The roar of the stuffed lions

Islamabad diary
There is a world of meaning hidden in the ISPR statement on government performance and the government’s counter-statement rejecting the army charge and spinning a story of its own. The army says the civilians are not delivering on: a) the National Action Plan, b) Fata reform, c) terrorism-related investigations, and d) return and rehabilitation of displaced persons.
The prime minister’s office responds with a fairy tale…that it was the government which forged the political consensus underpinning the operation against terrorism. It speaks of the “brave action by men and officers of the armed forces” but the consensus-building claim comes first.
The PM’s statement goes on to laud the role of the provincial governments and civilian law-enforcement agencies but not before appending a not-so-subtle warning: “However, it is to be noted that implementation of the NAP is a shared responsibility and all institutions have to play their role while remaining within the ambit of the constitution.” This is telling the army the limits of its territory.
The consensus claim suggests that Nawaz Sharif and company took the lead in the assault on the bastions of terrorism. This would be news for most Pakistanis who well remember that it was just last year that the brave-talking civilians were paralysed by fear and indecision. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan led by Mullah Fazlullah had made a mockery of the Pakistani state, freely launching terror attacks across the country, even going to the extent of playing football with the severed heads of captured soldiers – and the political class was for talks with these murderers, these precursors of the Islamic State or Daesh.
It was the army under its present command which overruled the civilians – all of them including the prime minister – and launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Does the PM’s office take public memories to be so short?
The entire nation had been led to believe that it was too risky to go into North Waziristan. Well, the army with close support from the air force (PAF) went into North Waziristan, smashing the terrorist sanctuaries there and putting the TTP to flight. The nation had been told that no one could go into the Tirah Valley. The army, supported by PAF, went into that forbidden vale…taking heavy casualties but without its advance faltering. We had been led to believe that the Shawal Valley was impregnable. Army units, at considerable cost, went there too.
Karachi, we were told, was too tough to handle, its problems too complicated. And who could beard the MQM lion in its den? At any rate, with the army heavily engaged in Fata it was foolhardy to get stuck in Karachi. The army command, putting the Sindh Rangers in the lead, took on this challenge too, even as it was engaged in Fata, and even as it had to keep a sharp eye on the Indian border. Confounding the doubters, the Karachi situation has turned around, with extortionists and killers on the run and the MQM’s deadly grip on the city removed.
Who could have thought that the MQM would be tamed? This was the seemingly impossible coming to pass. Before the Rangers’ operation brave media lions, all of them, dared not criticise the MQM. They wouldn’t whisper its name. Now they casually mention the MQM as if its reign of terror, more fearsome than any martial law, never existed. Altaf Hussein was the master of the nation’s airwaves, his telephonic addresses, at times featuring clownish performances that any bona-fide circus would have been proud of, lasting for hours and TV channels obliged to carry them live. Have we forgotten all that?
Indeed, the entire nation was given a university education in cowardice, the notion drilled into its collective imagination that the blowback from Fata, that from Karachi, would be too hot to withstand…that if we were foolish enough to set out on this path there would be hell to pay, the TTP blowing up our cities and Karachi erupting into something like civil war.
Not a defiant word that could touch the nation’s spirit and rouse it to action escaped the lips of the political class. It was the army under its present command which cast vacillation aside. Why is Gen Raheel Sharif such a popular figure? Because the ordinary people of this country, the overwhelming majority, realise what the political class and the government find so hard to concede: that if the national situation has changed for the better, if despair has given way to hope, it is only because of the armed forces.
Let’s not beat about the bush. The civilian contribution to this turnaround – except in Balochistan where Chief Minister Abdul Malik and the military have acted in harmony – is zero, raised to the power of ten.
If marriage halls and marquees – the leading national industries today being marriage halls and real estate – are doing a roaring business across the country and new shopping malls are coming up in cities large and small, and well-off Pakistanis dig into karahi gosht and chicken tikkas every evening - -and if bootleggers can scarcely keep up with the insatiable demand for Black Label and other stuff to cater to the great thirst of Pakistan’s lucky privilegentsia – it is only because soldiers and officers are putting their lives on the line in Fata and elsewhere.
This is Pakistan’s longest and toughest war, longer and tougher than all its previous wars put together. More soldiers have died in it than all previous wars – from Kashmir to East Pakistan to Kargil. And the PM’s office, quaking at the mere mention of the Taliban just last year, has the cheek to say that the government achieved the broad political consensus behind the launching of the present military operation.
The only consensus the government achieved was for talks with the murderous TTP. Tough decisions were no part of its agenda. Even when army and PAF had started Zarb-e-Azb the civilians were behaving little better than foot-dragging children being led reluctantly to school. The Peshawar school attack, with TTP gunmen mercilessly shooting down young boys and girls – the same TTP with which the government had been so keen to negotiate – left the political class no choice but to clamber aboard the military’s war chariot.
Now the PM’s office is claiming credit for the prime minister for leading this war. No doubt it takes this to be a nation of fools, easily misled and unable to recognise the truth. But the statement also reveals something else: that the PML-N top leadership is past changing and can never mend its ways.
During the dharna and the long marches its spirits were down and out. The fight had gone out of it. It thus made a virtue of deferring to Gen Raheel Sharif. But something has happened lately: either some vitamin shot given by the Americans during the PM’s US visit, or the first phase of the Punjab local elections during which the PML-N has done well or Imran Khan’s discomfiture…but something seems to have happened to bring back some of the PML-N’s traditional cockiness, the readiness with which, throwing caution to the winds, it takes on army chiefs and butts its head into the thickest walls.
A month ago the computers in the PM’s office would have shook before such a statement was issued. Now we are seeing the straw lion in his element again. And this is just Nov 2015. Just wait another six months when Gen Raheel Sharif comes closer to the end of his term. The confidence of the stuffed lions will then be something to behold.
If the army command thinks that the PML-N government, or the political leadership as a whole, can be prodded into becoming Churchills through ISPR tweets it should soon enough learn the limits of its influence. Military exhortations will not make for better civilian governance. The civilians are into orange railway lines, etc. Terrorism will remain the military’s baby. The military must sink or swim on its own.
But the people are with the military. This is the telling combination in this survival war against extremism and terrorism: military and the people. But it is getting to be near evening time and the shadows are lengthening. And the stuffed lions are waiting to have the last laugh.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com