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's patchy fight against Islamist violence sows confusion: by Myra MacDonald in Reuters

By Myra MacDonald

MINGORA, Pakistan | Fri Jul 8, 2011 6:50am EDT; Reuters
(Reuters) - At the rehabilitation center for former militants in Pakistan's Swat valley, the psychiatrist speaks for the young man sitting opposite him in silence. "It was terrible. He was unable to escape. The fear is so strong. Still the fear is so strong."

(A man takes a nap next to a poster of Osama bin Laden at the Chauburji monument in Lahore May 13, 2011. The message written on the posters read: "The prayer absentia for martyr of Islamic nation is a duty and a debt"/Mani Rana)

Hundreds of miles away in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, a retired army officer recalls another young man who attacked him while he prayed - his "absolutely expressionless face" as he crouched down robot-like to reload his gun.

Both youths had been sucked into an increasingly fierce campaign of gun and bomb attacks by Islamist militants on military and civilian targets across Pakistan.

But there the similarity stops.

One is now being "de-radicalized" in the rehabilitation center in Swat, the northern region which only two years ago was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban and has since been cleared after a massive military operation.

He will be taught that Islam does not permit violence against the state and that

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