As I sit down to write this article, I am sad and deeply troubled for four reasons. I am sad that I had to lose a friend, Saleem Shahzad; I am sad that I had to write an open letter to Lt-Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director-General-ISI; I am sad that letter got such a massive response; and I am sad that far from understanding what I wrote and why, the sleuths decided to respond by leaving pitiable comments through fake names, expressing the same putrid thinking that has brought us to this pass.
The thrust of the letter was simple. I tried to inform the DG-ISI that people were pointing fingers at the ISI and that the agency he heads is deeply distrusted by a very large number of people. Both of these are facts and not a figment of anyone’s imagination. Nor is this an external conspiracy. This distrust is grounded in how the agency has evolved over the years and how it has become unaccountable.
Allied with this was my contention that I consider this disconnect the biggest evolving threat to the state, the entity that has always been my unit of analysis. But because this entity as an organising principle can be easily problematised, being more imagined than real or biological, its cohesion and acceptability are a function of its legitimacy. That legitimacy comes when people accept the state as working on their behalf and when the core aspects of the identity of a state are accepted and internalised by the people to the point and where any external challenges to those core aspects are simply not entertained.
Anything short of this and the state begins to lose its legitimacy. A loss of legitimacy is, in many ways, the gravest threat that a state can face. Pakistan today faces this threat at a very high level. This is because the state first empowered various right-wing elements to fight its covert wars, and then lost control of those elements after staging a U-turn under external pressure. One consequence of this lack of control is that those radicalised elements have since run amok and created a bloodbath within Pakistan. The left-liberal enclave, on the retreat for a long time, has always been alienated from the state which it correctly considers to be heavily biased in favour of the military.
The result of all this is the near-absence of a centre and very deep internal fault-lines that, over the years, have only further deepened. It is woefully inadequate to say that all these fault-lines are produced by conspiracies against Pakistan. And it is downright dishonest to say that anyone pointing out these fault-lines is working for the enemies of Pakistan.
States have faced greater military challenges than the one facing Pakistan today. But those that come out victorious are not fractured nations whose homes lie divided. We are. And no amount of propaganda, dissembling and petty lying can negate that fact. It is these divisions which our external enemies are exploiting. Identifying these divisions therefore does not make one an enemy of Pakistan; in fact it is those ignoring or hiding our divisions who are betraying this country. Let there be no doubt about this.
Any writer would be happy to get a huge response to what he or she writes. Why then did the response to my letter make me sad? Simple. It proves the contention contained in the letter that we now have a disconnect between the military and the civilians, which disconnect is our biggest internal threat. And how does one address it? By being an ostrich? Pretending it doesn’t exist? That all is well? Quite the contrary.
Those Pakistanis who are distrustful of the state, the military, the intelligence agencies – not to mention politicians and political parties – are not enemies of this country. For the most part these are decent people, with families and jobs who would like nothing more than to see their country prosper. They would like nothing more than to hold a green passport with honour and dignity. They are all patriots, and given what they want, probably more patriotic than those contemptible sods who choose to fudge issues and malign others.
Finally, the ghost-written responses to my letter make me despair because they show so clearly what is wrong with us; they also prove, if proof were still required, that our only strategy when in a hole is to dig further. If it were just about myself, I would have written a satirical column, lampooning these ghosts who live in a phantom world. But this is about a state which is my only abode, my only identity, regardless of where I might be. It is home.
Let me reiterate. No matter what these apologists of the old and defeated paradigm might say, Pakistan has to reinvent itself; it has to woo its people and give them a sense of belonging – regardless of caste, creed, colour, ethnicity, religion and religious denominations. The day this happens, the external world will have nothing to exploit. No external intelligence agency will be able to hire its people to advance its agenda and this country will interest the world rather than worrying it. There will be no disconnect between the military and the people. No one will have to write an open letter; no one will read such a letter. No one will be sad.
In Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Life of Galileo, Andrea Sarti, Galileo’s student, is frustrated by his inability to stand up to the Inquisition and says: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Hearing this, Galileo replies: “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.
The thrust of the letter was simple. I tried to inform the DG-ISI that people were pointing fingers at the ISI and that the agency he heads is deeply distrusted by a very large number of people. Both of these are facts and not a figment of anyone’s imagination. Nor is this an external conspiracy. This distrust is grounded in how the agency has evolved over the years and how it has become unaccountable.
Allied with this was my contention that I consider this disconnect the biggest evolving threat to the state, the entity that has always been my unit of analysis. But because this entity as an organising principle can be easily problematised, being more imagined than real or biological, its cohesion and acceptability are a function of its legitimacy. That legitimacy comes when people accept the state as working on their behalf and when the core aspects of the identity of a state are accepted and internalised by the people to the point and where any external challenges to those core aspects are simply not entertained.
Anything short of this and the state begins to lose its legitimacy. A loss of legitimacy is, in many ways, the gravest threat that a state can face. Pakistan today faces this threat at a very high level. This is because the state first empowered various right-wing elements to fight its covert wars, and then lost control of those elements after staging a U-turn under external pressure. One consequence of this lack of control is that those radicalised elements have since run amok and created a bloodbath within Pakistan. The left-liberal enclave, on the retreat for a long time, has always been alienated from the state which it correctly considers to be heavily biased in favour of the military.
The result of all this is the near-absence of a centre and very deep internal fault-lines that, over the years, have only further deepened. It is woefully inadequate to say that all these fault-lines are produced by conspiracies against Pakistan. And it is downright dishonest to say that anyone pointing out these fault-lines is working for the enemies of Pakistan.
States have faced greater military challenges than the one facing Pakistan today. But those that come out victorious are not fractured nations whose homes lie divided. We are. And no amount of propaganda, dissembling and petty lying can negate that fact. It is these divisions which our external enemies are exploiting. Identifying these divisions therefore does not make one an enemy of Pakistan; in fact it is those ignoring or hiding our divisions who are betraying this country. Let there be no doubt about this.
Any writer would be happy to get a huge response to what he or she writes. Why then did the response to my letter make me sad? Simple. It proves the contention contained in the letter that we now have a disconnect between the military and the civilians, which disconnect is our biggest internal threat. And how does one address it? By being an ostrich? Pretending it doesn’t exist? That all is well? Quite the contrary.
Those Pakistanis who are distrustful of the state, the military, the intelligence agencies – not to mention politicians and political parties – are not enemies of this country. For the most part these are decent people, with families and jobs who would like nothing more than to see their country prosper. They would like nothing more than to hold a green passport with honour and dignity. They are all patriots, and given what they want, probably more patriotic than those contemptible sods who choose to fudge issues and malign others.
Finally, the ghost-written responses to my letter make me despair because they show so clearly what is wrong with us; they also prove, if proof were still required, that our only strategy when in a hole is to dig further. If it were just about myself, I would have written a satirical column, lampooning these ghosts who live in a phantom world. But this is about a state which is my only abode, my only identity, regardless of where I might be. It is home.
Let me reiterate. No matter what these apologists of the old and defeated paradigm might say, Pakistan has to reinvent itself; it has to woo its people and give them a sense of belonging – regardless of caste, creed, colour, ethnicity, religion and religious denominations. The day this happens, the external world will have nothing to exploit. No external intelligence agency will be able to hire its people to advance its agenda and this country will interest the world rather than worrying it. There will be no disconnect between the military and the people. No one will have to write an open letter; no one will read such a letter. No one will be sad.
In Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Life of Galileo, Andrea Sarti, Galileo’s student, is frustrated by his inability to stand up to the Inquisition and says: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Hearing this, Galileo replies: “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment