Islamabad diary
Even the innocent can see through this game. Prime minister and immediate circle are not coming clean about their offshore accounts and Mayfair properties, trying their best to evade the issue, through that time-honoured device of a toothless commission.
My Lord Justice Osmany is an ex army officer – 44th PMA. He should be the last person to fall for such a losing gambit. Incidentally, his wife did apply for a PML-N Senate ticket and even had her vote transferred to Lahore, intending to contest from Punjab. I must add, my Karachi friends say that Justice Osmany is a man of “unimpeachable integrity”.
The writing is on the wall for those who can read. The army chief has already delivered a sharp warning, stressing the need for “across-the-board” accountability if stability and peace are to come to Pakistan. Today the government can still do something. Tomorrow might be too late, for somebody else then will be doing the deciding.
Then politicians, democracy paladins and those who specialise in holding candle-light vigils will denounce the army and beat loudly the gong of democracy violated, forgetting the dithering and the outright lies that will have brought the nation to that pass.
This is not intervention being contemplated. This is intervention being invited. Nawaz Sharif is trying to save himself and his immediate family. Far from succeeding, the evasive tactics being employed and the reliance being placed on equivocation and dissembling are imperilling something more than just the Sharif business empire.
The army command is fast losing patience. That’s the clear import of the army chief’s statement. The army wants action and it wants it fast. When the politicians did nothing, the army started Zarb-e-Azb. It sorted out Karachi. The political order couldn’t handle Ghulam Rasool alias Chotu. The army had to come and take care of that too. Nawaz Sharif is deluded if he thinks he can sit endlessly on Panamagate.
But he is in a fix. If there were any convincing explanations for the Mayfair flats and the money trail leading to them we would have heard them by now. The silence and confusion on this count is the most telling evidence against the PM.
So he sits on the fence looking harassed and full of doom. The pressure instead of dissipating – as first hoped it would – mounts with every passing day. And General Raheel’s statement comes as a shot across the bows.
But it is not just Nawaz Sharif in a fix. The nation is too. This problem is not going away. The business of government – federal and Punjab, that is – is paralysed. The country can’t afford to be in this state indefinitely.
Nawaz Sharif was trusting to the nation’s simplicity, expecting that the nation would swallow the yarns being offered for the Panama revelations. The Sharifs have got away with so much. The Asghar Khan case, relatively speaking, is ancient history – money distributed by the ISI for influencing the 1990 elections. But the Model Town shooting – 14 dead including two women, and about 80 wounded – happened less than two years ago and the Sharifs survived that too. They survived the dharnas, thanks to Gen Raheel Sharif.
The Panama leaks are proving more difficult to shake off because of their international dimension. Imran Khan or some TV channel has not invented them. This bombshell has come, so to speak, from the skies…and Nawaz Sharif and family, amidst rising desperation, have no convincing defence to offer.
Let it be said plainly: the army will not wait forever. It is not just a matter of what Gen Raheel Sharif thinks. This is no longer a chocolate army. It is not the army commanded by Gen Musharraf or Gen Kayani. It is an army steeled in battle, one whose officers and men have laid down their lives in the killings fields of North Waziristan, Shawal, the Tirah Valley, which has gone into areas previously considered impassable – which has turned around the situation in Karachi and has taken the MQM, hitherto untouchable, through a rigorous course of re-education.
Will such an army long tolerate a governing clique whose legitimacy is tainted and compromised by the Panama leaks? Very soon the question will arise of Gen Raheel’s successor. Who will nominate that successor? A prime minister tainted by the Panama leaks? How will the army take that? This is an explosive situation…and likely to get more explosive as the PM ducks and evades.
So either the ruling politicians act fast to clear their names or the power to take decisions will be taken from their hands.
All is not bleak, however. Pakistan has a written constitution – which provides no guidance whatsoever as to how resolve a situation such as that created by the Panama revelations. But it also has an unwritten code. Gen Raheel’s warning in Kohat arose not from the written constitution but from that unwritten code. Gen Waheed Kakar’s intervention in 1993 when to resolve the impasse between President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and then prime minister Nawaz Sharif he ‘persuaded’ both to step down – and they did, paving the way for fresh elections – also sprang from that same unwritten code.
The written constitution has its high-sounding constitutionalist principles. The unwritten code is based on the Maoist principle that the arbiter of last resort is General Headquarters. A written constitution is only good as its practitioners. When their vision is limited, or when they are bereft of the power of action, other factors come into play. Take it almost as a law of nature.
Look at the vacillating stance of Syed Khursheed Shah. Take in the self-serving arguments of that character from a Byzantine drama, Rehman Malik. Consider the PM’s own continuing equivocations. The politicians are proving incapable of sorting out this mess. Their dithering is not just inviting but provoking a third-party intervention…and we all know what that means.
Nawaz Sharif himself can’t see beyond his immediate self-interest. It is futile expecting him to don the mantle of statesmanship. A PM who still insists that he doesn’t know what he is being charged with isn’t giving much proof of statesmanship. Somebody has to instil some sense into these geniuses, and that can only be the man of the moment, Gen Raheel Sharif.
Gen Kakar made them see reason all those years ago. For Pakistan’s sake a similar approach is in order now: a clear message to the PM that there is no way out except a high-powered, independent commission with clear and not murky terms of reference. The focus of the commission should be on the PM, not an endless list of other potential malefactors. It should go to the heart of the matter and not get stuck on externalities. My Lord the Chief Justice can also be requested to agree to this approach. With the army behind it such a commission should be able to cut through the mist and arrive at definitive conclusions.
This is a chance to clean the stables. Let the nation not miss it. Gen Raheel has led not just the army but in many ways the nation in these trying times. This could be his farewell gift to the nation.
I can’t help adding that a year ago democracy’s champions couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge Gen Raheel’s popularity. The words stuck in their throats. Today no article seems to be complete without a direct or passing reference to the chief’s public standing. Hallelujah.
Email: bhagwal63gmail.com