The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.
Contrasts do not come sharper than this. One picture shows fear personified. The other has images oozing confidence. One captures nervous wrecks in moments of utter horror. The other has captains of courage, determination writ large on faces. One has broken-down youth, screaming, crying, calling parents to save them from what at that time seemed to them approaching death. The other shows well-seated, sure-footed commanders in a meeting that yielded a hopeful message about terror receding in the country and of the national resolve to defeat this terrible enemy.
Printed the same day last week, the first picture was of students at a girls’ college. Petty criminals had triggered a false alarm of a terrorist attack and had the entire institution in a state of hellish chaos. Students fainted, fell, ran, tried to scale tall, barbed walls, hid in bathrooms for hours as military and police took charge of the place and swept it room by room. The incident sent shockwaves far and wide, and half of Islamabad’s schools and colleges almost shut down.
The other picture was of the corps commanders moot addressed by COAS General Raheel Sharif. The aim of this meeting, among other things, was to review progress on the counterterror front and to document for public record that things are under control. The two events – the imagined terror attack and the meeting – took place around the same time, ironically barely five kilometres from each other. Yet they seemed to have come from two different galaxies away.
What explains this distance between policymakers’ attempts at reassuring the nation and a public that continues to feel vulnerable? A traditional and popular answer to the question blames the media for spreading fear, for brandishing disturbing messages of terrorists’ outfits and for not giving official accounts centrality and projection. This answer may have been true a few years ago but not now.
The media has learnt its lessons. It has complied with rules, even though some of them are regressive, draconian and prone to abuse. Official accounts fill pages and news and current affairs hours for as long as officialdom wants. Every press conference, every statement, every interview that depicts headway against terrorists, that claims ‘big breakthroughs’ in busting ‘terror networks’ is repeated ad nauseam without anyone daring to ask whether these successes are genuine or bogus. Add to this, promotion of official accounts through social media and on government-controlled networks (radio, television, and advertisements on private outlets).
Altogether, the platforms that disseminate positive messages offer endless opportunities to convince the public that there is no reason to be terror-stricken and panicky. But still, collectively, the nation remains on edge, deeply disturbed about the future.
And it will remain so because official narratives have become the biggest source of confusion causing agitation in the public mind. Last week’s developments alone are enough to explain the point. While the Intelligence Bureau chief spoke in front of a parliamentary body at length about how the dreaded Daesh had been tackled in Pakistan, the Foreign Office and later the Punjab government spokespersons rubbished his claims by insisting that the organisation does not have any ‘organised presence’ in the country. The same denial was reinforced by the army’s spokesperson, who boasted two days later that such organisations can ‘under no circumstances’ get a toehold on our soil.
Seen together, officials of the same state are found speaking from both sides of the mouth on a potential threat as serious as Daesh operating in Pakistan. To the ordinary folks, who have no concern with the inner dynamics of decision-making and information flow in high places, this dual-speak translates into one thing: uncertainty and distrust. The simple conclusion drawn in drawing rooms is that realities are being hidden, and reassuring statements of officials are a tissue of lies.
This confusion caused by double-speak is reinforced by stark policy contradictions obvious to the common eye. Consider how gloriously hypocritical our stance looks when we claim, on the one hand, that there is no distinction between good and bad Taliban and then, on the other hand, prepare a red carpet reception for the Afghan Taliban on the quadrilateral table to bring peace in our backyard. We all know that most of the groups that we are chasing and killing in our own country have been fighting alongside the Afghan Taliban for decades and have become their ‘brothers in arms’. How do you shake hands with one arm and attempt to cut off the other arm from the same body at the same time?
True, Pakistan’s foreign relations demands aren’t simple. Agreed, good-for-goose-good-for-gander kind of black and white morality does not always apply to complex challenges. But then someone needs to explain this contradiction to a weary public, and most important, tell in plain terms how we intend to have a Taliban-free Pakistan by proposing a Taliban-inclusive Afghanistan. How do we stabilise and normalise borders with Afghanistan when the south and the east of Afghanistan is happily under the control of the Taliban whose networks of ideological support lie deep and well-entrenched in our areas?
Officialdom remains silent on all such matters. It seems to either believe that the public can be solaced by a daily dose of success stories and has no real appetite for policy-level explanations or that the popular mind is so simple that it would totally trust every time someone in a position of authority takes a seat before the cameras and begins to speak.
These wrong assumptions about the level of the public’s metal acuity and their gullibility lead men in power to continue with their superficial claims, thinking that they are winning people over to their side of the story. This mistaken belief breeds another cause of confusion: half-claims without any follow-up.
Consider the chief of army staff’s statement (repeated twice in seven days) that foreign agencies (plural) are hatching conspiracies in Balochistan. He whetted the appetite for more information but did not provide further details – leaving it to the hyper imagination of the public to fill in the blanks. Worse, remarks like these inflate the threat perception among the public that feels under siege by multiple, formidable and yet amorphous and unnamed enemies.
But perhaps the most prolific source of public’s rising distrust and panic level comes in the shape of over-projection and overspeak on issues related to terrorism. There has been quite literally a deluge of pompous claims about the totality of success against terrorists. However, after every instance of reality-bite, attempts at scaling down of expectations has inevitably followed leaving the people more sceptical, more cynical and more worried than before.
Now a new brand of success story saga has been introduced: IBOs or Intelligence Based Operations. Because of their nature, IBOs should never be made public even when these are successful. But there is such an acute need to top-up the success-story pyramid that these are now regularly listed in official briefings. There is no way to empirically verify whether these are true or false and how much reduction of threat to public peace has come about on account of these. But let us assume that these are not false and that pre-emption has led to scaling down of terror acts. However, these make little difference to the people’s view of stability especially when spectacular attacks like the Bacha Khan University horror keep happening with regular intervals.
This is a time when police check posts are attacked, grenades are hurled at homes and offices, threatening graffiti pops up on city walls, video messages and press releases land at media offices with regular intervals, and when, and this is important, not a single designated mastermind is caught and brought to justice through trial and prosecution.
In this environment it is a bit too much to expect the public to believe official claims of success or, for the more cynical-minded, not to see such statements as crass attempts at either self-projection or distracting the focus from policy failures.
Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com
Twitter: @TalatHussain12
