Remedy begins at home
By Shamshad Ahmad

During his nine-year rule, Gen (r) Musharraf almost found a place for himself in the Guinness Book of World Records as a Marco Polo head of state. Had he not for self-serving reasons made Pakistan the ‘ground zero’ of the US-led war on terror and hotbed of religious extremism, violence and terrorism, he might have managed to go around the world in eighty days with an average of two countries per day. Never mind, he still is the most travelled former head of state in the world.

The only one who surpassed General Musharraf in terms of the number of foreign visits was his own ‘short cut’ of a ‘tenure track’ prime minister whom he imported from New York. He visited in his three-year tenure more than one hundred countries in the ‘public interest’ to project a better image of Pakistan. After him, his ‘dummy’ successors could not keep apace because President Zardari himself was fond of travelling. The Marco Polo culture continued. After the elections this year, one thought things would change.

Inheriting a legacy of ‘blood and fire’, the PML-N government was expected to realise that our problems are all at home. Their solutions too are at home, not in Riyadh, Dubai, Beijing, London, Washington or New York. After taking his oath, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, at least for the crucial early months, should have stayed home leading his government’s efforts upfront in addressing the people’s grievances and sufferings. His country is no longer the same that he ruled twice in the 1990s. The governance challenges in today’s Pakistan are of an exceptional nature warranting a whole new approach.

It is the only state with an ongoing military operation, rightly or wrongly, against its own people in the name of the 'global' war on terror. The state that Nawaz Sharif was elected to rescue from its ongoing morass is almost crumbling with little writ or authority of its own left anywhere. This gruesome reality is manifesting itself in recurring tragedies in the form of suicide attacks and bomb blasts, sparing not even mosques, churches and funeral grounds and killing thousands of innocent people. The Peshawar carnage took place within hours after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took off for New York to attend the UN General Assembly’s 68th annual session.

Notably, the two previous major incidents also preceded or coincided with his visits to Beijing and then Turkey. Obviously, the attacks and their timings were not without a message. In that hour of grief, the best gesture Nawaz Sharif could have made to his people was to call off his New York visit and return home; especially because for unavoidable reasons, his meeting with President Obama was not going to take place in his current itinerary. He will now be returning to the US for his Washington visit later this month. That will be his fifth foreign visit in four months.

With a perilous security situation at home, one could have easily skipped this year’s General Assembly session, a ritualistic annual event that attracts only those lordly heads of state and government who have no problems in their countries and are looking for a ‘rest and recreation’ break from their routine life back home. As a popularly-elected leader, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif certainly does not belong to that leisured class of rulers. His mandate this time was in fact an SOS from his people to him and to his party to come and rescue them from their agonising hellfire left behind by his predecessors.

A fifteen-minute speech at the UN General Assembly, in which he spoke almost on all issues of global importance, had no relevance to the gravity and complexity of the current challenges confronting his government. What he said on Kashmir, Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria, UN reform or even on our relations with India was just routine reiteration of our known position on these issues. Drone ‘attacks’ was the only new issue raised in his statement with some direct bearing on the current situation in his country. But such proforma references in GA speeches are of no practical consequentiality.

Given our country’s dreary scenario, the only thing the world must have been anxious to know is whether we have a clearer road map on how to deal with the unrelenting threat of terrorism in our country. India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was blunt enough to call Pakistan an ‘epicentre’ of terrorism. He may have done this to score a point in response to our prime minister’s reference to Kashmir but he was not quite off the mark. We just need to look at ourselves to accept the sordid reality. Today, no other country on earth is considered a more dangerous place than Pakistan which also has the dubious distinction of being the most violent and unsafe country in the world.

The foremost challenge for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, therefore, is to free the country of these ignominies. Our rulers have traditionally been knocking on the wrong doors for remedies to the state’s ailments. The remedies lie at home, nowhere else. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif must distinguish himself from his predecessors by rethinking his priorities and changing the patterns of governance. A country remains vulnerable externally as long as it is weak domestically. Pakistan needs to be politically stable and economically strong so that it can be self-reliant and immune to external constraints and exploitation.

And domestic consolidation of a state as well as the wellbeing of its people is in the hands of those who rule them, not the UN or any other country. No doubt, Nawaz Sharif’s biggest handicap in interacting with his interlocutors in New York was the image that his country now carries being high on the global radar screen for all the wrong reasons. His meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also suffered on account of this ‘stigma’ and could not go beyond a shaky handshake. According to India’s External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “had given PM Nawaz Sharif a chance to ‘walk the talk’” on stopping ceasefire violations and terror activities against India.

This should have opened Nawaz Sharif’s eyes to India’s devious game plan to keep Pakistan under relentless pressure by blaming it for everything that goes wrong on its own side of the border or across the Line of Control in disputed Kashmir. In a calibrated diversionary campaign, India is only seeking to redefine the real Pakistan-India issues by obfuscating them into the ‘issue of terrorism’ and sporadic incidents of violence across the Line of Control. In its reckoning, the time is ripe for it to pressure Pakistan to an extent where it can surrender on the Kashmir cause.

This has been a familiar pattern in India’s arrogance towards Pakistan since 9/11 which in recent years has been amply visible in every meeting that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had with his Pakistani counterparts. He has been telling them that there will be no dialogue until “Pakistan clearly deals with the issue of terrorism”. Indeed, weakness begets indignity. It is time we restored our dignity by putting our own house in order. Terrorism will neither flourish nor survive in a genuinely democratic, moderate, educated and prosperous Pakistan.

The writer is a former foreign secretary. Email: shamshad1941@yahoo.com