False binaries

Legal eye
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
If you blame the army chief and the DG ISI for the OBL ignominy, aren’t you in fact helping the Indians and the Americans who’d like to weaken our army and the ISI? If you hold the army and the ISI chief accountable for failure to perform, won’t you lower the morale of troops fighting the enemy?
If the army and the ISI chief are held responsible for security, aren’t you an apologist for civilian law-enforcement agencies and their political masters who are actually responsible under law? But if you want those legally responsible to take functional control from the khakis at this crucial time, won’t you grievously hurt our national interest?
If you believe that the Taliban are a threat to the state, shouldn’t you support the drone that puts the fear of God in the hearts of these savages? But if you oppose the drone that assassinates innocent civilians, shouldn’t you understand why the Taliban are livid at the state of Pakistan for allowing drones strikes to continue and resultantly attack unarmed fellow citizens to vent their anger? Aren’t those who are celebrating 16-year-old Malala Yousufzai’s speech at the UN in a way endorsing all atrocities caused by evil global powers against the Muslim world? If you oppose X, you naturally support Y, don’t you?
The leaked Abbottabad Commission draft report and our response to it, and the Malala speech and our response to it, establish one thing: as a state and as a society we have lost our equilibrium. Let’s start with the leaked report. We now know this isn’t the report submitted to the government, but the draft report of one commission member. But even this draft, which doesn’t name names and is being criticised for not going far enough to instil meaningful accountability within our national security apparatus or stating clearly that nonfeasance can be as bad as malfeasance at times, proved too punchy for the rest of the commission members.
The worthy commission members, excluding former ambassador Ashraf Qazi (who authored the leaked draft report), thus elected to endorse the report drafted by the lone general who was part of the OBL Commission. The ‘leaked’ testimony of ambassador Qazi before a Senate subcommittee suggests that the leaked draft was one that had been written with the intent of making it the consensual report. When this draft wasn’t accepted, the author was forced to write a dissenting note in response to the report written by Lt General Nadeem Ahmed.
The commission’s primary responsibility was to determine why OBL’s presence in Pakistan was not detected for six long years and how the Americans were able to carry out a military operation in the heart of Pakistan without us finding out till after they had left. The leaked minority report states that the army, the ISI, the air force and all civilian authorities were incompetent and while complicity at some level cannot be ruled out altogether, the evidence presented before the commission doesn’t suggest that there was any complicity by state agencies either in keeping OBL or in letting the Americans conduct a military operation undisturbed.
While the commentary in the leaked report conclusively decimates any lingering suspicion of competence that might have been attributable to the DG ISI or the air chief, among others, it concludes that there is no point naming names (as ‘everyone’ knows the identity of those responsible), and we should focus instead on making amends. Notwithstanding the caustic commentary, that the khaki leadership didn’t think that a report that neither names names affixing blame nor focuses on the history of state agencies nurturing non-state militant actors is in fact a free pass, one wonders with dread what the majority report might say.
Question: where does the buck stop in Pakistan? Answer: It doesn’t. Only in extraordinary circumstances such as a GHQ attack or an OBL operation is it ever tossed up, only be to be kicked down quickly into a bottomless pit. One waits with bated breath to discover the pearls of wisdom that General Nadeem Ahmed’s report would have weaved together. What can be an alternative narrative to one we find in the leaked report? That the Americans are enemies masquerading as friends, who backstabbed us in conducting the OBL operation without our knowledge? That there is no evidence suggesting that the state was complicit in providing refuge to OBL and so let’s hand our security agencies a clean chit of health?
That the most-wanted-terrorist in the world being caught in Pakistan had no national security implications for us, and so catching him wasn’t a priority? That our problem of terror is so complex that affixing individual responsibility on those public officeholders responsible for ensuring security of the state and its citizens no longer makes sense? And that we should be realistic and throw our unconditional support behind our guardians instead of jumping up and down calling for heads to roll every time there is a security failure? The problem with these alternatives is that they are not just self-delusional but also dangerous for our future.
They are rooted in and strengthen the same conspiracy-driven victimhood mindset that blames a 16-year-old shot in the head by religious fanatics for not becoming the rebellious voice of the Muslim ummah when invited to speak at the UN. Is Nelson Mandela less worthy now because the rotten old UN that has presided over umpteen miseries inflicted upon weak nations by the strong is celebrating his 95th birthday? Does something that was unquestionably true yesterday become false today because the wrong sort of folks begin to champion its cause?
Malala emerged as the symbol of Pakistani society’s rejection of savagery in the name of religion and courage to stand up and fight against cruelty even when the state fails to protect citizens against terrorists. And instead of taking full ownership and building further the image of a moderate society interested in all things that ordinary rational human beings should be interested in (health, security, education, personal liberty) and that the world can relate to, we wish to disown this symbol (the only one of hope in very dark times) because the world has stood up to take note? Should we then wonder why the big bad world misunderstands us?
Weaving further the web of conspiracies in our minds will lead us nowhere. If the world has honoured our hero, we can either choose to define and take ownership of the narrative or begin to question the motives of our hero for attracting the attention of the evil world. If we conclude that the most remarkable aspect of the OBL episode was that the Americans backstabbed us, let us start with holding those within our national security apparatus accountable who projected and established them as friends within our national security mindset.
We failed to uncover OBL’s presence on our territory and CIA’s network trumped our own intelligence network; the ISI and IB chiefs should have been held responsible. We failed to detect air movement across our territory on the night of OBL raid; the air chief should have been held liable. And if our national security apparatus failed in defending itself against infiltration by Al-Qaeda and also against a foreign military operation on Pakistani soil, our army chief – who refused to appear before the Abbottabad Commission and who has been at the helm of our national security pyramid for the last six years – should have been named and blamed.
Meaningful accountability is only of one sort: the accountability of individuals for their acts and omissions. If we wish to strengthen institutions, there is no way other than by starting to hold their leaders accountable. Casting the net too wide or shying away from naming names will keep our heads where they are: buried deep in the sand.
Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu