Avoiding the allure of false binaries

The writer is an analyst and commentator.

In 1795 James Madison wrote: “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare”. This is a great quote because it fits in a tweet, validates the pro-normalisation, pro-peace inclinations of both politically neutral and politically partisan Pakistanis, and has the added bonus of being one of those binary litmus tests: if you like it, you’re ok. If you resist its irrefutable logic, you are a hawaldaar, pro-ISI stooge.

In the simple world of binaries that many politicians, television talks show hosts and corporations want us to occupy, things are easy. You are either for civilian supremacy as per the constitution or you are against democracy. You are either for national security and the protection of Pakistan from Ajit Doval’s sinister plots or you are with the enemy, abetting its every move. You are either against corruption or you are on the take yourself. You are either for honouring the sacrifice of the troops or you hate the troops.

Among the gifts of a free press is the space to resist the ease and comfort of false binaries. Zafar Abbas and Cyril Almeida have continued a long-standing tradition in this country of braving the odds, and writing the truth, as known to them, without the varnish of apology or reservation. People have paid with their lives for this freedom. There are other prices too. This newspaper, and the group that owns it, knows this well.

The interior minister’s assault on reason – he is trying to kill it with a death of a thousand cuts – was never as wondrous or as telling as when he announced that Almeida’s placement on the Exit Control List, and the alarm bells of national security were really set off, once he had tweeted his conviction of standing by his story. One can only imagine how hard it must be for spinelessness to be confronted with moral fortitude.

In Rawalpindi, the mood is sombre. “How did the details of a meeting that should have been classified end up on the front page of the newspaper?”, they thunder. I would ask a different question: “How did one front page story end up driving the news cycle for over ten days, earning international coverage from every newspaper of record, in every capital that matters?” The answer to that one is, dare I say, simple.

We place a globally cited newspaperman like Almeida on the ECL, and newspaper and television women and men everywhere will file stories. None of them will be about the endless curfew in Srinagar, or the pellet holes in young bodies, or the egregious murder of freedom in Kashmir. They will all be about Pakistan’s surfeit of sensitivity, rooted in the ceaseless and ceaselessly fascinating civil-military disequilibrium. Not to forget: no one did a story about Cyril’s story. Everyone did a story about Cyril being put on the ECL.

In Islamabad, the mood is the same as ever. Nervous. Twitchy. Scared. Naughty. Compliant. Complaining. “They never let us do anything”, they whimper. They cannot scream this because the retorts would come fast and furious. Consider the resplendent array of deplorables employed by the PML-N in Punjab or, for that matter, the PPP in Sindh or the MQM in Karachi, the ANP in KP, and the JUI-F, JI and PTI in various parts of the country, not to mention the alphabet soup of shame in Balochistan.

There are members of parliament associated with criminal gangs and mafias that would put the Corleones to shame. The currency is always different – ethnicity, the blasphemy law, tribal custom – but the purchased goods are always the same: mistreatment of women, denial of education and health, and sustenance of deprivation and poverty. Is this the deliverance from Hindu Raj that the Pak Studies aficionados would like honest people to celebrate?

Back to Rawalpindi, where no one should ever be anything but humble. That should be the defining trait of individuals and institutions that consistently and constantly cite false-flag operations on both home territory and enemy territory as the constant mechanism through which their worldview is misrepresented, through which they keep getting tagged as the bad guys. The shorter version of the security establishment’s lament: they keep beating us as looking innocent, because we keep getting played by them. The even shorter version: they are smarter than us.

And so it continues; the chants of ‘Zinda hai Bhutto zinda hai’ haunt this nation. So too does the image of Nawab Akbar Bugti. Both Bhutto and Bugti used to be close and cuddly with the national security agenda. But cut loose, they let loose. They represent the depths or heights of what could have been. For Pakistanis alive today, there is no wondering. The ‘what could have been’ happens to be. Be prime minister. He rules over the most formidable political empire known to Pakistan, ever. Here, and now, the question is: ‘can he be trusted?’

It is not a philosophical question. It is the question that has been answered emphatically three times. The people of this country, most of whom happen to live in Punjab, keep saying ‘yes’ (1990), ‘yes’ (1997) and ‘yes’ (2013). And perhaps in betraying the truth about the enemy being smarter than them, or perhaps in illuminating the truth about they being smarter than everyone, the protectors and guardians of this land keep asking: ‘No, seriously: can we trust him?’

Well, the people of this country have answered that emphatically, more than once. So let’s see what he cannot be trusted to do. Nawaz Sharif will not reform the civil service, he will not handle the domestic or international media very well, he will never fire non-performers, he will always reward loyalty, he won’t fix PIA, he won’t manage the economy professionally or creatively, he won’t grow exports, he won’t stamp out the reality nor the perception of corruption, and he will fail to cultivate a national consensus on national security. So no. He cannot be trusted to do the things he has not done, and likely won’t. Or basically, no, he cannot be trusted to have a perfect, unblemished record of governance.

Yet he can be trusted to wanting to win elections. Thus he (or his brother) builds this country’s road and electricity infrastructure, he (or his brother) produces varying qualities of social protection instruments, and he (or his brother) cosies up to an array of international actors, to secure things like the roll out of sukuk bonds, or support for the Kashmir cause at the OIC. It isn’t and will never have the stamp of approval from the New York Times, but isn’t as incompetent as patriotic Pakistanis seem to think it is. And it is certainly better than being seen as an enabler and facilitator of terrorists.

Who leaked the details of the top-secret meeting about national security? The speculation can range from ‘it was the civvies’ to ‘it was the khakis’. In game theory, all options, their motivations and their possible outcomes have to be considered. Yet we know this: no matter who leaked the details, the content of the discussion is crystal clear, and uncontested: Pakistan faces an unprecedented challenge at home, and abroad. At home, we must prevent violent extremism from undermining rule of law. Abroad, we must prevent our enemies from defining us through the lens most suitable to them.

This is not a situation that will ever offer clean binaries to choose from. We do have enemies, and they do seek to undermine us. And we do have an institutional imbalance that fuels the sustenance of groups that help the enemy undermine us.

The answer to a civ-mil disequilibrium in favour of the military is not a complete reversal in which our soldiers, spies, seamen and airmen are humiliated. But the answer to the presence of a devious and unrelenting set of enemies at home and abroad is not the continued demonisation of our elected leaders, the undermining of our democratic institutions and the continued assignment of holy cow status to our military and intelligence communities.

There is no shame in honouring our soldiers whilst holding our generals to account. And there is no dishonour in demanding more from our elected leaders, whilst defending the democratic infrastructure that sustains them. We must never give in to false binaries, Madisonian or otherwise. Long live the freedom of the Pakistani pen.