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Enough of army-bashing...now let
Enough of army-bashing...now lets look ahead
Ayaz Amir
Friday, June 24, 2011
Never a dull moment in the Islamic Republic. Pakistani politics, always interesting, is now getting positively exciting. But this, instead of leading the regular doom-and-gloom brigade into more depression, should be cause for come cheer. The disorder under the heavens it portrays could be the harbinger of glad tidings.
Pakistans problem is a truly democratic transition. In all our history not one democratic government has been able to complete its term and hand over the torch of responsibility to another popularly-elected government. It just might happen this time if, with all its shortcomings, the present dispensation holds and we safely come up to the next elections. It wont be the magical cure to end power and other shortages, or show us the outline of the promised kingdom of our dreams, but it will be a crucial step in the right direction.
So patience and a little forbearance, and the fervent prayer that we dont wreck the national train in the meantime. Just last year media jihadis, their deadly fervour never to be underestimated, were giving one deadline after another about imminent change at the top. Now, Allah be praised, even the foam around their mouths has dried up, their frustration being a sight to behold.
The heating up of the national atmosphere thus should cause us no great distress. This should be as it is, the battle-lines drawn sharper and national discourse developing along clearer lines. As this heat grows, and it should, the greater the pressure on all political parties to spell out their positions on important issues.
If there is one national problem, the severest of all, it is empty rhetoric. We could do with a bit more of substance in our national conversation. So let us take heart from the present clamour and not be dismayed by it.
One fallacy, however, is easily dismissed. On present evidence, there arent going to be early elections, no one being in a position to force this issue. So it is a bit of a long wait...between now and the end of 2012, which too should be counted a blessing enough time for necessary homework. Any party relying only on the drumbeats of hollow rhetoric may be setting itself up for huge disappointment. So this is perhaps a cue for comrades to get cracking. No time to waste.
But the season of one exercise should now definitely be over...that of army-bashing. Weve had enough of it, in buckets and with spades. There has been some cynical and sadistic pleasure in the exercise, as was bound to happen when a holy sanctum, long immune to any form of criticism or accountability, was caught all of a sudden in the glare of unwelcome and harsh publicity. But all of us having cast our stones, in fact hurled them with all our might, we could now do with some rest to our arms.
After all, this is our army and we dont have the luxury of creating a new one. Even when nations lose wars and suffer catastrophic defeats, they dont destroy their armies but strengthen them anew.
Our national ills are many but they werent all invented by the army. The army did not write the Objectives Resolution. It did not linger over the writing of our first constitution. Our national leadership, right from Jinnah onwards, were predisposed to seeking alliances with the United States. This did not happen because of the army, despite the army too being inclined in the same direction. The cry of Islam in danger, which we have been shouting from the housetops ever since the founding of Pakistan, was not devised by General Headquarters.
Jinnah took no orders from the army and it was Jinnah who said that Urdu should be the national language, causing anger and riots in East Pakistan. One can go on with this list.
Yes, the army is the author of many of our sorrows but not the sole author. Elements of the governing class with a say in determining the course of national elements have been equally responsible. If the armys outlook needs to be reformed and theres no question of this so does the outlook of the rest of us, all of us having made our little contributions to the cesspool of confusion which the Islamic Republic, in all its bewildering manifestations, has become. So the task and agenda of reform are wider than we care to think.
Gen Musharraf wanted it otherwise, but the present army command saw to it that the 2008 elections were free and fair. In all the army-bashing which seems to have become the flavour of the season this should not be forgotten.
The return to professionalism, the eschewing of overt political games (although the same, alas, cannot be said of covert games), and the operations in Swat and South Waziristan are not small achievements. If the army continues to call the shots on important issues it may partly be due to conscious design but to a great extent because of political inadequacy.
No one, after all, will accuse Yousuf Raza Gilani of being a Tayyip Erdogan. With a chief executive like him, with his own sense of priorities and his own brand of humour and let no one say that the prime minister is a man without humour any general, even the most vapid, would be inclined to spread his wings.
So we should keep things in perspective. Pakistans multifarious ills will not be cured in a day. The armys outlook will not change overnight. If we have taken a long time to nurture our distresses, it will take some time to remove the various cobwebs clogging the national mind. That is, if we are at all lucky in this undertaking there being equal chances, if not more, that we will remain beset by the ideological claptrap which has had such an enduring grip on our national thinking.
There may have been bitterness and anger in the statement issued after the last Corps Commanders Conference but didnt it also call upon the people of North Waziristan not to allow foreigners to make their territory a base for operations against Pakistan? This is a departure from the Hamid Gul and Aslam Beg schools of ideological thought, the jihadi theology we should finally be consigning to the trashcan of history. Shouldnt we welcome it? And shouldnt we welcome the fact that the army is doing this on its own instead of under American suggestion or dictation?
The strangest thing of all is that this army command, after all the bowing and scraping of the Musharraf years, is finally standing up to the Americans and trying to work out new rules of engagement with them. And yet this very command is coming under harsh criticism from the very elements whose foremost mantra is national dignity and honour and national sovereignty.
There is no winning this game: being attacked for subservience and then coming under more attack for showing a rare streak of independence. There is no suiting some tastes.
If the army is going after a banned religious outfit like the Hizb-ut-Tehrir what is there to object about it? All of us are entitled to our religious beliefs but there should be no place in the army for an outfit which subscribes, as the Hizb does, to a form of the caliphate.
Soldiers are bound by their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of Pakistan. If they subscribe to something else, they can create their own salvation army or erect some other temple to their beliefs but they should leave the army alone. So it is not a little surprising to find politicians mercifully, not too many cavilling at the arrest of some Hizb-inclined officers.
There is much to set right in the army. But then there is much to set right in the nation. If the army, at long last, is moving in the right direction it deserves our support, instead of becoming an object of reflexive target-shooting...as a mark, I suppose, of some higher kind of patriotism.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
Enough of army-bashing...now lets look ahead
Ayaz Amir
Friday, June 24, 2011
Never a dull moment in the Islamic Republic. Pakistani politics, always interesting, is now getting positively exciting. But this, instead of leading the regular doom-and-gloom brigade into more depression, should be cause for come cheer. The disorder under the heavens it portrays could be the harbinger of glad tidings.
Pakistans problem is a truly democratic transition. In all our history not one democratic government has been able to complete its term and hand over the torch of responsibility to another popularly-elected government. It just might happen this time if, with all its shortcomings, the present dispensation holds and we safely come up to the next elections. It wont be the magical cure to end power and other shortages, or show us the outline of the promised kingdom of our dreams, but it will be a crucial step in the right direction.
So patience and a little forbearance, and the fervent prayer that we dont wreck the national train in the meantime. Just last year media jihadis, their deadly fervour never to be underestimated, were giving one deadline after another about imminent change at the top. Now, Allah be praised, even the foam around their mouths has dried up, their frustration being a sight to behold.
The heating up of the national atmosphere thus should cause us no great distress. This should be as it is, the battle-lines drawn sharper and national discourse developing along clearer lines. As this heat grows, and it should, the greater the pressure on all political parties to spell out their positions on important issues.
If there is one national problem, the severest of all, it is empty rhetoric. We could do with a bit more of substance in our national conversation. So let us take heart from the present clamour and not be dismayed by it.
One fallacy, however, is easily dismissed. On present evidence, there arent going to be early elections, no one being in a position to force this issue. So it is a bit of a long wait...between now and the end of 2012, which too should be counted a blessing enough time for necessary homework. Any party relying only on the drumbeats of hollow rhetoric may be setting itself up for huge disappointment. So this is perhaps a cue for comrades to get cracking. No time to waste.
But the season of one exercise should now definitely be over...that of army-bashing. Weve had enough of it, in buckets and with spades. There has been some cynical and sadistic pleasure in the exercise, as was bound to happen when a holy sanctum, long immune to any form of criticism or accountability, was caught all of a sudden in the glare of unwelcome and harsh publicity. But all of us having cast our stones, in fact hurled them with all our might, we could now do with some rest to our arms.
After all, this is our army and we dont have the luxury of creating a new one. Even when nations lose wars and suffer catastrophic defeats, they dont destroy their armies but strengthen them anew.
Our national ills are many but they werent all invented by the army. The army did not write the Objectives Resolution. It did not linger over the writing of our first constitution. Our national leadership, right from Jinnah onwards, were predisposed to seeking alliances with the United States. This did not happen because of the army, despite the army too being inclined in the same direction. The cry of Islam in danger, which we have been shouting from the housetops ever since the founding of Pakistan, was not devised by General Headquarters.
Jinnah took no orders from the army and it was Jinnah who said that Urdu should be the national language, causing anger and riots in East Pakistan. One can go on with this list.
Yes, the army is the author of many of our sorrows but not the sole author. Elements of the governing class with a say in determining the course of national elements have been equally responsible. If the armys outlook needs to be reformed and theres no question of this so does the outlook of the rest of us, all of us having made our little contributions to the cesspool of confusion which the Islamic Republic, in all its bewildering manifestations, has become. So the task and agenda of reform are wider than we care to think.
Gen Musharraf wanted it otherwise, but the present army command saw to it that the 2008 elections were free and fair. In all the army-bashing which seems to have become the flavour of the season this should not be forgotten.
The return to professionalism, the eschewing of overt political games (although the same, alas, cannot be said of covert games), and the operations in Swat and South Waziristan are not small achievements. If the army continues to call the shots on important issues it may partly be due to conscious design but to a great extent because of political inadequacy.
No one, after all, will accuse Yousuf Raza Gilani of being a Tayyip Erdogan. With a chief executive like him, with his own sense of priorities and his own brand of humour and let no one say that the prime minister is a man without humour any general, even the most vapid, would be inclined to spread his wings.
So we should keep things in perspective. Pakistans multifarious ills will not be cured in a day. The armys outlook will not change overnight. If we have taken a long time to nurture our distresses, it will take some time to remove the various cobwebs clogging the national mind. That is, if we are at all lucky in this undertaking there being equal chances, if not more, that we will remain beset by the ideological claptrap which has had such an enduring grip on our national thinking.
There may have been bitterness and anger in the statement issued after the last Corps Commanders Conference but didnt it also call upon the people of North Waziristan not to allow foreigners to make their territory a base for operations against Pakistan? This is a departure from the Hamid Gul and Aslam Beg schools of ideological thought, the jihadi theology we should finally be consigning to the trashcan of history. Shouldnt we welcome it? And shouldnt we welcome the fact that the army is doing this on its own instead of under American suggestion or dictation?
The strangest thing of all is that this army command, after all the bowing and scraping of the Musharraf years, is finally standing up to the Americans and trying to work out new rules of engagement with them. And yet this very command is coming under harsh criticism from the very elements whose foremost mantra is national dignity and honour and national sovereignty.
There is no winning this game: being attacked for subservience and then coming under more attack for showing a rare streak of independence. There is no suiting some tastes.
If the army is going after a banned religious outfit like the Hizb-ut-Tehrir what is there to object about it? All of us are entitled to our religious beliefs but there should be no place in the army for an outfit which subscribes, as the Hizb does, to a form of the caliphate.
Soldiers are bound by their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of Pakistan. If they subscribe to something else, they can create their own salvation army or erect some other temple to their beliefs but they should leave the army alone. So it is not a little surprising to find politicians mercifully, not too many cavilling at the arrest of some Hizb-inclined officers.
There is much to set right in the army. But then there is much to set right in the nation. If the army, at long last, is moving in the right direction it deserves our support, instead of becoming an object of reflexive target-shooting...as a mark, I suppose, of some higher kind of patriotism.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
long live Pak Army.
