Dawn: Lying liars and the lies they tell By Cyril Almeida

By: Cyril Almeida

If the US is the 800-pound gorilla that stamps on itself, Pakistan is like a python which thinks it’s crushing its prey but is really asphyxiating itself.

For a couple of days after Mullen’s Haqqanis-are-a-veritable-arm-of-the-ISI allegation last week, it looked like the Americans had finally achieved the improbable: synchronising their tough talk against Pakistan.

In the wake of the Kabul embassy attack, it even made sense why the improbable had materialised: a psychological red line had been crossed by the Afghan militants and the US needed to snarl and snap until the war settled back into a low-level attritional framework.

But the improbable — getting a diverse American foreign and military policy cohort to speak as one, especially when it comes to Pakistan — is actually more like the impossible. Within days, the ‘full-court press’ has started to look like the bench press of a 99-pound weakling.

Mullen didn’t really mean what he said, the Americans began to suggest, the evidence is more like intelligence, it doesn’t really go that far. Yes, the mood is very emotional in DC and in Pakistan, but there’s still work to be done so let’s focus on that, they’ve been saying.

It’s not quite kiss-and-make-up, more an awkward one-armed hug.

The relationship will continue, intelligence cooperation over the capture of yet another Al Qaeda No 3 will be interspersed with spasmodic events like WikiLeaks, Raymond Davis, the OBL raid and the Mullen allegations.

Pressure will mount, pressure will subside, there’ll be paroxysms at times of unhappiness, circumspection at times of measured success and the ungainly and clumsy contraption that is the American policymaking apparatus will continue to make life for itself even more difficult when it comes to Pakistan.

As for the Pakistani side, expect more of the same, i.e. the same

The edge of reason: HM

By Hajra Mumtaz

THE way the Pakistani hive mind works can often leave you with the feeling that either you yourself are mad, or everybody else is.

Consider the word that has recently been doing the rounds: that the army must somehow, constitutionally and without initiating a coup, save the country. Are we crazy? True, there are a formidable number of challenges facing us — not that that is anything new.

From an unwieldy and seemingly escalating war with the obscurantists variously labelled as ‘terrorists’, ‘militants’ and ‘insurgents’ to a tanking economy, power shortages and the crisis of the flood-affected and the internally displaced, Pakistan is facing a host of issues of the sort that would deflate the optimist wearing even the rosiest of rose-tinted spectacles.

But what is the army, with its boots and guns and with its hands full, meant to do about this? Ask someone making this suggestion and they tend to do the metaphorical equivalent of shuffling their feet in embarrassment, grumbling about extraordinary times dictating extraordinary measures and how “somebody has to do something”. Such murmurings recently came to a head in certain sections of the media but they’re nothing new, really.

Since this phase of Pakistan’s flirtation with democracy began, sections of a shadowy ‘civil society’ have been mumbling about Pakistan being unfit for civilian rule — i.e. this country’s people need the stick, not the carrot — and about the ruling parties being unfit to rule. This is the same ‘civil society’, incidentally, that historically has refused to vote or participate much in politics and, most ironically, heaved itself out of its armchair only to boo the most recent of Pakistan’s civic-minded military rulers.

The basic trouble with a number of Pakistanis is that their memories are too

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short. Disconnected from the past, having learnt few lessons and even fewer truths, we float in an endless present, severed from history or context and therefore living in a present shorn of meaning.

We treat every crisis as a stand-alone affront, refusing to look at its roots and flailing ineffectively instead at its fruit, and then being flummoxed by the fact that a new shoot has sprung up elsewhere. As a society, generally, we try to understand the present through lots of single-frame ‘nows’, and become frustrated when the meaning that looking at the whole reel would produce is not forthcoming.

It seems that four crippling bouts of military takeovers have not been enough to make it clear to us, once and for all, that the tin hats’ exit leaves us worse off, and with even more systemic issues than we had before. Forget history, even the memory of events in our own lifetimes, just a few years ago, tends to evaporate from our minds.

Take the power crisis that is the first thing on everybody’s minds these days. If I had a rupee for each time I’ve heard someone, from drawing-room activists to people in shops and on the streets or being interviewed on television, say that we had electricity during the Musharraf years — well, I’d be quite rich by now, even while factoring in inflation. The implication is that Musharraf gave us electricity, the present government took it away.

Yes, there was far less loadshedding then. But did the present government start its time in office by shutting down power plants and thereby creating the crisis?

Rationally, we have no electricity now because for nearly a decade, nobody did much to cater to the future needs of a growing population, expanding industry and increasing urbanisation. There was little investment in the power-generation infrastructure and next to no planning. The result, which anybody could have guessed, is that now there is simply not enough to go around.

While bemoaning their fate today, how many people bother to remember that back in the 1990s, Pakistan had a surfeit of electricity and there was talk of selling it to India?

Pakistan’s tragedy is, and always has been, the tendency to reset to a baseline mode of existence which involves perpetually taking two steps back for each one forward, and that too with a unique variety of muddled thinking in which anything that is not a quick-fix solution is not worth considering.

That explains why there is such a widespread tendency to view democracy as some sort of magic wand which, if waved even once, will without further ado solve all our problems. And that, in turn, is the reason that a lot of people are especially critical of this government and the mess that it is overseeing.

Democracy has failed us, goes the line of thinking, because, see, we have it and yet our problems are only multiplying.

Obviously, democracy doesn’t work. Bring on the tin hats.

But democracy is not a goal in and of itself, obviously, and neither is it the sacred cow that many people view it as. It is incredible that one has to explain the fact that it is a process, but one does. Democracy allows you to vote in the people of your choice, and if the choice is only between the devil and the deep blue sea, then so be it.

They can carry on doing the damage that they do and in five years’ time, we’ll be wiser and can refuse to vote for them.

Dictatorships, on the other hand, you’re stuck with. Demand of any general in the presidency, ‘You and whose army?’, and all

he has to do is point out of the window.

Many of us Pakistanis, with our short memories and desire for instant solutions, do not see this. And because we fail to learn from history, we live in an endless cycle of making the same mistakes over and over again.

Source: Dawn Aug 1, 2011 http://www.dawn.com/2011/08/01/the-edge-of-reason.html

Pakistan, 50 years ago- By Hajra Mumtaz: Dawn

HAVING been occupied with compiling the ‘50 years ago’ section on these pages, I have recently spent hours trawling through Dawn’s 1961 editions. It is a fascinating yet ultimately, a deeply saddening experience.
The Dawn of those days was a slimmer volume, with a format different to what it is today. The first thing to strike me was the advertising. If any of you have the impression that the Forhans toothpaste advertisement hasn’t changed in years, you’re right: it hasn’t changed in decades. Much of the advertising content is pretty much what it is today: soaps, talcum powders and so on. There are some glaring differences, though.
Advertisements for dances, cabarets, acrobatic performances and balls — how alien they seem in the modern Pakistani landscape. Karachi was reasonably important on the international landscape, and references in western literature of the time reflect an exotic Orientalism that still exists in reference to, for example, Mumbai. And so, the city often hosted world-class performers and entertainers, as to a somewhat lesser extent did Lahore.
No doubt to other people in my age group, the children of Zia, these advertisements would hold more meaning than as merely curiosities reminiscent of different times.
The ad about dinner and drinks with live dance performances at the Beach Luxury, or sister acrobats Klaudia and Karla (pictured in short, frilled skirts) at the Metropole, talk not of different times but, indeed, of a different country. Such acts have not been tolerated in Pakistan for upwards of three decades — the lifespan of an entire generation.
Even before Pakistan involved itself in America’s duplicitous ‘war on terror’, which is when the situation really went into freefall, Klaudia and Karla could not have performed here. It was the Nawaz Sharif government, after all, which banned men with long hair on television. And Zia who dictated that all women appearing on television should have their heads covered at all times, so that it would appear to audiences that they went to bed and woke up in the morning wearing their modesty firmly on their heads.
Is the tragedy greater for those who knew such a Pakistan and then watched it die? Or is it greater for those, the people who are nearing middle-age now or younger, who never saw it at all and learnt to find their way through an increasingly complicated maze of fundamentalism and repression?
And what about the children who are under 15 now? The ones who know only the Pakistan of war and militancy, of the Taliban and suicide bombings, who don’t have the experience of the Khabarnama at 9pm being the single most boring thing broadcast on the one channel that Pakistan had? Perhaps, the only conclusion to reach is that in Pakistan, tragedy abounds.
In the 1960s, there was such a place as East Pakistan. We all know this, all of us having grown up with the haunting knowledge
of the country that once was. But it is different to trawl through the newspapers of that time and see the Dacca dateline, read about Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s expression of solidarity with the East Pakistanis after floods (which took place in early June, 1961), see a photograph of goods being readied to be flown to the eastern wing.
Hindsight brings clarity. It is easy, now, to read between the lines and see which way the wind would have to blow. In ’61, a decade before Bangladesh was born in blood and tears, Dawn has reports about people asking that Bengali be accorded greater status, questions of disproportionate spending and contributions to the national exchequer. Knowing what we know, it is easy to detect a certain parochialism in the debate of the time.
Going through all these newspapers, I am left with the impression of Pakistan of the early ’60s as a place with hope, its life stretching out before it fresh and untarnished — a country that was going places. Dawn’s editions from those days are full of plans: the Second Five-Year Plan was going into action, factories and industries were being set up, schemes were being formulated for the uplift and education of the rural poor in both wings of the country.
It is sobering to realise that back then, a new plan announced by the administration could not have been met with anything near the sort of cynicism with which it is received today, with people having learnt the lessons dictated by decades of failure.Fifty years ago, schemes to irrigate agricultural land in Wana and Miramshah were under way, and schools were being set up. Jute mills were being set up in East Pakistan. Women’s vocational centres were being set up seemingly all over the place. Fifty years ago, PIA had just launched its inaugural flight to New York and was one of the most successful young airlines of the time.
It’s easy to see things clearly in hindsight. Today, we can see that a number of the cancers that are tearing Pakistan apart now had already taken root, even back in 1961. The first military foray into civilian affairs had taken place, the country’s first prime minister had been assassinated and, over a decade later, no responsibility had been affixed (the irony being that the Rawalpindi park named in his honour was, just over 50 years later, to become the site where yet another prime minister was murdered, to be followed by yet another failed inquiry), a number of deeply flawed policies and mindsets had already been adopted.
But back then, could anybody have guessed the disastrous trajectory that the country was to take? From my vantage point of the present, because I am a rather fanciful person, I get the impression of the Pakistan of that time revelling in its newfound freedoms, irresponsible as a teenager — unaware of the horror its decisions would bring, dancing heedless into a future full of murder.
That was then, this is now. The past, it would appear, really is another country.
The writer is a member of staff.
hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com

A Wearily Familiar Bag of Tricks: By Cyril Almeida in Dawn News

ONE set of rules for themselves. Another set for the people they rule over, or who dare cross them. The army has been busy rounding up the OBL support network.


But not the network which helped the world’s most wanted terrorist hide a stone’s throw from where the army chief boasted his forces had broken the backbone of the terrorists.

No, the army has gone after the support network that helped capture and eliminate the world’s most wanted terrorist. You couldn’t make this stuff up — unless you knew what makes the army tick in the first place.

The army high command has two constituencies: the public at large and the military rank and file. With those two constituencies won over, and with their rear and flanks thus covered, the army high command is able to do what’s necessary to retain its internal predominance.

Since May, however, those two constituencies — so key to the army high command’s image of itself and what it’s able to get away with at home and outside — have been up in arms.

Perhaps most critically, the army rank and file (the ones at the top have more to lose and so are less inclined to criticise openly) has expressed deep unhappiness with the policies of their institution, increasingly exposed by events as duplicitous.Which leaves Gen K and his diminishing band of supporters in desperate need of something to stop the haemorrhaging of support accumulated through a combination of serendipity and shrewdness since the end of the Musharraf era.

No brilliant thinkers or strategists among them, they have turned to the obvious: pander to the populist tripe they have helped perpetuate and which has become an article of faith for people in uniform — that the US ultimately seeks to harm Pakistan and we must wriggle away from its deadly embrace.

Kicking out the Raymond Davis clones, arresting anyone remotely western-looking on an expired visa, detaining the people who helped piece together the goings-on in the OBL compound — all is meant to try and send a message that the army knows who the enemy is and is willing to take them on.

There is also signalling at another level. The infamous corps commanders’ statement was more carefully crafted than first recognised. “It needs to be clarified that Army had never accepted any training assistance from the US except for training on the newly inducted weapons and some training assistance for the Frontier Corps only. Even that has ceased now.”

See what that does, bold typeface and all? It says, the army is a self-sufficient fighting machine and doesn’t need Americans to teach it how to fight. In the macho world of soldiering, nothing is worse than having to rely on others to defend oneself.

In fact, the entire statement can be read as a point-by-point rebuttal to and reassurance on issues raised during Kayani’s town hall-style meetings with his troops. Faced with a choice — do you put some daylight between the US and the army to appease the rank and file or do you locate the relationship with the US in a necessary and pivotal fight against terrorism and extremism? — the army high command appears to have decided to appease its core constituency, the rank and file.

The path chosen shouldn’t come as a surprise. While the ability for this institution to self-reflect or course correct is non-existent, the survival instinct is well-entrenched. A disgruntled rank and file is never a recipe for survival.

The trouble is, attempting to win back the affections of the rank and file and the admiration of the public at large in this way means pushing the US further away — but that comes at a great cost and in any case, the US has developed a few tricks of its own to hit back.

Since May 2, the media has been used with great success by American officials to keep the squeeze on the army and prevent it from wriggling away.

After the OBL raid, the army was forced to keep changing its account of the American operation almost on the hour. What was initially spun as a ‘joint operation’ eventually became a humiliating admission of failure to detect the US intrusion into Pakistani airspace. Then, when Hillary Clinton presented a list of demands to the generals, American officials made sure those demands were leaked to the media one by one, forcing the generals here to deny yet more secret deals were in the works.

Soon, the North Waziristan bomb factories made their way into the news, ostensibly once again exposing the army’s perfidy and earning it a fresh round of criticism from the US. Now, we are told the local CIA spy network which helped capture OBL is in the army’s bad books — embarrassing the army by making it look petty and vindictive, or worse.

Weak, stupid, vulnerable, secretive, duplicitous — with each successive media leak, the US is chipping away at the army’s self-belief, eroding the space for it to convincingly vilify the US while further vilifying the army in the minds of many who already regarded it with suspicion.

(Of course, this being Pakistan, where things are never simple, the Americans may be being too clever by half. The campaign of embarrassing media leaks may actually be making it more difficult for the army high command to do anything but embrace anti-Americanism further, rendering the anyway likely into the certain.)

All the while, the public at large — the army’s second core constituency and internal line of defence — has been looking on in bewilderment, unsure of what it all means but pretty sure they have been lied to at all times.

What comes next? Unhappily, more of the same for now, it seems.

But at least this army high command won’t be able to argue, after it, the deluge. The deluge is already here.

The writer is a member of staff.

cyril.a@gmail.com