Dear Fatherland…when wilt thou grow up?

Islamabad diary
From which school of law and diplomacy has the Islamic Republic learned that every silly statement must be answered and that verbal muscle-flexing is a sign of power?
Verbosity is the occupational hazard of the professional politician, as is to be seen with some of our ministers who lose all sense of proportion in front of the cameras. If some good sense were to come to their aid they would save themselves considerable embarrassment.
I have quoted this before but it is worth repeating. Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father, threatened Sparta, “If I enter Laconia (the ancient name of Sparta), you shall be exterminated.” The Spartans gave reply with just one word: “If”. No moonh-torh jawab, no hashr kar den ge, just that one word. Try telling this to our bonzes.
It doesn’t say much for our Fortress of Islam if a couple of statements from the Indian side can throw it into so much confusion. Indian PM Narendra Modi’s remarks about the 1971 war were best ignored. Or the Foreign Office could have merely said, “The Indian PM is given to rash statements. It would do him good if he thought before he spoke”…something on those lines. The cutting or insulting remark is best delivered in low-key, and is most effective when short.
Here the Indian PM or an Indian minister has only to say something for Pakistanis in supposedly responsible positions to open up with all the verbal artillery at their disposal. What good this overkill does us is debatable, but it is certainly deeply flattering for our Indian friends. Nothing is more off-putting than to be ignored. Our reaction tells India that it is being taken seriously.
This is not the first time this is happening. In 1998 when India carried out its nuclear tests, it would have been in a spot if Pakistan had not responded in kind…for then the moral advantage would have been ours. The important thing was that we had nuke capability and no one was taking that away from us.
India wanted to deny us the moral advantage. They therefore wanted us to test. In other words, they wanted us to act emotionally, rather than with cool calculation. So L K Advani and others made threatening noises…and in Pakistan the cry went up that the strategic balance had been lost.
And the late Majid Nizami, Nawai Waqt editor, said to Nawaz Sharif if you don’t explode the bomb, the people will explode your bomb. Swept on the tide of this emotion, Pakistan carried out two more tests than India. Beating their chests our leaders said that Pakistan’s defence had become impregnable.
We became a declared nuclear power, when it would have been far better if, like Israel, we had remained a closet nuclear power, possessing both the bomb and the moral advantage. But subtlety of this kind has never been our forte, and probably we wanted to build those silly monuments to the Chagai mountains where the tests were carried out.
Once again we are letting silly statements that mean nothing, and add up to nothing, stampede us into unwarranted (and funny) hysteria. Interior Minister Nisar, who specialises in most other things except his own job, has said that Pakistan was not Myanmar (an Indian minister having said that Indian forces had stepped into Myanmar for action against terrorists…holding this as a warning to Pakistan). Imagine the delight of Myanmar authorities at this acute observation.
Nisar, remember, was mourner-in-chief to the Taliban leader Hakeemullah Mehsud when he was killed in a drone strike. Plunging into a state of deep mourning he said that peace chances had been wrecked. To make up for that super peace-loving phase he has turned super-hawk, taking on RAW, India and now Myanmar.
(The PM, it has to be said, is keeping a sensible head, refraining from ratcheting up the unnecessary temperature. People ask why Nawaz Sharif tolerates Nisar. Nisar has his uses. His prolix discourse would make anyone else look good.)
But what’s happening to the army? Does it really redound to the greater glory of the general staff that it should be going public every now and then about RAW and Indian intentions and declaring, as in the latest statement after the formation commanders’ conference, “Forum took serious notice of the recent Indian hostile rhetoric,” etc? It went on to say that any Indian misadventure would get a “befitting response”.
Any army, from that of Myanmar to the Fiji Islands, would endeavour to give a befitting response to aggression. So what’s the point of this chest-thumping?
Armies do what they can or what they must. They don’t sound impressive when they mount the pulpit and deliver messages about befitting responses through the use of the loudspeaker. The Taliban, usually, don’t hold out threats. They are not threatening the Ashraf Ghani government in Kabul. They are merely waging a deadly campaign against it. The Islamic State, it would have been noticed, holds out no threats at all. It merely slits throats and makes an example of its enemies wherever it can. The Americans held out no threats about Bin Laden. They merely took him out when everything was in place. Even then they avoided needless gloating.
Faced with the Khalistan uprising back in the 1980s the Indians – as far as I can recall – held out no threats against Pakistan, although it was well known what we were doing. K P S Gill was tasked to crush the uprising and he delivered effectively.
If RAW is up to mischief threats won’t deter it. In fact the repeated statements coming from Pakistan regarding RAW involvement in Balochistan and elsewhere are more likely to induce the opening of champagne bottles at RAW headquarters in Delhi. No spy agency – RAW, Mossad, CIA, KGB, ISI – likes to be seen as feckless. Spy agencies thrive on notoriety. Our statements far from deterring RAW are flattering it by providing it with testimonials of effectiveness.
At the height of the cold war CIA and KGB were engaged in a constant battle to gain the upper hand. They did things on the sly, away from the glare of publicity, and were utterly ruthless in the pursuit of their objectives. The hurling of empty threats was not part of their game.
So can we please pipe down on the RAW rhetoric? Balochistan is a festering sore and hence a source of vulnerability for us. Defeating RAW on that front requires not statements from the GHQ – the one on RAW was, to my mind, ill-advised – but the healing of that sore.
The main theatre of concern for the army currently is not the Indian border but the western marches and the Afghan border. Indian rhetoric should not bother us. We can take that in our stride, or treat it with Spartan contempt. The real change under Modi has been the occasional tough artillery exchanges on the Working Boundary and the Line of Control. Engaged as we are on the western front it doesn’t suit us to fall into the Indian trap of going for a tit-for-tat response on the eastern side. We must know what our priorities should be.
Let’s also take another thing to heart: Kashmir infiltration is a thing of the past. Its time and utility are over. False pride should not come in the way of this realisation. It was a wrong idea, not properly thought through, from the word go.
Pakistan and India are not the US and Canada, or the US and Mexico. We will have problems and disagreements. But we don’t have to make a fetish of jingoism. And we have to be slightly more confident about ourselves. Pakistan is not a minnow that can be swallowed by any passing whale. But the way we go on and on about our security we give the impression that we are a minnow and India a threatening whale. When will we rid ourselves of such foolish thinking?
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com