Date: Friday, November 25th, 2016.
A growing anxiety
The situation along the Line of Control and the Working Boundary with India is degrading almost by the hour. The default position of managed instability expanded beyond its ill-defined envelope with the targeting of a civilian bus killing ten, and then the targeting of the first-responder ambulance that had arrived to treat and evacuate the casualties. By convention ambulances and other battlefield medical services and operatives are not targets, a convention that India appears to have placed to one side. The Kashmir dispute is being taken as a licence to kill indiscriminately by India, and civilians and civilian support infrastructure are no longer ‘off limits’.
It is no exaggeration to say that the current level of hostilities is the most dangerous escalation since the 2003 ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan. Since 2003 there have been innumerable violations of the ceasefire, many of them relatively minor in purely military terms but in recent weeks both the frequency and severity of the violations have racked up. The numbers of dead on both sides, civil and military, is rising and perhaps the most concerning aspect is that there is no operant handbrake. There is no agency or process or set of protocols that appear able or indeed willing to stop or at least bring a pause to what is now dangerously close to outright warfare.
The mantra is always ‘ …but neither side wants nor can afford a war’. Any war would be disastrous for both sides and not only at the combatant level but in terms of their international relations — and here we encounter the silence of the international community. It is possible that India is seeking to provoke Pakistan into an overreaction, a misstep militarily and there does not appear to be any voice outside the two adversaries that is audible or of sufficient heft to bring matters to a halt or at least an agreement to press the ‘pause’ button.
The international community, or at least those parts of it that might have an interest in the Indo-Pak disputes, is paralysed in the oncoming headlights of the impending Trump Presidency. Whatever the brutalities being perpetrated in Indian-held Kashmir they are rendered invisible or at the least irrelevant in a world preoccupied with what may in the end amount to a reshaping of the global political order. No state is about to launch a diplomatic lifeboat in the direction of India and Pakistan. Both are more exposed than they have been in decades and both are heavily reliant on the competences or otherwise of their statesmen, politicians and bureaucrats.
Now is the time when our diplomatic muscle requires flexing because matters cannot be allowed to drift any longer. The meeting between the Prime Minister and concerned parties on Thursday 24th was little more than due process, and took nothing forwards. It is not enough to maintain the status quo because events are moving faster than is the political ability to react.
Now is the time for the civil and military leadership to be both ringing the alarm bells as well as working the backchannels internationally in those capitals that need their focus shifting in this direction. India needs to have demonstrated for it in the clearest possible terms that enough is enough — and Pakistan needs to attend to its Foreign Ministry, and specifically the prolonged and corrosive absence of a formally appointed Foreign Minister that has the muscle and competencies as well as the profile to make them heard and understood on the world stage.
The current crisis demands some urgent out-of-the-box thinking which may not be comfortable politically — but the crisis is owned by all of us and not just those in elected seats of power. There is the expectation that the military will deliver as it always has but this needs more than artillery — it requires statesmanship if it is to be fixed and a political pragmatism that rarely makes it out of the box.
Fatter cats
Politicians the world over that are elected to paid positions have their incomes regularly scrutinised and so it is in Pakistan. Most recently a meeting of the cabinet presided over by the Prime Minister gave scrutiny to the salaries of federal lawmakers, raised their eyebrows, and promptly increased them by in most instances over 100 per cent. Eyebrows have likewise been raised outside the rarefied halls of governance and questions posed as to the timing of this decision coming as it does amid a range of challenges and threats that beset the government on all sides.
To be scrupulously fair to the elected members their salaries had, as they are ever-quick to point out, fallen behind market values. The basic pay (unfattened by numerous allowances and credits) of MNAs and Senators was Rs44,630 which we admit is on the low side. It is now bumped up to a very healthy Rs150,000 and that of a federal minister from Rs114,892 to Rs200,000 — which seems to us to be fair remuneration when all the bells and whistles are factored in.
To be equally scrupulously fair the political classes of Pakistan rarely enter their vocation from a position of poverty, indeed many of them are among the richest in the land never mind what their annual statements of wealth (or relative poverty) to the Election Commission of Pakistan may say. One might be forgiven for wondering if the expressions of fiscal pain attached to the discharge of their public duties might be more than a little feigned.
There is of course not a shred of evidence to support the scurrilous assertions being bruited about in certain quarters that the government was seeking to curry favour with the elected worthies, and moreover doing so at what amounts to bargain basement prices when one aggregates the cost of the annual increases — considerably less than, say, building a new hospital anywhere in Balochistan. But no matter, the issue is said to have been pending for a decade and is for now resolved doubtless to the satisfaction of all concerned. Would that the same expediency could have been brought to bear on other pressing matters.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 25th, 2016.