Our own destroyers

We should be grateful to the Sheikh, our benefactor in death. For the trail leading to him has forced upon us, citizens of perhaps the most confused republic on earth, the soul-searching we would never have succumbed to on our own.
Masters of living in denial, champions of a creative fiction that could have flourished in no other land or clime, only an earthquake of the magnitude of Abbottabad could have opened our eyes and led us to examine some of the tenets of our strange national security beliefs.
Yet the guardians of these beliefs are still trying to fight a rearguard action, hoping to deflect the harsh winds of criticism blowing in their direction. Addressing officers in various garrisons, the previously lionised but now out-of-luck army chief, Gen Kayani, came up with this explanation: “Incomplete information and lack of technical details have resulted in speculations and misreporting.”
So it’s all down to incomplete information. What’s incomplete about Osama bin Laden being discovered in Abbottabad and an American attack team, in the darkness of a moonless night, making it to his compound and flying back to Afghanistan undetected?
Consider also this plaintive wail: “Public dismay and despondency has (sic) also been aggravated due to an insufficient formal response.” Which amounts to saying that better spin could have softened the impact of this disaster. When the mountains quiver and shake still an attempt to clutch at straws.
Why don’t we try honesty for a change? Why don’t we stop howling about violated honour and breached sovereignty when we, with our own virginal hands, mortgaged our sovereignty in the first Afghan ‘jihad’? The Americans did not force themselves upon us? Gen Ziaul Haq invited them, indeed asked for better terms in order to make the whole of Pakistan the staging post, the launching pad, for an enterprise which, as the years went by, was to bring us so much misery.
The Bin Ladens and other Arabs, and Chechens and Uzbeks, were equipped and launched into Afghanistan by us. The US and the Saudis may have funded that ‘jihad’ and the CIA may have provided the weapons. But we were the distributors and the liaison merchants, fired by the glory of what we never stopped claiming was a holy war.
Long after the Americans departed, when the entire dynamics of the game had changed we kept playing it. And, drawing the wrong conclusions, for good measure opened another ‘jihadi’ front in Indian-held Kashmir.
Kashmir was not liberated but an indigenous movement of resistance was corrupted and destroyed. Furthermore, the militias raised and trained for Kashmir over time turned into domestic problems. The spectre of terrorism haunting Pakistan has many dimensions but through them all runs the common thread of the culture of ‘jihad’ sponsored and promoted by Pakistan’s official agencies. And even after the world has changed, and so much of conventional wisdom lies atop the trashcans of history, we haven’t been able to rid our minds of such strange notions as of good and bad ‘jihadis’.
The world has moved on. Times have changed. We remain stuck in the past, none more so than our military guardians. In a country like Pakistan the military should be a repository of enlightened ideas, secular and progressive in its thinking. Yet what we see is the phenomenon of the army’s worldview having much in common with the thinking of the most reactionary sections of Pakistani society, as represented by the cohorts of the far right.
If this were just an ideological aberration it could be dismissed as something peculiar to the military with no other consequences. But when such notions begin to affect state policies and become the underpinning of strange strategic doctrines, and when these same notions encourage extra-territorial adventures as in Kashmir or India or Afghanistan, then the consequences become more substantive and, as in our case, fatal with the passage of time.
Without getting into the discussion whether anyone in Pakistan’s security hierarchy knew anything of Osama’s whereabouts or not, the sobering point for us to consider is that of all the countries in the world Osama could hide only in Pakistan, not because anyone was complicit in his hiding but because of the kind of society we have managed to create.
After 30 years of pro-jihadi policies, from one end of the country to the other, from Peshawar to Karachi, we have created a support network for ‘jihadi’ sympathisers. And the entire thrust of our foreign policy, with its emphasis on influence in Afghanistan and undying hostility towards India, has lent philosophical support to this network. This is a physical network and a network of the mind and both supplement each other.
The US may have violated our physical sovereignty and we are right to be outraged by it. But physical sovereignty is a passing concept, rooted in geography which can change. Our geography changed in 1971 but the concept of Pakistan remained unaltered in our minds. Germany’s geography changed in 1945 but the idea of Germany, quite apart from any change in frontiers, remained alive. Even after German reunification this idea remained the same.
Our inner sovereignty, our true sovereignty, was violated by our misguided and false notions of jihadism. When we saw nothing wrong in hosting elements who were extra-territorial players, intervening in Afghanistan and Kashmir, did the thought not cross our minds that this effort might boomerang on us and expose us to someone else’s definition of sovereignty?
The Israelis kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, a wanted war criminal, from Argentina. They laid a honey trap for their nuclear whistleblower, Mordechai Vinunu, in Rome. It stretches the imagination to think that the Americans would come to know of Osama’s presence somewhere in Pakistan and not move heaven and earth to nab him.
We should have intercepted their helicopter intrusion into Abbottabad. But perhaps it was all for the best that the gods of the night were kind and we were able to see and intercept nothing. What if, as those shouting the loudest about sovereignty would have wanted, our Shaheens had scrambled and shot down one or two helicopters? How would America have reacted if, as daylight broke, it was revealed that Osama had been discovered in Pakistan? It is mind-boggling to contemplate what then might have happened.
Let us condemn the US by all means but let us also look within ourselves to see as to how with our bizarre ideological preoccupations we have disfigured a once beautiful country, with so much promise in it, and made it the butt of international slander and derision. Headquarters of global ‘jihad’, home to so many of Al Qaeda’s leading figures, the footprints of so many terrorist acts originating from or leading to Pakistan. Is this a legacy and a reputation to be proud of? Which world are we living in?
If it be not too cruel to say so, we have been living a lie for too long and, if at all we are interested in what we like to call national honour, we must return to the paths of truth, concentrating on setting our house in order, working to make Pakistan a civilised country, an example for the rest of the Muslim world to follow, instead of becoming a bastion of everything that can be classified as backward and reactionary.
The Abbottabad affair is thus less a tragedy over which we should tear our hair and mourn endlessly and more an opportunity to re-examine some of our more cherished concepts and turn a new leaf in our life as a nation. But if we don’t change even after this wakeup call, then heaven alone help us. Our nukes, alas, would be of little use.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com