The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.
We can blame the Americans for many things, and all will be justified. We can say they have stabbed us in the back OBL-like in attacking Mullah Mansour and killing him on our soil. We can assert that by droning him they have drowned any reasonable hope of a breakthrough with the Taliban, leaving us, the unfortunate neighbour, to face the blowback of an expanding conflict in Afghanistan.
We can mourn and resent the deviousness of their policy, which on the one hand asks us to invite the Taliban on the talks table and, on the other hand, besmears our name for maintaining links with them. We can rightly feel outraged that while all other countries, including Washington, keep backdoors open to all sorts of Taliban, in case of Pakistan the same policy is categorised as double-speak.
We can raise, among others, the key question as to what Mullah Mansur was doing in Iran – which incidentally has a long history of giving space to the likes of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar and even Bin Laden’s wife? Why does the world not ask Tehran about its policy on the Taliban? And why is all the pressure on Islamabad?
What we cannot do is to blame the Americans for how we chose to respond to the challenges that flow from their unfair dealings. We do not control their moves, but we do control our own reactions and policies. If we are paralysed in action, and are confusing in thought and policy, it is no one’s fault but our own. Viewed from that standpoint the real story of Mullah Mansour’s killing is not that he was droned. He could have been killed by other means as well. The Americans have deep physical ingress in Pakistani territory, and they can arrange a ground grab-and-kill operation.
The actual story is how our entire state machinery was frozen in response to the attack. How all government and establishment heads together could not put together a single convincing sentence to reassure a public agog with surprise and shock.
Reading all fragments of our official response to this crisis is like going through a mad man’s diary. Incoherence, unintelligence, and clumsiness – that’s what you find in abundance alongside a complete famine of sensitivity to the seriousness of the matter at hand. Attempt to summarise this response spread over days, and you will end up rambling. Consider the following.
Mullah Mansour was not our man but he had our passport and national identity card. He was not allowed to move around freely yet he made home here and was a frequent traveller in and out of Pakistan. We had been observing him but we did not know where he went and what he did in Iran. We had no clout with him but we could still persuade him to be part of the peace talks.
The Americans told us that they had got him in the drone hit but we had to insist on a DNA test to prove that the man was not Wali. We had his dead body, then we did not have his dead body, and then we had his body again even though the Taliban without having done the DNA test could confirm that he was dead and – had been buried. Now while officially claiming that we have not handed over his dead body to anyone we, officially, also accept the Taliban’s claim that they have buried him.
Initially, we also did not confirm that it was a drone attack and yet the interior minister spoke at length about drone attacks being a grave violation of our sovereignty. We said that the drone did not enter deep into our territory and yet we said that it was precise engagement knowing full well that a drone had to be in the vicinity of 4 to 6 kms of the target to take it out. Mullah Mansour was killed 70 kms inside our land.
But there is a larger issue behind this circle of craziness we have been treated to in the past one week. Our disjointed response is born of a disjointed policy that we have pursued for long without ever bothering to look at its inherent contradictions. We have known for years that we cannot play the peace-maker in Afghanistan without patronising the Taliban (or a section of them) in a significant way. And yet we have done nothing to prepare ourselves for the obvious cost of this delicate balancing act. In fact, our posture has been that we don’t care what happens to the Taliban.
Then came the drone. We changed our tack on the dead man immediately after he was killed. When alive he was a man we tried our best to control and influence (or so we are told in background briefings) but he did not listen to us. After his death we made him look like a champion of peace and harmony – suddenly suggesting that there are good and bad Taliban and we need to pick and choose among them. We are now saying that the US has sabotaged a peace process that we ourselves were convinced was not going anywhere.
And even as we insist that talks are the only way to sort out Afghanistan’s bloody mess, on our side, in Fata, we have the long guns out; and precision-guided missiles rain on the same type of Taliban amidst daily vows not to spare a single soul among them. Killing solves problems for us but killing does not solve problems for Afghanistan? Now that is inconsistency.
And this is just one; there are hundreds of others that define our policy on sensitive national matters that form the core of our defence and security. Because these inconsistencies and contradictions are obvious, it is therefore hard to imagine that they are not apparent to our policymakers. Why then are these not resolved and some measure of sanity injected into them?
This leads us to the heart of all issues: institutional disconnect and endless turf battles in the echelons of intrigue. The civil and military leaders operate in two isolated realms. There is no interface, no meaningful interaction and no ongoing discussion on the country’s myriad challenges. The inane term ‘being on the same page’ only means that the two Sharifs should be occasionally seen in the picture sitting together and that one should repeat after (or before) the other hollow sentences like ‘no one can challenge our resolve to protect Pakistan’.
Other than that, the time-consuming, energy-spending, non-personal institutionalised discourse from which is born cogent policy does not exist. The Sharif government, like all pervious civilian governments, thinks that the army must respond to events created by its secretive policies. The army believes that the civilians – all civilians – are only capable of conducting mindless politics and have no interest in high-end agendas. The two sides have been and continue to be involved in a tug of nerves and one-upmanship. Day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, policymaking has remained hostage to this infighting in a dysfunctional system.
This country – the size of many European countries combined and of 200 million people – has a lot of mass. But it has no strategic weight in today’s world. This is because no gravitational vision governs it. Nothing pulls it down to the peg of long-term planning. Its fragmented, atomised decision-making processes are centralised around individuals who can’t look beyond their own noses, tenures and mandates. The problem, therefore, is not US drones.
The problem is that no one is serious about running state affairs as a combined responsibility. Here policy is reduced to press conferences and tweets. What happens later is left to fate. Almost 69 years later the world has figured us out. From Washington to Delhi to Kabul to Tehran, everyone knows how deeply divided we are – how scintillatingly incompetent. They will strike at will, and they will get away with it every time. A country that is droned from within is an invitation to all its detractors to do as they please.
Email: syedtalathussaingmail.com
Twitter: TalatHussain12