DRIFTING listlessly like a rudderless ship in choppy, hostile, waters the state of Pakistan is up against the heaviest fog since that cataclysmic crisis in East Pakistan that eventually lopped off half the country.

Say that to a votary of the establishment that there is a marked similarity in the drift of events between what is happening in Malakand Division today and what transpired, nearly four decades ago, in the then East Pakistan and it’s likely he would bristle with disagreement and snarl at you. That, in itself, is a tragedy. The crisis of East Pakistan that truncated the country was a calamity. But a greater calamity is that we have drawn no lessons from it and, so, history is threatening to repeat itself for a people who refuse to learn from it.

That President Zardari could find it convenient to absent himself from the country for no less than 25 days at a stretch says it all about the sense of drift and despondency among its people. What kind of a leader is that who steals himself from the scene — for days and weeks-on-end — every time there’s a crisis, real or of sorts, in the country?

Then, as now, back in 1971 when the crisis of East Pakistan started unfolding in all its ugly and dire propensities, there were visible fault lines in the leadership of Pakistan at the top. General Yahya Khan’s sole interest was riveted in keeping himself as the sole arbiter of Pakistan. Lacking political maturity and devoid of any insight into how the political forces then ruling the roost among the people would react to his diktat he opted for the use of force to settle a political problem. He thought his show of strength would puncture the resilience of the people of East Pakistan to fight on for their usurped rights and he, in the end, would muzzle all opposition to his rule.

Yahya couldn’t be more wrong in his prognosis of the crisis, as the ignominious surrender of December 16, 1971, by that caged (tiger) General Niazi to his victorious Indian counterpart, singed forever the conscience of every self-respecting Pakistani.

Zardari is, likewise, hooked on keeping himself in power as the nation’s sole arbiter. That explains his reluctance to part with any of those powers that General Musharraf’s notorious 17th amendment to the constitution vests in him. The military action against the Taliban in Swat, Dir and Buner, was timed to give him the maximum mileage in his extended sojourn in US, vis-à-vis its current leadership.

Indeed, the establishment partisans may protest that there could be no parallel between East Pakistan and Malakand, for the simple reason that there is no India fuelling the crisis, which it did in East Pakistan’s case. True there’s no India, up front, feeding the flames of the Taliban. But that may just be half the truth. There must be someone providing the logistics and a sophisticated arsenal to the Taliban. What else could explain the stiff resistance being put up by them against a modern and well-trained Pakistan Army equipped with hi-tech weapons and logistics?

Our military experts and commentators were dismissive, before the operation got under way, about the capabilities and manpower of the Taliban. But the so-called rag-tag fighters armed with an obscurantist ideology have been holding out against the military onslaught for almost two weeks, already, and no one is predicting an early end to the operation.

A pivotal point being missed is that the Mukti Bahiniin East Pakistan were able to keep the Pakistan army at bay for nearly nine months because, one, they had complete faith in the invincibility of their cause and, two, they had the people of East Pakistan firmly in tow behind them. Their backs were, proverbially, secure. On top of it there was India feeding their ‘movement’ in more senses and ways than one for well known reasons.

We may, and must, denounce the Taliban for their stone-age mentality and their obscurantist agenda. But they are battle-hardened veterans of their fighting tactics and their beliefs, howsoever deplorable they may be to a vast majority of Pakistanis, carry a lot of weight with them.

There’s no India, for argument’s sake, on the radar to be pointed at as the supplier of deadly arsenal to the Taliban. But there must be someone, some power below the radar keeping the gun powder dry for the Taliban and funnelling sophisticated weapons to them to take on the Pakistan army. Let the conspiracy theory buffs argue it out till the cows come home from pasture as to who that power may be; this scribe, for one, isn’t in the business of conspiracy theories. However, in the process of arguing who is feeding the Taliban’s appetite for battle we mustn’t miss the forest for the tree.

What’s keeping the Taliban fighting, on our side of the border and in Afghanistan, is the presence of the Americans and their Nato allies on the Afghan soil. That’s the prime raison d’etre for the Taliban to fight on and it can’t be denied that there’s support for them on both sides of the Durand Line among the tribes dotting the landscape. There could, otherwise, be no other explanation. That point is also, sadly, being missed by our political parties — all 43 of them assembled at the All Parties Conference convened by Prime Minister Gilani in Islamabad, on May 17, while Mr. Zardari was still on his capitals-hopping safari.

The official communiqué issued at the end of the day-long Islamabad conclave claimed that all the participants endorsed the military action against those challenging the writ of the state. There was a unanimous endorsement by the participants — notwithstanding an effete post-conference claim by Maulana Fazlur Rehman of JUI that there was some dissent — that this ‘existential’ threat to the security and integrity of Pakistan must be eliminated.

That brings the dark memory of 1971 rushing back like a dam-burst. Back then, in March 1971, when Yahya had ordered the guns to roar in East Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, of all the canny politicians of that time, had proudly proclaimed, without mentioning the ‘existential’ threat, that Pakistan had been saved! There weren’t any among his peers disputing his claim. On the contrary, it was the beginning of the end of Pakistan in its eastern wing.

The present lot of politicians may not be as savvy as the one in 1971. But with their remarkable survival instinct shouldn’t they be behaving with more finesse than invested in their forebears? The question our politicos should be asking of themselves and of the ruling elite is what comes at the end of the military action and how is it going to impact the political chessboard given, in particular, the plight of nearly two million internally displaced persons (IDPs)?

Perhaps the military brass didn’t have time to think it through, or wasn’t allowed to because of the paucity of time due to Mr Zardari’s tryst with his mentors in Washington. But the fallout on the affected civilian population is something everybody in the government and among the politicos must be worried about.

The poor management of the disaster is itself a disaster, as can be gleaned from the extensive media coverage of the affected people and the camps where they have been accommodated. Even by our low standards of preparedness to deal with disasters, natural or man-made, this performance is highly flawed. The question that should be agitating every sane politician among our present crop is, will it or will it not play into the hands of the ‘enemy?’ Isn’t there a possibility of these poorly-looked after camps becoming a rich recruiting source for the Taliban? The Taliban have been feeding on swamps of discontent and resentment which are ideal breeding grounds of those swayed by their ideology of hate. Wouldn’t they go for the youths enraged by the short-shrift received by them at these camps?

Our politicians should better prepare to deal with this burden like sensible people and not sleep-walk through this crisis as did their forebears in 1971. Their task, primarily, is to first convince themselves — and later the government — that the option of force may only serve the agenda or agendas of others, not of Pakistan.

Secondly, they should work as the conduits between the government and the Taliban for a dialogue to end the avoidable bloodshed. There are a number of political parties and politicians with their lines to the Taliban still believed to be intact. They should work for the end of fighting and commencement of a dialogue for a durable peace in the region. Giving a blank cheque to the government is the easiest way out of their collective onus and amounts to a woeful abdication of responsibility, something unwarranted under the unleashing storm.

In 1971, the establishment was fanning hope, until the lights went out in Dhaka that the American 7th Fleet was steaming to the Bay of Bengal to come to Pakistan’s assistance. That was a ruse but was clutched on to by the naïve and the gullible in our political class.

There is no such ‘saviour’ syndrome being marketed this time. However, Mr Zardari made an attempt to justify his extended sojourn in US by appearing on a raft of American television channels and taking obvious pride in fighting a war that was, to him, as much ‘his’ as of the Americans. That was just humbug.

Pakistani politicians of different shades and stripes currently lending their support to Islamabad’s military adventure ought to draw a clear and visible line between our agenda and that of Washington’s. The two aren’t the same and there’s absolutely no justification for us to be re-enacting the tragic episode of 1971. Let us, for a change, convince ourselves and the world that we can learn from history and are loath to repeating it. That’s what history expects of us at this crossroads.

The writer is a former ambassador.