Ayaz Amir - Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Islamabad diary

I have read two outstanding articles this morning (yesterday), the first, in an English newspaper, by Commander (r) Najeeb Anjum and titled ‘Give me back my old Pakistan’; and the second by Haroon-ur-Rashid in the Urdu daily in which he writes, titled ‘Captain’s Future’.

The commander writes: “If Imran wants a revolution, he must ask his supporters to work for an extra hour at their workplaces or better, go to their workplaces on Sundays to mark their protest.” More sensible words would be hard to come by. And he says that enticing people not to pay their taxes is to make both people and government more lax and irresponsible.

Haroon, who wrote about the PTI when no one else did, says, “Beyond anything else, the Tehreek-e-Insaf stands in need of organisation…Talent is honed by training.” The whole should not only be read but memorised by PTI supporters. Imran himself should read it twice over.

Haroon’s column is devoted exclusively to Imran, although to emphasise his argument he mentions Bhutto’s qualities and his grievous shortcomings. The commander mentions Imran in passing. But when they talk of the present both mention no other personality other than him because the sad fact remains that in Pakistan today there is no one else worth mentioning. Imran is no Achilles…let us be clear about this. But the rest of our straw heroes are not even rank-and-file Greeks or Trojans.

Imran began his agitation as a protest against the alleged rigging of the last elections. But as he took to the field what he had begun morphed into something bigger than rigging…a yearning for change. Can he build on that and wait for the next three years, using this time to expand his support and further organise his party? He leads a raw army, high on enthusiasm. Can he turn it into a battle-tested army, high on cohesion and discipline? That’s his challenge.

It is also the nation’s need because what Pakistan faces is a bankruptcy of leadership. If we were not aware of this already, the events of the last two weeks, since the Peshawar tragedy, should make this more than clear. Stalin and Roosevelt did not create as many committees during the Second World War as Nawaz Sharif has created in the last few days. Probably we need just one more committee to find out why we need so many committees.

Gen Raheel Sharif has his task cut out for him. He can either lead this war or he can attend meetings at the Prime Minister’s House. Given the number of times he is seen to be travelling to Islamabad he can’t do both at the same time.

We don’t have to blame Nawaz Sharif. He is doing the best he can. It’s just that his best is not good enough. When your resources of imagination are limited, when this is all the capacity you have, then it should not be considered strange if endless talking becomes a substitute for action. The PM says he will lead this war against terrorism. Hasan Nisar’s comment was apt: “Aap kya, aap kee qiyadat kya”. In Urdu this sounds poetic. In English it sounds a bit harsh: “You and your leadership”.

Butter can only be extracted from milk. You churn water from morning till night, it will remain water. The faces we see sitting around the PM’s war table, are they to be taken seriously? Ahsan Iqbal, my friend Irfan Siddiqui, my friend Asif Kirmani, the inevitable Fawad Hasan Fawad and a few other bemused attendees. This seems to be the best the ruling party has to offer, beginning its homework only now. The Taliban can be forgiven if they want to laugh up their sleeves.

Remember the time when the PM had discovered rape and he would visit rape victims every day, his compassion played out on television every evening? He has now discovered terrorism…and the approach seems to be the same as for the hapless victims of rape: a lot of coming- and-going (aanian-janian) carried out for the benefit of the cameras.

Is an all-parties conference required to deal with purveyors of hate and apostles of sectarianism? Does the elected government have to lean on other pillars of support in order to decide what to do about convicted prisoners? In the two weeks between the Peshawar tragedy and now what have our political bonzes done except debate to death the option of military courts? And they are going about it in such a belaboured manner that already we can hear more voices coming out in criticism of this move.

This is not leadership; this is abdication of leadership, although a strenuous effort is underway to manufacture an impression of decisiveness for the cameras. Is this likely to fool anyone?

Military chiefs are being roped in for this exercise too. There they sit stony-faced listening to the babble of talk around them. The army is supposed to be in command and it is the army’s agenda which is supposedly being followed. But the army is not getting its way for free…it is being made to run a tough obstacle course. The meetings in the PM’s house would test the patience of figures more saintly than our army commanders.

Anyone inclined to think there is a quick fix to any of this should think again. We can all hope and pray for decisive action but hanging a few terrorists, or even making a cult of hanging, will not solve our terrorism problem. The seeds of it are planted too deep in the ground. It will not be resolved in 2015. It will not end with the end of Gen Raheel’s tenure as army chief. We are in it for the long haul. We need the mailed fist. Without it we can’t even start this fight. But the mailed fist is not enough…with it must come the overhauling of Pakistani society, the reformation of the Pakistani mind.

Who will do this? Not Nawaz Sharif, not the PML-N, who/which are not the answer to Pakistan’s problems. It will take some other St George to slay the dragon of religious extremism, the militancy riding on the back of a perverted version of Islam which is the foremost challenge facing this nation. For this we require new resolve and fresh dynamism. History thus beckons…but who will respond to its call?

The maelstrom is not over; we are in the midst of the storm. Look at the situation in Afghanistan. Isaf and Nato have announced the end of their 13-year mission – longer than any of America’s wars – but for security reasons they couldn’t show the closing ceremony on live television. So far from that conflict being over, another phase of that drama is about to begin, even as in Pakistan we finally open our eyes to the demons of whose existence we should have been aware long ago. We are in it together as this problem straddles both sides of the Durand Line.

The civilian leadership gives proof of its competence every day. But the army can’t go it alone, not having the capacity to wage war and carry the weight of government at the same time. A ‘national government’ is no solution because that will only mean another collection of used crockery and cutlery. So we are stuck with what we have, and the PML-N has three more years to go.

This should be no cause for despair. Rather this should be an opportunity for whoever aspires to lead the nation. Let me therefore (for the umpteenth time) fall back on Neruda:

He trained himself like a long lance/He habituated his feet in cascades/He lived in the burrows of the snow/He ambushed the prey of eagles/He burned in infernal gorges/He made himself out of taciturn fibres/He oiled himself like the soul of the olive/He became glass of transparent hardness/He studied to be a hurricane wind/He fought himself until his blood was extinguished/Only then was he worthy of his people.

It is not easy, the education of the chieftain.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com