The following article is as good as can be. Please forgive me if it has already been posted elsewhere.
The lip of insanity
Babar Sattar
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I have been knocking from the inside. (Rumi)
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically and to have normal emotional responses. Delusion and denial are amongst the symptoms that generally work hand in glove. On May 2, 2011, immediately after the US Osama operation in Abbottabad General Aslam Beg, former army chief, declared that, it was a drama and a lie to embarrass Pakistan...there was no Osama there...attack helicopters came from Tarbela base, carrying an Osama look-alike and killed him in cold blood. Admiral Noman Bashir, our naval chief, has asserted that there was no security lapse at PNS Mehran and the navy prevented the terrorists from accomplishing their objectives. General Hamid Gul, former ISI chief, told Channel Four that he was 100 percent sure that the Taliban-claimed attack at the naval base was an American operation.
Embarrassed and angry that Osama bin Laden had been lounging around Pakistan Military Academy Kakul for years and the US had managed to assassinate him and carry his body back in a covert military operation deep inside Pakistan without our security forces finding out, the nation looked forward to the joint parliamentary session called to take cognizance of the fiasco. The unanimous resolution affirmed full confidence in the defence forces of Pakistan in safeguarding Pakistans sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity and in overcoming any challenge to security, and expressed distress on the campaign to malign Pakistan, launched by certain quarters in other countries, without appreciating Pakistans immense sacrifices in combating terror and the fact that more than 30,000 Pakistani innocent men, women and children and more than five thousand security forces personnel had lost their lives.
But there was not a word about Osamas shocking presence in Pakistan or the urgent need for a counterterrorism strategy to protect citizens and frontline law enforcement personnel who have been reduced to cannon fodder. The Defence Committee of the Cabinet that finally met on Wednesday to discuss the PNS Mehran disaster reportedly mandated, security, defence and law-enforcement agencies to use all means necessary to eliminate terrorists, and also expressed full confidence in the ability and the capacity of the armed forces and law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in meeting all threats to national security. So have security and law-enforcement agencies been holding their punches so far? Now that they have the DCCs blessing they will start taking terrorists seriously and it will be hunky-dory? If a country loses 35,000 precious lives, how can it repose confidence in a national security apparatus that was responsible for protecting them? Are Pakistani lives so expendable that we keep losing them in droves and no one is to account for them?
Blame and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Given that we live in the land of denial, no one is willing to accept fault and thus calls for accountability are seen as unhealthy finger pointing. But admission of mistakes and attribution of responsibility is a prerequisite to taking corrective measures. If there have been no intelligence and security lapses and the security apparatus is both able and performing, what explains the ability of terrorists to attack our citizens and security providers with impunity? Is it all a US-Zino-Hindu conspiracy to bring us to our knees and steal our nuclear weapons and natural resources? But have we not been on our knees for a while, dependent on foreign handouts even to finance and equip our security providers? And let us assume it is a conspiracy. Shall we just wail till the world order relents and the conspiracy goes away? The more important question is what we are going to do about it? How are we going to develop all instruments of state power to defeat this conspiracy and help Pakistan emerge as a secure, stable and responsible state?
We seem to have relied on blind faith and conspiracies for too long. It is time to add facts and reason to the mix. We need to transform the unanimous parliamentary resolution of October 22, 2008 that resolved not to allow Pakistani soil to be used for terror attacks inside or outside Pakistan into state policy. Defence analysts of the know-it-all khaki variety tell us that all states covertly support rogues in foreign lands to pursue national interest. The little detail they miss out is that probably no other state in the world has been reckless enough to transform its own citizens into non-state rogue elements as a matter of policy, and nurture, protect and finance them as strategic assets. That conniving foreign states have harnessed the disgruntled band amongst our own jihadis to attack the Pakistani state and citizens is the conspiracy. They do so to create chaos and engender circumstances wherein stealing our nuclear weapons programme would become justifiable.
The instrument being used to further this goal is our own misguided jihadis. So then for once do the conspiracy theorists and realists not agree that our jihadi assets have turned into a liability and must be liquidated? We have already lost over 35,000 Pakistani lives to terror. Even if there is immediate change in policy, our jihadi terrorists will have claimed many more of us before the madness ends. The manifestation of this policy will not be staunch military operation in Waziristan, but cession of recruiting camps in the outskirts of Lahore and Bahawalpur. Let us understand that there is no room for equivocation here. Irrespective of how the imperial powers tricked us into assembling the jihadi project in our backyard, its prime victim is now the ordinary citizen and the sentry. If the state and the security agencies continue a double game, they are only playing it with the lives of Pakistanis.
Once we rethink and review our domestic security policy and identify the weak links in our security and intelligence apparatus, we will need to build institutional structures to give effect to the revised policy and plug holes in our approach to security. The parliamentarians cannot limit their role to passing truistic resolutions and be done with their jobs. They will need to act as legislators and pass laws to create structures that ensure accountability and oversight in the realm of national security. We need a strong counterterrorism agency, independent of the interior division or the military, responsible for coordinating and enforcing our homeland security policy.
We need to provide statutory mandate for the ISIs role that provides for internal accountability to check incompetence and abuse of authority and external policy guidance and supervision, apart from enabling intelligence to be used to prosecute and convict terrorists through our court system. We need a law that details how the military is to act in aid of civil power when called upon to do so in order to integrate its internal security function into our criminal justice system. We need to amend our Anti-Terrorism Act to give it teeth and create automatic penal consequences for proscribed organisations. We need to exclude ouster clauses from the Army, Air Force and Navy Acts that shield actions and decisions of military commanders from judicial scrutiny.
None of this is rocket science. But who will assume responsibility for our moribund national security complex: our incompetent civilian leadership or our blinkered military high command? Who will purge the armed forces of jihadi sympathisers? Will those presiding over a blundering security policy suddenly have an epiphany? Can you teach an old dog new tricks?
Email:
sattar@post.harvard.edu
The lip of insanity
