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The army deaths in Fateh Jang caused by a suicide bomber, the deaths in Bajaur, other incidents in Fata – do we need any more reminders of the fact that this is a war we are in, whether the political leadership wants to accept this or not?
Losses such as this would have caused uproar in the United States or Britain. Obviously, we are made of sterner stuff. Apart from the usual crocodile tears, no one in government or even the commentariat seems unduly moved. At the national level we are still refusing to see what this war is about, and what the price of our heedlessness is likely to be.
The Taliban are not fighting for local autonomy. If only we were that lucky. They are fighting for their version of the Islamic state. And they think they are on a roll. Having outlasted and outfought the Soviet and American Empires, will problem-ridden Pakistan hold much fear for them?
A nation at war should be investing in resolve. Consider then our good fortune that our leaders are more interested in investing in a bizarre sense of grandeur. The nation and not just the army at war…that’s what we need. Yet the government has thrown this war into the lap of the army and air force and, to all appearances, behaves as if it is none of its business.
Imagine if Churchill and the Imperial General Staff were thinking on different lines. Why go that far? Imagine if President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka and the military were at odds over how to fight the Tamil Tigers. A fat chance they would have had of defeating them.
In Pakistan under the Sharif government we seem to be writing a new approach to warfare. Is anyone in the PM’s office into map-reading? London in the Blitz was not more unsafe from German bombs than Islamabad and its environs now are from terrorist attacks. Islamabad is open to infiltration from all sides. Yet Islamabad is being torn apart to build a metro-bus line. Ozymandias’ statue, immortalised by Shelley, would be nothing compared to the cement monuments this dispensation would leave behind.
It’s the wrong question the political leadership is asking: war or peace? When a war is imposed upon you, peace is never an option. There can be differences of approach, differences over strategy and tactics. But peace under the shadow of the gun is another name for surrender. What did Plutarch say? “A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He wants to make his entry into your cities unopposed.” The Taliban were never averse to peace on these terms.
So our problem is acute: a military leadership that understands the necessity of resolve but getting no guidance from the high table of politics; a political leadership that received its basic political training at the hands of the ISI – Lt Gen Hamid Gul would surely remember – and therefore unfit by background and temperament to lead a nation at war. Nothing in their 30 years in politics has prepared them for this role.
So army and air force are plunging into this conflict without political direction. And the nation is neither being informed nor mobilised. Where nation and military should be one, governmental ineptitude and lack of imagination are ensuring a split between the two. If this is a way to fight a war it has yet to find space in the relevant textbooks.
An insurgency such as that of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be defeated by military means alone. Helicopter gunships and air force assaults are temporary tactics, not a lasting solution. The Taliban are not just a military threat. They have morphed into being an ideological cancer, with sympathisers and sympathetic madressahs and sleeper cells now spread from one corner of the country to the other. Is the army to keep watch over madressahs? Is it the army’s job to keep an eye on refugee hamlets scattered around every city and town in Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab? South Punjab, by all accounts, is a hotbed of sectarian militancy – and sectarian militancy is the right arm of the Taliban insurgency. Whose job is it to deal with this threat?
There is a sectarian hardcore in Karachi too….along with a Taliban presence. And Karachi is gripped by fear and uncertainty because of Altaf Hussain’s arrest in London. Whose job is it to handle all this? Army and air force are out there at the front, the army taking hits almost every day. But where is the home front? Or is there a home front at all? Seems more like chaos and drift….plus the obligatory flyovers of course.
The phony peace following the Taliban talks is dead, as are the talks too. Sceptics said that the Taliban would use the respite provided by the ceasefire to regroup and reposition. These fears are proving true as fighting and roadside bombings across Fata intensify. The roadside bomb – the improvised explosive device (IED) – was the great weapon and invention of the Iraq war (thank you, America). That and the suicide bomber are turning out to be the prime weapons of our Fata conflict.
While the Americans messed up in a big way in Iraq – when the definitive story of America’s decline as the world’s only superpower comes to be written Iraq will figure in it – they always had the option of getting out. And turning their backs on that botched-up adventure they have exercised that option…leaving Iraqis to kill themselves, which they are doing with great enthusiasm.
Do we have the option of exiting from Fata? We don’t, if only because that would just be the beginning. There would then come the turn of the settled districts of Pakhtunkhwa, then the Indus, and then Punjab beyond. Whether we like it or not, a line has to be drawn in Fata. But who will solve our leadership problem? Who will persuade our present leaders to think beyond the next motorway?
Trouble is they have rebelled against their old tutors in the ISI’s hard school of politics and national ideology. For some time Sheikh-ul-Islam Allama Tahirul Qadri was their spiritual guide and mentor. Now even he is on the other side. And no one has come to replace those old tutors. This perhaps explains why they are having such a hard time squaring up to the new requirements of war and peace…and why we, the luckless nation, are stuck in such a bind.
Tailpiece: Altaf Hussain’s fall, for fall it is, is another Greek tragedy, although in a minor key. It’s the old story, hubris and over-reach, going just that too much too far, and the Fates, inexorable in their retribution, finally catching up. A long innings, one of the longest in Pakistan’s history, power unchallenged over Pakistan’s largest city, one of the country’s smartest communities in thrall to his commands, his signal contribution to the country’s politics being to give that community a voice and the power of unparalleled organization. But then power playing its corrupting influence, and we have the rise and fall of the MQM leader, the drop-scene yet to happen but the plot, gripping while it unfolded, coming to an end. Baaqi naam rahe Allah ka.
Tailpiece Two: And Masood Hasan is gone, and the space taken by his column in this paper nothing will be able to fill. At his best, which was often, he was simply delightful, his way with words unmatched. He used to tell me that he had a something of Chivas waiting for me. We got to other things but for some reason not that. Who knows somewhere in the great beyond, listening to his favourite jazz, we may yet get to open it.
Losses such as this would have caused uproar in the United States or Britain. Obviously, we are made of sterner stuff. Apart from the usual crocodile tears, no one in government or even the commentariat seems unduly moved. At the national level we are still refusing to see what this war is about, and what the price of our heedlessness is likely to be.
The Taliban are not fighting for local autonomy. If only we were that lucky. They are fighting for their version of the Islamic state. And they think they are on a roll. Having outlasted and outfought the Soviet and American Empires, will problem-ridden Pakistan hold much fear for them?
A nation at war should be investing in resolve. Consider then our good fortune that our leaders are more interested in investing in a bizarre sense of grandeur. The nation and not just the army at war…that’s what we need. Yet the government has thrown this war into the lap of the army and air force and, to all appearances, behaves as if it is none of its business.
Imagine if Churchill and the Imperial General Staff were thinking on different lines. Why go that far? Imagine if President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka and the military were at odds over how to fight the Tamil Tigers. A fat chance they would have had of defeating them.
In Pakistan under the Sharif government we seem to be writing a new approach to warfare. Is anyone in the PM’s office into map-reading? London in the Blitz was not more unsafe from German bombs than Islamabad and its environs now are from terrorist attacks. Islamabad is open to infiltration from all sides. Yet Islamabad is being torn apart to build a metro-bus line. Ozymandias’ statue, immortalised by Shelley, would be nothing compared to the cement monuments this dispensation would leave behind.
It’s the wrong question the political leadership is asking: war or peace? When a war is imposed upon you, peace is never an option. There can be differences of approach, differences over strategy and tactics. But peace under the shadow of the gun is another name for surrender. What did Plutarch say? “A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He wants to make his entry into your cities unopposed.” The Taliban were never averse to peace on these terms.
So our problem is acute: a military leadership that understands the necessity of resolve but getting no guidance from the high table of politics; a political leadership that received its basic political training at the hands of the ISI – Lt Gen Hamid Gul would surely remember – and therefore unfit by background and temperament to lead a nation at war. Nothing in their 30 years in politics has prepared them for this role.
So army and air force are plunging into this conflict without political direction. And the nation is neither being informed nor mobilised. Where nation and military should be one, governmental ineptitude and lack of imagination are ensuring a split between the two. If this is a way to fight a war it has yet to find space in the relevant textbooks.
An insurgency such as that of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be defeated by military means alone. Helicopter gunships and air force assaults are temporary tactics, not a lasting solution. The Taliban are not just a military threat. They have morphed into being an ideological cancer, with sympathisers and sympathetic madressahs and sleeper cells now spread from one corner of the country to the other. Is the army to keep watch over madressahs? Is it the army’s job to keep an eye on refugee hamlets scattered around every city and town in Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab? South Punjab, by all accounts, is a hotbed of sectarian militancy – and sectarian militancy is the right arm of the Taliban insurgency. Whose job is it to deal with this threat?
There is a sectarian hardcore in Karachi too….along with a Taliban presence. And Karachi is gripped by fear and uncertainty because of Altaf Hussain’s arrest in London. Whose job is it to handle all this? Army and air force are out there at the front, the army taking hits almost every day. But where is the home front? Or is there a home front at all? Seems more like chaos and drift….plus the obligatory flyovers of course.
The phony peace following the Taliban talks is dead, as are the talks too. Sceptics said that the Taliban would use the respite provided by the ceasefire to regroup and reposition. These fears are proving true as fighting and roadside bombings across Fata intensify. The roadside bomb – the improvised explosive device (IED) – was the great weapon and invention of the Iraq war (thank you, America). That and the suicide bomber are turning out to be the prime weapons of our Fata conflict.
While the Americans messed up in a big way in Iraq – when the definitive story of America’s decline as the world’s only superpower comes to be written Iraq will figure in it – they always had the option of getting out. And turning their backs on that botched-up adventure they have exercised that option…leaving Iraqis to kill themselves, which they are doing with great enthusiasm.
Do we have the option of exiting from Fata? We don’t, if only because that would just be the beginning. There would then come the turn of the settled districts of Pakhtunkhwa, then the Indus, and then Punjab beyond. Whether we like it or not, a line has to be drawn in Fata. But who will solve our leadership problem? Who will persuade our present leaders to think beyond the next motorway?
Trouble is they have rebelled against their old tutors in the ISI’s hard school of politics and national ideology. For some time Sheikh-ul-Islam Allama Tahirul Qadri was their spiritual guide and mentor. Now even he is on the other side. And no one has come to replace those old tutors. This perhaps explains why they are having such a hard time squaring up to the new requirements of war and peace…and why we, the luckless nation, are stuck in such a bind.
Tailpiece: Altaf Hussain’s fall, for fall it is, is another Greek tragedy, although in a minor key. It’s the old story, hubris and over-reach, going just that too much too far, and the Fates, inexorable in their retribution, finally catching up. A long innings, one of the longest in Pakistan’s history, power unchallenged over Pakistan’s largest city, one of the country’s smartest communities in thrall to his commands, his signal contribution to the country’s politics being to give that community a voice and the power of unparalleled organization. But then power playing its corrupting influence, and we have the rise and fall of the MQM leader, the drop-scene yet to happen but the plot, gripping while it unfolded, coming to an end. Baaqi naam rahe Allah ka.
Tailpiece Two: And Masood Hasan is gone, and the space taken by his column in this paper nothing will be able to fill. At his best, which was often, he was simply delightful, his way with words unmatched. He used to tell me that he had a something of Chivas waiting for me. We got to other things but for some reason not that. Who knows somewhere in the great beyond, listening to his favourite jazz, we may yet get to open it.
