Vacuum

Capital suggestion
Dr Asim Hussain (Sitara-e-Imtiaz, Hilal-e-Imtiaz), the man and the phenomenon, represents vacuums (vacuum is a ‘space entirely devoid of matter’). A state’s, any state’s, raison d’être is to provide personal and economic security to its citizens (raison d’être is the ‘most important reason o purpose for a state to exist’). Pakistan is a state trying to dodge its raison d’être. As a consequence, the Pakistani state now has two vacuums – a security vacuum and a capacity vacuum.
Pakistan’s security vacuum has two dimensions – a personal security vacuum and an economic security vacuum. Pakistan’s capacity vacuum has at least four dimensions – accountability, dispensation of justice, electricity and water. What that means is that the Pakistani state is failing to provide its citizens six things –personal security, economic security, accountability, dispensation of justice, electricity and water.
Pakistan has become a fragile state where there is little or no trust between citizens and their government, on the one hand, and little or no interpersonal trust among citizens. This wholesale lack of trust leads fragile states to failure.
General Raheel Sharif, the soldier, is horror vacui – meaning ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ and that wherever vacuums occur ‘denser surrounding material would immediately fill’ the vacuum. Our political order is old and so are our politicians. Our electoral order is old and so are our elected leaders. Our economic order is old and so are our economists. Our monopolies are all old and so are our monopolists. Our cartels are all old and so are our cartelists. Our war on terrorism is old and so are the terrorists. The only new element in this old game is the soldier, the horror vacui.
General Raheel Sharif is trying to establish a degree of trust between the Pakistani state and the state’s citizens. To being with, year-over-year fatalities in terrorist violence are down 40 percent, suicide attacks down 55 percent and bomb blasts down 60 percent. In Karachi, the average monthly killings are down from 95 a month to 45 a month, kidnappings from 115 a year to a total of 14 in 2015 so far.
The Pakistan Army, under its commander, is the denser material filling in the vacuums. As far as the Pakistani state and society is concerned, Dr Asim Hussain’s arrest has little to do with the man named Asim Hussain and everything to do with the Amir Hussain phenomenon being arrested. Consecutive civilian governments having failed to arrest the phenomenon had created a vacuum – and that vacuum is now being filed by the ‘denser surrounding material’.
In the Pakistani state and society plunder had become a way of life – and “when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
It was Frederic Bastiat, the French economist and author, who said, “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”
‘Nature abhors a vacuum. When a head lacks brains, nature fills it with conceit.’ Author unknown.
The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad.
Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com. Twitter: @saleemfarrukh