In the thickness of fog

Mosharraf Zaidi

By the time Pakistanis fell asleep on Sunday night, having been serenaded by the hysteria emanating from the MQM’s departure from the national government, a dense fog was busy enveloping itself right around Islamabad. Mother Nature moves in mysterious ways, and by Monday morning, the fog was so thick that low visibility was making a mystery of anything that was more than ten feet away. Rarely does nature reflect the state of a nation as accurately as Pakistan’s. The fog affecting national perspective doesn’t just affect short-term visibility, it limits the canvas of possibilities for 180 million people. There may be plenty of mystery about what will happen next in the National Assembly, but there is absolutely none about what is happening to the larger picture in Pakistan. Slowly but surely, the accumulated sins of politicians in Pakistan are helping speed up the cleansing the Pakistani military.

The hysteria surrounding the MQM’s exit from the Treasury benches is not entirely unjustified. The PPP now sits over a very fragile parliamentary minority. It is only natural for national attention to be fixated on the next steps that the MQM, the PML-N), the PML-Q and the PPP itself will take. What feels unnatural is how we got here.

On March 15, 2009 the Pakistani military arguably suffered the worst humiliation in its history. The movement for the restoration of the judiciary, despite all its shortcomings, successfully forced the Pakistani military to surrender to the threat of a wave of people marching off the GT Road and straight into Islamabad. The lawyers’ movement, contrary to many critics’ claims, was never about the judicial excellence represented by the chief justice and his colleagues. It was about institutional conflict. In all previous episodes, the Pakistani military had always dominated the Pakistani judiciary. Chief Justice Chaudhry Iftikhar decided that this winning streak was going to end, and the Pakistani people, led by the lawyers, endorsed him.

For the military, the restoration of the judiciary was a watershed moment because it represented an acceptance of another institution’s claim to “being right”. More importantly, it represented the military’s acceptance that the Pakistani people saw the judiciary as being right, and saw the military as having been wrong. Being wrong is one thing, but being seen to be wrong is entirely another. Since the military has spent so much time in charge of Pakistan, being seen to be wrong is unacceptable to it. The one thing the military cannot afford is the impression that it is anti-people.

This is why as terrorist gains in FATA and Swat were accumulating between 2002 and 2007, military officials were asked to stop appearing in public in uniform. It is why Gen Kayani ordered the recall of officers deployed to run civilian organisations. It is why Gen Musharraf tried everything in his power to paint the chief justice as a megalomaniac, and an unscrupulous judge. None of it really came off. The military had taken too much time in power, and delivered too little. By the time Musharraf was preparing his August 2007 resignation speech, he had failed the entire spectrum of challenges articulated in his once-famed seven point agenda.

So on the night of March 15, 2009, when the phone calls were coming in fast and furious, expressing trepidation about more than a million angry Pakistanis converging in front of parliament in Islamabad, the re-instatement of the chief justice represented, on the part of a quiet, but deeply invested Gen Kayani, an admission of his institution having been wrong.

The rehabilitation and cleansing of the military’s image in Pakistan since March 15, 2009 has been one of the most powerful lessons in managing change we’ll see in our lives. Within three months of the restoration, and that low point for the military’s image in Pakistan, television channels and op-ed writers (including yours truly) were blowing the war trumpets for military action in Swat. That necessary operation and the building of national consensus around Operation Rah-e-Rast was a massive shot in the arm for the military, which was once again demonstrating its rightful role as the defender of Pakistani soil, from enemies-even if they are internal.

As that operation came to a close and the summer of 2009 turned into the autumn of 2009, the US Congress finally approved the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill that appropriated $1.5 billion per annum for at least five years to Pakistan. Though the bill had little relationship to military aid, it did contain a vision of the conditions that the US seeks in Pakistan, particularly the sustenance of democracy.

All of a sudden, a whirlwind campaign emerged nationally, decrying the attack on national sovereignty that the Kerry Lugar Bill represented. The tipping point for that campaign was direct statements from the GHQ high-ups asserting national autonomy. Pakistanis were incessantly reminded about how the only ones to stand up for Pakistan always seem to be military officers.

Both the public diplomacy supporting Rah-e-Rast and the Kerry Lugar brouhaha were employed so successfully that in the last year, the military leadership has had no trouble at all manipulating the civilian government in a manner that it feels suits the national interest of Pakistan.

On March 16, 2010, prior to the spring session of the US-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, and exactly a year after the restoration of the chief justice, Gen Kayani chaired a meeting of federal secretaries, something that makes no administrative, political, or structural sense whatsoever. On July 22, 2010 he was given an unprecedented extension as army chief till 2013. Throughout 2010, while the military maintains a dignified silence, there seems to be surges of undignified anti-American outrage in the Pakistan that is completely incongruent to the military’s own proximity to, need for and appreciation of US power and US interests in the region.

All of this should be vitally important in making sense of the fog that surrounds politics in Pakistan. But it should be important for the right reasons. No country should have a national discourse that is constantly bad mouthing its military and intelligence agencies. Yet the constant efforts of the military, both deliberate and unintentional, to dominate the Pakistani narrative are, quite plainly, dangerous.

Democracies have power struggles, hung parliaments, fractured politics and votes of no-confidence all the time. Luckily, Gen Kayani’s sense of security and his method means that few people are talking about an outright takeover of power. This is all the more reason for Pakistanis to proceed with caution.

While frolicking in an orgy of condemnations of the incompetence of elected politicians, from the “corrupt” PPP, to the “thuggish” MQM, to the “sinister” PML-N, we might consider biting our lips, once in a while. The choice to reject these adjective-laden parties is a sovereign right of the people of Pakistan. It must be exercised by the Pakistani people. Spoon-fed governance from soldiers is a baby formula that we’ve consumed before. It has always produced indigestion.