What word for stupidity?

Anger is a spent force in Pakistan, an exhausted emotion. We are past its boundaries because many of us feel that nothing really matters, nothing will change. This is our destiny.
We are no strangers to horror. We have known it in all shapes and sizes. Churches have been attacked before, mosques desecrated, the innocent killed and maimed, all in the name of Islam. The march of extremism, and now virtually the triumph of extremism, the retreat of tolerance and good sense, we have seen and experienced all this. So there is nothing new on this front. One more outrage: it only adds to the list, creates nothing new.
The despair comes from something else: the nation directionless, its leaders acting like lost souls, afraid of their own shadows, covering themselves in layers of security that even Genghis Khan would have found excessive, feeling little, understanding even less, closing their eyes to reality, by their attitude conceding space to the forces of darkness, yet all the while pompous as if they hold the key to the riddles of the universe.
What have we done to deserve this? Huge as our faults may be, what have we done to deserve the combined intellects of the Sharifs and Imran Khan? There is no escaping the fact that we chose them with our own hands, anointed them with our approval. But this circumstance, if anything, only further emphasises the poverty of our circumstances…the narrow choices available to a nation with such grandiose pretensions: Fortress of Islam, God’s chosen kingdom, etc. We are close to becoming a monument to insanity and yet ascribe our creation to the fulfilment of a divine purpose.
There is a difference between folly and stupidity. Folly can be brilliance gone wrong, Napoleon, not heeding the warnings of the past, marching on Russia, and destroying his army in the process; Hitler, forgetting German history, and opening a second front.
Stupidity is far more sublime. It is the quality of the ass or the jackass: standing in the middle of the road and not understanding the danger posed by a fast-moving truck.
Dogs can sense traffic, when it gets close. Cats can too. Jackasses can’t. Leave a donkey standing in the middle of the road and he/she will keep standing there, oblivious to anything swishing past.
Pakistan is facing a jackass moment. The danger is out there, in front. Anyone with normal intelligence, even a child, would be able to grasp it, see it for what it is, make out its different dimensions. But for reasons that should be fascinating for social scientists to explore, Pakistan’s present leaders, gifts of fate or fortune, are eyeless in the desert, oblivious to everything…except their own interest.
How clever they are when it comes to pleasing their own class – whose leading members are laughing all the way down the garden path. See how cleverly, and quietly, tax concessions have been given to the business class: documentation steps announced in the budget withdrawn…no equivocation there. When something is slightly more complicated, requiring some pressure on the mind, such as the threat posed by extremism and the warped ideology of the Taliban, confusion takes over, and doublespeak becomes the norm. Or are we missing something? Something far simpler: a sound instinct for self-preservation, the fear of the unknown, fear of taking on the Taliban?
For the first few years after Musharraf came to power, barring a few exceptions, no one wrote against him. When his grip weakened it became the fashion to curse him. An article or a column wasn’t complete unless he was kicked. But if there is any justice in the world it would be hard not to admit that by the standards of today he almost seems like a professor from an advanced university. You won’t catch many people saying this…this not being the accepted wisdom. But think it over.
He was no paragon of virtue. Let us reserve such titles for saints and mahatmas. He made his mistakes and they were huge ones, with fateful consequences. But the show we are now seeing, even if these are early days, takes the prize, leaving him far behind. Musharraf could be too-clever-by-half, the perpetrator of folly, and he paid the price for that. But he was no jackass.
How different from today. If today’s knights in shining armour were only confused themselves it wouldn’t greatly matter. The nation could live with that. After all, despite the fact that they were voted into power, how many people would still be nursing any illusions about their great capabilities? But their influence extends beyond their own persons. As persons in authority, their mental arithmetic further confuses a nation already confused, and eats into what’s left of national morale.
Small wonder, anything like spirit or verve is not to be found in Pakistan today. A listless country, sunk in depression, that’s what we are becoming, if not there already. I was a young captain in the 1971 war (with not much to my credit, but that’s another story). If I was a young captain today – posted, say, in Wana or Miramshah – and I heard the confused babble of our bonzes would I be greatly inspired?
Destruction is one thing. Destroyed nations can be rebuilt. Flattened cities can rise again. But a nation dead in the mind, its imagination suppressed, its spirit crushed, it’s very hard raising that. Stand-up comics used to say, it’s in the mind. Comedy apart, it is indeed in the mind and thanks to our ghazis it’s there that we have lost it.
Kenya doesn’t have a sixth of our army’s strength, if even that. It has no Dr A Q Khan and no nuke bombs and no nuke-carrying missiles. And it doesn’t call itself the fortress of anything, such metaphysical titles reserved only for us.
But look at the way that country has just handled the siege of that mall in Nairobi. It took a long time clearing that mall but the Kenyan president, again no paragon of virtue His Excellency, said after the siege was over, “Our losses are immense. We have been badly hurt, but we have been brave, united and strong. Kenya has stared down evil and triumphed. We have defeated our enemies and showed the whole world what we can accomplish.” Try getting our leaders to utter such words.
If the same thing had happened here leaders and television commentators would have gone round and round, shying away from using the word terrorist to describe the mall attackers. Seeing our attitude even the angels would have begged for mercy.
So what on earth do we do? Where do we go from here? With our paladins – the Sharifs and Imran Khan – we are stuck. For better or worse, the nation’s direction is in their hands. And the army is waiting and waiting…waiting for one chief, who has been around for too long, to go and another to take his place.
In the PMA two things were drummed into our ears above everything else: character and initiative. An officer was not an officer if he lacked integrity. I look around at things today and can’t help laughing when I recall my platoon commander, Capt (later Brig) Shahid Aziz (may his soul rest in peace), going on and on about character. About initiative too we can rest easy. It has been some time since it passed into the hands of those we dignified as stakeholders in that circus, the All-Parties Conference.
Says Ghalib: “Rau mein hai raksh-e-umr, kahaan dekhiye thamey/Nae haath baag par hai, na paa hai rakaab mein.” (The stallion of my life is in a race, let’s see where it stops/Neither are my hands on the reins, nor my feet in the stirrup.”
An apt description of the Islamic Republic in these trying times.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com