The Project

Let us call it The Project. Since its launch over three-and-a-half decades ago, it has taken many forms and has gone through many stages. In the beginning, it was aimed at dividing the vast constituency of the Pakistan People’s Party by trimming its strength in the urban areas of Sindh. It also served an important secondary purpose: to wean away the Urdu-speaking population from the religious rightwing, which, while important at that time for fighting the jihad in Afghanistan, could not be allowed to become an uncontrollable political variable.
General Ziaul Haq and his numerous lab assistants knew all too well that they may have given the fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets a hard-line religious façade but at heart it was funded by the secular democracies of the west. They needed to balance the growing power of religious parties involved in the jihad with The Project. And to that extent they were quite successful.
Then in the 1990s, the era of truncated democracies run alternately by a rump PPP and a lumped-together Pakistan Muslim League, The Project became an important bargaining chip to tilt the balance of political power in favour of the favoured ones and against those who had gone out of favour. This too was a success story.
Later, different attempts by federal governments at controlling the power and influence of The Project came to naught. Except for the Nasreeullah Babar-led serious, and to a great extent successful, attempt at wresting back The Project’s veto power over urban Sindh’s fate all plans to stem it fell apart. The Project survived.
Enter General Pervez Musharraf on his chariot of fire with high aims – essentially for himself and his coterie. The Project suddenly became a vital peg to hang the dictator’s ambitious on. If he had The Project under his control, he could easily build a support base in the rest of the country. And he did control The Project. He in fact spearheaded The Project. The more so after 9/11 when the utility of The Project became almost universal.
Secular credentials in the age of fundamentalism were invaluable; in uprooting the jihad industry these were matchless assets. The worthy general played this side of The Project to the hilt before an international gallery wanting to be gullible. He hailed The Project as Pakistan’s most important bulwark against terrorism. His colleagues hailed him as a saviour. To add fervour to his affection for The Project, he wore his ethnic background alongside his four-stars. Nobody objected. They hailed him even more. All took immense pleasure in giving The Project a new mandate, unlimited resources, a no-questions-asked authority and, what’s more, absolute immunity from any audit.
To be sure, there was no dearth of information about the darker sides that The Project had developed. Caches of information were available about its international links, its internal tentacles, its hold over financial flows in and out of the country’s economic jugular vein. These things were well-known even to the most generally-informed officers. Those close to the general in their official capacity were bound to have more accurate access to vital data that painted a rather disturbing picture of the inner workings of The Project.
But everyone kept their conscience in abeyance, choosing the safer route of career development and timely promotions. Not only that, anyone who dared speak even a word about The Project was treated with utmost suspicion as far as his patriotic credentials were concerned. Hitting at The Project meant hitting at the heart of the country, and no one was allowed to do that. May 12 came, the land was drenched in blood but everybody praised The Project even more.
Fast forward. 2015. Now the narrative has changed. Completely. Now there is another project: and this project is the Close Down The Project. Why the new project? This question will be addressed in another article. For now the real question is: Will the new project be successful? Will The Project be shut down?
Those who are handling the new project believe that The Project has lost its steam and utility. That its leadership, its command structure and its core are so badly damaged that it is only a matter of a harder push for it to fold up. Underpinning this belief is the assumption that the MQM’s politics can be separated from The Project and kept alive under a new leadership. It is true that while The Project was part of bigger (shaddier) agendas, its political roots, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement as a party, ran deep. Over the years, the political side of The Project developed as a genuine force to reckon with. Today only a naïve mind would deny that this party has organisational structure. It has a popular base.
Besides, not every one of its 51 provincial assembly, 24 National Assembly seats or for that matter the millions of votes that the MQM has been getting are fake. As the by-polls in constituency 246 have proven, even under a pall of doom and gloom the party can pull a lot of weight. Close down The Project but allow its politics to stay intact – this seems to be direction of the new project. But there are still a few problems.
Sensing that the Directors are intent on dismantling The Project, Altaf Hussain has successfully used the MQM’s political standing as a shield to block the force of the attempt. This tactic is a tough one to counter. How do you separate the old guard of The Project from the politics of the MQM? So far there has not been any sufficient answer to this key challenge. The attempt to delegitimise The Project’s leaders by painting them in the colours of crime and terrorism has been successful for the consumption of the wider audience, but there is little public evidence to suggest that this campaign has taken its toll on them within their core support base.
There is another hurdle that stands in the way of closing down The Project: this can be called Project Files. There is a lot of focus on what the Directors of The Project know about Altaf Hussain, but not enough focus on what Altaf Hussain knows about the Directors – what he did for them (apart from other capitals of the world) or what they did together for each other. After all, this has been a mutually beneficial relationship of decades, and like all such liaisons it has to be a mutually compromising one as well. What if some of The Project Files come to light? What if the BBC’s OBJ were to get access to these files through his British sources detailing how The Project has been used by its makers over the years in Pakistan and to what effect and purpose? These files can be both damning and damaging.
It is quite likely that those who are closing down The Project have already thought these matters through. Most probably, they have also figured out an effective way to blast through these hurdles as well. This is perhaps why the movement towards closure (‘loadshedding’ in the wise words of Defence Minister Khawaja Asif) looks quite irreversible.
For us mortals now the big unknown is how quickly this process is going to move forward and reach its logical conclusion. Going by the media hype, perhaps the end is near. But then you never know. In Pakistan, The Project has always existed at a higher level, shrouded in secrecy and wrapped in silence. It has defied rules of political gravity many a time in the past, even though this time it is being pulled down by such force as never seen before.
That regardless, the truth is that most of us – judges, journalists, politicians etc – have never understood why The Project was allowed to grow so big. In our confused state we, by and large, accepted The Project in our midst and gulped down whatever was fed to us by the Directors. Not long ago they told us that The Project was the best thing that had happened to our beloved land. We believed them. Now they are telling us that The Project is the worst thing that has happened to Pakistan. We have to believe them because if we don’t then Operation Zarb-e-Azb will not succeed and nobody wants that.
So all the nation can do is to stay quiet and wait for the next round to begin in this fascinating tug of war between The Project and its Directors.
The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.
Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com
Twitter: @TalatHussain12