How we lost the plot - again

What's the litmus test to tell you that the managers at the helm of a company have lost the plot? From a bird’s eye view and in layman terms that’s usually when, despite the obvious lessons to be learned from bad business decisions, they keep repeating them till their company’s bottom line hits an inescapable red low.
And despite the most sincere, most desperate attempts to steer out of the corporate crisis, an irreversible downward spiral is triggered by demanding creditors, stern regulators, failed debtors and absent investors, sounding finally the death knell that gets the liquidator to come knocking on your company’s door. There are tomes written on the subject to help business managers steer clear of making bad business decisions; formal education ensures business managers read and memorise theory and apply learning to a wide simulacrum of practical real world models, to ensure they don’t goof up once they take up the reins of higher management.
The powers that be in Pakistan, unfortunately, have neither the benefit of formal management education nor the good sense to learn from the sins of their management past. And so we have a situation where, dissatisfied with the way we lost the plot decades ago – strategic depth in Afghanistan, cold-war American reliance, proxy warfare – we continue to devise ever more ingenious ways of losing it yet again and again in the form of the stubborn continuing reliance on non-state militant actors as regional counter-security strategy, the lifting of the moratorium on capital punishment, the enabling of an environment thus of violence to counter violence.
To condemn violence and yet to embrace it in the interests of national security; to reject the ‘good-Taliban bad-Taliban’ delusion, only to replace it with a ‘good-banned organisation versus bad-banned organisation’ policy (this term coined recently by a renowned Pakhtun intellectual) as the cornerstone of our Kashmir strategy; and to imagine that politicising the trials of murderers and terrorists to manipulate national politics is good governance, is a measure of the depths of absurdity only our ruling elite are capable of plumbing.
Take the case for capital punishment. The sentencing of the Shafqat Hussain, who allegedly committed murder when he was – for all legal purposes – a juvenile, and in whose case the circumstances surrounding and leading up to his conviction have been debated upon as being dubious, by rights campaigners and in both print and electronic media has nevertheless been received with impenitent glee and grim moral certainty by other sections of the civil society, a reflection of the blood lust that appears to have been inculcated swiftly into our national psyche post the Peshawar APS terror attack.
It is true there is a finality in death that would perhaps lend capital punishment the colour of justice. But will hangings or electrocutions of those who wreak terror with the purpose of being martyred and gaining access to heaven, who fear no form of death to wit, really prove to be an effective deterrence to terror? Is this not the response of a desperate and doddering, reactive state machinery, which in the absence of any sound strategy to combat the roots of terror is resorting instead to the easy and instinctively appealing short-cut of blood for blood?
Writing on the moral conundrums of retributive justice that confront jurisprudence, J M Coetzee cites the example of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief Nazi architects of the Holocaust, and under whose supervision millions of Jews were murdered in the concentration and extermination camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor among others. The Israeli courts in an attempt to convey Eichmann to a fate worse than death sentenced him thus: “You shall be hanged and your body shall be burnt to ash and the ash shall be scattered outside the boundaries of Israel”.
In Coetzee’s view this smacks of desperation and he concludes rightly that while six million deaths may not equal one, it is moot to conclude that they are less or more ‘worse’ than a single life lost. Eichmann’s hanging and cremation was a deserved end no doubt, but no different in its finality as the tragic deaths of the six million Jews before him and certainly set no enduring example that would years later preclude further tragic violence, as has been witnessed between the state of Israel and its Palestinian neighbours.
It is the failure of our establishment that today our state of siege mentality has quadrupled, with the imagined threats on our borders being supplanted with tangible and real threats from within. As I write this, Islamabad is in the process of being shut down to prepare for a costly show of our military strength that will apparently achieve the twin purpose of restoring national pride, as well as act as a psychological deterrent to our enemies.
As part of these preparations the citizens of Islamabad have been advised to stay within their homes. Cellular networks are also supposed to cease to function past midnight on Sunday and remain suspended till the parade is safely concluded. And all this caution and alarm when the news on the grapevine confirms that our military is pounding the terrorists day in and day out. If despite that pounding the terrorists can still manage to paralyse our lives and force us to keep glancing over our shoulders, then what is a few dozen or even a few thousand hangings going to achieve in terms of neutering the terrorist threat?
Effective retribution against the Taliban and sectarian terrorist outfits can only come through the proliferation of modern education across Pakistan, the end of the exploitative feudal order that, cancer-like, pervades the length and breadth of this country and an end to the elite capture that ensures that dysfunctional civil services, the corrupt politics of power and money, electoral fraud, tax evasion, horse trading, land grabbing et al continue to endure.
Until we decide that our sole purpose is the construction of a modern, progressive, secular and inclusive polity, until we decide that we must expunge any lingering confusions over our religious identity, until we ban the proselytising of ethnic and racial hatred masquerading as faith and until we introduce and enforce laws and regulations, in all public institutions and corridors of government that the elite with their money and resources would be unable to circumvent and which would ensure that their smugness is stripped away and they behave like the meek law-abiding citizens they routinely transform into whenever their planes touch down at Heathrow, JFK or De Gaulle – until that day we are condemned to keep glancing over our shoulders.
Perhaps these are only Utopian fantasies and may never be achieved. A year ago, grieving over the death of his friend, the social worker Parveen Rehman – another innocent victim of terror in Karachi – and scores of other good friends that he and others have lost to violence in the last few years in Pakistan, my good friend Harris Khalique mused on the burden of having to live out his life as Milan Kundera’s “hedonist trapped in a world politicized to extremes”.
While that may be an apt description of our existential angst, I’m more inclined to regard him, myself and many other good friends as J M Coetzee describes himself in the closing passages of Diary of a Bad Year: I feel we too are his anarchistic-quietist-pessimists. Anarchists because we are convinced that what is precisely wrong with politics is power; quietists because we also perhaps doubt our will to change what is wrong in Pakistan, infected as such will is with a drive to power; and pessimists because we realised long ago that no fundamental change may ever be brought about.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Email: kmushir@hotmail.com
Twitter: @kmushir