Hypocrisy as art form

Legal eye

Our defence minister tells us that Husain Haqqani has threatened our national security once again, this time by writing an opinion piece in the Washington Post. The bit that has patriots riled up is Haqqani’s disclosure that the Obama Administration wished to place intelligence assets in Pakistan to help track Osama bin Laden and that the Zardari government granted the request, and his assertion that the assets so placed might have been invaluable in helping US Navy Seals conduct the operation in Abbottabad without Pakistan’s knowledge.

Implicit in Haqqani’s disclosures and assertions in the piece is that Musharraf, towards the end, was seen by the US as running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The Zardari government, on the contrary, was serious about helping the US fight terror and achieve its objectives in Afghanistan. Due to the relationship between the civilian government and the US Administration, which Haqqani helped develop, Pakistan secured the Kerry-Lugar funding and in turn facilitated the US in finding Osama without the support of our military.

The real problem with the piece is the larger suggestion that can be gleaned: that our military sympathised with the Taliban and Islamist militants and was not a trustworthy ally when the fight against terror was focused on these groups; and the Obama Administration didn’t coordinate the Abbottabad operation with our military out of the fear that the information might be leaked and used to help Osama escape. And that is why the role of US assets deployed on the ground in Pakistan was invaluable.

Osama being found, captured and killed in Pakistan was a perilous moment for us. The choice for the state was to accept either incompetence or complicity. We settled for the former. Our best explanation to the world was that lapses happen even in the presence of the best intelligence agencies. We presented 9/11 as an example. But the suspicion that there might have been a combination of incompetence at the top and complicity at some level hasn’t vanished entirely. In other words, that the world isn’t sure that our state doesn’t hobnob with non-state outfits.

That is the charge India makes against us. And that is the allegation Afghanistan is also levelling. The campaign to have Pakistan declared a terror state is rooted in the assertion that Pakistan uses non-state actors to pursue its security goals in the region. At a time when the new Trump Administration is in the process of formulating a South Asia policy and how to pursue US objectives in Afghanistan, Haqqani has reminded Washington of its past suspicion. That is what is wrong with the Haqqani piece.

But our reaction to Haqqani’s piece also highlights what is wrong with Pakistan. We are never in the mood to face facts. We would rather distort them. We have transformed distortion of history, deliberate misinformation and lies into an art form.     And we keep assuring ourselves that if we can manage to weave a justificatory narrative that we find plausible and there are no ‘traitors’ like Haqqani poking holes in it, the rest of the world would also believe it.

And two, we believe it is okay to use loyalty to state and religious purity as leashes to stir up public sentiment and then use heightened public emotion as a source of power and leverage to achieve tactual gains – ie generate leverage in institutional turf wars or in negotiations with foreign states. We do so oblivious to the fact that it is easier to provoke public resentment than to quell it. And that provoking public sentiment and encouraging xenophobia and bigotry polarises society and prevents us from building consensus over the way forward for our polity.

Why leash-up hatred against the US every now and then and patronise rightwing rallies chanting “Amreeka ka jo yaar hai, ghaddar hai” (America’s friend is a traitor)? Starting from Liaquat Ali Khan, to Seato/Cento, to Ayub’s ‘Friends not Masters’, to Zia’s embrace of Uncle Sam, to Musharraf’s enlightened moderation, and including almost all civilian governments in between, hasn’t it been Pakistan’s consistent policy that staying on the right side of the US is in our best interest? If the US is seen as an ally we must do business with, why poison public opinion?

If Ayub did a swell job securing Western funding for mega-projects and hitching Pakistan to the US wagon during the cold war, if Musharraf committed no crime leasing out air bases to the US (we found out about that when Senator Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistan’s opposition to drones, which she thought flew from Pakistan), what crime did the PPP commit when allowing US intelligence personnel to track Osama’s whereabouts in Pakistan? Unless we wished to hide Osama, why would we obstruct US efforts aimed at sniffing him out?

Was our state fuming after the Abbottabad operation because a declared ally breached our sovereignty and embarrassed us before the world? Or because we didn’t want Osama to be found – or at least not found unless we wanted him to be found? Do Haqqani’s words and actions cultivate an atmosphere of rancour and distrust between the US and Pakistan or merely expose it? When we declare Haqqani a traitor or punish Shakeel Afridi we unwittingly confuse the world and our own people regarding the side we are rooting for in the fight against terror.

Pakistan has a terror problem. It’s not just that terrorists hide amongst us due to broken borders or a dysfunctional governance system or that the problem would vanish if our enemies stopped paying mercenaries to blow themselves up. The real sanctuary for terrorists in Pakistan is a segment of public opinion that sympathises with them and their worldview. The sympathisers might disagree with the means used by terrorists, but deep down they support those who have declared war in the name of Islam against all infidels and against bad Muslims who side with the infidels.

The fact that Muslims in Muslim-majority states are prime victims of our faith-inspired terrorists becomes an irrelevant detail for sympathisers. In this environment, an equivocal state narrative that distinguishes between terrorists on the basis of their targets and seems to implicitly endorse the view that it is okay for some within a Muslim majority state to define what a good Muslim is and force others to measure up to such definition is manna for the terror narrative. Such equivocation encourages vigilantism and culminates into terror.

A decade ago, Lal Masjid was a den of terrorists that had to be cleansed through a military operation in which several SSG officers lost their lives. Today, Lal Masjid is leading the move against bloggers who were picked up (reportedly by intelligence agencies) and later returned after being labelled blasphemers. It is quite inexplicable why blasphemy should be a major problem in a country where 96 percent people identify themselves as Muslims and minorities are too vulnerable to deliberately try and offend the religious sensibilities of the majority.

But when little-known social media activists who are critical of state policies go missing and are later released after being branded blasphemers through a whispering campaign and Lal Masjid folks show up in court with ‘evidence’ of blasphemy (that no one else has seen or verified) demanding their prosecution, two things happen. One, fear spreads even among right thinking citizens that they can be framed for this most heinous crime if they fall on the wrong side of the state. And two, people wonder if the state and Lal Masjid are allies working together.

The practice of using patriotism and religion as part of tactical manoeuvres to win turf wars must end. Let there be a wider debate on the mistakes we have made in the past, and the corrective steps required. Self-criticism doesn’t hurt nations and their interests – self-deceit and bigotry do.

The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.

Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu