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A War Between Pakistan’s Police and Army: Sharif Family’s Latest Reckless Politics
Pakistanis have seen a rapid downfall in Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s powers in less than two weeks.
His dramatic downfall is the result of political blunders in fifteen months in power.
But instead of resolving the political crisis and uniting the country, the embattled prime minister and the Sharif family are spending money on the media and some journalists and politicians to mount one of the most organized, reckless and dangerous attacks on the nation’s armed forces.
The plan is so heinous that it includes turning Pakistanis against their own military through a daily dose of disinformation, and pitching Pakistan’s Police and the Military against each other.
In doing all this, the premier and the Sharifs are playing a political game unheard of and unknown in Pakistani political history.
There is a reason why Nawaz Sharif is described as the most humiliated prime minister in Pakistan’s history, or why one western news wire service described him as the new Deputy Commissioner of Islamabad in terms of his reduced power and influence. [See Nawaz Sharif: The New Karzai of Islamabad]
This is a prime minister who failed to unite Pakistanis after the May 2013 elections. So arrogant was the new prime minister that for nearly a year he would not shake hands with many elected representatives that he disliked. He did not attend a single session of the Senate of Pakistan. He rarely attended Parliament sessions. He failed to rise above old political rivalries that date back a decade, and allowed those hatreds to come in the way of his job to unite Pakistanis. He allowed a simple case of possible election fraud in four constituencies to snowball into a major anti-Nawaz political movement. And while this crisis was developing, Sharif missed numerous opportunities to nip it in the bud. On 17 June, he and his younger brother ordered the police to open fire on unarmed anti-Nawaz Pakistanis in Lahore. Fourteen were killed, nearly a hundred injured. One of the killed was a young pregnant mother. On the night of Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, he turned Islamabad into a war zone and unleashed the most tear-gas shelling in Pakistan’s history on unarmed peaceful protesters who demanded his resignation. Three were killed and nearly 700 were injured. In dealing with this crisis, Sharif created the biggest security scare Pakistanis have seen in peacetime, sealed one of the five provinces that make up the country, and seized all commercial cargo containers to block streets in Punjab and the federal capital, and generally mishandled a normal political event. Not the most innovative solution to a political issue.
On Aug. 29, the prime minister stood on the Parliament floor and lied to the nation about who asked the army to broker a solution to the crisis. [He did.]
In committing all of these blunders, Nawaz Sharif failed to demonstrate wisdom and experience that should have come handy to a third-time elected premier, the first in Pakistan and one of the few in world democracies.
Even now, in 19 days of the anti-Nawaz sit-in in Islamabad, Sharif has failed to act magnanimously to solve what primarily is a political issue, not a security issue.
Instead, his family, party and some journalists and politicians allied to him through incentives, have launched a ferocious anti-military campaign to divert attention from his political failures.
The campaign, in the media, parliament and on social media, seeks to portray Sharif as a victim of a military-induced conspiracy, or ‘script’, where the anti-Nawaz movement is supposedly military’s creation.
The purpose of this campaign is to turn the debate away from his political failures and blame someone else.
The truth, however, is bitter. Since 2008, Pakistan’s military has emerged as the strongest supporter of democracy in the country, and ignored numerous opportunities to intervene in favor of strengthening the government.
Whose ‘script’ was it to fail in uniting the nation after elections, arrogantly refuse to solve a political issue before it snowballs, order the murder of 14 Pakistanis in Lahore, and three in Islamabad and injure a total of 1,000 Pakistanis in both cities?
Now Nawaz Sharif’s cronies in media and politics are creating misunderstandings between the country’s Police and the Military, like Achakzai did in parliament yesterday. There can hardly be a worse example than this of dangerous political recklessness.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif should own up his political blunders, recognize his failures that led to a crisis and led his opponents to come out to streets, stop shifting the blame on to the military.
As his old comrade Javed Hashmi said in the parliament, thirty-one years at the top of politics is a long time. It is time Nawaz Sharif gracefully resigned to spare Pakistan further agony.
Mr. Quraishi is a senior fellow at Project for Pakistan in 21st Century, a journalist and a human rights activist. Follow him @AQpk
A War Between Pakistan’s Police and Army: Sharif Family’s Latest Reckless Politics
