is saying that the MQM should cease being a political party. Long may it continue to represent its chosen constituency. But there’s a difference between operating as a political party and being accused repeatedly not just of gangsterism but violence and cold-blooded murder.
Now the shadows are closing in…and the party leadership knows it. It’s a sign of the new winds blowing across Karachi that the party’s response, apart from the occasional thunderclap, has been muted. In years past a tenth part of the current operation would have triggered an orgy of violence. Not this time – the party faces internal fissures, the Caudillo faces his own problems in London, and there are so many beans being spilled by the Saulat Mirzas, the Motas, the Chotas picked up from here and there.
Another wonder too is happening. All manner of barriers had become part of the Karachi landscape. Finally – note the overuse of the word ‘finally’ – the barriers are coming down. The litmus test, however, will be the barriers around Bilawal House. The day they are removed – and, let me hasten to add, the day the Caudillo’s interminable speeches are no longer covered live – will mark the day of Karachi’s liberation, or at least the beginning of its liberation.
How has all this happened? The army has imported no new tanks; the air force has inducted no new planes in its squadrons. It’s the same army, the same air force, the same intelligence agencies. The new thing is resolve…and the other thing different is new leadership. Under Gen Raheel the army command cast off its previous dithering – its endless hemming and hawing, the endless weighing of pros and cons – and came to see that enough was enough and that terrorism, whether religious or ‘secular’, had to be taken head on, if the very name of Pakistan was not to become a standing joke. Once this basic decision was taken other things followed.
But let’s be clear: this change of mind did not come about only after the Peshawar school attack. As far as the military were concerned this happened much earlier, with the change of command in the army. The trouble was that the entire civilian leadership, the political class as a whole, was out of sync with this new military mood. Don’t we all remember how the entire political leadership kept baying from the housetops – no other image comes to mind – about the need to engage the Taliban in talks.
Even as the Taliban were carrying out bombing atrocities – on such of their favourite targets as churches and Shia imambargahs – and, for good measure, slitting the throats of soldiers, and not a whit ashamed to claim proud responsibility, the entire political class, from Nawaz Sharif to Imran Khan, kept repeating the mantra of peaceful engagement.
To refresh fading memory just Google the resolution of the All Parties Conference in September 2013: there is much in it about drone attacks and the blowback effects of Nato/Isaf actions in Afghanistan, not a word about the Taliban war against Pakistan. Indeed, the one indirect reference to the Taliban comes in the phrase “our own people in the Tribal Areas”. A more complete document of appeasement would be hard to put together.
Following the APC and its historic resolution there came that prime comedy show of talks with the Taliban, two sets of jokers, from the government side and the Taliban, engaging in a transparent charade that any fool could see was destined to go nowhere. Does anyone even remember the names of those jokers?
That APC was in September, towards the fag end of Gen Pervaiz Kayani’s elongated tenure as army chief. Two months later, in November 2013, Gen Raheel Sharif becomes army chief. His problem was that before the army could decide anything on terrorism it had to do something about the defeatism of the political class. Indeed, at that point political defeatism represented a greater threat to the nation than Taliban terrorism or the situation in Karachi.
Two events, happening almost together, provided an opportunity for the army and agencies to give a lesson in real politik to the political government: the Musharraf treason trial and the media civil war which erupted after the attack on the journalist Hamid Mir. Before these two events the ‘mizaaj’ – the mood or temperament – of the government was altogether different, its leading gunslingers – Khawaja Asif, Saad Rafiq, Pervez Rashid–-shooting from the hip in all seasons.
After the air was taken out of the balloon of the Musharraf trial, and the way the government was made to look foolish in the media civil war, the gunslinging ministers suddenly seemed to lose their appetite for belligerence. Earlier they were not averse to mocking the army. Now they kept their own counsel or sang to a different tune. As Lata sings in that old song, “badle, badle mere sarkar nazar aate hain…”
Today the government as a whole, having learnt its lesson and the limits of its power, gives the impression that the new approach to terrorism was its idea rather than the army’s. Thus times change. In his long political career Nawaz Sharif has often made a virtue of confrontation. Today the credit goes to him for learning to bend before the wind.
The limits of political power having been laid down by GHQ, and accepted by the political government, the ‘long marches’ and dharnas led by the two eminences, Imran Khan and Qadri, were really unnecessary. Or at best they were an exercise in overkill, driving the earlier point home by further underlining 1) the government’s helplessness, and 2) the army’s whip-hand.
Our two heroes made a fundamental miscalculation: when the sitting government, having received its various tutorials, was thus ready to fall in line behind the army, why would General Headquarters go to the trouble of removing a jockey who had just been given his training and replace him with an uncertain commodity, yet to be trained, in the shape of Imran Khan?
Let Imran and Qadri take heart from the Miltonian line: “They also serve who stand and wait”. And wiseacres like me were wrong because they thought the eminences were on to a sure thing.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com